Contact: jeff@schumancentre.eu

No, the game is not over–yet! There is still hope for Europe, participants at the State of Europe Forum in Copenhagen heard last week. But warnings of serious consequences if radical change is not effected were sounded by several speakers.
Tunne Kelam, a leading dissident of the Soviet era in Estonia  and a europarliamentarian since 2004, spoke of Europe as a sick continent requiring proper diagnosis in order to receive an effective remedy.
The one-day forum, held annually in the capital of the country holding the EU presidency, aims to evaluate the current state of Europe in the light of Robert Schuman’s vision for a ‘community of peoples deeply rooted in Christian values’.
Tunne recalled how the post-war crisis in Europe–which, he said, made our present one seem less serious–was responded to by unorthodox solutions, proposed by a creative minority of practising Christians. Robert Schuman and his colleagues, Kondrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gaspari, believed that democracy was either Christian, or it would become non-existent. Tyranny and anarchy were the alternative outcomes, Schuman believed.
Today such a statement seemed crazy, the keynote speaker admitted. Yet the founding fathers of the European project shared this conviction. So what had gone wrong in Europe since? asked the Estonian. What had made the search for Europe’s soul so urgent?
As a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe ten years ago, Tunne met strong opposition to any mention of Europe’s Christian roots in the proposed constitution.  At that moment he understood the initiative would not succeed because it would not have God’s blessing.
Dictatorship
So now we found ourselves in a situation today described back in 2004 by Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, in a article entitled, Europa ist krank–Europe is sick.
Sure, representatives of other religions still saw Europe as a ‘Christian’ continent, whatever we did. We were seen as Christians and bore the responsibility for that, he added.
But European culture and identity had become hollow and had lost its substance. Loss of eternal values and the dictatorship of relativism and secularism had led to our current crisis, a crisis that had not suddenly come upon us but had been building for decades.
Not only were we living at the expense of our children by borrowing to pay today’s bills, Tunne explained, we were now living at the expense of our grandchildren, whose numbers were diminishing.
And now the moment of truth had arrived. There would be no return to the previous style of living.
But there was hope, he believed. Latvia’s turn-about after becoming bankrupt three years ago, embracing financial discipline and a sober lifestyle, was a signal of hope for Greece and for Europe. But it required turning from selfish consumerism back to the soft values amd eternal truths on which Europe was founded.
This crisis was an opportunity, said Tunne, to reconsider our spiritual values and not to be afraid.
“We have immense spiritual potential,” he concluded, “and the unique tradition of Europe is something to be proud of and to declare in the public square!’
Crash
Dr Gary Wilton, representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the EU, likened the current situation to the moment before a car crash: “We don’t know where exactly we are in the process and we certainly don’t know what state we will end up in. What we do know is that it’s not going to be like it was before the crash started. It’s been a long time in the making, and it will be a long time in the solving.” 
Economist Dr Michael Schluter called for a Copernican revolution placing relationships rather than economics at the heart of society to give Europe a fresh future.
Dr Evert van de Poll, associate professor at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in Leuven, lamented the widespread ignorance among Christians about the relationship between the Christian faith and European culture, and the resulting spiritual vacuum that had allowed widespread apostacy, as he presented his manual on The Gospel and the making of Europe.
Videos and audio recordings of forum will be posted shortly on www.tinyurl.com/soeforum and www.hopetalks.eu. Next year’s forum will be in Dublin, May 9 &10, 2013. Contact me if you would like to be on the invitation list for that event.
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

Political earthquakes shook Europe this weekend with elections results that promise to overturn the status quo. The people in France and in Greece have called for change. The people in northern Germany have also signalled that change is on the way. So what now?

