Nihilism… All That Exists is Matter and Energy: the Worldview that Caused the Collapse of Christendom and Protestant America

Man has stopped regarding himself as the vice-regent of God, created in His image, and having given up his soul (inner person), exists as a non-self,  “fragmented being ruled by ancient urges and lusts which control him and reduce his reason to a façade for rampant irrationalism. Not surprisingly, T.S. Eliot saw modern man in a waste land of his own making.” (The Word of Flux, Rousas John Rushdoony, p. 54)

America is quickly transforming into a wasteland of irrational, fragmented, non-self beings and nothingness. This worldview has undermined and caused the collapse of Western and American Christian foundations. The collapse has meant the loss of Divine Moral Law, imago Dei, immutable truth, everything normal and natural, together with purpose and meaning; all derived from a uniquely Christian base. Madness, ugliness, the cheapening of human life, death-wishing, inversion of good and evil, systemic lawlessness, murder, brutality, violence, and nihilism have rushed into the vacuum created by the collapse.

According to the spirit of nihilism, matter and energy exists but God does not. He is dead so life has no ultimate meaning or purpose, nor does the universe as a whole have any meaning. Whatever meaning and purpose that exists is an artificial construct created by people, and only exists as a coping mechanism without purpose. Since only matter and energy exist, there is no right way or wrong way to live, so people are free to invent their own identities and define their own way as they see fit. By extension of this way of thinking, there is no such thing as a morally right or morally wrong action because there is no such thing as God, thus no such thing as a Divine Law that says this is good and that is evil. (1) (7 Most Important Nihilist Philosophers and Their Main Ideas, atlasmythica)

Then there are the nihilists who believe that by undermining, destroying, and burning down the foundations of Western and American civilization, out of the ashes will magically arise a utopian paradise. While this is their stated belief, destruction is the primary goal.

The collapse was predictable since for over one hundred years Western and American ruling class elite nihilists and their accomplices in the church have been sweeping Western civilization clean of all traces of the living Foundation of the Western and American civilization: Christ Jesus, the Word, the Creator God of Genesis and Revelation.

The assault against Christ Jesus began during the Renaissance when Christians at the highest level of church and society rejected Christ Jesus and His offer of salvation in favor of ancient Mysteries, Egyptian magic science, Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, evolution and Gnostic pagan creeds that had appeared in the heart of Christendom during the Renaissance.  

The resulting rebellion against Christ Jesus and His Gospel message gained speed and force with the philosophically pagan materialist implications of Darwinian theory.  The idea that humans evolved by chance and natural selection from primordial waters (also the void) lay the axe at the very foundation of the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo.  On the heels of Darwinian theory Christian theism came under forceful attack allowing a new pagan atheistic-mindset to be declared a scientifically supported reality.

Karl Marx’s exuberance for Darwin’s idea prompted him to consider dedicating his Das Kapital to Darwin, an honor which Darwin declined.   Marx was a pagan materialist, hence the rationale behind his invitation to Darwin was that he saw how Darwin’s materialist theory provided a so-called scientific anti-creation origin account to support his economic infrastructure, thereby allowing him to build his godless communist utopia, a modern Tower-building project.  

Darwin’s pagan materialist theory (loss of the living Creator-God), and Marxist materialist presuppositions (based in new pagan creeds and new economic theory grounded in hatred of God) together with Freud’s pagan materialist- based analysis of religion and human sexuality threw faith in the Triune God and Christian theism into the dustbin of history.

It was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who exorcised the West of Biblical influence by declaring the death of Christ Jesus.

