RadixJournal - June 19, 2021


Those Words： The Death of God


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

126.837036

Word Count

1,939

Sentence Count

117

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary

In this episode, we discuss the ideas of the death of God and the role of the Holy Spirit in redeeming the world, and how that relates to Nietzsche's ideas of God's death and the Christian conception of God as an all-powerful all-knowing being.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The idea of the death of God was used before Nietzsche,
00:00:03.220 but Nietzsche obviously used it most infamously.
00:00:06.740 And he used it in a way that expressed a kind of trauma.
00:00:14.880 I mean, he introduced it in the gay science, not Zarathustra,
00:00:19.520 but it's a madman with a lantern.
00:00:23.620 And he is announcing the death of God and declaring that we killed him.
00:00:29.260 And you can take that lantern as a symbol, obviously, of enlightenment or what have you.
00:00:37.720 But it is a madman after all.
00:00:40.900 And it's a kind of trauma of can we actually survive this thing?
00:00:48.000 Can we, as a civilization, really live past the fact that that whole kind of bargain,
00:01:02.060 that debt relationship that we have where we are born in sin and we are sinners,
00:01:07.880 and thus we must repent and put our faith in Jesus Christ and he will redeem us.
00:01:13.460 And so we get out of that.
00:01:15.800 That's that kind of internal logic.
00:01:18.960 And when you start to question the reality of that, it just kind of becomes like,
00:01:25.860 well, what do we do with this thing now?
00:01:29.520 And, you know, I mean, there was a lot of, lots of criticism of that.
00:01:34.600 There's this kind of like, God isn't dead, but God is not dead, but Nietzsche is, ha, ha, hearty, har, har.
00:01:43.060 There's also the kind of a little bit deeper, but kind of expresses similar sentiment.
00:01:48.380 It's like, God is dead.
00:01:50.200 He died on the cross and he rose again.
00:01:55.000 That's really the whole point.
00:01:57.240 And that was made by Chesterton and others.
00:02:01.460 And I was reminded of Hegel.
00:02:03.240 I mean, Hegel's an interesting person.
00:02:05.080 Hegel also talked about the death of God.
00:02:07.480 Hegel's an interesting character in the sense that he would often kind of misread scripture
00:02:13.760 and use it as a metaphor in a way that actually went contrary to the clear intent of the scripture,
00:02:24.300 but kind of was successful as a metaphor, as expressing how we should think about this.
00:02:31.600 And for instance, his reading of, this is like from lectures and religion,
00:02:39.660 but like his reading of the Garden of Eden saga is that the fall is kind of a good thing in a way.
00:02:47.500 It's a loss of innocence.
00:02:49.760 And we are kicked out of this beautiful garden where we're vegetarians and all loving,
00:02:59.040 but then we kind of recognize our own nakedness.
00:03:02.480 It's like we gain self-consciousness and, you know, in some ways are ashamed of ourselves.
00:03:10.560 And, but on another level, we grow up, so to speak, and we move on.
00:03:17.940 And it's a metaphor for like leaving the bosom of your mother or leaving childhood or leaving,
00:03:25.400 you know, extended adolescence and kind of growing up.
00:03:29.880 And in some ways, recognizing your sinful nature is kind of being self-aware.
00:03:36.460 Not just being in a way like one of the animals, but being a human who is self-aware
00:03:42.200 and in some ways ashamed of himself.
00:03:46.120 And I don't think that that is intended by the authors of the Bible or Moses, I guess, who wrote it.
00:03:56.380 But I don't think they intended that at all.
00:04:00.940 But I do think that it's an interesting metaphor.
00:04:04.300 And it expresses kind of Hegel's mature philosophy, you know, which he kind of thinks through, through biblical imagery.
00:04:16.080 And, you know, when you think about like the death of God in the sense of Jesus Christ,
00:04:23.920 you have the all-Father who is omnipotent and all-knowing.
00:04:31.860 And then you have this spectacular failure at redeeming the world.