I don’t envy anyone taking office in these times. As for President-elect Hollande, he doesn’t have a day of governmental experience to draw from.
Clearly these latest developments simply add uncertainty to uncertainty.
Which highlights the question we have been asking recently in ww: ‘is the game over?’ That refers to Jacques Delors’ statement from 20 years ago, that if we hadn’t found a soul for Europe within the next decade, the game would be up.
A few days ago in the Hague, at a Christian Union congress on ‘Europe at a crossroads’, I put this question to Peter van Dalen, a Christian mep from Holland. His answer was clear and straightforward: NO! 
We may be in the half-time break, he added, and some things definitely need re-arranging. But this is not the first, nor the last, crisis Europe will have to overcome. No, he reiterated, the game is not over.
Not that he thought we had (re-)discovered Europe’s soul. Neither would everyone share his optimism. But all would agree things need re-arranging.
Frankly, we’re not going to discover a soul for Europe without re-discovering her roots; and with those roots, virtues that can restore the necessary values of solidarity, equality, freedom and peace, as Schuman once identified them.
Brotherhood
Post-christian Europeans don’t want to hear however that the roots of such values really are biblical. Revolutionaries from Paris to Moscow have cried for equality and brotherhood–but how do you have brotherhood without fatherhood? And where did the idea of equality come from if we are simply the result of a savage process in which only the fittest survive?
All across Europe, we are being faced with similar challenges. This is no time to entrench ourselves behind nationalistic slogans as some of our populist politicians suggest as a way out of our crises. Blame the Muslims, the Poles, the Germans, Brussels…!!
It is a time for serious dialogue among ourselves, as Christians in Europe. What do we have to offer in the difficult days ahead? Can we help make a difference? In most academic and political circles, of course, Christians and their ‘out-dated faith’ are considered an irrelevant  embarrassment, if not the root cause of a lot of the problems. 
So it is refreshing to hear an esteemed scholar and expert on European law lamenting the absence of Christian thought and teaching in the debates on the future of Europe.
Christian deficit
Joseph Weiler, an orthodox Jew, holds the Jean Monnet Chair at the New York University School of Law. He talks of the Christian deficit in the European intellectual process, especially when it comes to talking about the goals, the objects of the European project. ‘Christian thought is part of Europe’s heritage, both for believers and non-believers, Christians and non-Christians. A voice that one can dispute, undoubtedly; that can be discussed, of course; that one can reject, certainly. After all, we live in a democracy. But its absence impoverishes us all.’1
This week in Copenhagen the State of Europe Forum aims to encourage dialogue among Christians from across a Europe impoverished by such absence, on the challenges and opportunities facing us today. Whether we hear the same straightforward answer from others as we heard from Peter van Dalen remains to be seen.
But one lesson from the past is clear: God has always worked through individuals and creative minorities to bring change, positive change. That was true in the days of N.F.S. Grundtvig, whose statue adorns the courtyard of the Vartov where the forum will meet. This Christian poet/pastor/pedagogue/politician left an indelible imprint on Danish culture and history; as have countless other believers through the ages, shaping Europe’s heritage.
May this modest forum be a step towards reducing the Christian deficit in the debate about Europe’s future.
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

1 A Christian Europe? Europe and Christianity: rules of commitment, Joseph H.H. Wieler, European View (2007)p145

Let me confess that I am not a great royalist–despite the fact that I have often joked about the three queens in my life. As a New Zealander, there’s Elizabeth. As  a Dutchman, there’s Beatrix. As a husband, there’s Romkje, sometimes nicknamed ‘the Queen’ by family and friends.

