Nietzsche understood the faith, and hated it: Christianity does not idolise strength. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that God, supposedly the strongest being in the universe, could ever be weak. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that weakness could ever be good, it’s seen as something to fight and overcome. We fear old age because we will weaken and one day experience the cold embrace of the grave.
For Nietzsche the way of Jesus propagated what he called ‘slave morality’ and stopped humanity rising to reach our potential. A God that was not strong, a God who would allow himself to be ridiculed and killed by his creation was no God to Nietzsche.
Our culture thinks like this at times. It idolises strength. Perhaps not to the lengths that Nietzsche himself proposed, but nonetheless weakness is not a virtue. It is, as our very language indicates, a weakness. In amidst all his vitriol, Nietzsche understood the faith, and hated it: Christianity does not idolise strength.
There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that God, supposedly the strongest being in the universe, could ever be weak. There is something disturbing to the modern mind in the idea that weakness could ever be good, it’s seen as something to fight and overcome. We fear old age because we will weaken and one day experience the cold embrace of the grave.
I mean, we don’t say that out loud, but I think it’s true. Despite all our love of safety we don’t want to weak or seen as being weak. Even our newfound embrace of mental health issues, “it’s ok to not be ok,” is so often a rhetoric of strength. It’s not pitched as a cry for help but as self-actualisation.
Here’s thing friends, the Bible says we’re weak. It’s good if we notice that. Then, strangely we’re told to exult in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12) because when we recognise that we are weak we can see and experience that God is strong.
Then there’s a deeper truth, the one the Nietzsche saw and hated. The Bible tells us of a God who has ultimate strength, the unmoved mover, the God who is pure act and can do whatever he wants. So far so ubermench. And then the story takes the strangest turn. God gives up strength for weakness. He descends. God comes down.
God Comes Down
There are many things that set Christianity apart from the other world religions, but the incarnation has to be among the starkest of differences. God is born as a man, Jesus. Let’s just stop there for a second, we become used to this sort of language in church circles. Sit with the absurdity of it for a few minutes.
God—the infinite incomprehensible one in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17). That God. God is born. The God with no beginning and end, is born. And not as a superhero, as a Jewish peasant.
That’s nuts.
And it happened. God is born as a man, the second person of the Trinity exposed to the distress of a world that has rejected his rule, a diamond in the human dust.
