THE TRUTH WE SEE

One of my favorite philosophers, Merold Westphal, suggests that Christians should read the great modern atheists Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as a lenten exercise. We need their dissonant voices just as wayward Israel needed the prophets.

I recently came across a quote that I had noted several years ago from Nietzsche's The Antichrist. While there is a certain sense of inadequacy to Nietzsche's statement, there is, nevertheless, something profoundly true about it as well. Nietzsche writes:

"The only thing that is Christian is the Christian mode of existence, a life such as he led who died on the Cross. To this day a life of this kind is possible; for certain men, it is even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible in all ages. To reduce the fact of being a Christian, or of Christianity, to a holding of something for true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is tantamount to denying Christianity."

Friedrich Nietzsche- The Antichrist

I recently came accross the following great quote from Gerhard Ebeling's treatment of the petition for daily bread in his book on the Lord's Prayer. Ebeling was a student of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the illegal seminary at Finkenwalde during WWII. This quote makes evident Ebeling's very Lutheran commitment to the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. That God's grace could be present in such an ordinary thing as bread should make us realize that much of what we call ordinary can, in fact, serve us as pointers to the divine and that the modern contrast between physical and spiritual cannot be sustained from a robustly Christian perspective. Ebeling writes:

“Really, though, is anything still matter-of-fact when we are expected to think of God and man as so closely united that even bread, that epitome of the corporeal and commonplace character of human life, is to be thought of at the same time as God, and God at the same time bread? Such thinking in fact puts an end to that deceptive matter-of-factness which prevents us from noticing, hearing, and understanding what everyday things are saying to us. That the things with which we deal have turned dumb and have nothing to say to us, that they have consequently lost their living coherence and become dead objects is a symptom – and certainly not an insignificant one – of our foolishness, our thoughtlessness, our hardheartedness. The result is that we ourselves become increasingly dumb without having anything to say – or it may be, loquacious, also without really having anything to say. The more awake, attentive, and open our hearts become, the more meaningful and eloquent everything around us becomes and the more everything joins together in a single, living coherence. Bread is no longer merely a thing to be regarded in physical or chemical terms, no longer merely a means of nourishment or of enjoyment, but it is eloquent bread, bearing, so to speak, words that concern us. And this is not because it has a voice of its own, as is found in fairy tales, but because God’s word is present in all that is.” – Gerhard Ebeling, The Lord’s Prayer, 60-61.