Royalism is not in my genes. One of my forefathers, John Fountain, a co-worker with William Carey in India, got his fingers rapped by the Baptist Missionary Society for expressing republican sentiments in correspondence back home in England, which was at war with Napoleon’s republican France.
The pomp and ceremony, the wealth and ostentatiousness,  and the fawning of the press around royalty–who, after all, are mortal human beings who have to dress and undress like all the rest of us–rather grate against my colonial sense of egalitarianism.
The privileged position of state churches often closely tied to monarchies through the centuries also clashes with my non-conformist Baptist background.
Nevertheless, as this is Queen’s Day (Koninginnedag) in Holland, it’s time to give honour where honour is due. I have put out the Dutch flag by the front door (as most Dutch do on this day) without my wife even asking me to do so! And we have sat before the television drinking coffee and eating orange cake (in honour of the House of Orange) watching the queen and members of her family parade through a town mingling with the public–even leaving her signature on the (orange) plastercast of a lad with a broken leg.
Many in the crowd are sporting white flowers in support of the queen whose son Friso is conspicuously absent from the entourage. He still lies in a coma after being buried by an avalanche in a ski accident in Austria earlier this year, and is not expected ever to regain consciousness.
Reminder
In these post-Christian times, when mention of Christianity in political and diplomatic circles is often considered embarrassing, it is refreshing that several European monarchs continue to be forthright in referring to God and to their faith in Jesus Christ.
Beatrix in recent Christmas messages has frequently reminded her audiences of the Christian values on which Holland and Europe have been built, while remaining sensitive to those new Europeans–as well as the old–who do not share her professed faith.
The Protestant faith of Beatrix’s forefather, William of Orange, who led the successful rebellion against the Catholic Spanish overlords, provided the moral impetus for the birth of the Dutch nation, as well as the foundations for  its government and democracy. The House of Orange, for all its imperfections, is a reminder of these roots.  
Allegiance
Across the channel, murder and adultery on behalf of Henry VIII were not a great start for the Church of England! Yet that church has been and continues to be a source of fresh spiritual life, such as the recent Alpha movement.
Last week, on Elizabeth’s visit to Wales celebrating her diamond jubilee, the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, praised the queen for 'doing God' in public in spite of changing public opinion.
Christian Today magazine reported Dr Morgan as honouring the queen for having regarded the Christian faith as the rock on which she had been able to draw strength and comfort over the last 60 years, ‘amidst all the shifting sands of public opinion and different viewpoints’. Her faith had been a reminder that Britain had been shaped by the Christian faith.  The archbishop added that there had been a tendency in British society ‘to believe that we, as a country, “don’t do God in public life”’.
“You have never been ashamed to confess your personal allegiance to Jesus Christ, whatever the prevailing political climate,” he told the queen.
Yesterday as I was driven to the airport in Copenhagen, we passed the royal palace of Queen Margrethe II. Here was yet another European monarch who reminded her people of their Christian roots. Heiress of a long pietistic tradition in the Danish royal family, which actively supported early protestant missions from Halle, Herrnhut and in Carey’s Serampore, she chose for her motto: God's help, the love of The People, Denmark's strength. Each year she leads her government in a prayer for God’s help for Denmark. An accomplished artist, her illustrations were used for the Danish edition of Lord of the Rings, a story with clear Christian values which she also helped to translate.
Long live such reminders!
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

One of the iconic films from my youth was a Stanley Kramer comedy called it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. The title came to mind as I prepared to share at an urban missions conference in Montreal about the challenges and opportunities of living in a post-Christian society. 

