Nietzsche? At Liberty? Please Tell Me I'm Dreaming...
The following is a letter I considered sending to the administration or English department at Liberty University, where I graduated in early 2008. I decided that, after my past experiences with the school, probably no one will read the letter or answer my questions so I will just put it for you here. I have absolutely no intention of attending this ridiculous lecture, and wouldn't get caught within a mile of it, but for the Facebook group where I posted this link I was somehow able to write on their wall, probably because my mouse hovered over the "Maybe" button and then I had to change it to "Not Attending." Internets are weird. Anyway, I would appreciate anyone's thoughts:
Dear Liberty,
I am writing to express my profound disappointment in the recent decision of the Department of English to host an event entitled “Nietzsche and Shakespeare: the Most Poetic Philosopher and the Philosophic Poet.” I think this is a very sad reflection on a university who claims to be the world’s largest and most prestigious evangelical Christian institution of higher learning. Friederich Nietzsche was nothing more than a radical nihilist and religion-hating zealot who, I am confident to say, has the blood of millions of Christians, Jews, and non-believers too on his hands. He was a profound influence upon men such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Benito Mussolini, who were some of the worst madmen of the twentieth century and caused the greatest war in human history, which resulted in 80 million souls exterminated, most of them innocent. Even President Richard Nixon used some of Nietzsche’s ubermensch/superman ideas to justify his very unethical and even illegal actions during the Watergate break-in and cover-up. As someone who has attended and worked at secular schools, I can testify that many of the most problematic students often revere Nietzsche as a justification for their actions and ideas. One need only watch pop culture films to see the countless references to Nietzsche made by characters who delight in causing problems for other characters; e.g. Kevin Kline’s character in “A Fish Called Wanda.” Nietzsche believed strongly that every man must create his own morality, rather than answering to outdated faiths and institutions and other individuals, of which he saw Christianity as the foremost. Thinking that Shakespeare and Nietzsche resemble each other in that manner is laughable. Shakespeare was a royalist and traditionalist, and by all accounts a believer, or at least an individual who respected Christianity and portrayed that in his writings.
In the Facebook advertisement promotion for this questionable event, there is even a very euphemistic statement which is quite misleading about the man’s ideas: “he is the great companion of anyone conscious of rare gifts he must grow to splendid fruition in a democratic age.” Such a statement is, frankly, garbage and uses flowery, misleading language to alter what the man’s contributions to philosophy and political theory really were. Some of us Liberty alumni are honestly beginning to wonder what Liberty stands for after seeing things like this promoted. It is one thing to host an event to promote discussion or dialog or understanding, especially if it is clear in the title or synopsis that a negative criticism is being offered, but from what I can see, and from what others I have shown these advertisements can see, this event even seems to be glorifying Nietzsche’s life and ideas, and I find that incredibly troubling.
As though Nietzsche’s very blunt declaration of “God is dead,” is not enough, his works are replete with other anti-Christian and simply anti-theistic statements, some of which are frankly frightening. Men like Hitler loved Nietzsche and used his writings to justify many of their actions, including the wholesale genocide of God’s Chosen People, the Jews, and the selective torture, imprisonment, and execution of many countless Protestants, Catholics, and other Europeans of belief. How Liberty can possibly justify this lecture, especially in comparing a wonderful and history-changing poet and playwright such as Shakespeare to Nietzsche, is hard to imagine.
The title of the lecture seems to be promoting Nietzsche and Shakespeare as equals when in fact their ideas are completely different. While Shakespeare’s works do include a fair amount of hopelessness and doubt, they still are replete with theistic and even Christian references, and convey a sense of awe, gratitude and worship to the reader. Nietzsche’s writings, meanwhile, are often very insulting and arrogant, rooted in ancient pagan stories as one can see in Also Sprach Zarathustra, and as I said above are full of anti-religious ramblings. In some cases Nietzsche purposefully did not even bother capitalizing the word “Jew,” which I think Hitler picked up on and which I think goes to show his true feelings about God’s people. Jehovah makes it clear in Genesis that whoever curses Israel will be cursed, so having anti-Semitic radicals like Nietzsche front and center is probably not the best way to go about procuring God’s blessing for our beautiful university. This is so disturbing to me that we Liberty alumni and students are paying for events like this, that I am wondering if I have made the wrong choice in considering graduate studies here in the future. At the very least, secular institutions do not make pretensions to Christian principles and then violate them in open view of the public. There is a place for engaging with secular ideas and writings, but the approach here seems counterproductive.
