Is God Really Dead?

"God is dead!" claimed Nietzsche, a German philosopher, philologist, and a cultural critic. His pronouncement, though, is not literal –in the sense that a God is literally lying dead in a coffin.  He rather implies a cultural fact –that is, at modern times, people are living their lives as if God is dead.  There is another implication of Nietzsche’s pronouncement, as commonly agreed by scholars, which is a sort of nihilism.  Nihilism is a philosophical belief which claims that there is no foundation or whatsoever to one’s belief, knowledge, morals, and so on.

Let me elaborate each implication in this article.  Firstly, the death of God is a cultural fact. During his times, Nietzsche observed that people's obsession or their fundamental concern in life has dramatically changed.  This paradigmatic shift was spawned mainly by industrialization.  In its primitive form, industrialization replaced the traditional means of producing goods such as garments, shoes, textiles and so on by means of machines.  The invention of machines somehow shaped the dawn of industrialization, which generates the philosophy of materialism.  In highly-industrialized cities, the cathedrals which were once the centers of the lives of the people are dwarfed by shopping malls, high-rise industrial buildings, and many other business-oriented institutions.  In fact, in some European countries, there are only few people going to church to worship God.  Many are going to church as tourists who are more interested of the socio-cultural, historic and aesthetic value of churches. 

In feudalistic (agricultural) society in Medieval Europe, what was at the center in the life of the people was the church.  It was in the church where people prayed before going to their farms and after working in the farms.  It was in the church where some people spent their lives in prayer and devoted their whole life serving God in prayer and doing corporal works of mercy. Even how the village was arranged, the church was located at the center of the village.  The municipal hall and residences surrounded the church. 

In modern times, people are busy in doing business or busy spending their waking hours earning income.  The obsession of people today is money and how to get more money.  God is placed at the side-line.  To put it succinctly, the idea of God is fading, or waning like the moonlight in a dark night, in the minds of people caught up in the web of industrialization and of the materialistic philosophy.

Secondly, the death of God also implies nihilism.  Nihilism is derived from the Latin word nihil, which means “nothing.”  If “God is dead,” there is nothing which serves as the foundation of man’s existence, man’s moral sense, man’s knowledge, and so on.  Among Christian thinkers, God is regarded as the cause and foundation of man’s existence and the existence of all things.  Without God, we are nothing.  Moreover, God sets all foundations of other realities.  God implants the fundamental principle of morality in all of us so that each of us, by nature, knows what is good from bad.  God is also the source of true knowledge, and the one who truly knows the truth is enlightened by God.  “God is dead,” everything is lost as well.

How to Overcome the Death of God?

Nietzsche does not preach the glory of God in his mournful death.  Instead, he eventually buries God in his graveyard.  I mean, Nietzsche settles with the idea that God is really dead, and he is completely gone.  With God’s absence, man is left flying in the vacuum.  Man is left to exist without God to look upon for his salvation and ultimate purpose in life.  For Nietzsche, man has to overcome God’s absence by becoming an “ubermensch” (superman).  He has to fly without wings.  Otherwise, he lives without any purpose in life.  As a superman, he has to exert his “will to power.”  With “will to power,” man shall create and impose his own values in life, his own standards of right and wrong, of what is true.  He has to become what he wants to become without determinations of someone powerful than him (like God).  He has to turn himself into a god.

Is God Really Dead?

Let me attempt to answer this question.  Yes, the idea of God is dead!  But, the historical God who became man (Emmanuel) in the person of Christ is not dead.  He is really alive and has impacted the lives of saints and martyrs for centuries, and the lives people who are still within the signal of God’s presence.

It’s true that people, in modern times, are drifting away from God.  But it doesn’t follow that He’s dead.  He is still there inside the church waiting for his prodigal sons and daughters to come back and pay him homage.