For today, the western world over, we find ourselves living in a post, post, post, post world. That is, post-Christian, post-modern, post-migrant and post-secular. And in central and eastern Europe, post-communist.
We all know post-Christians, people like Karl the banker from Frankfurt. Karl was raised Lutheran in a rural town, and attended catechism classes before being confirmed. Then at university Karl encountered ‘better explanations for life’, stopped believing ‘in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and God’ and set himself the goal to become a millionaire by the age of 35. And he’s close to realising his dream.
Most of us have Katrins in our lives too, post-modern twenty-somethings who never had any Christian upbringing, whose parents were baby-boomers or later, and who never bothered to follow the social convention of church attendance. Our Katrin lives in Prague, and grew up in one of the most secular countries in the world, despite its rich Christian heritage with national heroes like John Hus and Jan Amos Comenius. She works in a café and her ‘ambition’ is basically, well, to have fun.
Disillusioned
Unlike Olga, from Kyiv, Katrin never knew what it was like to grow up in a communist society. The Velvet Revolution of the late eighties all happened a decade before she was born. For Olga, however, Marx was her schoolmaster, and a strict one at that. When communism collapsed, she joined the jubilant crowds, hoping for a better life for her two children with whom she had shared a small ninth-floor apartment since her alcoholic husband left her.
As time passed, Olga became disillusioned as she saw the same old faces clinging on to power behind new political party names, and a nouveau-riche elite driving their SUV’s with the same arrogance as the old party apparatchiks  while the poor like herself struggled to make ends meet. Olga often found herself wistfully remembering the ‘good old days’ when the state promised to look after her from cradle to the grave. Where was her security now in post-communist times?
And of course, we're all aware of the Mustaphas now living in our western cities–children of migrants from Muslim lands. Our Mustapha lives in Hamburg but has been confused about his identity. He has visited his parents’ homeland a few times but can’t identify with it like they still do. He doesn’t belong to that culture and doesn’t feel accepted there. He’s too European for his relatives but not European enough for the Europeans. So he has been  unemployed for some time now and has begun to hang out with radicalised Muslim youth in his neighbourhood who do accept him.
And that’s basically Mustapha’s ambition–to be accepted.
Then there’s Diana, the esoteric healer and spiritual counsellor from Paris, in a land which has more spiritist healers than doctors, lawyers and priests combined. She happily rejected the secular, modernistic, rationalist option long ago as various life experiences convinced her of the reality of the spirit world.
In her community, Diana feels respected and useful as she helps her clients get in touch with their inner selves–or with departed love ones.
Engagement
Most of these categories don’t fit easily into the standard missiology of ‘unreached people groups’. Yet these folk are the mission field under our noses. Each of them require specific approaches for which our average local church life doesn’t usually cater.
But standard missiology can help. As with an unreached tribe in New Guinea, incarnational mission requires engagement, learning about culture, language and beliefs, and seeking effective communication bridges.
And there’s the opportunity.
For each of these humans made in God’s image have heart-felt needs for love, meaning, acceptance, forgiveness and fulfilment.
Jesus offers all of the above. How can we communicate that? That’s the challenge in our post, post, post, post world.
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

The bombs rained down on Dresden on the night of February 15, 1945. At Stalin’s request, Allied bombers wreaked vengeance on the German people, killing over 20,000 civilians (at conservative estimates) as well as refugees and Allied prisoners of war in a horrific firestorm that laid waste the inner city. 