Here is a particularly disturbing passage of Nietzsche that I found in my research in anticipation of this coming lecture: “When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew [sic], crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory... How ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?"
Yes, of course these things are still believed, and this is typical Nietzschean arrogance and dogma. I really can’t understand why students’ tuition dollars are going toward promotion of such a man. It would be one thing if the event were to clearly discourage students from believing him since his ideas were wholly unbiblical and outright blasphemous, and inspired many of the worst tyrants and killers of the twentieth century to embark on the madness that they did. That being said, it looks like the event is morally equivocating between Shakespeare and Nietzsche, even in the title selected for the lecture, and I find that offensive. Shakespeare was a good man and a great writer, perhaps the greatest writer of all time, and he is being compared to a mentally ill, wholly immoral philosopher who wrote wildly exaggerated texts and took pleasure in breaking down institutions and arrogantly domineering over others with whom he debated. It is particularly troubling that a great number of the people who say they are going to attend the event are undergraduate students who probably know very little either about Shakespeare or Nietzsche. This would be a good opportunity to give the students truth about perhaps the most dangerous philosopher of the past two centuries, but instead they are being encouraged to view Nietzsche as a “poetic philosopher” who is a very fitting companion for a “democratic age.” Just read Chapter 4 in Protestant historian William L. Shirer’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and one gets an idea of how “democratic” Nietzsche’s ideas really are in practice…
There are many other great philosophers in recent memory with whom Shakespeare could be better compared. In fact, why not promote an event like this comparing him to Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky, in his beautifully written novels, posed many of the same questions as did Nietzsche, but arrived at more faith-based and worshipful answers to those questions despite the suffering and horror that he had experienced, often out of his control. Should not that be the kind of intellectual influence we wish to see our students experience? It is acceptable to encourage students to voice their fears and doubts and angers about this life, but if we do not help them to resolve those questions from a biblically rooted worldview as did great men like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, instead of Nietzsche who flaunted religion and worshipped self, then we have failed them. It would appear that the English department at Liberty has failed its students in this particular situation, and I think someone needs to speak up and say that this event is wrong in its premise and its practice. God is not dead, He is alive and well and He will either bless or curse our school on the basis of our obedience to Him. Yes, Liberty should seek to promote intellectual engagement and even discussion of controversial subjects such as Nietzsche, but if that is done, it must be done from a Colossians 2:8 mindset, which is certainly not the case here: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces[a] of this world rather than on Christ.”
