(The following interview features Dr. Tim Gilbert in conversation with Dr. Bill Tillman, Director of the Center for Congregational Ethics and co-host of the T. B. Maston Foundation’s podcast, Everyday Ethics.)

CFCE: A little academic interest in the concept of nihilism has come. Some of this interest has been toward defining nihilism. How was nihilism discussed in your theological education? How would you define nihilism in its current expressions as compared to maybe how you were taught in your congregational rearing about nihilism?

TG: Nihilism is defined as the philosophical belief that life, existence, and the universe lack any inherent meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. The word comes from the Latin nihil which means “nothing.” It is often tied to the beliefs of Friedrich Nietzsche, the German Death of God philosopher. During my theological education it was something briefly touched on because theological education implies that there is a theological meaning to the universe found in the Judeo-Christian understanding of life found in Scripture and the Church.

Because of the rise of post-modernity and its accompanying philosophical views, especially deconstruction which teaches that there are really no established meanings of texts only those given to them by established distinctions and established hierarchies which give their own meaning to texts. Essentially, since this is the case, texts have no established meanings, and one must read a text and bring one’s own meaning to it.

Since Christianity is established on the text of the Bible, deconstruction is a devastating blow to the foundations of Judeo-Christian belief and the consequent belief that perhaps the religious foundations of much of the Western civilization are meaningless. In addition, since a text has no inherent meaning, one may use the texts of the Bible to establish any meaning about them that one desires and claim that interpretation is authoritative.

For large numbers of modern people this is the existential crisis – there is no ultimate meaning to the universe. Out of this it is easy to see how nihilism has emerged as a relevant philosophical system for viewing the world around us. “Be suspicious of claims that present themselves as universal truth. Perhaps there is no universal meaning, value, or truth at all.” This has led some to describe the present time as an Age of Disorder. Emerging in it are power structures that openly tell lies to give people who feel their world is crumbling a sense of false stability.

In my congregational upbringing nihilism was never a threatening philosophy because I lived in a community based on stable, universal beliefs. Today it is an existential threat as it has become a viable option for describing the spirit of our age.

CFCE: According to theologians and sociologists, nihilism is not a new phenomenon, but likely can be found in every culture in history. If you agree with that thought, do you have any historical, or contemporary, cultures in which nihilism has found traction to demonstrate what this dynamic looks like?

TG: I suspect in every culture there have been those who attacked the dominant structure of meaning and values of the age in which they lived. In ancient Greece the Sophist philosophers were committed to individualism and relativism. What the Sophists believed was that the gods did not exist and because of that there may be no one, universally appropriate way of doing things; there are no absolutes of any kind. There was for them no fixed, absolute reality. In their time they were challenged in their views by the classical philosophical views of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

One can follow history to see that in every culture there were always the counterculturalists who attacked the world view and values of the dominant group. Western civilization with the coming of the Renaissance saw more and more of a challenge to the Judeo-Christian foundations of the Western worldview and philosophers developed their own philosophical systems based on something else. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is just one example.

The emergence of modernity argued that there is a discernable, rational order to reality. Post-modernity argues there is in fact no rational order to the universe and no ultimate meaning at all which brings us to the present crisis and the emergence of nihilism as a viable option for viewing the universe. But this has brought with it a crisis of meaning for the lives of many people living in our time.

CFCE: What do you think of some of the scholarly attention given to points in scripture, the Wisdom and Prophetic literature, eg, that the writers realized without naming it what we would call nihilism? Could we read Scripture, then, so as to glean some of their suggestions toward dealing with nihilism?

TG: I think there is much to be gleaned from the Wisdom and Prophetic writings in the Bible that perhaps help us to see that a nihilism is really not a new phenomenon. The writers of the Proverbs saw practical wisdom as a way of answering the questions of life with advice for practical ways of living in a world that challenged religious ways of life. In Ecclesiastes, the writer is himself skeptical about life and relating to a God who is not always what the writer was taught or believed God to be and a God sometimes difficult to find. Yet the book was included in the Jewish canon.

The Prophets, especially those of the Exile and after, prophesied to a people who had come through a crisis of faith and meaning. The land that God has promised them was gone and they were living in a foreign land. The Temple in Jerusalem, the very dwelling place of God, had been taken and destroyed by the Babylonians. What did their faith all mean now that it appeared their faith and values had failed? A form of nihilism prevailed. Yet the Prophets stepped in to interpret the meaning of these things for the people of God and provide a hope for the future. Perhaps we need to step in and carefully discern how to interpret the story of God for a people in a crisis of meaning here in the 21st century.

