The Madman Returns

A Modern Retelling of Nietzsche's "The Madman"

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies”
-Friedrich Neitzsche

Have you not heard of that madman who ran into the megachurches one bright and sunny Sunday morning? Holding a Bible over his head he shouted incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!”

As there were many gathered who had not yet lost God, and instead clung to their convictions with deep certainty, the madman caused a great deal of laughter. Is He lost?, one asked. Has he gone missing?, asked another. Has he wondered off? Or is He hiding? Is He afraid of us? Has He been canceled? The congregation continued to jeer and laugh, shouting over one another.

The mad man jumped up on stage, grabbed a microphone, and pierced the congregation with his eyes.

“Where has God gone? I will tell you! You have killed Him! You have killed Him! You are all His murders! But how did you do this? How were you able to drink up the sea? Where did you find the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did you do when you unchained the earth from its sun? Where is this world heading? Where are you heading? Are you not in constant free-fall? Are you not being tossed around by the wind, backwards, sideward, forward, and in all directions? Is there any up or down? Are you not straying as through an infinite nothingness?”

“Do you smell nothing of the Divine rot? For even gods rot! Can you not smell the rot of a God whose name has been laundered through polling stations and partisan platforms? I smell it! It reeks and seeps out from your baptistries. It spews forth from your voter guides. It fills the air oozing from the stages where your flag stands taller than the cross. God is dead! God remains dead! And you have killed Him! How then shall you console yourselves, oh you, the most murderous of all murderers?”

“You said you loved Him! But look what you have done to His name! The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever known has bled to death under your knives! Who will wash the blood from your hands and launder the blood soaked carpets of your churches? You took the one who blessed the poor and made Him a mascot for the powerful! You took the one who said, “my kingdom is not of this world” and you constructed Him a kingdom of this world with lobbyists and legislation and the weapons of empire! You took the one who washed feet and clothed Him in a costume of domination!”

“God is dead! God remains dead! And you have killed Him!”

“You killed God when you locked Him inside of a book and threw away the key! You killed God when you traded in the living Word for an inerrant paper pope, incapable of surprise and domesticated into dogmatic ideology. The God who spoke from a burning bush does not survive the flattening of scripture. The dynamic and relational I AM WHO I AM cannot live inside a system designed to control Him!”

“You killed God when you turned the Gospel into a product, the altar call into a conversion metric, discipleship into a brand, and subordinated Love to market share. You built Him massive auditoriums with parking garages and coffee kiosks, and in doing so evicted Him from the places He told us He would be: the margins and at tables with the sinners and the oppressed. You replaced the scandal of the cross with the comfort of stadium seating.”

“You killed God when you wrapped Him in that flag! You killed God when you reduced the infinite into a finite nation-state, when your sermons became stump speeches, and when the communion table became a Klan campaign rally. You killed God by sacrificing Him on the altar of the political. You took the one who stood before Pilate and refashioned him into Pilate’s very image. You killed God when you rendered Him unto Caesar! You killed God when you baptized your racism and bigotry in His name! God died the moment you decided He hated the same people that you hate. God died when you stopped asking what is required of you and instead began telling others what is required of them. God died the first time you said “God and Country” and no ontological difference could be detected.”

“But do not be fooled into thinking I spare the others, those who wear their doubt as a fashion. They killed God by sanding down every edge until it could no longer cut. They translated the Holy into the therapeutic and replaced discipleship with self-help workshops. They did not crucify God in a stadium, but euthanized him in endless committee meetings. Sure they kept the candles, the liturgy, and the beautiful words, but they quietly evacuated them of any claim that could actually cost them something. They are curators of a museum they no longer believe in. They call it openness and nuance, but there is a difference between a faith that wrestles and a faith that has stopped wrestling simply because the struggle is deemed impolite. They killed God by making Him superfluous!”

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at the congregation; they too were silent and stared at him confused and uncomfortable. At last, he pulled out a lighter and set his Bible on fire. He threw the flaming Bible into the congregation as they screamed in fear and protested in offense. They couldn’t see that the madman was simply enacting what they had already done.

“I have come too early,” he said, and closed his eyes. “The time has not come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way–it has not yet reached the ears of the people in the pews. Thunder and lighting require time; the light of the stars requires time; and deeds too require time, before they can be seen and heard. This deed, the murder of God by his own devotees, is still further from them than the farthest star. And yet they have done it. They have killed God!”

It has been further revealed that on that same day, the madman forced his way into several other churches, and there offered up his requiem aeternam deo. When the churches armed security teams carried him out and called him to account, he always replied, “What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

And the congregations sang on.