Part One: Blitz
Have you ever woken in terror at the sound of thunder? Yes, of course you have. In that moment between sleeping and waking, you imagine yourself under attack. Adrenaline rushes through your veins—your heart races. Even in the light of day, the crackle of lightning and echoing roar of thunder have the power to make us stand in awe. In the dark of night, this spectacle can terrify.
On such a night, Martin Luther is said to have been riding in the countryside when he was caught in the middle of a thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning struck near his horse, and feeling the mad rush of terror, he uttered that famous prayer to his family’s patron saint: “Help me, Saint Anne! I will become a monk!”
When this story is related by historians, it is typically followed by the explanation that Luther was, after all, a medieval man. The new men of science were conquering the cities, but Luther was a country boy through and through. He spoke of demons and the devil not in a purely hypothetical manner, but as apparitions before his eyes. He feared the goblins of the forest and the terrors of the storm. Yes, the word blitz (German for “lightning”) and its Latin equivalent are sprinkled throughout Luther’s writings. The might of God as displayed in the violence of nature had a firm hold on his thinking. This should hardly surprise us. After all, his Saxon ancestors assigned the power of thunder to Thor.
I too had a close encounter with lightning. I was lying in bed one evening when I was about twenty years old, listening to a storm pass. At first, the thunder came at regular intervals and shook the walls of the house. Then it lessened in severity until it was only a low rumble in the distance. Thinking myself perfectly safe, I set about the business of slumber, only to be jolted by the loudest noise I had ever heard. It was as if the bolt of lightning had struck within that very room. My heart seemed to pound out of my chest, and to borrow a phrase from the King James Bible, I was sore afraid. The next morning, the prized white pine in our front yard was etched with an unmistakable scar, and we realized how close we had come to this outburst of nature. However, I had no intention in that moment of adopting the monastic life. Rather, I marveled at how my modern shelter had protected me.
Our ancestors knew what it was to fear a lightning bolt. They lived in constant dread of the forces of nature. This anxiety is best demonstrated by how they assigned deity to nature itself, imagining every whisper of the wind to be the product of divine machinations. Perhaps this was due to a vain hope that if nature was controlled by gods and those gods could somehow be appeased, they might be spared the awful miseries it dealt them year after year: floods, drought, disease, pestilence, earthquakes, and whirlwinds. For them, the world was less a well-oiled machine and more a teeming chaos. Thus, in the mythology of ancient Babylon, the god Marduk slew Tiamat—the great sea goddess who symbolized the primordial chaos of the waters—and made the heavens and earth from her corpse.
Yes, the power of nature to take from them their lives and livelihoods caused the ancients to dwell in constant anxiety of the world around them. Modern man thought he could solve this problem. Wishing to never live in dread again, he sought to understand the world around him, and in understanding to move beyond fear. Much good came of this venture, and many natural mysteries were explained. Thus, when you and I see lightning and hear thunder, we understand that they are caused by an electromagnetic field, and this small bit of knowledge eases our fear by providing the illusion of control.
But though modern man plumbed the depths of nature’s mysteries and found the answers to many questions, his anxiety by no means decreased. Just when he imagined he could know his fear, and by knowing it control it, a new specter rose to haunt him. Despite his best efforts, nothing could have prepared him for a far greater source of anxiety: the evils of the human heart. Here was the most fearsome and uncontrollable enemy of all—one far crueler than nature, and with a greater power to destroy.
The more people were able to tame nature with the strength of their minds, the more their evil hearts grew in their destructive capacity. Many of the blessings of science led to curses the moment they were placed in the hands of selfish, grasping human beings. A revolution in industry threatened as much harm to nature as nature had caused to humanity. No sooner were atoms harnessed for energy than they were used to create weapons that presented an existential threat to life on earth. The internet was meant to bring us together, but it has proved equally adept at tearing us apart. In every case, it was not nature or technology that was evil, but the humans who sought to control it. The fault, as Shakespeare once wrote, is not in our stars.
Now we stand no longer afraid of the blitz, but terrified of ourselves. Not that we would admit it, for humans always endeavor to convince themselves of their own innate goodness. Yet our insistence is hollow, for our deepest anxieties betray us. We are not only scared of our neighbors: we are terrified that the same evils we see in them might exist within us. This is a great anxiety of our age, which we constantly seek to deny. We have striven to move beyond the fear of nature, only to be confronted with the fear of ourselves, and for all our wisdom, we are running scared.
The horrors on the banks of the Somme, the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking, the crematories of Auschwitz, the mountains of dead in Dresden, and the mushroom clouds in Hiroshima and Nagasaki all pointed to the inescapable conclusion that there is real evil in this world, and it lies within the heart of man. Any other conclusion would render the word “evil” meaningless. It was not the unfeeling whims of nature that brought us low, but the very will to power we once praised.
The modernists who were willing to admit this found their utopian dreams shattered, but many clung to the hope that it was only a few bad apples that had spoiled the bushel, and a perfect society was still within reach. As the postmodern age dawned, they suppressed their fears rather than facing them. In the words of W.H. Auden’s great post-war poem, The Age of Anxiety,
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.[1]
Are we so much better than the ancients, who knew what it was to live in fear while standing in awe? Ah, but there is a greater fear than these.
Part Two: Anfechtung
Copenhagen was not the center of philosophy in mid-19th century Europe. That distinction surely belonged to the universities of what was soon to become the nation-state of Germany. There Immanuel Kant had attempted to save the sinking ship of Christianity from the crashing waves of the Enlightenment by jettisoning the notion that faith and reason had a share in one another, or so the story is often told. (This characterization is not entirely accurate.) It is true that Kant saw a difference between knowledge and faith, the former being rooted in our sensory experience and the latter in something supersensory but nonetheless rational. Coming shortly after Kant was the philosopher Georg Hegel and his concept of the “Absolute Mind”. Some of his followers made it to the University of Copenhagen and announced that they were going beyond Kant, which some interpreted as going beyond faith itself.
Into this world, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was born and pursued the path of philosophy. Although he disdained the national Church of Denmark, he also saw flaws in the thinking of these new Hegelians. Thus, in the year 1843, an anonymous work titled Fear and Trembling went on sale in Copenhagen: one wholly unlike the scientific bestsellers of the day. Even as Charles Darwin was developing his thoughts about natural selection, Kierkegaard appealed to the philosophy of the ancients.
