Introduction
As the title perhaps indicates, this is a blog post that is like that Christmas present you got for your seven-year-old that one time—some assembly required. The first thing, at least the first thing that I would suggest, is to get all the pieces laid out in front of you on the table.
The Timidity of Most Atheism
One of the central reasons why the secular project has failed in the way it has is because of its incorrigible intellectual timidity. Like so many satiated and complacent medieval middle-class burghers, with eyes like raisins pushed halfway down into the porridge, they wanted a god who would stay out of their affairs. But this had to be done in a respectable way. They wanted to assume (quietly enough) that god was already dead, and so they did not need to take Him into account. Theirs needed to be a complacent atheism.
God served well enough in His time, back in the olden days when people needed to believe in something, but as time wore on, the Deity grew more and more decrepit, and finally had to be put in a home, where He died of natural causes. We would have visited him more, but we were busy. God is now dead, safely dead, and so we no longer need concern ourselves overmuch with the question. There are stacks of gold coins to count.
But Nietzsche, one of the few philosophers who actually saw, understood things differently. He knew that in order for God to be dead, He would need to be murdered, and murdered with knives. Here he is, in The Gay Science:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!”
As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he caused considerable laughter. “Have you lost him then?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he scared of us? Did he emigrate?” They shouted and laughed in this manner. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his look. “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving now? Away from all suns? Aren’t we perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Hasn’t it become colder? Isn’t more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s putrefaction? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives— who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games will we need to invent? Isn’t the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?”
“There has never been a greater deed—and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all the history that came before.” Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground and it shattered and went out. “I come too early,” he said then; “my time hasn’t come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still traveling—it has not yet reached human ears. Lightning and thunder need time, deeds need time after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet we have done it ourselves.”
It has also been related that on that same day the madman entered various churches and there sang a requiem aeternam deo. Led out and told to shut up, he is said to have retorted each time: “What are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
The Gay Science, Aphorism 125
Nietzsche understood the run-up to the death of God, and he also saw the necessary aftermath of such a death. The run-up was the planning of a murder that none of the murderers could afford to acknowledge was actually happening. And then after the fact, the murderers had to pretend to themselves that they had not actually been participants in anything of the kind. Like ungrateful grandchildren, heirs to a great fortune, who conspired to smother a dowager with a pillow in her sleep, there was nothing left for them to do but to enjoy their millions . . . provided they could only figure out a way to forget how they had gotten their fortune.
And of course, I think it is also obvious that Nietzsche saw the end result of such clear-sightedness . . . it was madness. That being the case, the fact that he ended his life in such madness provides a salutary warning to those overstuffed burghers. Best not to examine the ramifications of what we have done too closely. Let us not follow the madman.
This is a strategy of complacence that can be carried off—for a time. But even though individuals can be radically inconsistent in this way for a time, man collectively is always remarkably consistent over time. The madness can be kept at bay temporarily but it will eventually arise with a vengeance, and here we are now, patiently trying to explain to professionally-trained medical doctors that boys aren’t girls.
Our secular age wanted to be atheistic without tumbling headlong into the Void. But as it turns out, that is not possible. When you untether the earth from its sun, as Nietzsche saw, certain things follow. One of them is the kind of darkness that you cannot dance away.
The Tombs of the Prophets
Jesus says something in His diatribe in Matthew 23 that is treated as kind of a throwaway line, and everyone wants to slide safely past the stark import of what He is saying. In the same way that complacent atheists talk glibly about the death of God, honoring Nietzsche, while at the same time blithely ignoring the fact that he was talking about the murder of God and the insanity that would follow, so also do pious sorts continue to build and garnish the tombs of the prophets. It is the same spirit, the spirit that refuses to understand the import of what you are saying.
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.”Matthew 23:29–32 (KJV)
Jesus is pointing to a deep structure of the fallen human mind. We honor the righteous dead, that is in the first place. In the second place, we disclaim any responsibility for their martyrdom. And in the third place, Jesus points to this as clear evidence of our complicity in their martyrdom.
Shall I go over this again? We name something after Calvin, we say that it was a darn shame that the Geneva city council treated him the way they did, and Jesus points to this as clear evidence that we are just the kind of people who would have been on that council. This is not done by every last person in the world, but it is done often enough that we should expect it. This is the peculiar blindness of museum curators. They put together outstanding displays that highlight the courage and steadfastness of William Tyndale, and if the actual William Tyndale showed up to the museum one day, he would be escorted off the premises by security.
This is the way of the world. This is what we do. Moses leads a contentious people around the wilderness for forty years, with the earth needing to open up and swallow some of them. As long as he is alive, he has opposition within the ranks. Once he is dead and safely lionized in the history books, his heirs have to govern the same unruly bunch—but this time, both sides of the conflict appeal to Moses. Both sides want to claim the body of Moses.
This is not to say that Moses cannot have a true heir. Rather it is only to say that his true heir is going to be opposed by stated clerk of the Sons of Moses, Jerusalem chapter.