By the time of Nietzsche, perceptive thinkers had already been expressing apprehension at the prospect of the awakened multitudes whose loss of faith and hope would eventually be exploited by materialist haters of Christ Jesus (i.e., Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, American Progressive Liberals, Leftists, Secular Humanists).  With Nietzsche, dreadful apprehension deepened into certainty, for Nietzsche despised religion in general, but upon Christianity he poured his unbridled fury:

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhanded, too underground, and too petty.” (Nietzsche in “The Life of Nietzsche,” Faru Forster Nietzsche, 1921, p. 656)

It was Nietzsche, the dark prophet, the son of a Lutheran pastor calling himself the antichrist who pronounced the death of Christ Jesus and saw that His death had already begun to cast its first shadows over Europe, and though,

 “….the event itself is far too great, too remote, too much beyond most people’s power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them,” still its advent was certain, and it was men like Nietzsche who were “the firstlings and premature children of the coming century,” the century of the “triumph of Nihilism.” (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 44)

Nietzsche was the first apostate Christian philosopher to gaze fully upon man’s loss of faith and hope and its terrifying consequences.  With no living Triune God up above to obstruct his vision, the nihilism (meaninglessness, hopelessness, despair) he saw down here was agonizing.  

 In “The Gnostic Religion,” Hans Jonas provides a full-scale study of the heretical world of pre-Christian and Christian era Gnostic nihilism together with its modern variants— Nietzsche’s nihilism, Existential nihilism, Epistemological nihilism, Moral nihilism, and Political nihilism. 

Jonas writes that while ancient Gnostic man was thrown,

“…into an antagonistic, anti-divine, and therefore anti-human nature, modern (Gnostic) man (is thrown) into an indifferent one.” (p. 338)

Whereas the ancient gnostic conception was still anthropomorphic despite the nihilism, hostility and demonic, its modern counterpart with its’ completely godless, soulless, spiritless nature, represents the “absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit.”

At least the ancient Gnostic dualism, as fantastic as it was, was at least self-consistent, as there was a source for ‘self’ (being).   Not so for its’ modern counterpart:

“So radically has anthropomorphism been banned from….nature that even man must cease to be conceived anthropomorphically if he is just an accident of nature.  As the product of the indifferent, his being, too, must be indifferent.  Then the facing of his mortality would simply warrant the reaction, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” (p. 339)

In other words, the death of Christ Jesus means the modern unbeliever has no source for his soul (inner person), spirit (mind), and identity in his Creator (John 1). Furthermore, there is loss of hope and immortality.   For man, now the soulless fragmented being of evolution working on matter, there is nothing—no  higher truth, absolute moral law, no heaven above, no hell below and nothing to relieve the dreadful, agonizing fear of death. 

Nietzsche saw only darkness with no entry from the outside into this hermetically sealed world. The paralyzing darkness that fell was an inner blinding, a madness that spread outward.

Hans Jonas concurs:

“…modern nihilism (is) infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic nihilism ever could be for all its panic terror of the world and its defiant contempt of its laws.  That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss.  That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with….the objective meaninglessness of his projected meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.” (Jonas, p. 339)

This was precisely Nietzsche’s point.  With the death of man’s only hope, Christ Jesus, objective meaninglessness, hopelessness, despair, fear of death, and escape from suffering at any cost would penetrate every avenue of thought and life, making life itself unbearable. All of this has become clear in these last days with the advent of the coronavirus pandemic. It took the form of a a panic-stricken spirit of death that haunted and terrorized unbelievers and even afflicted undiscerning orthodox Christians, making them ready to accept further losses of their personal freedoms.

Nietzsche went on to say that because Christ Jesus had died in the 19th century there would be two direct results in the 20th century.

First, the 20th century would become the bloodiest, most catastrophically destructive century in history, and second, a universal madness would break out and turn the West upside-down.  Truth would become lie and lie truth; evil would become good; males would claim to be female and females claim to be males; the unnatural would become natural, and the unholy would become holy.    

Nietzsche has been right on both counts.

There is only one way out of the spiritual wasteland of non-self, nothingness, and madness as it crazily careens downward into the abyss. That way is the Narrow Way. The time is right now for repentance and turning back to Jesus Christ: “And do this, understanding the occasion. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day has drawn near. So let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.… ” Romans 13:11-12

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

2024@Linda Kimball