The death of God and the death of man: A civilizational choice

Catholic theologian and philosopher Peter Kreeft, commenting on German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche’s proclamation at the end of the nineteenth century that “God is dead,” with an insightful and penetrating analysis of how such a declaration impacted Western culture, said:

“One need not share Nietzche’s atheism to agree with his historical, not theological dictum that God is dead (i.e., that faith in God is dead as a functional center for Western civilization), that we are now a planet detached from its sun.  One need not share Nietzsche’s refusal of morality and natural laws to agree with his observation that Western man is increasingly denying morality and natural law, that we are well on our way to the brave new world.”

The widespread acceptance of the “death of God” (i.e. God either did not exist or was a meaningless concept) resulted in the widespread death of objective truth and objective morality in Western culture. (Is it a surprise that Adolph Hitler was a profound admirer of Nietzsche?)

Two of the twentieth century’s most insightful Christian thinkers, C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, predicted that the death of man as man would follow, unless man repents and turns back to the true God and Creator.

Schaeffer and Lewis both understood that as the Christian worldview receded in dominance, it would be replaced by a secular, humanistic view of reality that would permeate the West. As this transpired as the twentieth century progressed, modern man has fallen below what Schaeffer called the “line of despair.” Schaeffer explained that by throwing the God of the Bible out of the equation, modern man left to himself and without divine revelation could not find absolute Truth and eventually would give up the search for it in despair.

As Schaeffer points out, modern man no longer thinks in terms of antithesis (i.e. the law of noncontradiction). Modern man now assumes all truth as “relative.” And since modern man now believes there are no absolutes, modern man has largely rejected universal moral laws and has thus embraced moral relativism.

Schaeffer concludes, “Our society now functions with no fixed ethics.” Moral chaos is the inevitable fruit of falling into the temptation of everyone doing that which is right in his own eyes. It leads either to chaos or chaos followed by order from an oppressive government elite.

Once a society loses the agreed-upon morality of Judeo-Christian theism, there is no “normal,” so everything becomes normal. Chaos and anarchy ensue. Thus, enter government elites who arbitrarily force their values on the public. (Example: the U.S. Supreme Court justices who imposed same-sex marriage on the entire American nation against its will.)

The great Anglo-American writer T.S. Eliot was right when he warned in his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech that the West faced an inevitable choice between a reassertion of Judeo-Christian values in our culture or an acquiescence to an emerging pagan, humanistic culture, and that, in due course, will lead to the “death” of man.

E.R. Norman, the British historian, once said, “Pluralism is a name a society gives to itself when it is in the process of transitioning from one orthodoxy to another.” Make no mistake, there will be an orthodoxy, either a Judeo-Christian one or a pagan, atheistic, or agnostic one.

Back when I was in college (1965-1969), the most popular thinker on campuses across the country was B.F. Skinner, a behavioral psychologist who wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, argued that freedom and dignity were outmoded concepts that we no longer could afford and that human beings were basically analogous to the white mice in the Skinnerian Box. Schaeffer penned a reply, entitled Back to Freedom and Dignity.

I fear this is the choice we face, and the good news is that all of us get a vote. I vote for freedom, dignity, and the uniqueness of man created in the image of God.