If Nietzsche is not “hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition,” I’m not sure what is. Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems like wonderful fare for our students and I think we should encourage the reading and understanding of his works, especially without trying to compare him to a far inferior mind and intellect from a far less reverent time centuries later. I think souls are on the line, and Liberty needs to be far more careful in which thinkers and writers it actively promotes. If Liberty’s goal in hosting such an event is to prove to the outside world that it is openminded and intellectual, it should stop trying to do that… the world will never view a Christian school as its academic equal, since Christ promises us in the Scriptures that the world will always despise us for being His followers. We should hold fast to our own values and beliefs, and realize that secular schools would not be any more receptive to the ideas of Christian intellectuals such as Lewis, Spurgeon, and Schaeffer. Sometimes a line has to be drawn, and it would seem as though this is such a time. I appreciate your attention in reading my letter, and I am more than happy to speak with a representative of the school about this matter if that is desired by whomever reads this. God bless Liberty and the students there who deserve far better academic offerings than the man who smiled through his bushy mustache as he said “God is dead.” Yours truly,
Douglas A. Schrock
Liberty University Alumnus, Class of 2008
B.S. in History and Religion
Dear Liberty,
I am writing to express my profound disappointment in the recent decision of the Department of English to host an event entitled “Nietzsche and Shakespeare: the Most Poetic Philosopher and the Philosophic Poet.” I think this is a very sad reflection on a university who claims to be the world’s largest and most prestigious evangelical Christian institution of higher learning. Friederich Nietzsche was nothing more than a radical nihilist and religion-hating zealot who, I am confident to say, has the blood of millions of Christians, Jews, and non-believers too on his hands. He was a profound influence upon men such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Benito Mussolini, who were some of the worst madmen of the twentieth century and caused the greatest war in human history, which resulted in 80 million souls exterminated, most of them innocent. Even President Richard Nixon used some of Nietzsche’s ubermensch/superman ideas to justify his very unethical and even illegal actions during the Watergate break-in and cover-up. As someone who has attended and worked at secular schools, I can testify that many of the most problematic students often revere Nietzsche as a justification for their actions and ideas. One need only watch pop culture films to see the countless references to Nietzsche made by characters who delight in causing problems for other characters; e.g. Kevin Kline’s character in “A Fish Called Wanda.” Nietzsche believed strongly that every man must create his own morality, rather than answering to outdated faiths and institutions and other individuals, of which he saw Christianity as the foremost. Thinking that Shakespeare and Nietzsche resemble each other in that manner is laughable. Shakespeare was a royalist and traditionalist, and by all accounts a believer, or at least an individual who respected Christianity and portrayed that in his writings.
In the Facebook advertisement promotion for this questionable event, there is even a very euphemistic statement which is quite misleading about the man’s ideas: “he is the great companion of anyone conscious of rare gifts he must grow to splendid fruition in a democratic age.” Such a statement is, frankly, garbage and uses flowery, misleading language to alter what the man’s contributions to philosophy and political theory really were. Some of us Liberty alumni are honestly beginning to wonder what Liberty stands for after seeing things like this promoted. It is one thing to host an event to promote discussion or dialog or understanding, especially if it is clear in the title or synopsis that a negative criticism is being offered, but from what I can see, and from what others I have shown these advertisements can see, this event even seems to be glorifying Nietzsche’s life and ideas, and I find that incredibly troubling.
As though Nietzsche’s very blunt declaration of “God is dead,” is not enough, his works are replete with other anti-Christian and simply anti-theistic statements, some of which are frankly frightening. Men like Hitler loved Nietzsche and used his writings to justify many of their actions, including the wholesale genocide of God’s Chosen People, the Jews, and the selective torture, imprisonment, and execution of many countless Protestants, Catholics, and other Europeans of belief. How Liberty can possibly justify this lecture, especially in comparing a wonderful and history-changing poet and playwright such as Shakespeare to Nietzsche, is hard to imagine.
The title of the lecture seems to be promoting Nietzsche and Shakespeare as equals when in fact their ideas are completely different. While Shakespeare’s works do include a fair amount of hopelessness and doubt, they still are replete with theistic and even Christian references, and convey a sense of awe, gratitude and worship to the reader. Nietzsche’s writings, meanwhile, are often very insulting and arrogant, rooted in ancient pagan stories as one can see in Also Sprach Zarathustra, and as I said above are full of anti-religious ramblings. In some cases Nietzsche purposefully did not even bother capitalizing the word “Jew,” which I think Hitler picked up on and which I think goes to show his true feelings about God’s people. Jehovah makes it clear in Genesis that whoever curses Israel will be cursed, so having anti-Semitic radicals like Nietzsche front and center is probably not the best way to go about procuring God’s blessing for our beautiful university. This is so disturbing to me that we Liberty alumni and students are paying for events like this, that I am wondering if I have made the wrong choice in considering graduate studies here in the future. At the very least, secular institutions do not make pretensions to Christian principles and then violate them in open view of the public. There is a place for engaging with secular ideas and writings, but the approach here seems counterproductive.