In those old days it was different. For then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill thought to be acquired in either days or weeks. When the old campaigner approached the end, had fought the good fight, and kept his faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the fear and trembling that disciplined his youth and which, although the grown man mastered it, no man altogether outgrows—unless he somehow manages at the earliest possible opportunity to go further.[2]
Here Kierkegaard introduced the primary themes that were to govern his work. He posited that faith was not the beginning of rational thought, but its end. This is not to say that reason must be maintained and faith discarded, but that faith is something higher than reason: the product of a lifetime of fear and trembling. According to Kierkegaard, faith achieves its highest quality in struggle and a willingness to confront our fears. In the trial of faith, the individual moves beyond the realm of traditional social mores to engage with the absolutes of divinity, thus experiencing a kind of ethical paradox.
The prime example of such a trial of faith, according to Kierkegaard, was the biblical patriarch Abraham. He was fascinated by God’s command for Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Here was something that seemed to be a great moral evil: the killing of an innocent boy by his own father. What made it more abhorrent was that it had been demanded of Abraham by God.
In a sequence where he reimagines the story in four different ways, Kierkegaard remarks at one point, “From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before: but Abraham’s eye was darkened, he saw joy no more.”[3] In another instance, he writes that “as he turned away Isaac saw that Abraham’s left hand was clenched in anguish, that a shudder went through his body—but Abraham drew the knife. Then they turned home again and Sarah ran to meet them, but Isaac had lost his faith.”[4]
Kierkegaard presented Abraham’s dilemma to the 19th century world, but it is especially applicable to our own age. Man began by fearing that nature might have evil intent. Having conquered much of the world around him, he found another source of evil in himself. But the greatest fear of all and the one that has driven our postmodern society to madness is the possibility that God himself is evil.
This is hardly a new concern. For as long as human beings have believed in a single, omnipotent deity, they have doubted that being’s goodness. Neither is the problem particularly novel to Christianity. You cannot embrace the Christian way without dealing in paradoxes and theodicies. Is there any other religion on earth that holds up as its central event an action which appears to turn God into a monster? For what else can we say of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? Here was a man who lived for love and still found himself nailed to a stake, crying out, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?”[5] As the prophet Isaiah put it almost perversely, “But the Lord was pleased / To crush Him, putting Him to grief…”[6]
The supreme test of Abraham’s faith, related in the 22nd chapter of Genesis, is usually interpreted in relation to the atonement of Jesus Christ. Isaac, like Christ, is said to be an innocent victim sacrificed by his father. Not all biblical scholars accept that Isaac is a type of Christ, and the thought probably did not pass through Abraham’s mind when he was told, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”[7] Instead, Abraham was forced to grapple with two heinous possibilities: that God was evil for commanding such a thing, and that he was evil for choosing to obey.
It was not the typological element of this event but Abraham’s struggle of faith that interested Kierkegaard. He said of those who are great in this world, “They shall all be remembered, but everyone was great in proportion to the magnitude of what he strove with. For he who strove with the world became great by conquering the world, and he who strove with himself became greater by conquering himself; but he who strove with God became greater than all.”[8] Then finishing his line of reasoning with a flourish, he wrote that “greater than all was Abraham, great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, great in that love which is hatred of self.”[9]
Long before Isaac was born, the Lord had made a covenant with Abraham in two parts, which are described in Genesis chapters 15 and 17. The first account relates the grim ceremony of covenant initiation. It was the custom in those days for two parties to a contract to cut various animals in half and walk between the pieces, the implication being, “So be it to me if I should violate the terms of our agreement.” Yet when God made a covenant with Abraham, he moved through the pieces alone in the form of a smoking oven and flaming torch. He did not ask Abraham to place himself in danger of the curse.
Then in chapter 17, God returned to Abraham, this time demanding that he and all his male posterity should be circumcised. Here for the first time came a curse: “But an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”[10] Did Abraham tremble in fear at this revelation? The Lord had sworn by himself, but then attached conditions. This was a paradox without easy explanation.
Abraham saw the goodness of the Lord when he was spared the burden of walking through the pieces, but then he must have been struck with fear by the divine law that says, “Do this and live.” Knowing himself to be evil, he likely sensed that he could never do that and live. The command of the Lord was therefore death to him, or so it must have seemed. And when the Lord demanded the life of Isaac, the very blessing that was promised, Abraham may well have thought the Almighty capricious, arbitrary, and cruel—a God with no sense of love or compassion. As he marched to Moriah, Abraham faced his greatest test. Was the God of chapter 17 also the God of chapter 15? Was the one who called him to sacrifice his son…good?
Martin Luther gave much consideration to such trials of faith. He called them Anfechtungen, a term that famously defies easy translation into English, with both “temptation” and “trial” being employed to capture part of the meaning. Describing the German word, David P. Scaer has written, “In this temptation the Christian is given the opportunity by God to overcome Satan personally, but there can be no suggestion that God is the origin of sin or provokes the Christian to sin…Through the trial God puts the Christian to the test to measure the depth and sincerity of faith and to bring it to a higher level.”[11] Surely no saint has experienced a harsher instance of Anfechtung than Abraham did when he was commanded to sacrifice his son, and yet he passed the test.
Abraham’s fear of nature and even his fear of the evil within himself was subsumed by his fear of God, but this was something different from standard anxiety. You see, fear is not so different from faith, and that was certainly the case with Abraham. Faced with the possibility that God himself was evil, his faith allowed him to comprehend that God could raise the dead, as related by the author epistle to the Hebrews.[12] Thus, his fear of nature was removed along with his fear of becoming a murderer, and when his faith proved to be justified, he could not help but stand in awe and marvel at the one who is truly worthy of fear. He feared God in the sense of submission rather than simple anxiety.
But why do I go on about Abraham? Because he is not just some ancient man of clay—a myth conjured to give purpose to the wandering souls in Sinai. He is you and me. He is akin to postmodern man and yet he rises above postmodern man. He is the faithless one who became the father of the faithful. And what makes Abraham great? The same thing that made his grandson, Jacob, great: he wrestled with God, not as one without hope, but seeking the divine blessing.
Part Three: Untergang
It is early morning in Germany, and the sun is rising. A new book has made its way into the world. A few years on, this work will inspire a tone poem by Richard Strauss, which will later go on to provide the triumphant opening to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But that is all in the realm of the future. This is today, and Friedrich Nietzsche is delivering to the world what is to become his most cherished book: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a narrative that claims to present the teachings of the eponymous prophet.
