Dionysus on a Bike

by Justin Marquis

I would believe only in a god who could dance….Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. –Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On Reading and Writing.”

I keep starting to begin a blog post explaining my return to the church beginning with the tension between expressing where I am to the non-Christians in my life and expressing where I am to the Christians in my life. It has taken me a long time to express what is contained in this post, and even so this is only a start. The tension between my non-Christian past and my current return to the church seems so insignificant to me internally that I forget that it probably looks really strange from the outside. I know that I do not hold the same faith I once held as a late-teen. I also know that I do not hold the same faith as those who deny humanity to queer people, immigrants, and those outside the Christian faith. I don’t have their certainty. I do not have their way of interpreting scripture. I do not have their way of looking at and evaluating the wisdom of those outside of the Christian faith. Most importantly, I have a critical view of the unfolding of Christian history. I do not believe that Christians have acted collectively as a Christ-like institution for a great deal of their history, and the form the church took at Nicaea in 325 was the form it was shepherded into by the powers of empire and domination, subjecting others to enforced norms dictated by those with the most political power.

The problem is that the positive expression of my faith has so much nuance that it could easily be mistaken for what it’s not. It could easily be mistaken for full-blown self-confident theism on the one hand or completely closed off atheist-leaning agnosticism on the other. It is neither of those things, all the way to the point at which the distinction between atheism, agnosticism, and theism breaks down. I reject the traditional theistic God of the Greek philosophers, but I do not thereby commit myself to the reductive naturalism of the atheistic scientist, even if metaphysically I am only willing to admit the existence of matter and energy arranged in various ways across space and time.

God is receding from view in that we are further and further removed from the time when Jesus, the one we Christians call both God and God’s Son, walked the earth. This temporal distance between us now and the incarnation of God means that we have to take into account that distance. We cannot take for granted that the there is one faith that has passed down intact through the centuries. Even if it were the case that one truth faith was passed down intact, we would still carry the weight of having to interpret the faith and make it new again as we stand in a different relationship to the presence of Jesus on earth and the experience of his resurrection because of all the intervening centuries.

Here is where I think the non-Christians in my life might get hung up or get the wrong idea from the language of Christianity. Words like “faith,” “grace,” “belief,” “salvation,” “eternal life,” “God,” and “creation” among many more such jargon have been given relatively narrow understandings in many expressions of the Christian life. When I say I have faith in God to save my soul (something I do not utter very often but comes as a consequence of being a Christian) I do not mean anything magical by that; I do not mean anything supernatural by that. I only mean that I have entered into a different relationship with the Ground of What is, a Ground that cannot be fully known, and that new relationship is not something I attained or earned.

Perhaps here the Lutherans, who are the particular Christians I have joined, can shed some light on what I mean by the life of faith. Lutherans emphasize as a matter of central importance that our being happy and blessed is not something we earn by our own effort, but rather it is an act of benevolence by the creator. Nietzsche rejected this way of interpreting our relationship with existence because he argued that it denigrates our ability to legislate our own set of values and our own responsibility for evaluating what makes for blessedness and the good life. Here the Lutherans/Christians are not so different from Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche did not believe the ludicrous and naive view that we are in a position to freely choose whatever we want in life or to create any values we want. We are products of our culture, our upbringing, our sorrows, and our triumphs. We did not make ourselves; we were made. The only difference between the theologically orthodox Lutheran and the Lutheran Nietzsche is that Nietzsche does not ascribe having a will or an orientation toward some end goal as attributes of that which is responsible for our blessedness. The Christian, one supposes, holds something different. That which is responsible for our lot in life, our blessedness or our being cursed, our salvation or our damnation, is God, a Being with a will and who has a plan for creation.