Here is a particularly disturbing passage of Nietzsche that I found in my research in anticipation of this coming lecture: “When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew [sic], crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory... How ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?"
Yes, of course these things are still believed, and this is typical Nietzschean arrogance and dogma. I really can’t understand why students’ tuition dollars are going toward promotion of such a man. It would be one thing if the event were to clearly discourage students from believing him since his ideas were wholly unbiblical and outright blasphemous, and inspired many of the worst tyrants and killers of the twentieth century to embark on the madness that they did. That being said, it looks like the event is morally equivocating between Shakespeare and Nietzsche, even in the title selected for the lecture, and I find that offensive. Shakespeare was a good man and a great writer, perhaps the greatest writer of all time, and he is being compared to a mentally ill, wholly immoral philosopher who wrote wildly exaggerated texts and took pleasure in breaking down institutions and arrogantly domineering over others with whom he debated. It is particularly troubling that a great number of the people who say they are going to attend the event are undergraduate students who probably know very little either about Shakespeare or Nietzsche. This would be a good opportunity to give the students truth about perhaps the most dangerous philosopher of the past two centuries, but instead they are being encouraged to view Nietzsche as a “poetic philosopher” who is a very fitting companion for a “democratic age.” Just read Chapter 4 in Protestant historian William L. Shirer’s masterpiece The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and one gets an idea of how “democratic” Nietzsche’s ideas really are in practice…
There are many other great philosophers in recent memory with whom Shakespeare could be better compared. In fact, why not promote an event like this comparing him to Dostoevsky? Dostoevsky, in his beautifully written novels, posed many of the same questions as did Nietzsche, but arrived at more faith-based and worshipful answers to those questions despite the suffering and horror that he had experienced, often out of his control. Should not that be the kind of intellectual influence we wish to see our students experience? It is acceptable to encourage students to voice their fears and doubts and angers about this life, but if we do not help them to resolve those questions from a biblically rooted worldview as did great men like Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, instead of Nietzsche who flaunted religion and worshipped self, then we have failed them. It would appear that the English department at Liberty has failed its students in this particular situation, and I think someone needs to speak up and say that this event is wrong in its premise and its practice. God is not dead, He is alive and well and He will either bless or curse our school on the basis of our obedience to Him. Yes, Liberty should seek to promote intellectual engagement and even discussion of controversial subjects such as Nietzsche, but if that is done, it must be done from a Colossians 2:8 mindset, which is certainly not the case here: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces[a] of this world rather than on Christ.”
If Nietzsche is not “hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition,” I’m not sure what is. Shakespeare, on the other hand, seems like wonderful fare for our students and I think we should encourage the reading and understanding of his works, especially without trying to compare him to a far inferior mind and intellect from a far less reverent time centuries later. I think souls are on the line, and Liberty needs to be far more careful in which thinkers and writers it actively promotes. If Liberty’s goal in hosting such an event is to prove to the outside world that it is openminded and intellectual, it should stop trying to do that… the world will never view a Christian school as its academic equal, since Christ promises us in the Scriptures that the world will always despise us for being His followers. We should hold fast to our own values and beliefs, and realize that secular schools would not be any more receptive to the ideas of Christian intellectuals such as Lewis, Spurgeon, and Schaeffer. Sometimes a line has to be drawn, and it would seem as though this is such a time. I appreciate your attention in reading my letter, and I am more than happy to speak with a representative of the school about this matter if that is desired by whomever reads this. God bless Liberty and the students there who deserve far better academic offerings than the man who smiled through his bushy mustache as he said “God is dead.” Yours truly,
Douglas A. Schrock
Liberty University Alumnus, Class of 2008
B.S. in History and Religion
posted by Douglas Schrock at 2:55 PM
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