This Zarathustra is nothing like the historical one, who founded the religion of Zoroastrianism. No, he has descended to earth upon a different purpose, and his arrival has the force of a lightning bolt. In awe at his teachings, a young man proclaims, “Yes, Zarathustra, you speak the truth. I desired my own going-under when I aspired to the heights, and you are the lightning for which I was waiting!”[13]
The truth that Zarathustra reveals to the world in Nietzsche’s work is complex, but it centers around the idea that, “The human is something that shall be overcome.”[14] There is a higher state to which we must aspire: that of the Übermensch (usually translated “Overhuman”), in which we will no longer be slaves to primitive moralities and duties. A new freedom is offered to man, and the first thing he must do to reach this height is accept the truth that, “God is dead.”[15]
Nietzsche deserves respect for his willingness to address our greatest fears with brutal honesty, even if he was too optimistic about the possibilities that lay ahead once the “truth” was revealed. In a society where men no longer believed in the supernatural, he concluded that God was, for all practical purposes, dead. That is, loyalty to an all-powerful deity could no longer be the guiding light of man. To his credit, Nietzsche realized that this would lead irreversibly into a kind of nihilism. Once the traditional sources of morality were removed, the only meaning in life would be whatever humans create for themselves by strength of will.
“What is the great dragon that the spirit no longer likes to call Lord and God?” Zarathustra asks in one typical contrast. “‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says ‘I will.’”[16] The title of another one of Nietzsche’s classic works, The Will to Power, seems to encapsulate this idea. The philosopher saw mankind perched upon the brink of nihilism, afraid to jump. He sought to give them a push, that in their descent they might somehow right themselves.
What Nietzsche was promoting was a kind of crisis of faith, or at least an intellectual crisis. He describes this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an “Untergang” (going under/down) which is then followed by an “Übergang” (going over/beyond). At the beginning of the book, Zarathustra descends from the mountain where he has been engaged in contemplation to preach the truth to those below. This symbolizes what Nietzsche has in mind for those who seek to become Übermenschen. They must enter into a kind of psychological struggle in which the primitive ideas of the earthy man are extinguished, and a new, empowered identity emerges. Importantly, the fate of the individual in this struggle is not entirely certain. Untergang can also be translated as “downfall”, and thus there is an implied danger in this process. However, the goal is to transition to a new normal—or rather, a kind of super normal.
I am reminded of Kierkegaard’s description of “going further” than faith and how he saw this as a folly of his age. He likely would have sympathized with certain aspects of Nietzsche’s description of moral and intellectual struggle, even if he would have strongly objected to his conclusions. After all, the idea that one must in a sense “go under” or descend into the depths to ascend to a higher level of knowledge is almost as old as dirt.
More than half a millennium earlier, Dante Alighieri had composed his Divine Comedy, widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature in the Western canon. At the beginning of his epic, Dante finds himself in “a dark wood” whose “very memory gives a shape to fear”.[17] He endeavors to depart the wood and climb the celestial hill, but his way is blocked by a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. The ancient poet Virgil comes to his rescue but informs him that the only way to escape both the wood and the beasts is to descend with him into the abyss of Hell, then rise through the fiery hill of Purgatory until reaching the blessed heights of Heaven. Again, notice the pattern: you must go under to go up, only Dante aspires to an eternity in the divine presence while Nietzsche dreams of becoming an Übermensch in the here and now.
The concept of Untergang closely mirrors the dying and rising motif that has appeared at various points in mythological history. The ancient Egyptians saw this power in the phoenix, but Christianity likely contains the strongest version of Untergang. The Son of God descends to earth and endures a life of suffering, culminating in his death and burial, at which point he descends further “into hell”, to use the terminology of the Apostles’ Creed. This seems to be an ultimate perversion of divine justice. However, the Son of God is then raised to life and ascends into heaven. As symbolized in the ritual of baptism, this same model of death and rebirth is repeated in the life of the Christian. Nietzsche’s Untergang marked the end of faith and the death of God. The biblical Untergang is the beginning of faith and the resurrection to life.
The message of Christianity is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, it acknowledges that the spiritual path of the individual involves a kind of Untergang: a dying to self. It is full of Anfechtungen, or trials of faith. However, it also says loudly and clearly that there is one who has gone under on your behalf, and if you hope to rise, you must do so not only by listening to his teachings and putting them into practice, but by becoming united to him. Thus, the Apostle Paul wrote in his epistle to the Philippians of his desire to know Christ “and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”[18]
This narrative, in which the spiritual journey of the individual is linked with and fulfilled in Christ, runs throughout the Christian scriptures. In the Old Testament, the oracle Agur laments,
Surely I am more stupid than any man,
And I do not have the understanding of a man.
Neither have I learned wisdom,
Nor do I have the knowledge of the Holy One.
Who has ascended into heaven and descended?
Who has gathered the wind in His fists?
Who has wrapped the waters in His garment?
Who has established all the ends of the earth?
What is His name or His Son’s name?
Surely you know![19]
Likewise, Zophar rebukes his friend Job, saying,
Can you discover the depths of God?
Can you discover the limits of the Almighty?
They are high as the heavens, what can you do?
Deeper than Sheol, what can you know?[20]
In the ancient Hebrew understanding, Sheol was the place of the dead. It is also referred to in the Psalms as the “depths” or “pit”. King David speaks of it as both a physical location and a state of psychological torment. At one point, he complains to God, “You have put me in the lowest pit, in dark places, in the depths.”[21] Thus, there is a sense in which God desires David’s going under, but the Almighty is also the one who will “bring me up again from the depths of the earth”.[22]
Leaving aside the scriptures, let us consider what Nietzsche is really proposing: a journey by which we may come to understand the ultimate truth. Is this reality subjective or objective? It is a general characteristic of humankind that we consider our own truth objective and all others subjective. But we can say with certainty that if there is a truth that is hidden from us, then it must somehow be revealed if we are to know it.
Perhaps we can seek it out by our own striving, but depending on how obscured it is, this might be insufficient. We may need someone “from the other side” to reveal it to us. Is that “other side” above or below? Is it in the depths or at the summit? And must we not descend into the depths to ascend to the heavens? That was what Nietzsche taught: we must all have a going under before we can go beyond. Untergang before Übergang.
The Christian scriptures make an exceedingly bold claim. They say that the man Jesus Christ was also divine. He was once unbound by space-time but entered into it. He knew the deep things and revealed them, and he was able to do so because he descended to ascend. The Gospel of John records his words: “If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man.”[23] The Apostle Paul also wrote of him, “He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, so that He might fill all things.”[24]
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is more akin to Christ than his namesake. Like Christ, he withdraws from society to have a private encounter with the ultimate reality: if you will, a going under of spiritual testing or even temptation. Like Christ, he descends to earth to reveal truth to the people. Even the style of narrative chosen by Nietzsche mirrors the Gospels, but there is a major difference.
Zarathustra is unlike Christ in that he does not descend to suffer. No, he is the first Overhuman. He has come purely to conquer: not with weapons, but with words. Christ did not come to see his will done, but to see his Father’s will done. He descended not only to earth, but into death itself. He sought to change the people of the world not simply by convincing them of a higher truth, but by creating the higher truth that would be applied to them. His words were not presented as mere abstractions, but concrete reality. He did not call men to create a subjective truth for themselves, but to embrace the objective truth.