00:04:39.080 And that is the Son, the Son of the Father who comes down to the world as a Messiah.
00:04:47.800 And the Messiah is depicted variously in the Old Testament.
00:04:51.720 In some ways, he's a war chief.
00:04:54.440 In other ways, he's a pacifist.
00:04:56.820 There's a famous passage from Isaiah of the child walking with the lion and the wolf lying down at the lamb or whatever kind of livestock imagery was used.
00:05:09.560 It was an image of a kind of heaven on earth, a redemption of mankind.
00:05:16.000 And, you know, whether that would be a Messiah in the sense of a leader for the Jewish people,
00:05:23.500 or whether that would be someone who in some ways redeemed the world and ended suffering and strife for all,
00:05:32.920 kind of depended on, you could say, the mood of the author.
00:05:38.380 And, but that failed.
00:05:40.940 Like, God is dead.
00:05:43.060 The Son is dead.
00:05:44.540 The Son sets.
00:05:46.280 And he did not actually redeem the world.
00:05:51.400 The world killed him.
00:05:54.060 And what happens after that is the kind of third aspect of the Trinity, which is that the Holy Spirit enters your heart.
00:06:02.400 And so we've kind of passed from the Father God, the, you know, all-knowing, all-powerful being,
00:06:10.380 to a son who would redeem the world, to a Holy Spirit.
00:06:15.640 And that is something that enters your heart.
00:06:17.840 And you could think of that as the spirit of the Messiah.
00:06:21.680 And again, whether you imagine that as a warlord for the Jews, it's almost like this right-wing and left-wing Judaism.
00:06:30.780 Whether you imagine that as, like, a leader of the Jewish people or as a global communist, effectively, you know, kind of depends on you.
00:06:40.100 But it's a spirit in your heart.
00:06:41.620 Like, God failed.
00:06:43.140 The Son of God failed.
00:06:44.840 God is dead.
00:06:45.800 But now we have that spirit within us.
00:06:49.640 And I think this kind of reminded me of this critique of Jordan Peterson, or a critique that Jordan Peterson made.
00:06:59.020 I guess I really am taking pains to defend Jordan Peterson.
00:07:03.020 As you all know, I kind of weirdly don't hate him, even though pretty much all criticisms of him are valid.
00:07:10.440 But this notion that, you know, I mean, one of his attacks on atheism is that, like, you actually aren't an atheist.
00:07:24.360 You've attacked Christianity on scientific grounds, factual grounds, maybe.
00:07:30.940 But you yourself are coming in the wake of that mythic system.
00:07:36.380 So, I mean, and this is clearly true.
00:07:38.800 I mean, like, Richard Dawkins talks about the origins of morality, and he gives a rather stark Darwinian picture.
00:07:50.520 But then he's like, well, but none of that actually matters now, does it?
00:07:55.720 I mean, I might be a product of evolution, but, you know, I'm a good liberal.
00:08:00.760 I oppose the Gulf War.
00:08:03.300 You know, of course you can be a liberal and not be a Christian.
00:08:06.860 Why are you even saying this?
00:08:09.080 You know, it's like he doesn't want to confront the real issue, which is that can you have that morality absent the mythic structure?
00:08:18.440 Or for a Christian, it's not a mythic structure.
00:08:22.600 Myths and the Testaments have little, well, they have something in common, but they're starkly different.
00:08:29.380 But Richard Dawkins is writing in that wake of Christianity.
00:08:35.240 I mean, he is a cultural Christian, yet he doesn't, he wants to undermine the reality, the kind of mythic structure, or you could say reality of the Christian message.
00:08:48.560 So he, his heart has been touched by the Christian spirit.
00:08:52.300 He believes in that Messiah at the end of the day, the child who will walk with the lion.
00:08:58.460 He is a Christian, he is messianic, but he is in some ways similar to Nietzsche's conception of the last man, which is kind of like, well, God is dead, but who cares?
00:09:12.120 Who cares? God's dead? What does that matter?
00:09:15.400 You know, this was traumatic for most Europeans, including Nietzsche.
00:09:20.300 But for the last man, it's just like, you know, who cares?
00:09:25.620 We're all Christians anyway.
