Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Baum der Erkenntnis von gut und böse - moderne Gesellschaft, Amerika; Nietzsche, Vater der Lüge (kein Angriff auf die Existenz Gottes, sondern ...)

Kurzinhalt: The crucial issue is whether people seek to live as the image of God, i.e., to live in obedience to the will of God, who alone knows how he is to be imaged, or whether they seek to be the Nietzschean overmen who command good and evil for themselves.

Textausschnitt: AMERICANS AND THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

78a Feminism, as already noted, is but the tip of an iceberg—an iceberg, already large, that is growing daily. The feminists say, sometimes in terms far more sophisticated and even sometimes far more honest than many Americans would be comfortable hearing, what those Americans themselves really believe and already practice in their own lives. (Fs)

78b This point was made far more effectively than any theologian could by John Chancellor, in his commentary on NBC Nightly News on the night of December 4, 1990, regarding the indictment of Dr. Jack Kevorkian for the aid he had given a woman to kill herself in the back of his van by means of his so-called "death machine". Over the past thirty years, Chancellor said, we have witnessed an enormous change of values in this country. This change, according to him, began in the 1960s with the introduction of the pill and other forms of contraception that made it possible for women to take control of their fertility. Indeed, as he pointed out, contraception has given women more power and control than either sex had ever had before over who enters this world and who does not. This "revolution of immense importance", in turn, has provoked a situation in which, as Chancellor put it, "our system of values is changing so fast we can hardly keep up. One of the themes of change is that people are taking more and more control of their bodies and their lives." This change in attitude, he went on to say, is something the law has not heretofore taken sufficiently into account. Hence, in his view, cases such as that of Kevorkian are to be welcomed, because "we need some guidelines on how to behave when people want to take control of their deaths."

78c John Chancellor is right in his analysis of the impact of the contraceptive pill. All that remains to be said in that regard is that it took him until 1990 to figure out what Paul VI saw in 1968. (Fs)
78d People intent on controlling their bodies and their lives are people intent on defining themselves and their purpose for existing. They are no longer interested, consciously at least, in living their lives in such a way as to make visible in the world the invisible mystery of God. They have set themselves up as morally autonomous agents, defining for themselves what is good and what is evil. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they are not merely tasting the forbidden fruit; they are claiming it as their most precious right. (Fs) (notabene)

79a In 1882, Nietzsche, the great German nihilist philosopher, published a work whose English title is The Joyful Wisdom or The Gay Science. That work contained his famous parable of the madman who comes to the marketplace early in the morning to declare that God is dead, that we have killed God. Those gathered in the marketplace do not understand what he is talking about (hence, their view that he is mad), which leads the madman finally to conclude:

I have come too early ... my time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves. (Fs)

79b The primary point of his parable is not that God is dead; the primary point is that we have killed God. How do people kill God? They do so by eliminating him—or any serious need for him—from their lives. They may continue to pay lip service to him, but in reality his existence makes no serious difference in how they live. (Fs)

79c Every poll taken on the subject indicates that more than 90 percent of the American people believe in God. But belief in God is not the crucial issue. As the Pope has pointed out regarding the serpent's temptation in Genesis,

When the father of lies approaches man he does not deny the existence of God; he does not deny God the existence and omnipotence to which creation bears witness; he aims straight at the God of the covenant. (Fs)

Outright denial of God is not possible because his existence is too apparent in the created world ... even in Satan himself. The Apostle James wrote: "Even the demons believe in him, and tremble" (2:19), showing that even they are incapable of denying God's existence and his sovereign power over all beings. But the truth about the God of the covenant, about the God who creates out of love, who in love offers humanity the covenant in Adam, who for love's sake puts to man requirements which have direct bearing on the truth of man's creaturely being—this is the truth that is destroyed in what Satan says. And the destruction is total.1 (Fs)

80a The crucial issue is whether people seek to live as the image of God, i.e., to live in obedience to the will of God, who alone knows how he is to be imaged, or whether they seek to be the Nietzschean overmen who command good and evil for themselves. The Pope clearly believes the temptation to the latter is one of the most prominent notes of our age:
"The spirit of falsehood seeks to make the people of our age believe that they are 'like gods,' beyond good and evil ('knowing good and evil' [Gen 3:5]), that sin does not exist even while the reality of sin and evil assails people as never before, giving proof of its existence by threats on a scale never experienced up to this time."2 Thus, although an overwhelming majority of people still claim to believe in God, we face, as the Pope pointed out in Veritatis Splendor, a situation in which "many, indeed too many, people think and live 'as if God did not exist'" (88). (Fs)