I suppose the chief question is, who creates the reality that we seek? Is it the lion who says, “I will,” or the God who says, “I will”? This consideration creates internal conflict. Which revelation should we believe? Where is the ultimate truth? We strive toward freedom, but are confronted with our own limitations. Even so, the Apostle Paul once instructed the Philippians to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”[25] What kind of Untergang is this?
Part Four: Je Suis
What is real?
This may seem like a fundamentally modern or even postmodern question, but it is surely ancient. After all, human beings have always understood that there are such things as truth and error, reality and mirage. The concept of investigating a matter to determine the truth did not begin with the Scientific Revolution. It is as old as Pontius Pilate’s famous question: “What is truth?”[26]
Yes, the ancients may not have understood every aspect of reality, but they knew there is such a thing as reality, and that it behooves human beings to seek it out. What changed after the Scientific Revolution was that people began to prioritize empirical evidence over other types of evidence—that is to say, as they pursued the truth, they tended to give more weight to sensory experiences gained in the material world than they did to other forms of evidence or knowledge. Because the scientific disciplines only have the capacity to measure the material world (by which I mean anything subject to the understood laws of nature), scientists tend to define reality as anything that exists within this realm…and nothing else.
However, even as the men of science became the arbiters of truth, the more philosophical disciplines refused to cede their historic place. They argued that the limitations of science require a different means of learning by which man can explore things that may not be subject to the ordinary laws of nature, such as morality. Here philosophers like Immanuel Kant attempted to establish a basic, unchanging moral law that could be discovered using human reason even if it was not subject to purely scientific study.
Into this world stepped the young René Descartes. After receiving his law degrees, he took up a military occupation in the hope of seeing the world. On a November day in 1619, while participating in a tour of Germany, Descartes sat alone in a small room heated by a stove. (Why the stove is important, I cannot tell you, but it is always mentioned.) Here he attempted to devise a system of knowledge that would mirror mathematics in the “certainty and evidence of its reasonings”.[27] Essentially, he felt human reason must operate according to principles similar to the scientific method.
After much consideration, Descartes decided that since many of our beliefs are influenced by personal bias or opinion, it was necessary for him to begin by doubting everything if he was to arrive at the most perfect system of thinking. Although he believed himself equal to the task, being well assured of his own rational abilities, he stated that, “The single resolution to rid onseself of all the opinions to which one has heretofore given credence is not an example that everyone ought to follow…”[28] Indeed, even within the world of science, one typically starts with a hypothesis based on a priori knowledge. However, Descartes hoped to discover one fundamental principle upon which he could build his system, and he strove to do so without relying on prior assumptions. This was his conclusion:
But immediately afterward I noticed that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.[29]
That truth discovered by Descartes, which in the original French read, “Je pense, donc je suis,” has become the defining truth of the postmodern world, but not in the way Descartes intended. For him, it was merely the beginning, but for us it is both the end and the means. Postmodern society lives by this maxim as if it were the ultimate reality rather than one part of a thought experiment meant to help Descartes determine what was real.
The 21st century world has raised up personal consciousness as the ultimate reality, even allowing it to override the material. Truth has increasingly been regarded as a matter of subjective opinion rather than objective fact. While fact and opinion have been intermingled throughout human history just like truth and falsehood, there has been a general assumption that they were different things, and that fact and truth should be pursued while opinion and falsehood should be avoided. The scholars of the Scientific Revolution did their best to assure us that material reality is the only reality that exists, and we must rely on objectivity rather than subjectivity. Some religious persons objected on the grounds that science can have nothing to say about the supernatural, but what has happened today is that both the traditionally scientific and religious understandings of truth (at least in the more Western sense) have been thrown aside in favor of an understanding that is subjective, individual, and mutable.
The prime example of this is surely the increasing cultural acceptance of transgenderism as equal in validity to cisgenderism. Gender dysphoria has existed since time immemorial, but it was typically assumed to be something that should be corrected. When a psychological condition (i.e. “I feel like a woman”) conflicted with a material condition (i.e. “I have a Y chromosome”), the material typically ruled the day. After all, science has no way to accurately test or measure what a person “feels like” in the purely psychological sense of the phrase, but it does possess the means to study a person’s DNA. Therefore, the testimony of DNA was considered an objective fact and the testimony of the person’s heart was thought to be a matter of subjective opinion.
Perhaps it is the vast expansion of the psychological sphere, chronicled more than five decades ago in Philip Reiff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic, that has caused our reasoning to shift in this manner. In one sense, our general opinion about how a person with gender dysphoria should be treated has not changed: we believe the conflict between the psychological and material should be solved by leading the person toward the truth. What has changed is how we define and understand truth. We now believe that what a person feels psychologically is a better indicator of truth than the physical construction of their body.
The never-ending platitudes fed to us by our culture—“follow your heart”, “do what you feel is right”, “only you know what is best for you”, “speak your truth”—speak to a psychological rather than material understanding of truth. This means what is reality for one person may not be reality for another. Again, we have raised up personal consciousness as the ultimate reality. We have taken the phrase, “Je pense, donc je suis!” as our rallying cry. We believe that thought or consciousness is the determiner of reality. We allow feelings to reign supreme, even though feelings are demonstrably varied among different people. What then is the ultimate reality?
As a statement of basic truth, “I am, therefore I think,” would perhaps be more appropriate. Thought always proceeds from existence in our universe. A thinking thing must exist, but an existing thing need not necessarily think. Yes, existence precedes consciousness. This was precisely Descartes’ point. When he said, “I think, therefore I am,” he was raising up thought as the evidence of something logically prior: existence. However, our postmodern society has come to believe that either existence proceeds from thinking, or existence and consciousness are one and the same.
One need not be a philosopher to see how this changes the way we understand reality, making it a matter of individual opinion. If existence does not precede consciousness, then there can be no common reality and logic itself breaks down. What is so troubling about this is not merely the poor logic, but the gaping hole left in the human heart by such a worldview. All of us long for reality. Even as our cultural mores change and the subjective is raised above the objective, we revert to the notion of material reality if we do not bother to check ourselves.
Why do we do that? Because we know somewhere deep inside that existence precedes consciousness. It must, for where there is no objective truth, society moves first to anarchy and then to tyranny. The anarchy comes because we can no longer agree on what the facts are, and the tyranny comes when someone forces us to do so.