The magnificent ‘Florence of the Elbe’, city of high art and culture, and a wonder of baroque architecture built over centuries, was destroyed in one barbaric attack.
The old cross atop the famous Frauenkirche plummeted some 90 metres to the ground as the dome collapsed, to lie for almost 50 years lost under the ruins. In 1993, amid great excitement, archaeologists clearing the rubble of the church discovered the cross bent and mangled, but not destroyed. Today inside the reconstructed Frauenkirche, the cross has been erected as a lasting symbol of reconstruction and resurrection. Visitors are invited to write prayer requests there and light a candle.
One of the world’s most visited churches, the Frauenkirche had predecessor churches dedicated to Mary stretching back over a thousand years. The ‘new’ 18th century building reflected Lutheran Protestant theology in its circular sanctuary, now splendid in light pastel egg-white based colours, and reminiscent of an opera house.
Ironically, in light of the church’s destruction by Allied bombers, the Lutheran Bishop of Saxony had taken a brave stand against Nazi proclamations in this sanctuary of the Frauenkirche.
Healing
The famous dome structure dominated Dresden’s skyline for 200 years until its destruction. As the 30-strong Swiss group I was travelling with on a Heritage Tour this past week approached the city from the west, we could see the dome again rising among the also recently reconstructed steeples and towers.
Up close, signs of the tragic destruction were clearly visible on the reconstructed walls and dome. The darker old stones juxtaposed next to the pristine new masonry symbolised the destruction and suffering of war, as well as the healing and reconciliation now embodied in the church.
Large parts of the altar were salvaged from under the rubble more or less intact. As reconstruction of churches was not a priority under communism, serious work did not begin until after the reunification of Germany. Over more than a decade, following original plans and using original materials where possible, the rebuilding was finally completed by Reformation Day in 2005. A large bronze image of the reformer Martin Luther once more dominates the square in front of the church.
The crypt of the church, the so-called Lower Church, has been dedicated to the message of forgiveness, reconciliation and new beginnings. In the form of a Greek cross (with arms of equal length), the Lower Church witnessed services, devotions, ecumenical evensong and concerts while the main sanctuary was being reconstructed. In the centre, over a monumental altar of black Irish Iimestone, hangs a three-dimensional stone cross. Five chapels in the crypt offer places of silence, contemplation and prayer around the theme of destruction and construction, reminding visitors that ‘we are again and again held responsible for halting the powers of destruction’.
Haunted
High on the top of the new dome today is  the new cross with three layers of gold leaf, financed by British donations and made by British sculptor Alan Smith. Smith’s father had been one of the bomber pilots who had helped destroy Dresden. Haunted by the memories of that fateful night, his father became a pacifist. For Smith, the seven-metre-tall gilded steel cross was the pinnacle of his artistic career, healing an open scar from his family’s past.
Dresden is linked with Coventry Cathedral in England, destroyed by German bombers in 1940. A copy of the Coventry Cross of Nails, originally forged from three medieval carpenter’s nails found in the smoking ruins,  stands on the altar of the Frauenkirche as a link in the Ecumenical Memorial Route across Europe. Both the cross and the church are remnants of destruction turned into signs of Christian hope and symbols of healed wounds.
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

You can view the screenshow I made about 'my father's century' – we didn't actually use it in the evening class, but I explained that when my father turned 90, I preached in his church about how the 20th century, 'the century of my father', was a terrible century, surely the century of Satan! Two world wars, a depression, a cold war, the invention of the nuclear bomb, able to destroy the human race! Names like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot remind us what terrible things happened this last century.

Yet, as Charles Dickens wrote in his opening line of A Tale of Two Cities, 'it was the best of times, it was the worst of times'..

For the 20th century can also be called the century of the Spirit! It began with revival, in Wales, then Azusa Street, spreading to Scandanavia and other parts, becoming the global Pentecostal movement, still growing strongly in many parts of the world. the greatest revivals in history have taken place in the 20th century -East Africa Revival, Korea, China! More people came into the kingdom in the 20th century than all the other centuries put together!

So will the future be better or worse? The answer is: YES!

We can expect both the wheat and the tares to continue to grow – until judgement day.

Screenshow: The century of my father.

We then looked at 2 Peter 3:11-14, which uses the phrase 'looking forward' three times. We have stressed throughout the course that we need to be rooted in the past and focused on the future, in order to be effectively engaged in the present. Peter encourages us to be forward focused, so that our present lives will be holy, pure and righteous.

Tom Wright, in "Surprised by Hope', opens his book saying: this book is about two questions: What are we waiting for? and what are we doing about it?

Our eschatology will influence the way we live now; what we believe about the future affects our current actions. Some read Peter as reason to neglect this world – "God's going to destroy it, right?" Yet as we have earlier touched on this passage, the 'new' heaven and 'new' earth are actually a restored, renewed earth, and heaven; kainos, not neos. The prophets are in agreement with Paul (Romans 8 ) when he writes about restoration. This is what we are looking forward to.

That is what we work and pray towards now: the restoration, transformation, renewal of all things – to see God's will being done, his Kingdom come in greater measure, knowing that while we can see more of his kingdom now in the here and now, it will only be consummated when Jesus returns. The kingdom is already – but not yet. As we are pregnant with God's future, as people of hope.

