“Religion is man’s great venture and man’s great, fatal failure.” (K.H. Miskotte)
K.H. Miskotte (from When the Gods Are Silent):
The gods are silent. The idea is still in the air, but it is mute. The shape lingers on the horizon but is suffused in a silent fog. The words still resound, as in a strange, unknown language or like a song from childhood; but they no longer speak the mystery to us. We no longer feel secure in the bosom of nature; we know that all things far and near do not speak, neither the Milky Way nor the electron. We are bound by the spell of things; the facts have us in their grip. We still feel an occasional prickle of dead before a higher power, but that power is voiceless, it no longer shows any signs of life.
Nihilism can be understood as a reaction to Christianity, which, after all, had increasingly put the stamp of the divine on worldly entities; in this sense it was the Enlightenment that inaugurated the process of nihilism in Europe. Then the Enlightenment itself strengthened ‘the agonizing feeling of the nothingness of science,’ for in a strange way understanding brings with it an emptying of life and initiative. According to Nietzsche, nihilism comes as a reaction to the mind’s habit of construing by means of value judgments an increasing number of areas and goals of life as being desirable and meaningful. But then, ‘The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false. It makes no difference whether the question of meaning was a proper question to which previously we have given a false answer or whether it was a wrong question which must always be followed by a wrong answer.’
Nihilism may also take the form of saying, ‘There is no reality behind any faith or any ideal. There is nothing but an abyss of absurd existence. But hail to the summer, the sun, laughter; blessed be life and strength and women! We roam the world with hungry eyes to see everything we can; we want to fly to the moon; there is not enough time to enjoy to the full this terrible life!’ This kind of nihilism is genuine, warm, human, and understandable.
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{In which we are told that moral codes are made to be broken.}
“If someone asks me what he should do in a particular situation, I cannot tell him.”
John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):
There is no such thing as a general ethic for man as to what he shall do, or not do, in all circumstances. Such a theory would presuppose an understanding of man as a being with definite plans and goals. But man does not have his life at his disposal in such a way. Man lives in a state of uncertainty in the face of what meets him from day to day, and every decision is a new decision. Ethical truth is distinguished from other forms of truth, such as mathematical truth, by the fact that it is never self-evident but becomes evident only in the concrete situation. The actuality of our present situation is always a decision which we have to make, and the ethical truth which appears is not a general truth but a particular truth. There is no such thing as ‘goodness’ in itself, nor is there any moral law as such.
There can be no such thing as a system of individual or social ethics. Neither is there any such thing as moral law as such. The idea of a ‘general’ ethics or a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. Ethics develops no program but deals from case to case. It uses no high-sounding language about the uplift of humanity or the creation of a better social order but gets down to real and simple things. A man knows only what he needs to do now, not what he may have to do in the next quarter of an hour.
Neither man nor the world can be improved, they can only be kept in check, and that with difficulty. To treat the Sermon on the Mount as a general ethics, or as a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society, can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. This world cannot be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount; it is the ethics of the new man and of the new world, the ethics of the kingdom.
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