But think about what I have just argued: that existence precedes consciousness. That means not only that our existence logically preceded our thought, but that something existed before we did, and were we to reach back through space and time, we would come to an existence from which all others proceed, and this would be the ultimate reality. Thus, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes moved immediately from establishing his own existence as a thinking thing to considering what existed first.
Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get its reality, if not from its cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect.[30]
Descartes identified God as the ultimate reality: a pure and perfect existence from which all others proceed. But if God exists, then he (or she, or it) must exist in a certain way. Such a God must be part of objective reality, and the most frightening thing of all for human beings who long for personal autonomy is that God may, in fact, be a person.
Why should it frighten us that God is a person? Because our experience with persons has taught us that they often disagree with us. They may even presume to tell us what to do, and if their power is greater than our own, they might succeed in bending us to their will. We rightly discern that if God is a person—a reality we are forced to confront—then the game is up. We can no longer simply play at religion. We must bow the knee to this person and adjust our understanding to his (or hers, or its). What a terrifying prospect this is!
Many human beings have concluded it would be far better for God not to exist, or to be some kind of nebulous spirit rather than a person. There is little to fear from a nothing or a nebulous spirit, but they provide little assurance of security. This is where we must seek out the true reality and determine the nature of this first existence. It is our Anfechtung and our Untergang, and it causes us to fear and tremble.
If anyone has a right to proclaim, “Je suis!” it is the one who proclaimed, “I AM WHO I AM.”[31]
Part Five: YHWH
Do you remember a time in your youth when you were faced with the hard truth that this world is a chaotic and evil place from which you are not fully protected?
For me, this occurred on the day of the 9/11 terror attacks. It was the first time I felt a substantial threat against the country in which I lived. I was fourteen at the time, and the sense of security I had enjoyed throughout most of my early years was effectively shattered. I continued on with life, but I felt a shadow hanging over me, as if the dread of that day had left a mark.
I visited New York City for the first time seven years later. The former World Trade Center site was under construction, and the new buildings had not yet come to fruition. Instead, I looked into a gaping hole: an apt symbol of the wound to the nation’s heart that had not yet healed.
In 2014, I returned to the city with my husband. We stayed at a hotel in Lower Manhattan, and the first item on our agenda was a visit to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The main exhibits are underground, where the parking garages used to be. I took the escalator down into the darkness and walked into a large open area. My eyes were immediately drawn to a huge concrete wall, and upon reading the placard, I learned that it was a slurry wall: a portion of the original foundation complex intended to prevent seepage from the high water table. Although the towers above it were destroyed, this wall still stands as a testament to what came before it and what occurred on that fateful day.
Upon viewing that wall, my mind was drawn to something from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In the second book, The Two Towers, the wizard Gandalf essentially returns from the dead. While the other characters had seen him fall into an abyss after fighting a balrog, Gandalf tells them of an epic struggle in which he wrestled with the fiery monster as both descended into darkness.
Long I fell, and he fell with me. His fire was about me. I was burned. Then we plunged into the deep water and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death: almost it froze my heart…Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone. He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake. We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted.[32]
Gandalf then describes their rise to the summit of the mountain, where they battled to the death. The struggle irreversibly changed the wizard: he was brought back, but carried the terrible memory of his struggle. When another character mentions the balrog, the text says of Gandalf that “for a moment it seemed that a cloud of pain passed over his face, and he sat silent, looking old as death”.[33]
As I stood before the slurry wall, I too felt a cloud pass over me. This was the uttermost foundation of stone. Here the memory of dread remained in the darkness, hidden from the eyes of the watching world. Here some poor souls had lain, pinned under the wreckage, clinging desperately to life, with only the slightest bit of hope. A few were rescued, but the memory of those hours likely still haunts them, even as it haunted Gandalf.
There is some debate over the degree of similarity between the character Gandalf and Jesus Christ. One of my pastors happily pointed out shortly after the release of the film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring that Gandalf sacrificed himself to save the other members of the fellowship, and his body made the shape of the cross when he fell. I have no idea if the filmmakers were trying to create a Christian image, but it is true enough that the fiery balrog Gandalf battles in that film looks rather like Beelzebub, and the wizard essentially rises from the dead. Like Jesus Christ, he faces his greatest test on behalf of those he loves, and he must descend into the depths in order to rise. Indeed, Gandalf’s descent in flames to a lowest level of icy cold is equally reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno.
Postmodern society is uncomfortable with the fiery imagery of the Bible, which frequently speaks of wrath and judgment. Some biblical scholars have objected to the notion, long central to the penal substitution understanding of the Christ’s atonement, that the Son of God was made to bear the wrath of his Father upon the cross. They tend to refer to this idea as “cosmic child abuse”. Others repeat the common refrain, “How can a good God allow so much evil in the world?” This is one of the chief accusations made by the so-called New Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Everything from the violent acts of religious extremists to the terrible diseases afflicting young children are held up as evidence that if there was a God, he could not be good. The sins of Christians—e.g. the Crusades, anti-Semitism, and sexual abuse scandals—have caused many to doubt the God they claim to represent. Then there is a large group of people who are offended by the notion of a place of eternal punishment. They are happy enough to accept the biblical concept of heaven, but chafe at the idea of hell.
This last objection was on the mind of Martin Luther when he wrote his longest work on the topic of predestination and divine sovereignty, The Bondage of the Will. In his response to another work by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luther argued that the deep things of God are beyond the power of human comprehension, and our reasoning cannot always grasp his intent. Indeed, what God declares good may seem abhorrent to us, and therefore to truly love God is an act of faith. In one particularly hard hitting passage, he writes,
This is the highest degree of faith, to believe him merciful when he saves so few and damns so many, and to believe him righteous when by his own will, he makes us necessarily damnable, so that he seems according to Erasmus, to delight in the torments of the wretched and to be worthy of hatred rather than of love. If, then, I could by any means comprehend how this God can be merciful and just who displays so much wrath and iniquity, there would be no need of faith.[34]
The God presented in the Bible possesses many characteristics that postmodern man struggles to accept. He specifically and repeatedly claims to be a supernatural actor. He is wrathful toward evil, yet allows that evil to occur. He demonstrates his love, yet allows his own followers to suffer immensely. He says he is unwilling that any should perish, but he also says that none can come to him unless they are drawn by his Spirit.
“I AM WHO I AM,” he declares.
Many people have attempted to get around this, particularly in the past few centuries. They have assured us that God is so loving that he would never send people to hell, any suffering is beyond his control, he has a very minimal moral code, and we can understand him easily enough with our mental faculties. The odd thing about this postmodern God is that he seems very…human. He does not seem supernatural at all, but entirely natural, unlike the God of the Bible.
Yet the God of the Bible declares, “I AM WHO I AM.”
