James and the Death of God (by Jonathan Storment)

The past few weeks I have been preaching through the book of James at the church where I serve, and a couple of weeks ago while I was studying, the most bizarre thought popped in my head.  “Friedrich Nietzsche and James actually have a lot in common.”  And their greatest similarities revolve around the fact that at one point in their lives they realized the death of God.

Nietzsche has gotten a lot of bad press from Christians.  He was not some monster claiming that he had killed God.  He was just observing the reality around him.  Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor and had grown up in a “Christian” culture that had become just a shallow husk of Christian values.  He was looking around the pseudo-religious culture he lived in and concluded, if God were dead it would not make any difference.

Nietzsche actually said “God is dead and we killed Him, and His blood is on our hands.”  His point was that people were using God to justify their own agendas. Nietzsche was saying God is dead as a way of exposing all the ways that the people of his day were taking God’s name in vain to do what they already wanted to do.

The way Dallas Willard described it is that, “The institutions of Christian society and government were to a large degree not based on what they professed-the reality of God.  Everyone said, as we say on our coins today, ‘in God we trust’.  But it was clear that they did not trust in God.  They trusted in their own abilities, in their capacity to form cliques and power groups and move in ways they wanted to…and Nietzsche saw that…it was really his revulsion against a system of hypocrisy, even hypocrisy about inquiry and truth that dominated his development.”

Nietzsche eventually came to see Christianity as a religion invented by the weak and the poor as a way of having some will to power.  And he was tired of the religious and political leaders of his day using God’s name for their own agendas.

But Nietzsche wasn’t saying this to stop us from using our will to power, he was saying it to stop us from hiding behind God for our will to power.  Those who can should, those who are stronger, better, more formidable should exert their will to power, there is no God and our institutions should stop tiptoeing around the weak and oppressed because of some archaic sentiment that God exists and will hold us accountable.

Just look at the commercials that we watch everyday and ask if Nietzsche was right.  We Americans often call ourselves a Christian nation and something like 70% of people say they follow Jesus.  I think Nietzsche would look at the collective story that American Christians tell ourselves and the beautiful people we have on the front cover of every magazine and who star in our sitcoms and movies and he would say all over again “God is dead!”  But I don’t believe in Christian nations, so that doesn’t concern me; what concerns me is the local church.

I have a friend who does consulting work with churches. Recently he was invited to go to one of the largest churches in America. They asked him during his visit to give them some feedback about their worship services.  My friend was very complimentary of the many things they did well, but when they pressed him for a critique he told them their biggest problem was that they were “deathless.”  Their assemblies were led by the young, attractive and healthy Christians.  They were singing about death and crosses and dying and their assemblies, or at least those leading them, didn’t reflect what they really believed.  In the words of Nietzsche, “God is dead”.

And this is where James and Nietzsche actually overlap.  They both would point out our churches and Christian organizations and they would ask us if we really believe what we say we do.  I think both James and Nietzsche would look at our church cultures today, and how often it is that the young, privileged, healthy, and educated people are the lead participants and I think they would both say “God is dead.”

Of course James means this very differently.  After spending a lifetime with Jesus, James realized in hindsight that God was like Jesus – A God who spent time with the least, weakest, and most vulnerable.  God is like Jesus and Jesus died.

What is bizarre about James is that he uses the most explicitly religious language in the whole New Testament.  He is deliberately using language of the religious “cult” or ritual worship.  If there is any place in the New Testament that you would expect for it to immediately start talking about the ritual of baptism or communion this would be it, but it’s not.

Instead when James uses the words to describe what “true religion” is, he doesn’t talk about ritual, he talks about people who need God in tangible ways, people who are a couple of missed meals away from death.  That is how James defines “true religion”, because the true religion of the people of the God who died, is to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.

In my desk drawer is a letter written to me from the preacher of the 10 person church I grew up in.  Vocationally, Brother Foy was a high school math teacher and when I was 18, he drove me to college and took out a loan so that I, as a poor kid, could go to college.  He wrote me the letter years after I had graduated, and was no longer poor, when I was working at a big (and good) church, and Brother Foy wanted to let me know how proud he was of me.  And he also wanted to remind me of the story I belonged to.

The last line of the last letter Brother Foy ever wrote to me is just this, “take care of the widows and orphans.”

That is true religion.