Unshackled Moments ~ August 8 ~ God Is Dead

God is Dead. 

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Sorry Freddy, I get where you're coming from. I really do. But you were wrong. Oh so wrong. Nietzsche knows now without question that God is alive. I personally believe that there's a good chance that I'll get to chat with the fellow preacher's kid in heaven someday. I hope so, but there's also a chance he didn't make it.  What I do know is that to hate anything as much as Nietzsche came to hate God there must be deep hurt that comes from loving and feeling betrayed. His issues with God may have started where my own did. I think there is so commonality in the pain that comes from that unique status of being the son of a preacher man.

Regardless, Nietzsche had hurts that led him to questions that led him to philosophy. I went that route some myself. In fact I almost majored in philosophy in college. But finally I came to a place that Nietzsche did not. I realized that old Fred suffered from acute arrogance. What Nietzsche's ideas finally boiled down to is that if Christianity didn't make sense to him, if he couldn't figure God out and answer all of the questions he had satisfactorily then God was irrelevant and not real.  I came to the place where I realized that no one with a finite mind would ever truly be able to understand and perceive an infinite anything.

Oh and it's so easy for those of us who never got hurt or angry enough at God to say, "You're dead to me," to say Nietzsche was wrong and that we've always believed. I told a man seven years ago that I was not an atheist nor an agnostic, that as messed us as I had gotten I had always known that there is a God. He laughed and told me that I was the ultimate agnostic. I disagreed until he told me that an agnostic was less someone who didn't know if there was a God as much as someone who claimed that there was but lived as though He either didn't exist or was irrelevant.

The truth is that God is either everything or He is nothing. If we declare Him to be alive, then He must be everything. We have no other option than to fall on our knees in submission to all that He is. If we are unable or unwilling to surrender, the only way we can do so is to declare in our hearts, irregardless of what we say with our mouths, that God is dead. And if we go that route, a patient, merciful and loving Heavenly Daddy, who is very much alive, will weep with all heaven and hope for our return to Him. God defeated death...and He is alive.