“Go, and sin no more,” Jesus tells the adulteress, in John 8:11. He did not put her on a pedestal. He saved her from a violent death and let her go with a stern admonition to sin no more.
True, we all have sinned, but this is not an excuse to glorify the sinner. Turning a private act of repentance into an obscene orgy of public theater is an abomination. Repentance every Sunday, and in large numbers, creates the perpetual sinner, and his or her jazzy release from culpability on a weekly basis seems designed to celebrate not the elusive virtue of triumphant righteousness, but the chronic depravity of sin.
Christianity seems to have given up on sinning no more, and turned a habitually self-confessing scoundrel into its get-real hero. You cannot stop sinning, they say, because you were born in the shadow of sin, from a couple of sinners, and, to top it all, you were born to sin. But no worry, for God looks at everybody through the purifying Blood of Christ, and when seen through such a mighty purifier the greatest sinner becomes just as white as the whitest of the whitest. Thus the righteous are in fact arrogant hypocrites, because they are no better than the depraved, etc., etc…
Needless to say, this perversion of “being saved by faith only” is offensive to me. Why, then, should I be offended by, say, Nietzsche’s anti-Christian invective? He is not offending my own sense of religious piety. My Christianity is not on trial, nor under attack here.
Here is a magnificent line from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; 3rd Essay (20), which may sound cruel, but rings true nevertheless:
“For two millennia now we have been condemned to the sight of this new type of invalid, the sinner.”
Nietzsche’s stinging diatribe against “bad conscience,” as a disease, may sound overstated, if generalized against all Christianity across the board, but the standard weekly practice of many Evangelical churches in America, of which I can judge from personal experience, shows bad conscience turned into such a caricature that I honestly doubt that even Nietzsche’s fertile imagination could have caught up with the horrifyingly ludicrous reality of testimonies given by those weeping, self-abusing invalid-sinners joyously and tearfully, spilling their diseased guts in a most sickening, gruesome and revolting detail in front of the appreciative Sunday-dressed audiences, nicely dressed children and all, every Sunday morning in so many Christian churches all around the nation. (To be fair, I ought to mention the commendably reserved practices of American Conservative Baptists, for instance, to which I’ve been an eyewitness as well… As long as these refuse to go the orgiastic way of the majority of Evangelical churches, there is still hope...)
I have read tons of books of literature with depictions and references to Tartuffery and self-deprecating orgies, but none of those can rival the ugly reality of my personal observations. Nothing of this sort exists inside the Russian church, although the practice of the Yurodivy, outside the church entrances, is rather unpleasant and disconcerting. The Catholic churches, where I also had some experience, are much more subdued, even when talking of the horrors of sin and the curse of the Fall. Where Nietzsche finds the source of his own opinion, I cannot say for sure, as German Lutheran practices seem reserved enough. But if this was something comparable, I would not blame him for his fiery condemnation and nausea-driven contempt. So, let me stop now, and make a confession that I may have been unfair in singling out modern American churches. A revolting sickness in Christianity goes back a long way, virtually to its early days, and Nietzsche, for one, had a lot of its clinical history to draw from.
Indeed, Christianity has suffered from a variety of sadomasochistic sicknesses. It should suffice to mention those infamous passages in Tertullian (an eminent Church Father), and even in Thomas Aquinas, revoltingly promising the wretched Christian sufferers of their time, and by extension of all time, the incomparable bliss of “eternally watching the spectacle of God’s enemies eternally tortured in Hell!” These horror things are worth each other. There is an obvious connection here between the early sickness of the Dark Ages and the much more recent Christian practices. When sickness is seen as the norm, it encourages imitation, and this is where things are getting really ugly!
It is clear to me now that those Church Fathers who promised their fellow Christians the bliss of watching other people’s eternal suffering were very sick men, the type of invalid Nietzsche is talking about. The key worry here, in general, aside from the sickness of the sick minds, is the hypocrisy of the not-so-sick. Their teary testimonies may not be an expression of their own pathology, but oftentimes a calculated pandering to other people’s sickness, and a recognition of this general cult and culture of sickness as the norm.
To put it in a nutshell, whatever Nietzsche says about Christianity, even in the strongest disparaging terms, may be a perfectly legitimate expression of his utter disgust for the abnormal and unnatural practices of all these men and women who have sadly come to represent the faith and practice of Christianity, supposedly the highest achievement of our Western civilization.
