Advantages of Christian Morality per Nietzsche

This is an extended quote from Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks (p 116, the italics reflect Nietzsche’s underlining in his hand written notebooks):

What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?

1. It endowed man with an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away.

2. It served the advocates of God by conceding to the world, despite suffering and evil, the character of perfection, including that ‘freedom’ - evil seemed full of meaning.

3. It posited that man knows about absolute values, thus giving him adequate knowledge precisely of what is most important.

It shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation - in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.

I take it for granted that points 1 & 2 can both be correct and uncontroversially used to argue for or against Christian morality. However, point 3 is quite remarkable, for I tend to agree with Nietzsche here and see this as a current sin of the Church. My only concern would be that man can know absolute value versus knowing about absolute value. It we take him to mean the Christian morality can equip us with a kind of knowledge that is absolute, then I’m not sure what biblical warrant or situation we will be able to find in support of this.dore_joshua_sun.jpg

The great deceit of certainty extends into our sense of the moral and the Body of Christ must be clear as to what our epistemology is like. What sense does it make to say that we can know some moral in an absolute way when every law of morality has to be transgressed in order to maintain its coherence (sans the worship of God)? As I often point out, the command to ‘not murder’ is given by a God who just murder thousands of children and Egyptian soldiers and is planning the systematic slaughter of the people of Canaan. Further, this God gives that commandment through the hands and prayers of a man who is established an enraged murderer himself. What absolute value do we gain from such a narrative and its embedded codes?

If the goal is to walk away from canon with a knowledge of absolute values transferred to your mind, then Nietzsche’s words here ought to cut you to the bone. That kind of knowledge can only act as an illusory antidote to nihilism. But I will suggest that our retort to Nietzsche is to argue against abuse of absolutism in favor of an epistemology that does allow us to know what is moral, but not contain or domesticate that morality. In the end, our morality is based in the worship of Yahweh, His Son through the Spirit given to us. That is, after all, the intent of the first commandment. All attempts at absolutizing morality will rightly fall under Nietzsche’s admonition here.

The Nietzsche Challenge

Since Nietzsche is clearly the most influential philologist of the last 150 years, if not arguably the most influential philosopher, his definition of Christianity has pervaded the West.  Much of Nietzsche’s conclusions about religion (academic and theological) are peppered throughout our conversations without much of the substance of Nietzsche’s actual critique.  But here in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche is already offering a challenge of defining Christendom.

 Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another: or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths”

I will maintain (and provide substantial justification for) that Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is largely based upon Franz Overbeck’s esoteric view of early Christianity.  He flatly admits as much in his correspondence with his best friend and Christian historian. In the end, it almost does not matter from where Nietzsche derived his esoteric versions of Christianity, the version he critiques took hold.

The Challenge is to assess whether or not his version of Christianity is more aptly termed ‘Gnostic Social Stoicism’.  But even if we can separate out the Jewish Christianity of the sacred texts from Nietzsche’s caricature, the caricature surely fits some flavors of modern Christianity.  The first goal of responding to Nietzsche here is to show how the Euangelion is not the bizarrity of Stoicism he descries.  The second is to be honest and critical regarding the parts of the church that do resemble Christianity as Nietzsche describes it.

Signs & Errors in Nietzsche’s Epistemology

Nietzsche’s epistemology of signs seems to be a derivative of his larger project. As what we call “I” is the governor of the commonwealth that is our body, what he calls the “sign” is a token for a much deeper and richer reality. He goes on to say that we have made signs for whole classes of signs. This makes our epistemology narrower. He notes that error is purely a problem for the organic world.

Later in the Notebooks, he writes about the internalization of all movement so that movement itself may just be a sign in our epistemic structure, an abbreviated reaction to pressure or force. But, Nietzsche himself is concerned with what, exactly, is the nature of an error. Clearly, he does not believe that error is a problem with our sensory (body). Courtesy of tickledorange.comIn defense of Descartes, he says, “This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.” Maybe becoming is hidden from us because of our own nature, and we wrongly ascribe that hiddenness and elusiveness to be a form of error on our part, the deception of our bodies. How incredibly perspicacious is this?