After this study, each person shared in broad terms what they will take away from the course, and we finished with Romkje and myself praying for each person.

Thank you for joining us on this course! Our hope is that it will set you all on a life-long learning experience where you can pick up more and more about God's story through the centuries, filling in the gaps and joining the dots.

And the best way to keep what you learn is to give it away!

Warmest greetings,

Jeff

Once upon a time, in a city called Copenhagen, there lived a story teller named Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75).
His many tales, including The Ugly Duckling, The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Pea, The Snow Queen, The Ice Maiden and The Philosopher’s Stone have been enjoyed by young and old worldwide for over 150 years.
Perhaps if the master story-teller were to return to his home city today and choose a tale to illustrate our times, he would tell us of The Emperor’s New Suit. For it exposes how pride and political correctness prevent obvious truths from being seen or admitted.
The vain emperor–a dedicated follower of fashion–was duped by swindlers who promised to make him a suit from cloth which was invisible to stupid or incompetent people. Receiving payment in advance, the pseudo-tailors pretended to be hard at work day and night on their empty looms creating their nonexistent suit. Each of the emperor’s messengers sent to check on the con-men’s progress were too proud to admit they could not see the cloth.
The day came for the emperor to try on his new ‘suit’ and parade through the streets. Now he too was caught up in the web of deceit and make-believe, unwilling to state the obvious for fear of being considered stupid.
It took a naïve child, oblivious to the game adults play, to state the obvious: ‘The emperor has no clothes on!’ While the crowd agreed with the child, the emperor played out the pretense to the end. As did his chamberlains, who, Andersen wrote, “walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.”
Trapped
Today Europeans parade through the streets in overt dispays of ‘freedom’ and taboo-breaking behaviour, overthrowing ‘outdated’ and ‘restrictive’ conventions. Politicians fall over each other in the rush to be popular and progressive, and to introduce ‘enlightened’ legislation in keeping with the times.
Talk of equality and rights flows freely without any thought given to the origins of such concepts, as if as self-evident as, well, motherhood. Motherhood?! Now there’s an old-fashioned concept! Who wants to defend motherhood these days? Who wants to get trapped in a long-term relationship with a partner? let alone have children interfering with your career… or your sex-life?
Today the new ‘motherhood’ is sustainability. At least in Europe. We all need to drive low-carbon-emission cars, recycle waste and insulate our houses, along with a hundred others measures to sustain the environment.
But even a child can see our hypocrisy. We’re not truly interested in sustainability–not when we promote same-sex marriage or sex-in-the-city lifestyles and decry motherhood. Every European nation has a fertility rate well below the sustainability level of 2.1. When research after research demonstrates that stable heterosexual marriages lead to greater health, wealth and happiness, why do politicians continue to pretend that the future belongs to those who overthrow time-tested conventions? Why do they insist on playing out their pretense to the end?
Conversation
Pride, greed and political correctness have led Europe into moral blindness and social, financial and political crisis. Is there a way out?
There are no easy answers. No one is promising a fairy tale future any more. No one promises prospects of living happily ever after. But neither can we simply shrug our shoulders and pretend nothing is amiss.
If you’re concerned about these issues, about how today’s crises are affecting economics, politics, youth and health, and about how the body of Christ can respond to these challenges, I invite you to join the conversation in H.C. Andersen’s city next month, May 9 & 10 at The State of Europe Forum. Europarliamentarian Tunne Kelam from Estonia will address the question, ‘Is the game over?’ After responses from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative to the EU, Dr Gary Wilton, the general secretary of the European Evangelical Alliance, Rev Niek Tramper, Danish politician Tove Videbaek and Martin Bucer Seminary rector Prof Dr Thomas Schirrmacher, and open discussion, interest groups will meet to seek biblical responses to today’s challenges. (Reply to this ww if interested. For further information, see www.tinyurl.com/soeforum).
If you’re not concerned, simply follow on behind the naked emperor ‘with still greater dignity, as if carrying a train which does not exist’.

Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain

Here’s a verse to ponder for this coming Sunday, April first: ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God’ –Psalm 14:1.
The psalmist’s wasn’t trying to offend or denigrate. Rather, he described a dangerous condition with real consequences for individuals and those they influence.
Take the warning we referred to last week from Blaise Pascal, father of probability theory (a useful branch of mathematics for gamblers). ‘Man’ who knows so little about where ‘he’ came from or where ‘he’ is going knows that sooner or later ‘he’ will die. Perhaps that’s the end of the matter. Perhaps not.
A reasonable person ought to be concerned about these options; and whether or not there is a God. Only a fool would be indifferent, concluded Pascal. The wise pragmatist would surely choose for the option of maximum happiness. This is a wager we all have to make. We’re all in this game.
Simply on the basis of probabilities, the only wise choice is to bet on God’s existence, Pascal reasoned. If true, we have gained eternal life; if false, we’ve lost nothing.
If we bet there’s no God, and we’re right, we’ve gained nothing; but if wrong, we’ve lost everything. Such a gambler would be called a fool in any company. So why would we make that irrational choice?
Wishful thinkers
Believers are often accused of being ‘wishful thinkers’, believing in God simply because they want him to exist. The argument of course cuts both ways. Are atheists so convinced God does not exist for rational reasons, or simply because it would be so terribly inconvenient to their lifestyles if he did happen to exist?
Suppose, for argument’s sake, God did not exist. So what?The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, in his story The Madman, echoed the psalmist by having a fool tell the laughing crowd that there was no longer any God. ”We have killed him–you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
In Nietzsche's view, modern science and secularization of European society had effectively 'killed' the Abrahamic God, from whom meaning and value had been derived in the West for more than a thousand years. But Nietzsche’s madman was the only one who understood the implications.
The death of God, Nietzsche foresaw, would lead to any coherent sense of objective truth being replaced by our own ‘multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives’–thus birthing relativism and post-modernism.
Further, he correctly saw that the death of God would lead to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing had any inherent importance and that life lacked purpose.
Nietzsche profoundly influenced philosophy in the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell wrote that we had to resign ourselves to building our lives on ‘the firm foundation of unyielding despair’. Jean-Paul Sartre believed humankind was left alone in the universe with no Creator. Albert Camus was resigned to facing life’s absurdity honestly.
Which has created the impossible dilemma of living with nihilism. Initially there’s something exhilarating about overthrowing old taboos and celebrating ‘freedom’.
Aldous Huxley put it candidly in Ends and Means (1937): For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
Blind leaps
But in the long run, where does it lead to? Dostoevsky said that without God everything is permissible. We can’t say anything is wrong anymore–infanticide, incest, pedofilia, terrorism, greed, exploitation, human trafficking or genocide.
Hitler took Nietzsche at his word and Auschwitz was the logical outcome.
Russell, Sartre and Camus all had to make blind leaps of faith, irrationally choosing some meaning, purpose or value to live by: pacifism, brotherhood, love, Marxism…
Francis Schaeffer explained that modern man finds himself trapped in the basement of despair. But he makes an irrational leap of faith to the upper story of meaning–because it is impossible to live consistently otherwise.
In other words, modern, secular man is a squatter, choosing values, causes and rights without paying any rent.
Nietzsche’s madman pondered the folly of ‘killing God’: ‘What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun?’
By the way, Charles Spurgeon preached that a more accurate translation of Psalm 14 verse one read: The fool says, ‘no, God’. Anyone–believers included–who says ‘no’ to God on any issue is a fool.
A word of advice: don’t be a fool.
Till next week,
 Jeff Fountain