I can remember the exact spot where I sat in the college cafeteria that day, several tables back from the main crowd. I thought I’d make some progress in my reading assignments over lunch, so I self-selected away from friends and chatty conversation.
But instead of making progress, I had my eyes opened and my world blown open. All by a few words from a man who went insane.
The reading in question could rightly be called a parable – one of those short little stories that turns your assumptions about the world inside-out and upside-down.
It told the story of a man who burst into a town marketplace some years ago seeking God. The townspeople laugh at him, wondering if God has gotten lost or gone on a holiday; their derision reveals their underlying lack of belief in or need for a deity.
Not deterred, the man presses on, revealing the truth: God isn’t just gone – he’s been murdered! (Gasp!)
It’s something of a Knives-Out revelation: everyone’s in on the murder. All of us.
But only the man gets the enormity of this loss. Without God, it’s just us out here in the void. And to be worthy of the act of god-killing, one must become god-like. Otherwise, the emptiness of EVERYTHING will just swallow us up like the sea.
The townspeople just think the man is crazy – a madman! – and run him out town. But not before he sees them gathered in their little churches, going on as if nothing has happened. He departs with the remark, “What are these churches now if not the tombs and monuments of God?”
The madman, of course, was Friedrich Nietzsche, the late 19th-century German philosopher of the will-to-power and the Ubermensch (or “superman”). But sitting there in that Christian college cafeteria, I saw something so obvious, so clearly, it felt like the entire earth was moving, pulsing with a kind of energy that you couldn’t determine was destructive or creative.
Our churches – all those churches in Nashville, the buckle of the Bible Belt – were full of ordinary townspeople people going about their lives, as if the reality, or unreality, of God simply didn’t matter. They had no idea how beside the point it was.
And here’s what I learned in that moment: a belief is not a belief if it makes no livable difference in your life. It’s simply a lie you tell yourself. The real belief is the one expressed in action.
What was it that another, more ancient madman said? Right: you shall know them by their fruits.