No doubt most readers have, at one time or another, come across Nietzsche\u2019s famous declaration that God is dead.\u00a0 By this, he did not intend any argument for atheism or sacrilege.\u00a0 On the contrary, he meant to expose the pre-existing albeit unacknowledged atheism and sacrilege that he found both around and within himself.\u00a0 The tendency that Nietzsche was trying diagnose was how people in his time no longer employed the concept of God within their lives.\u00a0 Even if people still professed to believe in Him – in some sense \u2013 the simple fact of the matter was that they never explained things in terms of Him, they never expected things from Him, He was no longer the foundation or ultimate justification for anything and, accordingly, they saw a world around them in which He was totally absent.\u00a0 This famous passage is always worth a read:<\/p>\n
“Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are 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 the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not 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 decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the 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 shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”<\/p>\n
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 broke and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling – it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars – and yet they have done it themselves.”<\/p>\n
It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: “what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The people within Nietzsche\u2019s society had replaced God with\u00a0various mechanisms and ideologies, all of which contributed to the displacement and death of God.\u00a0 Evolution and not God was responsible for creation.\u00a0 Utility, equality\u00a0and freedom became the foundations of righteousness instead of God.\u00a0 Activism and revolution became the source of affirmative change rather than prayer for divine intervention.\u00a0 The personal God of Christianity had been watered down into the totally impersonal god of deism.\u00a0 This was, Nietzsche claimed, how his audience had killed God.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nietzsche\u2019s accusation was that his audience could not understand it, let all own up to it.\u00a0 They went to church every Sunday and said their prayers over dinner.\u00a0 They most certainly still believed in God \u2013 in some lifeless sense of the word.\u00a0 At any rate, if God had in fact been killed, they most certainly did not intended it and thus could not be held responsible for it.\u00a0 By their lights, if anybody was at fault it was God Himself for no longer appearing to them on their newly chosen terms.\u00a0 Nietzsche fully acknowledges that this is how his audience genuinely felt, but this did not change the fact that they had all been complicit in the death of God.\u00a0 Whether they meant to or not, their choices to employ secular categories and intellectual strategies for coping with and navigating the world had almost totally displaced God from their lives.\u00a0 Because of the choices that these people freely made, vocabulary that they freely employed, the only God that continued to exist for them was nothing more than the lifeless remains of the God who once was.<\/p>\n
I want to bring a very similar accusation against the bloggernacle.\u00a0 I want to suggest that far too many posts that we read within the \u2018nacle have killed the God of Mormonism \u2013 the God who leads the Mormon Church through revelation.\u00a0 As far as the authors of these posts are concerned, the church is led by cultural influences and political pressures rather than God.\u00a0 They see a conservative allegiance to the status quo in the place of divine mandates given through prophets.\u00a0 They see activism and public protest rather than prophecy and personal prayer as the true source of change.\u00a0 They see adaptation in policy and doctrine (for the sake of institutional survival) rather than continuing revelation.\u00a0 They see contradictions between past and present teachings and policies rather than an ongoing and living relationship with the divine.\u00a0 They see a graduate degree as conferring more authority to speak Truth than an ordination.\u00a0 They see whitewash for discrimination and enslavement rather than a proclamation regarding divine natures and destinies.\u00a0 They see public relations rather than divine guidance.<\/p>\n
I am not saying, any more than Nietzsche did, that these ways of looking at the church are intellectually bankrupt.\u00a0 Nor am I directly arguing for the incoherence of looking at the church in these ways.\u00a0 What I am arguing, following Nietzsche, is that these ways of choosing to see the church kill the divinity within it.\u00a0 They transform the church into nothing more than a memorial of how things used to be.\u00a0 They undermine activity within the church (as testimonies lose their foundation) and missionary work without (as the church becomes indistinguishable from the world around it).<\/p>\n
Yes, these authors still believe and advocate a belief in the divinity of the Mormon Church, in some sense.\u00a0 They still praise and bear testimony of those teachings and leaders that square with their secular ideologies.\u00a0 I most certainly do not believe that they consciously intend to kill the divinity within the church.\u00a0 Not unlike Nietzsche\u2019s audience, they think it is the church rather than they themselves that is to blame.\u00a0 Nevertheless, their feelings and intentions on these matters are totally irrelevant to the fact that they have been complicit in the death of the Mormon God.\u00a0 Whether they mean to or not, their choices to employ secular categories and intellectual strategies for coping with and navigating their lives within and without the church has almost totally displaced the living God that guides the Mormon Church.\u00a0 In Nietzsche\u2019s words, the church has become little, if nothing more than a tomb and sepulcher for the lifeless remains of the Mormon God that once was.<\/p>\n
Most embarrassing of all, I worry that my own attempts (this being one of them) to critique and undermine such tendencies by using the very same categories and strategies (by which others have displaced the Mormon God) itself serves to displace the Mormon God.\u00a0 By these lights, my posts become nothing more than the rantings of the madman who was no less complicit than those around him.