In the Face of Nihilism
Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash
More than any other theologian, Karl Barth has offered a full account of the reality of the Nihil. On the one hand, Barth sees that the Nihil is an active agent aggressively opposed to the will and purpose of God. On the other hand, he sees that the Nihil is derivative from and a parasite on the reality of God’s rule. Barth gives voice to a strong evangelical affirmation that the Nihil will be defeated and finally nullified and destroyed by the power of God’s love.
In his book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (2024), James Davison Hunter details the claims of Nihilism:
Nihilism is an epistemological failure because it denies the existence of a “true world.” There is no reliable reality to be affirmed or described.
Nihilism is marked by ethical incoherence. There are no abiding ethical claims. Good and evil, right and wrong are no more than social constructs.
Nihilism results in existential despair; there is no intrinsic meaning or ultimate purpose to individual or social life. Existence has no goal or end.
Nihilism leads to political annihilation in which only power counts for anything. Life itself is a “will to power” that eventuates in “the will for nothingness.”
As I pondered the wise words of Hunter, I read a recent posting by David Brooks, “Can You Please Stop Calling these People Populists?” The New York Times (February 14, 2025, A23). Brooks suggests that the people clustered around our current administration are not conservatives at all; they are nihilists.
At the outset of his book, Hunter asserts that all these social-political efforts that have failed are “indeed, fixable” (p. 5). As a way of restoration and rediscovery of social cohesion and ethical realism, Hunter proposes:
We can address the deeply fractured and dysfunctional nature of our Republic by reviving mediating institutions.
We can renew the depleted social capital that withers the bond of our communities.
We can address the alienation of the electorate from government.
We can overcome our debased and factionalized public discourse.
We can moderate a polarizing internet.
We can remedy the inadequacies of our administrative state and our hyper-individualism and, in turn, reinvigorate civic life.
We can rediscover the common good.
We can even address the spiritual dimensions of this political crisis…through a Christian revival of America.
Hunter’s agenda seems to me innocently hopeful; he reckons all of these failings can be “fixed.” I do indeed hope that he is right. He holds as possible the recovery and re-empowerment of civic life as a generative force that would permit serious address of the acute failures of our current society. That current society, moreover, is overrun and overpowered by the reality of excessive wealth and desperate need. Nothing less is now required than thinking outside the box of right and left in order to articulate with daring thickness human possibility and human responsibility that are both deeper and more urgent than our usual assumptions. Only one caveat: it will not do, with Hunter, to focus on a “Christian revival” in our pluralistic society; rather, we must hope for and have a great spiritual revival that includes the work and witness of all faiths, most especially including Judaism and Islam.
It is of immense importance that after his probing analysis and after his somewhat parochial response, Hunter concludes with these words:
Liberal democracy in the late modern world will not find renewal without the moral imagination to envision a public life that transcends the present warring binaries, and with it, a fresh vocabulary with which to talk about and pragmatically address the genuine problems the nation and the world face. It would be a renewed ethical vision for the re-formation of public life, for the institutions that sustain it, and for the citizens who put it into practice. This vision would be embedded in a mythos that doesn’t deny the story of America, but reframes it toward what it could yet be (p. 378).
And then more specifically:
Democratic politics would not be that vision, as I say, but it would serve it all the same. To imagine it and to give it voice would require poets more than power brokers (378).
We may pause and relish his rhetoric: “moral imagination…ethical vision…poets”!! What is now required is the capacity to think outside the boxes of left and right, to articulate with great thickness human possibility and human responsibility, both of which are more urgent than our usual assumptions. Hunter’s commendation of moral imagination and poets calls to mind the lyric of Walt Whitman:
After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, the ethnologist,
Finally shall come that poet worthy of that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs (Leaves of Grass, 324).
These lines affirm that what is now essential for social wellbeing among us are not engineers, or a variety of scientists. What are now indispensable in our society are poets with the courage, imagination, and skill to summon us to a very different world that refuses our present ideological reductions or our present confidence in our technological capacity. In the end, the threats to our common life are human threats. And the counter to those threats is human engagement that lives and moves below our ideological passions and ideologies. Such an appeal to uncredentialed poets strikes me as a reiteration of the way in which King Zedekiah came to the prophet Jeremiah at night (Jeremiah 37:17-21, 38:14-16) or the way in which Nicodemus “came to Jesus by night” (John 3:2). Such desperate consultations only take place after it is recognized that conventional knowledge is not adequate to the crisis. So it surely is in our society. There are no technological solutions to the deep human problems that beset us.