True, we all have sinned, but this is not an excuse to glorify the sinner. Turning a private act of repentance into an obscene orgy of public theater is an abomination. Repentance every Sunday, and in large numbers, creates the perpetual sinner, and his or her jazzy release from culpability on a weekly basis seems designed to celebrate not the elusive virtue of triumphant righteousness, but the chronic depravity of sin.
Christianity seems to have given up on sinning no more, and turned a habitually self-confessing scoundrel into its get-real hero. You cannot stop sinning, they say, because you were born in the shadow of sin, from a couple of sinners, and, to top it all, you were born to sin. But no worry, for God looks at everybody through the purifying Blood of Christ, and when seen through such a mighty purifier the greatest sinner becomes just as white as the whitest of the whitest. Thus the righteous are in fact arrogant hypocrites, because they are no better than the depraved, etc., etc…
Needless to say, this perversion of “being saved by faith only” is offensive to me. Why, then, should I be offended by, say, Nietzsche’s anti-Christian invective? He is not offending my own sense of religious piety. My Christianity is not on trial, nor under attack here.
Here is a magnificent line from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; 3rd Essay (20), which may sound cruel, but rings true nevertheless:
“For two millennia now we have been condemned to the sight of this new type of invalid, the sinner.”
Nietzsche’s stinging diatribe against “bad conscience,” as a disease, may sound overstated, if generalized against all Christianity across the board, but the standard weekly practice of many Evangelical churches in America, of which I can judge from personal experience, shows bad conscience turned into such a caricature that I honestly doubt that even Nietzsche’s fertile imagination could have caught up with the horrifyingly ludicrous reality of testimonies given by those weeping, self-abusing invalid-sinners joyously and tearfully, spilling their diseased guts in a most sickening, gruesome and revolting detail in front of the appreciative Sunday-dressed audiences, nicely dressed children and all, every Sunday morning in so many Christian churches all around the nation. (To be fair, I ought to mention the commendably reserved practices of American Conservative Baptists, for instance, to which I’ve been an eyewitness as well… As long as these refuse to go the orgiastic way of the majority of Evangelical churches, there is still hope...)
I have read tons of books of literature with depictions and references to Tartuffery and self-deprecating orgies, but none of those can rival the ugly reality of my personal observations. Nothing of this sort exists inside the Russian church, although the practice of the Yurodivy, outside the church entrances, is rather unpleasant and disconcerting. The Catholic churches, where I also had some experience, are much more subdued, even when talking of the horrors of sin and the curse of the Fall. Where Nietzsche finds the source of his own opinion, I cannot say for sure, as German Lutheran practices seem reserved enough. But if this was something comparable, I would not blame him for his fiery condemnation and nausea-driven contempt. So, let me stop now, and make a confession that I may have been unfair in singling out modern American churches. A revolting sickness in Christianity goes back a long way, virtually to its early days, and Nietzsche, for one, had a lot of its clinical history to draw from.
Indeed, Christianity has suffered from a variety of sadomasochistic sicknesses. It should suffice to mention those infamous passages in Tertullian (an eminent Church Father), and even in Thomas Aquinas, revoltingly promising the wretched Christian sufferers of their time, and by extension of all time, the incomparable bliss of “eternally watching the spectacle of God’s enemies eternally tortured in Hell!” These horror things are worth each other. There is an obvious connection here between the early sickness of the Dark Ages and the much more recent Christian practices. When sickness is seen as the norm, it encourages imitation, and this is where things are getting really ugly!
It is clear to me now that those Church Fathers who promised their fellow Christians the bliss of watching other people’s eternal suffering were very sick men, the type of invalid Nietzsche is talking about. The key worry here, in general, aside from the sickness of the sick minds, is the hypocrisy of the not-so-sick. Their teary testimonies may not be an expression of their own pathology, but oftentimes a calculated pandering to other people’s sickness, and a recognition of this general cult and culture of sickness as the norm.
To put it in a nutshell, whatever Nietzsche says about Christianity, even in the strongest disparaging terms, may be a perfectly legitimate expression of his utter disgust for the abnormal and unnatural practices of all these men and women who have sadly come to represent the faith and practice of Christianity, supposedly the highest achievement of our Western civilization.
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