Apologetics

Which Conqueror Which Conquest

by Terry Barlow
08/23/14
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The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose father was a Lutheran minister that died when Friedrich was only 5, claimed in one of his writings that the Judeo-Christian God had died of pity. First, though, all the other gods had died laughing at the claim that the Judeo-Christian God was the only God. Nietzsche went on to say that virtues or qualities like patience, or humility, meekness or lowliness were the “soft underbelly” of humankind and made it vulnerable to extinction. For him and many like him it is the will to power and conquest exhibited by his Superman (Overman) that is the virtue most to be prized and pursued, and that achieves all that has been, or ever will be, worth achieving in the world. It was the writings of Nietzsche, by the way, that Hitler gave to his fellow soldiers, the same Hitler who despised Jews as being an impure race, as the Jews had despised Samaritans thousands of years before for the same reason. Nietzsche saw humility then as a despised weakness in humanity. But Jesus Christ who, in his only recorded reference to his own virtue, had said that he himself was meek and lowly, also spoke of having overcome the world, and how we who believe could experience that victory in practical ways. Where did the strength come from that Jesus used in winning that grand victory? It came from the same source where his followers would later obtain it in partaking of the fruits of his victory: submission to the will and authority of God the Father. It came from the so-called “soft underbelly” not the hard formidable shell of humanity. Frederick Nietzsche spent about the last decade of his life in an insane asylum where it was said that his sister sold sideshow admission tickets to hear his ravings, during a time when he himself had delusions of being the Messiah. His mother sat more compassionately at his side when nothing decipherable was uttered by him for weeks at a time until suddenly Bible verses would flow verbatim, perhaps the very ones his father had taught him before his untimely death. In those flashes of lucidity Nietzsche might have agreed with the great Augustine of Hippo who once said, “Seek what you seek, but not where you seek it.”