What was Stephen charged with? He was accused of speaking blasphemous words against Moses and against God (Acts 6:11). What was Stephen doing? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, he was acting like Moses. He did great wonders among the people (Acts 6:8), the same way Moses did. He was strong in wisdom and in spirit (Acts 6:10), just like Moses was (Acts 7:22). They looked at him, and saw that his face was radiant like that of an angel (Acts 6:15), the same way Moses face shone. And so when the heirs of Moses met someone just like Moses, what did they do? Well, they rushed upon him and killed him, just like their fathers had wanted to do to the original Moses.
This is because the enemies of the righteous are wily and know how to shift their ground. They always shift their ground. They oppose the righteous with everything they have, and as soon as the righteous are faithful to the point of death, and are raised by general acclaim to heroic status, the enemies of this man while alive can be found peppered throughout the memorial committees dedicated to preserving the legacy of said hero (by which they intend diluting or corrupting the legacy of said hero). The one thing that can be said for a seared conscience is that it certainly comes in handy for those who are prepared to fight dirty.
John Calvin was shrewd enough to keep the location of his tomb a secret, which is why you can’t go visit his mausoleum in Geneva, festooned with rainbow flags without and stern lectures on climate change and white supremacy within.
A Civic Version of the Same Thing
When it comes to the America Founding, ostensible conservatives can be really bad in giving way to this tendency. The progressives want to topple all the statues from our Founding era while the conservatives want to keep those statues standing, anchor points for the lies we intend to keep telling on their behalf and in their name. We inscribe those lies on bronze plaques and insert them into textbooks.
The secularist dogma about the so-called godless founding of the United States got established after the close of World War II. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who presided over a bunch of it was Earl Warren, whose tenure was from 1953, the year I was born, down to 1969. To be a rock-ribbed conservative in those days was to have an Impeach Earl Warren bumper sticker on your car. But because modern conservatism does not have any substantial foundation, it has drifted into the folly of living out the truth of Dabney’s jibe, when he said there was a kind of conservatism out there that is the shadow that follows radicalism to perdition. This legal revolution was accomplished by the progressives, and then diligently conserved by the kind of conservatives who believes it is their job to conserve the policies foisted upon us by the progressives fifteen years ago.
This blind folly has been highlighted, once again, by the freak out reaction to Christian nationalism, a freak out that has included so-called conservatives. The poster boy for this would be David French, whose recent commitment to vote for Kamala Harris in order to “save conservatism from itself” ranks right up there with the quote from an unnamed American major at the Battle of Bến Tre in Vietnam, who reportedly said, “we had to destroy the town in order save it.”
Quite a few conservatives have adopted the notion that America was a “propositional nation,” to the exclusion of being a regular, old-fashioned nation. An example of this would be Paul Ryan, who once said, “America is the only nation founded on an idea—not an identity.” But the problem with the propositional nation guys is not that they remember the value of certain propositions in the founding of our country. Certainly, “all men are created equal” is one of them. So is “we the people,” and granted. But another proposition that was very important at the founding of America was this one: “Jesus rose from the dead.”
John Jay said that we were “one united people,” all committed to the “same principles of government.” He also declared that we were bound together by more than propositions. He said we were “descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion.” To this, we find we have to reply to the sneer “and who was John Jay anyhow?” This is an ignorance that helps us identify the source of the problem. Jay said this in Federalist 2. And George Washington, in his Farewell Address, said that we were bound together by shared “political principles,” not to mention “the same religion, manners, [and] habits.” And the 1619 Project replies with a toss of the pink dreads. “What did they know?”
I have before delighted to refer to the 1891 SCOTUS decision (Holy Trinity v. the United States of America), in which the Supreme Court determined that we were in fact a Christian nation, and had been from the beginning. It is somewhat tedious to point out truths that are manifestly true, and which have been documented to the moon and back, only to have some wiseacre on Twitter respond with “the Founders gave us a secular nation, moron. Look it up.” Okaaaaay.
The Promised Ends and Odds
The refusal to stay true to any founding whatever is a deep-seated characteristic of fallen humanity. This is what we do. Not only so, but the false hearts involved in it always make sure to keep the original flags flying. This has happened to Harvard, to Yale, to Christianity Today, to IVP, to Campus Crusade, to Calvin University, to the United Methodists, to all the atheists in Oxford, and to the United States of America. This is what we do.
This has happened so often, following the same regular pattern, that you would think we would be able to recognize it by now. You would think we could see it coming. But we don’t. The pattern is invisible to all but a few seers like Nietzsche or Girard, and their observations are then dismissed or ignored as nothing more than recondite mutterings.
Of course, Jesus saw it also, but He was in a different category. He is the only one who can deliver us from this strange myopia. Our blindness is caused by our deep-seated need to feel righteous, coupled with our deep-seated need to actually be unrighteous. This is the cause of all spiritual blindness. You have to see enough to be culpable and blind enough to be able to sleep at night.
The heirs of all foundings tend to be temporizing curators . . . curators who do not understand what they are tending. They are not the trained historians that they think they are. They are not true keepers of the foundings, but rather waifs and foundlings.