With equal clarity, Nietzsche opposes the graspability of reality. He derides those who think they can signify the world around them. We grasp with signs, and signs of signs, in order to avoid error. However, error is a necessary condition of life. Error is not objective falsity; it sits among a hierarchy of errors. So our signs are our errors may be the same thing. Our ego is a ‘becoming collection’, so too is our epistemology, a becoming collection of abbreviations, errors and signs.

This post refers to Nietzsche’s private notebooks recently published through Cambridge Press (Nietzsche: Writings from the late notebooks, especially p. 56).

Questions that dig: Canonicism

Dr. Michael Bird (the oft mistaken Rick Astley impersonator of Highland Theological College & the blog EUANGELION) posted the following questions to leading Reformed theologians.  The answers appear to require a book-length well-reasoned argument.  But the questions cut right to the core of Biblical Theology and really, any kind of Jewish or Christian theology.  Here they are:

1. What is the “Reformed Orthodox” view of using extra-biblical sources in exegesis? What led you to this answer and what (if anything) makes your answer prescriptive?
2. Why is Genesis 1-3 similar to the Enuma Elish? On what do you base your answer?
3. Did the Apostle Paul believe in the inerrancy of the autographa? Why are Paul’s citation of Scripture often different from the wording and meaning in the original Hebrew Bible and even the Septuagint (to give one example: Isa. 59.20 cited in Rom. 11.26-27)?
4. Did the historical person of Enoch prophesy about the coming of the Lord (Jude 14-15)? Why does Jude cite this extra-canonical source (an Enochic tradition?), without differentiating it from the Hebrew Scriptures that he also quotes in his short epistle?

Rereading Nietzsche

nietzche2.jpgAs I began to read Nietzsche for the first time (beyond his renowned Thus Spoke Zarathustra), I immediately realized that I was in over my head. I took a seminar on Nietzsche where we read and discussed many of his major works, including the recently published Writings from the Late Notebooks. The more that I read, the more I became enamored with his iconoclastic motivations and bizarre methodology. His resistance to non-somatic epistemology is very refreshing. In many ways, I very much identify with what he was trying to do.And you have to love someone who has so much unashamed hatred for academics, Socrates, and Christianity alike. His aphorismic flights are almost as fantasical as they are disturbing. For instance, he list these top three destroyers of Europe (source: Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 21): 1) Christianity, 2) Alcoholic Poisoning of Europe, and 3) Syphilis.

You can’t make this stuff up. I particularly like how Christianity beat out syphilis in the vie for first place. It must have been quite a scrabble!

As I have shared my enthusiasm for Nietzsche, there is an understandable trend in the reactions (mostly stares laced with possible intonations of heresy). Most people are interacting with Nietzsche very superficially, just as we interact with many of the influential scholars without appreciating the nuances of their approach. But because I am intensely interested in developing a somatically indwelled epistemology, Friedrich Nietzsche is a obvious interlocutor.

I would hope to merely motivate people, especially Christians, to give Nietzsche’s work another look. I will offer two juicy quotes as a means of wading into Friedrich’s world:

You ask me what is idiosyncratic about philosophers?… There is, for instance their lack of a sense of history, their hatred for the very notion of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are honoring a thing if they de-historicize it, see it sub specie aeterni– if they make a mummy out of it. Everything that philosophers have handled, for thousands of years now, has been a conceptual mummy; nothing real escaped their hands alive. They kill and stuff whatever they worship, these gentlemen who idolize concepts; they endanger the life of whatever they worship.
…Be a philosopher, be a mummy, portray monotono-theism with a gravedigger’s pantomime! — And above all, away with the body, this patheitc [pet idea] of the senses, afflicted with every logical error there is, refuted, even impossible — although it has the nerve to behave as if it were real!” -Twilight of the Idols

“Logic and mechanics can only be applied to what is most superficial, and are really only an art of schematising and abbreviating, a coping with multiplicity through an art of expression - not an ‘understanding’, but a designating in order to make oneself understood. Thinking the world as reduced to its surface means above all making it ‘graspable’.
Logic and mechanics never touch on causality –” -Writing from the Late Notebooks

Now I know

And as G.I. Joe says, “Knowing is half the battle.” I suppose killing is the other half (which ironically never happened on G.I. Joe).