It is exceedingly clear to me as I examine the religious landscape in the postmodern West that many of us are simply playing at religion. We are not approaching God as if he were an objective reality. We are seeking to define him rather than allowing him to define himself. If God exists (and I realize for many this is a big “if”), then he must exist in a certain way, even as humans do. And to repeat Descartes’ point, the source of our existence must be more real and perfect than we are. Why then do we seek to dictate to the ultimate reality? Surely it will dictate to us.
“I AM WHO I AM,” he declares.
That phrase was the name by which the God of the Bible revealed himself to Moses: YHWH in the Hebrew language, usually written in English as Yahweh. It was not given to him by Moses, but revealed from heaven. It speaks to an eternal, unchanging, uncompromising nature. You cannot make this God into whatever you desire. You must simply take him or leave him. He is real as revealed or he is nothing. As C.S. Lewis famously said about Jesus Christ,
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[35]
Too many people now are attempting to take the option that was not left open. They seek an ultimate reality that is too distant, tame, and compromising to harm them. Perhaps you are one such person. You looked in horror upon that God who judges, damns, and seems altogether evil, and declared him to be a phantom of an earlier age rather than a deity for the postmodern world. If we need a deity at all, you say, it is one that is altogether tolerant of everything: loving and gracious without exception, bestowing every kind of gift on every kind of person.
And so you tell yourself that all is well, and perhaps you will make it to the end of life untroubled. “I have lived!” you declare. No, my friend. You have not lived. You have merely passed the hours.
Life calls us to a struggle: a going under. It calls us to consider our origin, our purpose, and our end. It calls us to seek out the ultimate reality, and a cursory examination of the world around us reveals that the ultimate reality is not all cotton candy and lollipops. I would assume that only those who have never suffered could imagine the world to be altogether good, but all creatures suffer. I am therefore forced to conclude that the greater part of humanity lives by means of constant distraction and denial, fearing the truth. They whisper words of false comfort to themselves, for they dare not undergo the Anfechtung that leads to true comfort.
Yes, the greater part of men live in denial, unwilling to endure the fear and trembling through which true faith is created. They do not understand that one must doubt before one can believe in anything—that existential despair is the path to life. They live for comfort and therefore disdain suffering. Because of this, they cannot comprehend the good that may come from trial. They dare not descend into the depths to arrive at the foundation of stone.
But this struggle and these philosophical considerations are what make our species truly unique! All creatures on earth suffer, but only humans derive any purpose from their sufferings. Only humans wish to know what came before and what comes after. When you ask why, you are doing the most human thing imaginable. The very youngest humans ask why, but no other creature does. Your going under on the path to life is what defines you most certainly as the highest of all beings on planet Earth. Are you willing then to seek out the first existence? Are you willing to wrestle with this God as he is revealed? My friend, you must. As Luther once stated,
That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.[36]
This generation is desperate for something real, but we are terrified of what will happen if we ever trip over the ultimate reality in our never ending journey toward “our truth”. We would rather create our own road to nowhere than walk the same path as our ancestors in fear and trembling. We are unwilling to strive with something that conflicts with our narrative, or at least we will only do so on our own terms. But this is not a game and we cannot write the rules. If there is a supreme being who created and governs this universe, then he is the one who writes the rules, and you must strive with him.
Perhaps you are not prepared to enter that battle. You do not wish to go under for fear of what you will find at the uttermost foundation of stone. Yes, this society is like nothing so much as the biblical King Ahaz, who proclaimed in false reverence, “I will not ask, nor will I test the LORD!”[37] Those who play at religion would loath this YHWH if ever they met him, but they will never do so. Instead, they enclose him in layers of psychological projection, until his image is so faint that it can barely be seen. “Now I am safe from you,” they think. “I need not strive. Let the zealots fear and tremble.”
To shun that battle to which YHWH himself invites you is to be guilty of spiritual cowardice. When Job questioned the Almighty, he was declared righteous. When his friends attempted to remove the problem of evil, they were rebuked. Even so it is with us. Only those who fear and tremble can make a strong claim to faith.
Perhaps you cannot accept a God who eternally damns his creatures. Very well. Abandon that notion, but know that when you do you abandon the YHWH revealed in the Bible. You can choose to accept some portions of scripture and reject others, but remember, this is ultimate reality we are talking about: it is not a game. How do you know which God is the true one? In your rush to free Christianity from the wrathful God, you may well have thrown out the loving one as well. The mercy of the cross would not exist without the wrath. Are you prepared to lose it?
Consider the words of YHWH to Job. He came to that old saint in the depths of his suffering, but he did not offer him simple explanations. He did not attempt to soothe away the harsh realities of the world or to deny his omnipotence. He called upon a man in utter desperation to “gird up your loins like a man”, and then he revealed his lordship over all: even the foundations of stone.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?[38]
Those are the words that YHWH offered to Job, and now he offers them to us. Are we prepared to hear them? Will we call the thing what it actually is?
You will know the real God when you find him because he will infuriate you. If your conception of God does nothing to challenge your comfort, then you must ask yourself if it is the true God you hear or simply the voice of your subconscious. The majority reaction of the saints of old when they encountered God was to bow in terror.
If you have never feared God, then you have never felt him as a real and active being. You have never wrestled with the paradoxes of Christianity. You have never questioned his goodness or your own. It is possible that you don’t believe in him at all—that you are still playing at religion. The true God can be known in part by the fact that he never lets you remain as you are. Yes, he must be real, or he is nothing. If you wish to know that God, you must go under. You must place your faith on the altar, believing that you will receive it back with a blessing.
Part Six: Sehnsucht
It was not the doctrine of the Trinity that troubled me. It was not the bones of a billion years. It was not the pain in my muscles, the offense of predestination, or even the sexual ethic.
It was the silence.
The silence of God hit me with the force of an atom bomb. It drowned out every other sound. In the dark of the abyss, I cried out to my Creator. I cried to the God who gave me life.
Nothing. Silence.
The doubt that was planted in me years earlier sprung forth and coursed through my veins. It awakened every secret fear, and I wept bitterly. Oh, how I wept! My faith, so precious and yet so fragile! I felt as if it was slipping away, and I cried out to the Lord, “Grant me your Spirit!”
The God who remains silent in my deepest distress, when my faith itself is on the line. The God who remains silent in the face of injustice—who can look upon the Holocaust without saying a word. The God who spoke to the prophets of old, but has nothing to say to this present darkness, when the light of faith is going out in the West, and all that is left is silence.
Why should the silence have bothered me and not the suffering? Why could I accept the God who seems monstrous to others, but struggled to accept a God who is silent?
“God is not silent,” you say. Yes, of course. I said it to myself. He has revealed himself in scripture. He is with us here and now. But was he with me? How could he be if I doubted?