00:09:27.040 Why do we need to believe in this thing?
00:09:28.380 Why do we need to go to church?
00:09:29.300 Why do we need to believe in the reality and the myth, mythos of Jesus Christ, a savior who died on the cross?
00:09:39.920 And I think that, like, in some ways, Zizek and Peterson are kind of saying very similar things.
00:09:49.520 Like, Zizek wants to redeem the Holy Spirit.
00:09:53.460 I mean, Zizek is an atheist, but he is a Christian.
00:09:56.080 He wants to redeem the Holy Spirit and to the point where there actually is hope.
00:10:02.060 And we can ultimately achieve that messianic vision of Isaiah in the real world, but we kind of wreck after our recognition that God is dead.
00:10:18.360 And I think kind of the tendency of a lot of conservative Christians is to basically say, like, I don't need a new savior.
00:10:24.340 I don't need a Lenin or a Marx or a Hitler or a George Floyd or MLK or whomever.
00:10:31.720 I've already got my savior.
00:10:32.940 They're fascinated with Jesus Christ.
00:10:35.860 They are like Catholics who, at their mass, want to constantly, endlessly sacrifice Jesus Christ, which is what Catholics believe, that Jesus Christ's body and blood are in the bread and wine.
00:10:50.760 They are eating and drinking this human sacrifice, and they are doing it over and over again every Sunday.
00:10:58.320 I mean, it is shocking when you think about it.
00:11:02.500 They want to just keep reliving that.
00:11:05.140 Well, actually, that failed.
00:11:08.000 Jesus Christ failed.
00:11:09.900 He was not the Messiah in the sense that he was imagined.
00:11:13.440 And after that failure, you have to accept the Holy Spirit, the third aspect of the Trinity.
00:11:20.900 You have to accept the Holy Spirit in your heart and grow into a true Christian who recognizes that the sun set and is not coming back.
00:11:32.280 And that we now need to be possessed by this togetherness, this messianic vision, and bring that into the world.
00:11:41.580 The conservative Christian response is to endlessly sacrifice Jesus every Sunday and just dwell on his failure and just reenact it and, in fact, eat him.
00:11:52.340 Whereas a truer Christian wants to bring that into the world through the Holy Spirit.
00:12:01.940 I think we need to kind of recognize that aspect, like all aspects of the death of God.
00:12:15.480 First off, there's the last man aspect, which I think is easy to recognize, which is that for contemporary Americans, none of this matters.
00:12:24.040 Like this grand trauma that went on for 200 years of the decline of Christianity and the introspection and the unending historical and scientific criticism of the Gospels and everything.
00:12:41.360 Like, they just don't care.
00:12:44.920 They're just kind of in the wake of Christianity, just kind of surfing the wake and not recognizing that it's going to end.
00:12:54.040 And I think we also kind of need to understand something in a way deeper about the left, in the sense that the left that actually has an animating spirit to it, that it is animated by a Holy Spirit.
00:13:11.780 It is animated by something.
00:13:14.680 It is trying to achieve a heaven on earth, and that is actually what gives it power.
00:13:22.820 Now, obviously, my general project, and the project of Mark and so on, is to, in a way, reject the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that we can't just ride in its wake.
00:13:41.420 We can recognize certain, you know, grandeur and benefits of Christianity.
00:13:48.300 We're a reasonable people.
00:13:50.460 But we can't, this isn't going to hold, we can't just ride in this wake and be cultural Christian, basically atheist.
00:13:58.800 We obviously don't want to engage in the kind of eternal masturbation of Catholicism, of endlessly sacrificing Jesus and eating him.
00:14:10.000 That is grotesque.
00:14:12.140 But we also, like, what we are trying to do is overthrowing the Father, overthrowing the Son, and offering a new animating spirit to reality.
00:14:28.140 Something that will, much like the Holy Spirit, touch people's hearts.
00:14:34.780 And that sounds saccharine, perhaps, but I mean that very seriously.
00:14:40.220 And that can bring about a new and transformed reality.
00:14:47.260 Thank you.