St. Mary’s DivinityI heard back from the only program to which I applied. I have been ‘offered a place to study for a Ph.D. under the supervision of… .” Apparently, my proposal and the 100 quid I stuffed into the application worked well enough. I also had to pay quite a high price for those letters of reference (this is sarcasm lest anyone mistake it). Needless to say, we are extremely happy, after all, it just feels good not to be rejected again. Also, this program and supervisor is an infinitely better fit for me with a much more prestigious university. When I was reading rejection letters last year, I wouldn’t have ever summoned the notion that it was possible for things to work out like this.

Anyway, this is the is just the fun part: knowing that I’m accepted. The coming parts are where all the work is at.

Until I hear back from the application process…

I  am learning the hard reality of what it means to identify with God before I identify with whatever God has called me to do. It’s summed in a deceptively smart phrase from Psalm 37:

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.

I won’t preach this, but the blatant value of such a disposition is painfully gained (at least for people of my disposition).

NT Criticism Quote

Michael Bird citing Markus Bockmuehl citing C.K. Barrett citing Edward Hoskyns.  If you don’t already read Euangelion, you probably should.  Michael Bird gives a daily mix of reading summaries, insider NT info, and journal TOC’s.  It’s a great glimpse at some happenings in NT studies. 

Hoskyns apparently says this of his endeavor in NT criticism: 

“You look down your critical miscroscope at the New testament text with a view to describing the religious life of the first-century Christians, and you find that God is looking back at you through the microscope and declaring you to be a sinner” (Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word, 147).

Tanakh Epistemology

I have been reading through Doug Yoder’s dissertation entitled ‘Tanakh Epistemology’. It is a mammoth dissertation and covers much ground. He emailed a copy after discovering my ‘cry for help’ post. I cannot believe that I asked for help finding someone and they actually found me. Thank you internet!

However, he did tell me that he is currently working to get it published, so I will only tantalize you epistemology dorks with scant details. Essentially, Dr. Yoder spends a lot of time getting us to see that the importation of Hellenistic epistemology lenses is not necessarily fair to what he calls the ‘native epistemology’ of the Tanakh. I like that term ‘native epistemology’.

His method for pursuing this ‘native epistemology’ is to look at concentrations of the Hebrew root yada. Using Daniel 2 and Quohelet as his primary epistemological texts, he shows how these text must be read to demonstrate an internal epistemology that is, “…cohesive, nuanced, far-ranging, and bold. Its deepest conceptual commitments voice
noncontradictory positions regarding skepticism, perception, physical and nonphysical reality, epistemic limits, and the relation of knowledge to power, desire, and life.”  And that’s just from the abstract.

I looked forward to having more conversation with him as I digest more of the thesis, but for now, I am very excited to find someone else who takes the the Tanakh’s purview this seriously AND takes the anachronistic superiority complex of Western Philosophy to task. I am very interested in his view of Biblical Theology and I will report more hear as I talk with him and continue to read on.

Information Needed

EDIT: See comments.  I am reading his dissertation right now.  Thanks Doug! 

There is a guy named Douglas Yoder who just finished his Ph.D. at Claremont. If anyone knows him or someone at Claremont Graduate University who could connect me to him or his work, I would be indebted. His dissertation is titled: Tanakh Epistemology, A Philosophical Reading of an Ancient Semitic Text.

Also, while I am shamelessly appealing for help, if anyone has the book The Bible and Epistemology (Eds. Mary Healy & Robyn Parry. If someone knows where I can get a copy of this book in Saint Louis, I would truly appreciate it. It seems to be sold out just about everywhere except the UK and I can’t afford it in British stirling. I would be equally happy if someone could even provide me with a table of contents, names of chapters and authors.

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Concerning Abided Knowing

This blog is dedicated to some outflow of my research into sacramental epistemology through a largely canonical/exegetical lens.