Imagine if we synthesize these two views, the affirmation of a personal God on the one hand and the Ground of all that is devoid of consciousness or direction or purpose, on the other. These two ways of being oriented, one atheistic and naturalistic grounded in immanence and the other otherworldly and oriented toward that which is wholly other from Nature seem like they cannot be reconciled. They seem diametrically opposed to one another. They only are able to come into contact when we add to them the particular person who inhabits the position of faith, the believer, the atheist-theist, the saint and sinner who tries to hold them both out of an abundance of existential humility and skepticism. From such a place the words “hope” and “faith” make sense, and a God that is not a Being who controls things but rather a yearning and a longing in the middle of knowing that I, alone and by myself, cannot do anything, cannot make of myself anything, cannot save either myself or this world. With epistemic humility I admit that I do not know the nature of the Ground of Being and with a love of life and a love of other human beings who share my lot in the universe, I hope for a world without war, environmental destruction, oppression, degradation, or inequality. To hope in humility can be universal, but to connect that hope to the simple carpenter’s son whose words echo across two millennia is part of the chance or fate of where I was born and under what circumstances I was raised. The Buddhist, the atheist, the Jew, the Druze, the animist, the pagan, the naturalist, and the none-of-the-above (among others), all can hope in humility, and that hope can be given different names, which brings me to perhaps the biggest practical difference between being a Christian now and the expression my faith took 20-plus years ago.

Central to Christianity is the belief in the universality of Christ. All are welcome. Ethnicity, nationality, ancestry, language and culture, none of them matter as far as one’s welcome to the table. That kind of universality, a universality that draws me to the faith, has been replaced by another distinct type of universality, a belief and conviction that all must become Christian, that Christianity is the only avenue to have legitimate hope in humility. That exclusive universality leads to dogmatism and a rigidity in belief and interpretation that cut off an openness to the world and to new experiences. This being closed off to the world turns Christianity into the constricting and life-negating religion that Nietzsche criticized and people in my life might be afraid I have returned to after being liberated from it all those years ago.

Many of my Christian readers will have already written me off, at this point, as heretical. The openness to the possibility that God is not at all like they conceive, the lack of exclusive universalism and an openness to the wisdom and good faith of those who relate to their hope with different terms and different historical landmarks, the willingness to admit to the hiddenness of God and the intractability of the problem of evil, all of these would exclude me from so many particular Christian fellowships, including the one I left while I was in college.

The Lutheran Church I now attend recently invited me to lead an adult study unit; they assigned a book, The Gospel According to James Baldwin, as the text on which to base the study. Baldwin, a radical voice of the civil rights movement, was, among many other things, explicitly not a Christian. Though steeped in the language and culture of the Christian faith, he rejected it because the church failed to live up to its proclamation of a Gospel of love for all in its failure to engage in meaningfully positive ways with segregation and the oppression of black Americans. For me, to be given a text from a figure like that, non-Christian, church rejecting, openly queer, stranger in his own hometown as one with wisdom for the church, confirmed for me that I am at home here. It confirmed for me that this group of Lutherans, even as their focus is on Christ, do not have the hubris to reject the experience of those fellow-travelers who themselves are searching in a hope and a desire for the reconciliation of all things.

The gospel of love preached by a carpenter from Galilee is compelling to me for its rejection of distinctions between the value of persons and its wild hope for the reconciliation of all things. To know that there is a community where I can affirm that and connect it to the echos of Jesus’s words across time in an expression of the church that his followers founded has been a life-changing homecoming. This was only possible because in this particular church, I can approach the teachings of Jesus and be a part of that community without having to pretend that there is certainty and without having to pretend there are not other ways of understanding the hope for a world reconciled. A belief in grace, a belief that we did not earn our blessedness or our hope, implies a humility about one’s own understanding of the Ground of things and an openness to the possibility that others, even others who are quite different from me, have insight and access that I lack.

Even as there are many Christians who might reject my faith as not purely Christian enough, there are also those in my life who might still wonder, why a church? Why Christianity, when these institutions have done so much harm in the world? When the most vocal, the most visible Christians oppose justice, show hatred toward woman and toward queer people and even toward the poor, it is legitimate to fear that I have fallen in with their irrationality, their cowardice, and their bad faith. It is absolutely true that the church has enabled genocide and conquest, colonialism and empire. It is true that the Church has been, more often than not, a life-denying force throughout much of its history. Here, one of the things I learned from the academic study of religion is worth repeating as a mantra; there is not one Christianity but many Christianities. There is not one monolithic expression of the faith, and to believe otherwise is to deny the evidence of history and the diversity of the world. Even when there are so many life-denying, oppression enabling, hateful expressions of the Church, there is also a thread of justice and love, a thread of those who keep alive a hope in the blessedness of following Jesus’s teaching to love one another and accept even the most distant stranger as a brother or sister. I am throwing my lot in with them.