This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Paul Anleitner
For some mysterious reason that still eludes me to this day, the world I inhabited of 90s Evangelical youth group culture made some fierce and strange attempts to package the message of the gospel into witty t-shirt designs. There seemed to be a belief that pervaded the times, that the profound, transformative, and hauntingly beautiful Good News of Jesus Christ could be condensed into tritely cliched and parodied t-shirts and other wares that occupied the shelves of my local Christian bookstore.
I could walk the halls of any youth group lock-in, or survey the sea of adolescent Jesus freaks sitting in the pews as they watched a strongman rip a phonebook, and find at least one person wearing an orange shirt that looked like it said Reese’s—with the unmistakable peanut butter cup logo and font—but upon closer inspection, revealed the word Jesus in that same patented branding. Look around a bit more and I’d likely find at least one adult youth leader that never skipped bicep day, wearing a black t-shirt that said Lord’s Gym, clearly parodying Gold’s Gym, with a body-builder Jesus doing a push-up, the cross resting precariously on His back.
Though the intended outcome of these shirts remain a mystery to me, there was one specific standard 90s youth group shirt that completely fascinated me. It was typically all black with white font. Each side had a brief quotation.
The front of the shirt read:
“God is dead.” — NietzscheWhile the back said:
“Nietzsche is dead.”— God
Philosophy was not an enterprise that my particular Christian context celebrated. In fact, in many Evangelical Christian schools or student ministry programs, one’s first exposure to any proper philosopher at all was likely to only occur in the latter years of high school, typically through an apologetics course or Christian worldview class.
As a result, by the time I entered early adulthood, I was only familiar with the 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche through the lens of the facile own-the-atheists apologetics—a methodology that typically accomplished its aims through the easily burned straw men of atheist caricatures.
It was in my early adult years, when I was confronted by the startling dissimilarities between the Jesus of the Scriptures and the parody, dare I even say idolatrous, caricatures of a Reese’s Jesus, (along with the stark realization of the sheer ineffectiveness of offering a hurting world such vapid cliches) that I began to feel within me a growing thirst for depth and a courage to confront a world far more complex than t-shirt cliches.
I studied history in undergrad and became obsessed with the shifting movements of thought in Western civilization. Eventually, I went on to graduate school and studied philosophical theology and theology of culture. Though it may sound odd, Nietzsche became my favorite atheist. As I immersed myself in his work, the story that contains his famous
“God is dead” quotation came to be, from my new vantage point, one of the most important and profound insights in the history of Western civilization.
Understanding Nietzsche’s point is pivotal to understanding our current cultural moment and the new epoch that is dawning. To be serious about the Good News requires us to wrestle with what the shape of that Good News will look like in the day and time that we inhabit.
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