Pastor Glenn McDonald: The Wellspring of Western Values

Who could have imagined that followers of Jesus would owe a debt of gratitude to Friederick Nietzsche?
 
That particular German philosopher, after all, has long been regarded as one of history’s arch-atheists.
 
Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the intellectual who popularized the phrase “God is dead” – and then challenged his fellow nonbelievers to think and live as if that were actually true. The problem, as Nietzsche saw it, is that the majority of secularists and nihilists cheat. They borrow some of their most cherished values from the realm of religion, then pretend that such values are actually meaningful in a cosmos without God.
 
What values did he have in mind?
 
The secular European intelligentsia of the 19th century believed in human rights. They applauded Thomas Jefferson’s ringing phrase in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” They proclaimed the inherent dignity of the poor and weak, and insisted that powerful people trampling powerless people is a great evil.
 
A majority of Enlightenment thinkers believed in moral absolutes. Certain things are right and certain other things are wrong. Period. Love, compassion, and service are among the noblest human virtues.
 
Science and reason would soon usher in humanity’s Golden Age. Courageous leaders must sweep away the crumbling and irrelevant old order, represented in particular by the Church. In the words of the French Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
 
Some of the brightest minds in the West went so far as to say that ideals like social compassion, scientific precision, and human rights were recent inventions. They sprang from the minds of people who had at last been freed from religious bigotry and superstition.
 
And what was Nietzsche’s response to those thinkers?
 
He mocked them.
 
Didn’t these arrogant “freethinkers” grasp that the majority of their cherished values were unique to the religion associated with Jesus? And that if you erase God from the big picture, you can’t pick and choose a handful of Christian virtues just because you happen to like them?
 
A century and a half ago, Nietzsche was railing at his fellow atheists that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it, too. We can thank him for calling out his peers for their inconsistency.
 
If the Darwinist view of reality is objectively true, as most secularists insist, “love” and “human rights” are meaningless. We are here by accident. There are no moral absolutes. Life is about dominating others, not forgiving your enemies. Human beings are most certainly not created equal.
 
Secular philosophers thus find themselves in an uncomfortable position. If free will, human rights, and the dignity of the poor make sense only if there is a God who cares about such things, how can we hang on to such ideals in a universe where God is dead? The default answer has been to insist that these cherished values (surprise!) are in fact the gifts bestowed upon the world by secularism.
 
No so fast, says British historian Tom Holland.
 
Holland is not a Christian – not yet, at least. With every new book and interview he seems to be inching closer to affirming that the Jesus Story might be the one account that makes good sense of reality.
 
In his 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Holland is merciless in his criticism of the Church. People who claim to represent Jesus have said and done some of the dumbest things imaginable. Yet Christianity – and not some recent “discoveries” by secularists – is unquestionably the source of the values and ideals we associate most closely with the West.
 
Holland notes that the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome found Christianity to be absurd. Who would want to follow a failed revolutionary who died a slave’s death on a cross?
 
Likewise, the shame-and-honor cultures of old, pagan Europe – the Franks, Huns, Anglo-Saxons and others – thought that forgiving enemies and honoring the poor could not possibly work in their rough-and-tumble world.
 
In other words, such ideas would never have occurred to such groups on their own. Author Tim Keller asserts they only began to make sense when aligned with the conviction that there exists a single, infinite-personal God – someone who, incredibly, became a human being and died in sacrificial love.
 
The early Christians cared for the sick, adopted orphans, fed the hungry, and rescued abandoned infants. No other group had ever done such things. This depth of charity was unique to Christian faith.
 
But wasn’t science, at least, the invention of the Enlightenment?
 
Holland notes that so-called “modern” science, with its dependance on reason and experimentation, is founded on the biblical assertion that the world is actually there, and is not an illusion – the starting point of most Eastern faiths.
 
Most of the pioneers of modern science sustained an active Christian faith – and there is no reason to doubt that science and faith can co-exist as mutually reinforcing quests for truth.
 
Above all, the idea of hope – that history is actually going somewhere, and is leading us toward greater truth, justice, and peace – was not dreamed up by Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson or Franklin. It is hands-down a Christian invention.
 
Nietzsche died in an asylum at the age of 56, driven mad by syphilis and his failure to convince his peers that they needed to be “all-in” when it came to their atheism.
 
Christianity, he thought, was for losers. Society would inevitably become as weak as that weak-minded Galilean – unless “supermen” chose to rise up and renounce Christian virtues.
 
The flow of history, however, seems to be going in the opposite direction. Christianity’s gifts to the world – the inherent dignity of each individual, irrevocable human rights, the priority of helping the weak, and a living hope that our actions truly matter – are considered so important that even secularism claims them as its own.
 
One crucial question remains. It looms over every page of Holland’s book. He puts it like this:
 
“If secular humanism derives not from reason or from science, but from the distinctive course of Christianity’s evolution – a course that, in the opinion of growing numbers in Europe and America, has left God dead – then how are its values anything more than the shadow of a corpse?”
 
In other words, if the things we value most depend on an informed trust that God is really there, what will happen when that trust dies?
 
Holland doesn’t directly answer that question. But book critic and atheist George Scialabba offers his own take:
 
“Perseverance in virtue will sometimes require self-sacrifice. And self-sacrifice seems to require some transcendental justification or motivation, of which the most common, and perhaps the most logical, is belief in the existence of God. Can we be good for long without God?”
 
Can we – our families, our communities, our nation – be good in the long run without God?
 
That is the question.