The urgency of moral imagination in poetic cadence invites many folk who live outside the power grid of our society to have a critical, energizing say in our common future. Not least among the folk most outside the power grid of our society is the church community and its pastors. Thus I judge that the pastors, preachers, and teachers of the church have a distinct possibility and wondrous opportunity to articulate a world other than the one subject to the force of the Nihil. Indeed the church meets regularly exactly to remember, reiterate, and re-embrace an alternative world that refuses and resists the dominant world of the Nihil. The church and its preachers have entrusted to them the most elemental claims of imagination given us in Scripture. It remains, always again, for the church to tap into that rich deposit of alternative imagination whereby we are recruited to an alternative ethic marked by neighborliness:
-Thus Moses, in the wake of the great songs of victory (Exodus 15:1-18, 21) can issue the Ten Commandments that initiate alternative vision of neighborliness (Exodus 20:1-17). For good reason, the Decalogue concludes with a three-fold, comprehensive accent on “the neighbor.” It is the victorious singing of Moses and Miriam that gives energy and credence to the ethical vision of the Commandments. The one who voices the Commandments is the same one who defeated Pharaoh who himself is an embodiment of nihilism:
Sing to them Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea (Exodus 15:21).
-Thus Jesus can line out an alternative world that identifies the truly “blessed”:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matthew 5:1, 5:12).
The world of cynical power has mistakenly imagined that the ones with the most power and wealth are the blessed. But we know better than that. We know that the truly blessed are those who are surrounded by mercy, compassion, and justice. They are the ones energized to tell the truth about our true situation concerning our deep fear and our chance for life in a generative community.
-Thus Paul, in a staggering affirmation, attests the power of the risen Christ, an event that has no analogue in the world beset by the force of the Nihil. But Paul gives compelling force to his alternative conviction:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 15:54-57).
And from that great event Paul draws a practical conclusion with ethical imagination:
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (v. 58).
The “work of the Lord” is restoration that is accomplished through forgiveness, generosity, and hospitality. Indeed Hunter can write of “forgiveness” as our practice:
Another fundamental concept is the retrieval of the idea of forgiveness, a practice that allows opposing factions to fight tooth and claw without denying the humanity of the other (379).
For good reason he cites Hannah Arendt:
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever (379).
And Hunter adds:
And if forgiveness is too high a bar, then perhaps we could learn to somehow let go and pass by. On the other side of the coin, forgiveness would also require abandoning the moral conceit of self-righteousness, even when it is justified, for “the evil in the foe is also in the self (379).
Elsewhere in a reference now lost to me Arendt has a footnote that observes the distinguishing mark of Christian faith is not the resurrection but forgiveness. In a world governed by the gospel, there is no quid pro quo of revenge. There is only a willing and ready capacity to break the cycle of retaliation by starting again with forgiveness. Thus we may judge that “forgiveness,” along with generosity and hospitality, mark a life-world in which the negating force of the Nihil has no sway. The church has no monopoly on the life-renewing act of forgiveness, but the church is the only social body that has forgiveness as its core and proper work. Forgiveness is, as we say:
creatio ex nihilo. It is making a new world possible out of the shambles of our chaos. Every time the church meets, we gather with our various shambles of chaos, and receive the news, yet again, that God’s limitless goodness has outflanked the failure and disappointment of our lives.
justification by grace. We cannot of ourselves begin a new life. It is a gift from God who is not a scorekeeper but a victor, a father who welcomes us and a mother who nourishes and embraces us.
The core news of the gospel, to be reperformed every time the church assembles, is that along with forgiveness of our sin there is the defeat of chaos that we cannot manage on our own. There is nullification of our submissive fear before the Nihil. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the narrative of Mark 4:35-41. The disciples are with Jesus out on the water:
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped (v. 37).
The disciples are deeply frightened. They wonder if Jesus does not care about their safety or wellbeing. But he remains unperturbed. He is sleeping soundly in quiet confidence. When awakened, he utters his lordly word:
Peace, be still! (v. 38).
Or perhaps, “shut up” or “get back.” He quiets the chaotic waters. He has good reason to be the ultimate “unanxious presence.” He rebukes his disciples for their fear that manifests their lack of trust in him. The disciples do not answer his query about fear and faith. Rather, they respond in awe and bewilderment. They now know that Jesus could calm chaos. They witness that he can silence chaos. They are not yet ready, in this episode, to recognize that there in the boat with them is the creator God who has limited the force of chaos since the beginning of creation. (See Psalm 104:9, Jeremiah 5:22.)
The church meets regularly to confess and affirm that we know the name and character of the one who effectively manages chaos and who creates viable life-space for our creaturely enterprise. It is no wonder that we used to sing, in trusting innocence:
Jesus, Saviour, pilot me,
Over life’s tempestuous sea;
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding rock and treach’rous shoal;
Chart and compass come from Thee—
Jesus, Savior, pilot me!
As a mother stills her child,
Thou canst hush the ocean wild;
Boist’rous waves obey Thy will
When Thou sayest to them, “Be still!”
Wondrous Sov’reign of the sea,
Jesus, Savior, pilot me!
When at last I near the shore,
And the fearful breakers roar
‘Twist me and the peaceful rest—
Then while leaning on Thy breast,
May I hear Thee say to me,
“Fear not—I will pilot thee!”
(Edward Hopper, 1871).