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
That the mountains might quake at Your presence—
As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil—
To make Your name known to Your adversaries,
That the nations may tremble at Your presence![39]
How I longed for God! Even as the silence grew more deafening by the hour, I felt my desire growing. And I prayed in the words of the Psalmist,
As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So my soul pants for You, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God?
My tears have been my food day and night,
While they say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’[40]
I could not think why this silence should trouble me so when it did not trouble others. Why should this of all things cause me to doubt? Why did it threaten to shipwreck my faith…or did it?
I did not know what would happen. I wished to move on—to put it out of my mind. I loathed the struggle. I lived every day in fear and trembling.
“Why would God require faith?” I thought. “Why would he deny me this one thing: the only thing that is necessary?”
But had he denied me? Indeed, I noted the marks of faith within myself. I seemed to hang upon that faith like an elephant upon a thread, but it was there all the same. I clung to it and treasured it. I did not know if it would hold.
“And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”[41]
How I sought that God every day! How I cried and groaned! For this was my Anfechtung, the testing of my faith. I had descended into the depths. I was nearing the foundations of stone, and I feared what I would find there: what would come from this Untergang. Would I rise to life or succumb to death?
I blamed myself for wandering from the straight path. I felt much like Dante when he awoke in the middle of that dark wood, not quite knowing how he had arrived there, but struck with terror all the same. I feared that God would never forgive me for doubting—that the seed of faith inside me would never grow into a tree in which the birds of the air could find a dwelling. I served God, but I doubted him. I doubted, yet I hated myself for doubting. I could not bear the silence. It was deafening to my ears.
Then I considered the path of my life. I meditated upon its meaning. What did I desire? What did I fear? This was when I realized that every fear I carried inside me was pointing me toward the ultimate reality in which I might find peace for my soul. I hoped that if I could experience that perfect love which has no equal, I would be free.
The Germans have a word for what I was experiencing: Sehnsucht. The closest translation is “longing” or even “blessed longing”. It is that feeling somewhere between pleasure and pain, but surpassing them both in equal measure. It is the pang of nostalgia we feel when contemplating the past and the fierce expectancy when contemplating the future. It is the desire for something this world cannot provide, but which is hinted at by certain things in this world. C.S. Lewis equated it with joy, which is somewhat odd, since the standard English speaker’s understanding of joy would have no room for grief…yet that is exactly what Lewis suggested joy involves.
I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.[42]
This joy of which Lewis speaks shares an intimate connection with the Sehnsucht of German Romanticism. From a young age, Lewis had been fascinated by the old Germanic and Scandinavian myths. He felt the pang of longing when listening to the flow of the Rhine and glories of the Schwarzwald portrayed in a Richard Wagner score. His imagination was captured by the adventures of Siegfried. He was also familiar with those twin lords of Weimar—Goethe and Schiller—and he built upon their theme of longing (Sehnsucht), interpreting it as a desire not for nature but heaven itself.
The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated.[43]
It was there at the foundation of stone that I came to understand the great longing that had followed me every day of my life. Often, it had lain dormant somewhere deep in the recesses of my soul, while my conscious mind concerned itself with more urgent matters…or what I thought were more urgent matters. There had been moments where it nearly broke free: bouts of anxiety and terrible loneliness. At times, I was almost hopeless as I saw the days passing by and felt myself as ancient as the earth on which I stood. But every so often, I had a glimpse of something divine, and I knew I could never be content with the kind of life for which so many of my peers settled.
What was troubling me was nothing less than a longing for the beatific vision. I felt keenly the pains of this world and how my own existence was impoverished in comparison with that first and most perfect existence of which Descartes spoke. Was the doubt I felt in response to the silence of God an act of rebellion against him or a desperate yearning for him? Even to ask this question caused me to tremble and fear.
“Whatever happens now, I know I will not be the same,” I thought. “It is all or nothing. This God cannot simply be a subject of academic study, though he is certainly that. He cannot simply be a stopgap for the present day. Either he is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of all existence, or he is a myth not worth considering.” Of course, I feared the myth hypothesis, but the hope—the hope was just that. It was the reason I lived and breathed: because I hoped in the promises of scripture. I longed for the beatific vision.
I knew myself to be a worm and not a woman, but I had questions of God as well. Why did it have to be this way? Why did he hide himself? Was this my Mount Moriah? Was I to fear and tremble for the rest of my days? I could not look back in assurance from the mountain top, for I was not yet there. Indeed, I am still not there. I did not know if this testing would be for good or ill, but I knew I must endure it. I prayed that I would endure it. I felt I would endure anything to know that perfect love.
Moses once cried out to YHWH, “I pray You, show me Your glory!”[44] The answer he received from God was not what one might expect.
And He said, ‘I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.’ But He said, ‘You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!’[45]
What an odd reply this was! To look upon the glory of God, we are told, is fatal to human beings. Only the goodness we may see, and indeed we see it all around us. But YHWH refused to bend to Moses’ desire. He would not relinquish his sovereign right. “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” Who is this strange God? If I gave my whole life to him, I could no sooner comprehend what has been from beginning to end. Yet for myself, I would try. I would make the descent in hope of resurrection, for I have felt the Sehnsucht of which Goethe’s lyric speaks.
Tell it only to the wise,
For the crows at once will jeer:
That which is alive I praise,
That which longs for death by fire.[46]
How I hoped to see myself in those words! How I desired to be truly alive, even if it meant dying to rise.
You have known the alien feeling
In the calm of candlelight;
Gloom-embrace will lie no more,
By the flickering shades obscured,
But are seized by new desire,
To a higher union lured.
Then no distance holds you fast;
Winged, enchanted, on you fly,
Light your longing, and at last,
Moth, you meet the flame and die.
Never prompted to that quest:
Die and dare rebirth![47]
Many will be filled with longing, but only some will seek to fulfill it in the ultimate reality. Only some will spend their life in fear and trembling, pursuing the city that has foundations. Others will attempt to seize satisfaction in the here and now. They will search for it in wealth, power, sex, fitness, mindfulness—anything to fill the gaping hole. Even the love they feel toward their fellow human beings is a stopgap. It is just as Lewis said: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.”[48]
Ah, but is that joy truly offered? The specter of death rises before us. It will bring an end to all we have built. What then is our purpose? Is there any hope in this life, or is it all meaningless? Was Nietzsche right? Are we simply doing the dance of death? Should we pursue dominion in the here and now? What would it matter? What does any of it matter? Dare I ask it? Yes, I will. Is God silent because…he is not there?
