"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part V).

Part V:
Theogony

Thus, it is through our God-given love made possible through Christ that Nietzsche’s mantra of man becoming “beyond good and evil” is made possible— since it is obvious that a man who acts in Christ-like love toward both God and his neighbor will always freely do what is best toward them without need for moral guidance. This conclusion is especially ironic considering Nietzsche’s view of Christianity, since Nietzsche said that himself: “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche may have recognized the truth of this statement, but even if he did, he had no means to bring it about himself, since he clearly did not know Christ. In going beyond good and evil, Nietzsche claimed that one would be immoral, building up his own moral construct against the moral construct of his time and culture— he groups himself in saying, “We immoralists….” However, I would claim that, in going beyond good and evil in Christ, we are not immoral in the least— we are supramoral because we transcend the need for a moral construct entirely!

Our salvation in Christ, then, has at least two major effects on man. The first is that the will of man is actively transformed by his God-given love through the Spirit, so that he more and more displays the “will to love” of Christ. The second effect on man follows directly from the first: man’s “will to love” enables him to freely act in love toward both God and man, freeing him from the restraints placed on him by moral construct. Now, man can do more than just the good action— he can love! Irenaeus says this as well in his treatise On the Apostolic Preaching. He states,

"Therefore we do not need the Law as a paedagogue…. For no more shall the Law say, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ to him to whom even come desire for another’s wife; nor, ‘You shall not kill’, to him who has removed all anger and enmity from himself…."

Put simply, this salvation in Christ makes us Christ-like— makes us God-like— completely free to love.

If this salvation in Christ is making us more Christ-like, then this salvation is the restoration of man to what he was originally created to be— the image of God, since Christ himself is “the image of the invisible God.” Athanasius was very concerned with the fallen state of man in light of what he could have been. He says, “What was God to do in face of this dehumanizing of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits?” We had “dehumanized” ourselves by marring the image of God that God had originally stamped on us in creating us. In our salvation, God makes us truly human again— that is, God makes us to be gods again, since to be truly human is to be godlike. Athanasius says,

"As, then, he who desires to see God Who by nature is invisible and not to be beheld, may yet perceive and know Him through His works, so too let him who does not see Christ with his understanding at least consider Him in His bodily works and test whether they be of man or God…. He, indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God."

As Athanasius says, Christ— acting like the Superman, acting as the God-man— gives us the example of what a human truly is in his fullest sense. He shows us a life lived in love, defying the set moral construct of the time and abolishing moral constructs embodied in the Law altogether, healing and giving life to man even in this earthly life, and destroying death once and for all, defeating nihilism through submitting himself to it.

As far as what being Christ-like means, Paul also gives us clues in his epistles. He says in Romans, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed into the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” Christ, through this example, shows us, whom are called his brothers and coheirs in his kingdom, that men as we are now were meant to be like Supermen; free from the bonds of death and morality, we would be able to freely choose to love God and men in true freedom. Also, Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” Paul was not the only man of faith to give us insight in this area. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said of the Christ-like life in his Five Theological Orations, “Walk like God through all that is sublime, and with a fellow-feeling through all that involve the body; but better treat all as God does, so that you may ascend from below to become God, because he came down from above for us.” Really, we Christians surpass even Nietzsche’s hopes for the continuing progression of man. Far from making man into a herd animal, as Nietzsche thought, Christ makes us into the men of true excellence that we were always meant to be. Following Christ’s example, we who are truly in Christ— and have thus received His Holy Spirit— are, through His ultimate sacrificial love, being remade to be like Christ, to be Supermen, to be gods; higher even than God’s angels, brothers to the only-begotten Son of God, coheirs to the universe! Immortality, eternal life, godhood, is ours for the taking, if we will only but receive it!

So often we make so little of humanity. Obviously, we are correct in saying that all men have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but in doing so, it seems as if we do not understand the glory for which humanity was really created. In understanding the greatness for which we were made, we can see our present depravity and rejoice all the more in our restoration to godhood through Jesus Christ. After realizing this, however, we must also understand that we are still underneath the God by whom we were created. We must realize that we are glorified only because He was, is, and will be glorious, and that though we are closer than brothers to the King of Kings, He is still King, and we are not. Between both of these represented extremes, we find humanity’s proper place. Christ, then, fulfills Nietzsche’s project better than Nietzsche himself ever could have. By restoring man to his proper place, Christ has restored the natural order of the universe, placing those who were meant to be strong back in a position of strength, excellence, and power. Through Christ, man is restored to where he was always meant to be: sitting at the right hand of God the Father, a god himself, crowned in glory, splendor, and majesty.