CFCE: Jim Palmer who has the substack called “deconstructionology” contends that nihilism is not to be perceived as only a turn into cultural meaninglessness, but can serve as a transitional dynamic for a society. What do you think?

TG: Jim Palmer’s “deconstructionology” site began as a sort of “why I am no longer a Christian” discussion. He argues that Christian beliefs, doctrines, authority structures, and assumptions about God, Scripture, salvation, morality, etc. are inherited belief systems that post-modernity has overturned. But he argues that this not only applies to Christianity but also to secular ideologies, cultural assumptions, identity, morality,
authority, work, money, masculinity, and ideas what make life worthwhile. He argues that, ironically, nihilism has emerged as its own rigid system of meaning.

Palmer argues that we should practice “deconstrutionology”: Destruction – eliminating something; Deconstruction – taking something apart to examine how it was constructed; Deconstructionology – making that examination a disciplined practice. His point is to ask what can be built after inherited certainty has been dismantled. Palmer seeks a framework for living without what he calls “borrowed certainty.” He calls this existential health, a set of capacities that enable a person to remain engaged with reality, make choices, and inhabit life without outsourcing authority to a religious or ideological system. It is a developmental passage rather than a destination, a brand of individual existentialism.

I agree with Palmer that nihilism is a philosophy that has re-emerged in the present period that has helped lead to the present Ag e of Disorder. Unfortunately, individual existentialism has been tried before (The Sophists of ancient Greece among others), and still leaves us with the problem of shared beliefs out of which to build a common society. His seems to be a very individualistic search for meaning. He argues that people should look for, not meaning since the universe has none, but their own significant moments in life upon which to build. I believe it was the Qoheleth who said, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” and neither is Palmer’s philosophy.

CFCE: If nihilism, a kind of underneath-other-matters dynamic, is to be dealt with, where should congregations be on identification, description, analysis, but especially addressing the concept?

TG: I think the nihilistic spirit of this age really is not anything new that the church is facing in our time. It has simply become a dominant philosophy in our age. But the message of the church concerning the centrality of Christ, salvation through Him, and the Christ-life leading from Him remains unchanged. However, here are some suggestions for the 21st century Church. Too often we have talked about Christianity in terms of our beliefs providing a certainty about the universe and its underlying structure based on the “inerrancy” of the Bible. When that authority came under attack by philosophical deconstruction the authority was undercut in a massive way. Science has also made Christian ideas about the universe difficult when one looks at Deep Time and the age of the earth and the origins and size of the universe.

Deconstruction implies there is no inherent meaning in any text that can be discovered so one must discover one’s own meaning about the world and ultimate reality. These forces have driven the tide of nihilism that has helped to lead to the present Age of Disorder. The problem is that faith is actually driven by models that are based more in probability than certainty. Meanings of texts can be discovered with high degrees of probability establishing some interpretations as vastly superior to others. But they are still not certain. In fact, Judaism and Christianity are both based in relationships of faith in God. For Christianity, that relationship to God is founded on the life, teachings, and saving work of Jesus Christ. As John Biersdorf has rightly reminded us, the world is not random chaos, but an arena for purposeful activity to bring all things to God.

Relationships are things that are begun and continue to grow as the partners involved begin to know each other better over time. As they do, the relationship deepens. But this is not certainty, it is faith, based in trust. I have faith centering in the trust that I have I Christ that when I die, I will be gathered home to God because of the trust which I have in Jesus Christ reinforced by a lifetime of faith in Christ. Likewise, that faith commands me to follow the teachings of Jesus, not simply some theory about the Bible, in the life that I live in faith.

Palmer is right, twenty-first century people must still discern their own meaning for life. But that meaning can still be found in a community of faith, the Church, universal and local, from which the call is made to salvation in Christ and to follow his teachings in the world. However, because of its very nature, it cannot be inherited, it must be based in a personal relationship with God through Christ, not some philosophical theory of certainty. It is by faith we follow, not epistemological certainty.

CFCE: Thank you for giving some sense of what nihilism is, how it appears in society, and some ways of addressing the dynamic.

TG: I appreciate the opportunity. An interview format is difficult to deal with the complexity of why nihilism has emerged as it has in the present age and far more needs to be said about interpreting the Bible as authority in the 21st century. Abuses of how it is authority have led to much of the disorder of the present age. Again, I appreciate the opportunity.