Where does one turn when these darkest of doubts rise to the surface? I say look to the cross. Look upon the lamb that was slain. If anyone would have the right to reveal ultimate reality, it would be one who descended and ascended. It would be one who walked through that valley of the shadow of death, and who requires nothing of us that he did not complete himself. Only one who came from heaven can reveal heaven to earth. Only through the incarnate Son of God can we look upon our Creator and truly know him.
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth…No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.[49]
In a twist no writer could have imagined, the glory of God is revealed most perfectly in the cross of Jesus Christ. Only in that darkest of hours was the joy of the ages accomplished. Therefore, the author of Hebrews declares, “…let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”[50]
Yes, as Christ knelt in the garden of Gethsemane and made his prayer of lament to the Father, he was staring into an abyss of terror: the deepest darkness ever known to man. “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death,” he told his disciples.[51] Once before, he had said to them, “But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished!”[52] This was the Untergang of the Son of God in which he was called upon to drink the cup of wrath that had been assigned to others. He, the only innocent person in history, was called upon to be tortured and killed, receiving the full punishment due for sin. There had been a substitute for Isaac, but there would be no substitute for the Son of God.
The greatest Anfechtung he faced in that hour! How he must have longed for deliverance! He was, after all, a man. No common man, yes, but a man nonetheless. And so he cried out, “Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me,” as any of us would. But then he said something few of us would dare. Nietzsche’s lion had proclaimed the end of “thou shalt” and the beginning of “I will”, but in that moment, the one who had more right than any other to proclaim his own prerogative said, “…yet not what I will, but what You will.”[53] He sought a greater joy, and like Abraham, he hoped in the resurrection from the dead.
And what of the disciples who saw him experience that suffering? The darkness of that day threatened to be the end of them. Their faith, which once seemed so strong, disappeared. They abandoned him one by one, save for John. Only John stood at the foot of the cross. What horror he must have endured! Peter had denied the Lord three times, but for all his faithfulness, John was forced to witness the greatest darkness in history.
Even as Christ died that day, the faith of the disciples seemed to die. The next time we find them, they are not in the garden awaiting the prophesied resurrection. They are hiding together, afraid of sharing in their master’s fate. Even Peter, who had so boldly declared, “Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You,”[54] was not prepared to face his own going under. The shallowness of the disciples’ faith had been exposed by this trial. Though they had spent all their time around Christ, they did not truly know him at all.
Then they were exposed to something higher than reason: they saw the resurrected Christ face to face, and their faith was restored. They were no longer playing at religion. They saw that even as they would share in the sufferings of Christ, they would share in his resurrection. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection…”[55] For God is not silent at all. In these last days, he has spoken through his Son.
There is only one thing unchanging. There is only one balm for the soul. I seek the higher love of God. I seek the death of death. Only in Christ can my longing be fulfilled. “For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes even to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.”[56]
But what about you, my friend? Do you know that of which I speak? Have you too walked in the depths?
Here you take your stand in the valley of the shadow of death, the wilderness of the soul, the graveyard of faith. What you thought you knew has been belied. What you built lies in rubble, and here amid the charred remains, you seek some solace: a last bit of hope among the dry bones. You have felt the Sehnsucht.
You fear this moment, but your fear is not that of the weak. You fear what it would mean to be truly alive: that the truth itself will be your undoing. With a voiceless cry, you cast your lament to the heavens. You make your final stand in the valley of the shadow of death. This is your Untergang.
Nothing. Silence.
The only sound is the wind scattering dust, overthrowing all in its path. You know not where it comes from, nor where it is going. It has forced you along, through triumph and tragedy, and now it has brought you here.
Perhaps you shed a tear. Perhaps you utter a prayer. The seed which was planted in you is all that is left. Would you throw it away, or would you endure the Anfechtung?
And you call out to the sky and say, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down! Oh, that you would grant me what I seek!” Only God knows how long you wait.
Then suddenly, all is changed. The lightning strikes. You can never be the same.
The sky alight, the great storehouses open. This is the Blitz. It is the end and the beginning. For this is not a dead place. This is holy ground. And there you are, flat on your back, confronted with the ultimate reality. You are overwhelmed and despair of yourself.
Then rising, you are swept up in the torrent. For a moment, you see what was and what will be. You know you are called by His name. At least, you are captivated by this maddening thing, and all else fades away. A consoling force, a consuming fire: YHWH.
Soli Deo Gloria.
[1] Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. Ed. Alan Jacobs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 105.
[2] Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 1985. 42.
[3] Ibid, 46.
[4] Ibid, 47.
[5] Matthew 27:46. The New American Standard Bible. Updated edition. The Lockman Foundation, 1995. (All biblical quotations are from this source.)
[6] Isaiah 53:10
[7] Genesis 22:2
[8] Kierkegaard, 50.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Genesis 17:14.
[11] Scaer, David P. “The Concept of Anfechtung in Luther’s Thought”. Concordia Theological Quarterly. Vol. 27. No. 1. January 1983. 15.
[12] Hebrews 11:17-19
[13] Nietzche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 38.
[14] Ibid, 11.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid, 24.
[17] Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. by John Ciardi. New York: New American Library, 2009. 4.
[18] Philippians 3:10-11
[19] Proverbs 30:2-4
[20] Job 11:7-8
[21] Psalm 88:6
[22] Psalm 71:20
[23] John 3:12-13
[24] Ephesians 4:10
[25] Philippians 2:12-13
[26] John 18:38
[27] Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Fourth edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. 4.
[28] Ibid, 9.
[29] Ibid, 18.
[30] Ibid, 73.
[31] Exodus 3:14
[32] Tokien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings. 2003 film cover single volume edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 490.
[33] Ibid, 490.
[34] Luther, Martin. The Bondage of the Will (De Servo Arbitrio). Luther and Eramus: Free Will and Salvation. Trans. and ed. by E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson. Ichthus Edition. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969. 138.
[35] Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. New York: Harper Collins, 2002. 50-1.
[36] Luther, Martin. Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518. http://bookofconcord.org/heidelberg.php
[37] Isaiah 7:12
[38] Job 38:4-7
[39] Isaiah 64:1-2
[40] Psalm 42:1-3
[41] Hebrews 11:6
[42] Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life. San Francisco: Harper One, 2017. 19.
[43] Lewis, C.S. The Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014. 234.
[44] Exodus 33:18
[45] Exodus 33:19-20
[46] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Blessed Longing”. The Essential Goethe. Ed. Matthew Bell. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 39.
[47] Ibid
[48] Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. 2001 paperback edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1980. 26.
[49] John 1:14, 18
[50] Hebrews 12:1b-2
[51] Mark 14:34
[52] Luke 12:50
[53] Mark 14:36
[54] Matthew 26:35
[55] Romans 6:5
[56] Matthew 24:27