It may be that someone objects, and believes that this idea of human apotheosis as I have stated it— the idea of our Theogony— is absurd. After all, even as Christians, we still fall prey to sin and do “bad” things. In at least some real way, we are not truly free from morality. This objection would indeed present a problem for my argument, if I were arguing that, in Christ, we are made into perfect images of Christ immediately. However, this is not what I am arguing in the least. This is a simple objection to circumvent by simply arguing that our Theogony is another way of viewing our Christian sanctification. As the Holy Spirit, through the love of Christ, makes us into more perfect images of God, we are made more and more able to exhibit Christ-like love, thereby continuously lessening the hold of morality over us. C. S. Lewis talks about the surpassing of the moral construct by humanity in an essay entitled “Man or Rabbit?,” arguing that man was always meant for something much greater than our moral constructs. He says,

"The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up."

Since, then, as we are still unable to completely and totally exhibit Christ-like love at all times to both God and man, morality must govern our actions insofar as we cannot love as Christ did. This can be shown as a kind of inverse relationship. Less ability to act in love requires more moral control; more ability to love requires less.

Now surely, this imperative of love is much harder to live by than any moral construct, since it comes into direct conflict with our “will to power.” Now, instead of repenting of our sins— those actions that did not conform to morality— we now must repent of anything less than unconditional love for both God and man. Until our “will to power” is completely replaced by our “will to love,” this is indeed a difficult thing— surely, it is a complete paradigm shift. But thank God for His Grace, and for His Holy Spirit, who is continuously reforming and reshaping us, transforming our “will to power” into the “will to love,” making us more and more into the likeness of the Son of God and His Glory. We will love and be loved as He does and is; we will be free as He is free; we will be glorious as He is glorious. We will be gods, but we are not quite there yet.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Part IV).

Part IV:
The Death of Morality

But how is this even possible? As I have previously mentioned, and as C. S. Lewis aptly points out in The Abolition of Man, fallen man requires a Law— a moral construct— in order to keep from destroying one another and himself. This is why Nietzsche failed, so how is it that we succeed where he did not? We succeed in this endeavor simply because we have the Superman, Jesus Christ, the man who was “beyond man.” Paul tells us, in his letter to the Romans, of the restoration of man through the great actions of Christ, and likewise, of defeat of sin and the law:

"For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

In fulfilling the Law here on Earth and defeating death, Christ does what we cannot, and lifts up the whole of humanity in doing so. He makes us righteous, bringing us above the Law that could only condemn, giving us new life eternal here and now. Of our absolute freedom in Christ, Paul writes in Galatians:

"But what does the Scripture say? ‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.’ So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery."

Christ sets us free, and we are free indeed! To do anything less than live our new lives in Christ as truly free men would be to turn back to our slave masters, as the Israelites did in the desert when they begged to return to Egypt, rather than face the hardships their new-found freedom brought them.

But how is this new life brought about? How do the life, death and resurrection of the God-man almost two thousand years ago affect our lives in such a way as to bring us freedom, specifically, freedom from morality? Christ himself tells his disciples before he ascends back into heaven: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” Once he has gone back to God the Father Jesus will send us the Holy Spirit who will come upon us in power to guide us in the ways we should go. Christ acted analogously to the Superman, doing what man could not do by himself; restoring man to glory, and, more importantly, restoring man to God. Once that restoration took place, Christ could then send God’s Holy Spirit to dwell within us. In the Spirit, we are set free from the Law in its many forms, as Paul tells us in Galatians chapter five: “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.” This is true because since we are being guided and empowered by the Spirit, we no longer require moral constructs to curb and control our behavior. We no longer need the Law to act as our schoolmaster, as Paul says.

But what does the Spirit do within us to make us able to transcend our need for morality? Quite simply, He replaces our “will to power”— that product of the Fall that causes us to selfishly exert our own will for our personal benefits and happiness— with the even more powerful “will to love.” This “will to love” was first exerted by Christ himself, when, all for our sake, he made himself nothing, as Paul tells us in Philippians. Christ Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross,” and, in the letter to the Romans, Paul tells us that, rather than let us suffer death, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Arguably, in making himself nothing, Christ relinquished his “will to power” (his right to exert his omnipotence in any way he desired). But what an enormous display of power this is! To forfeit one’s will to act as he wished (his “will to power”) out of love, only to gain back the power over death itself, as well as the restoration of man to God, through that same “will to love.” Christ’s “will to love” was indeed much more powerful than his “will to power!” Our selfless “will to love” is similarly even more powerful than our selfish “will to power.” In our “will to love”, we relinquish our “will to power”— that desire to enact change to benefit ourselves— in order to benefit another, only to gain back what we desired: the power to benefit ourselves, the power to flourish, the power to be happy— as well as the ability to live harmoniously in community with other men.

