Ankerberg: Yeah, I find it interesting that
Nietzsche’s writings influenced Hitler.
Hitler gave them to Stalin and to Mussolini.
And you can tell what happened in all three
of those nations.
Zacharias: Yes.
This is, you know, if you read Paul Johnson’s
book, you know, Modern Times, he tells this
story.
He talks about these three demagogues of the
mid 1900’s there, in Hitler, Stalin and
Mussolini.
And the irony of it was, Stalin at one time
was preparing to go into the ministry, you
know, and lost his faith in God.
Hitler, of course, wanted to build the super
race, the uber man, the stronger man that
he wanted to build to take over.
And these ideas of living without God became
popular.
Nietzsche, ironically too, son of a pastor,
and both of his grandfathers were in the ministry.
And he said when we realize God had died in
the 19th century a kind of madness will break
out.
The last 13 years of his own life he spent
moving between sanity and insanity, oftentimes
in silence for weeks.
But here is the parable he gave.
He said, have you not heard of that mad man
who took a lantern and went into the city
saying, “I’m looking for God, I’m looking
for God.”
He excited considerable laughter, people standing
there looked at him, thought he was just a
maniac himself.
And then he said, you know, “Where has God
gone?
Have we lost him, has he gone on a journey
or a voyage?”
And these questions.
But the thing I like about Nietzsche is he
was honest about the implications of his conclusion.
Modern philosophers don’t like to take it
logically to where it goes.
Nietzsche was honest.
And he said things like this, the metaphors
that he used, “Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the horizon?”
“Is there any up or down left?”
“Will lanterns have to be lit in the morning
hours?”
“How did we accomplish the greatest of all
deeds that humanity has ever accomplished?”
No horizon left, no point of reference left.
He recognized that the death of God meant
the death of absolutes, and the death of definitions.
So here was his question: “What sacred games
will we need to invent in order to sort of
assuage and to bring some kind of satisfaction?”
So what is he saying?
Some type of spirituality is desperately needed;
something mystical, something of an absolute
nature.
How are we going to find all of this now?
This to me, John, really, this to me is the
greatest question of our time.
If God is no longer in the paradigm, where
are we going to find the definitions?
What point of reference?
Nietzsche was right on target.
And so he said two things will happen: the
20th century will become the bloodiest century
in history of because the 19th century killed
God—philosophically he meant; and universal
madness will break out.
Need we even probe beyond even the surface
to see the data on where we are today in our
world?
When you look at what happened in the 20th
century, Auschwitz and all of that.
You know, people don’t like to hear these
things.
They say, ah, you know, you’re pulling at
extremes.
No, no, no.
G.K.
Chesterton put it this way, “The tragedy
of disbelieving in God is not that a person
ends up believing in nothing.
Alas, it is much worse, a person may end up
believing in anything.”