This is the reason that the Law can be summed up in Christ’s simple command: “‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,’” and “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Paul says something very similar to the church at Galatia: “For you were called to freedom. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But what really makes love so much better than the Law? Why does acting in Christian love through the Holy Spirit transcend the moral construct and truly make us free? Within a moral construct, the goal, or the end, of the man that wishes to be “good” is to act in such a way that is considered to be good within that moral construct. This is generally in order to avoid its punishments. To do this he must conform to the construct’s standard of goodness; he must be moral.

Presupposing a man unable to exhibit Christ-like love (as we would have to do pre-Christ), the “good” man is being moral for the sake of being considered morally good within the construct. If the man wants to be good, and therefore remain unharmed, he must conform to the good action X as is defined by the construct. Nietzsche talks about this when writing about the taming of man by society and its moral constructs:

"Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments being among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the bad conscience."

It then follows that if he wants to be good, the “good” man is effectively coerced into committing X. Even if this man “freely” chooses to commit this action X, his freedom to choose his course of action has been removed for the sake of his desired end— being good so as to avoid punishment. These effects of the construct cause man to turn his “will to power” on himself, and thus Nietzsche believes man experiences guilt or “bad conscience.” Therefore, the pre-Christ man cannot be freely good— he must be coerced into being so.

The moral construct then acts as an electric fence that curbs man’s “will to power.” If he wishes to not be shocked, he must necessarily stay within the fence— but this is really all morality can do. Nietzsche says as much in his Genealogy: “That which can in general be attained through punishment, in men and in animals, is an increase of fear, a heightening of prudence, mastery of the desires: thus punishment tames men, but it does not make them ‘better’—one might with more justice assert the opposite.” In this way, morality is insufficient because it cannot reform the “will to power” and therefore it cannot allow us to be freely good. Why then does acting in Christ-like love transcend the moral construct? Because when we come to know Christ and receive the Holy Spirit as a result, our “will to power” is gradually remade into a “will to love” that continually reforms us into the image of Christ. Thus, the law is summed up and surpassed in loving God above all and our neighbors as ourselves. About this, St. Irenaeus of Lyons says,

"And that, not by the prolixity of the Law, but according to the brevity of faith and love, men were going to be saved, Isaiah, in this fashion says, ‘He will complete and cut short His Word in righteousness; for God will make a concise Word in all the world.’ And therefore the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law,’ for he who loves God has fulfilled the Law."

The electric fences of morality are gradually removed because we begin to understand where it is beneficial for us to go, and we desire those places rather than the harmful ones. In Nietzsche’s terms, we are no longer guilty, because the “will to power” that was necessarily turned inward against itself within the moral construct, thereby inflicting the “bad conscience,” has been replaced by the “will to love,” against which “there is no law.” Therefore, in the love of Christ lies the death of morality.

"I Said, You Are Gods!" - A Trans-Nietzschean Perspective on Christian Soteriology (Prologue).

Ever since he wrote in the late nineteenth century, people have been either glorifying or demonizing Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed Antichrist, not finding much middle ground for serious critical acceptance or denial for him. This is particularly true of Christians, who, for the last century, have tossed Nietzsche in their philosophical wastebaskets, simply ignoring his enormous contributions to certain modern and postmodern views on ethics and psychology. In doing this, I believe that we have been missing an extraordinary opportunity to reconcile an enemy of the Kingdom of God to ourselves, granting us yet another weapon for use against the forces of darkness. While we, as Christians, should obviously not accept a Nietzschean philosophy wholesale, I believe that adopting a Nietzschean perspective in certain ways is invaluable to a Christian understanding of ethics, as well as a Christian understanding of the ontology of man. This is because Nietzsche says some particularly enlightening things in regards to the relations between the nature of man, his “will to power,” and moral constructions that have much more in common with Scripture than most Christians would like to believe. In this paper, I hope to reconcile elements of this Nietzschean perspective on morality and man with a model of Christian soteriology, our doctrine of salvation, as seen in the writings of the Apostle Paul, as well as several patristic theologians. Christ, in becoming a man, makes it possible for us to become gods by replacing our “will to power” with a more powerful “will to love,” thereby removing the need for the constraints placed on us by the moral construct.