“…if we are good consistent materialists, why are we mourning with those who are suffering?”
On July 3rd, my family was returning from church, and we passed our local mall as we always do on our commute home. By the grace of God, we did not go in. Had we done so, we would have found ourselves fleeing not long thereafter with our two children in tow as a gunman began a bloody rampage. A few days after this tragedy, Denmark gathered to mourn and weep for the dead and injured, where the Prime Minister denounced the violence as ‘cruel, unjust, and senseless.’ On behalf of a country shocked by the uncharacteristic violence, PM Frederiksen spoke to those most affected saying, ‘You must know that the whole of Denmark is with you. We mourn with you, we share your pain.’ I am thankful for the Prime Minister’s words, but they underscore an inconsistency that dominates much of Western thought. The secular and social dogma of the West is materialism. In this philosophy matter is the sole explanatory cause of all things, and so there is little love for the divine or tolerance for the transcendent. But if we are good, consistent materialists, why are we mourning with those who are suffering? What is cruel and unjust about violence if all things are merely matter and devoid of transcendently infused meaning? With respect to PM Frederiksen, this violence was not senseless; on the contrary, it was perfectly sensible within the applied materialist framework that tends to dominate Danish society. Why then have the Danes reacted with so much sorrow and shock? Because even though many of our underlying assumptions tend towards materialism, we are not materialists. The Danish response to this tragedy has shown that when confronted with evil and suffering there remains a deep moral, and consequently metaphysical, impulse within us.
“You must know that the whole of Denmark is with you. We mourn with you, we share your pain.”
In Danish culture there has been a near total rejection of divine and biblical belief. What has replaced it is a strict naturalistic paradigm, the disavowal of the metaphysical for a love of the material. But this revolution of thought allows no room for the mourning of this shooting or declaring it ‘unjust’ because these are moral moves that conflict with the foundational principles of materialistic philosophy. There is nothing to mourn in a violent death if man is only meat. In fact, there may be something to celebrate, since every act that ‘proceeds from power is good’ in the materialist schema. [1] But what was Denmark doing when it gathered in solidarity? Was it celebrating the exercise of an individual’s autonomy and power in a world sterilized of all transcendent meaning? No. It was a ceremony that recognized transcendent truth: evil exists and that lives with value were harmed and lost. We even understand that the killer, as cruel and despicable as his act was, is due dignity. When apprehended, he was taken before a judge, not slaughtered like a rabid dog. He was reprimanded to psychiatric care and treated humanely. Why is his fate different than those he killed? Because there is an assumption in the broader culture that life has value, even if it is a life deeply disordered. But if we are materialists, then our sorrow over the dead and wounded and our mercy towards the merciless is incoherent, because life and death mean nothing, mercy and suffering mean nothing, justice and bloodlust mean nothing; the indifferent universe does not care, and neither should we if we are merely its inconsequential offspring.
The incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God rebukes our materialistic leanings by the declaration that human life is so meaningful that God would even die to save it.
However, we have not responded with the indifference demanded by materialism. We have mourned as though there is metaphysical meaning, as though acts have a moral quality, and the death of the innocent should cause us pain. Shall we then in our daily lives neglect the metaphysical and moral realities that have so powerfully made themselves known through our collective suffering? To do so would be irrational, but sadly this entrenched irrationality has become a standard feature of the West. We ignore Jesus, the God-man, who, like us, wept over darkness and suffering, and by his divine death singularly proved that human life is of unutterable value. In place of this most noble doctrine, we have dehumanized humanity by arguing for a mere material existence; we are animals of a fortuitous origin. Are we then surprised when we are slaughtered like animals? We shouldn’t be. Our confessions will dictate our actions. Our beliefs will determine how we engage our fellow man. If the West wants to hold life as meaningful, it must again look to Jesus as the sole fountain from which human life is to be understood and judged. The incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God rebukes our materialistic leanings by the declaration that human life is so meaningful that God would even die to save it. We recognize elements of this meaning to be true on occasion, the faint flickers of the image of God within, but the allure of materialism is strong. We want to structure our lives by a materialistic framework because of the freedom we think it provides us, but we cling to fragments of the Christian faith in order to maintain the meaning we desperately need in life. Because of this, there remains a collective belief that some things are sacred and transcend individual valuation, like the goodness of human life, the evil of violence, the equality of persons, or the beauty in seeking the welfare of others. By mangling and mashing elements of Christian convictions with naturalistic commitments, Denmark and the West have become mired in a fatal double-mindedness: not fully Christian nor absolutely materialistic.
This mass shooting in the typically peaceful land of Denmark has helped expose the compartmentalized and flawed thought that is currently popular in the West. We believe God is dead, but strangely we are mourning like he is very much alive. If we take seriously what we have said and felt in recent weeks, we must renounce our half-hearted embrace of materialistic philosophy and its underlying principles, since it is incompatible with the charity we feel for those who are suffering and the evil we want to condemn. We are not materialists, at least not in the full sense of what the dogma demands. There remain vital Christian impulses within us, but why continue to hamper these by clinging to a false and harmful belief system like materialism? There is something far greater than the soul crushing naturalistic philosophy that, for the moment, is firmly rooted in our minds. In a world plagued by suffering, we can mourn with meaning, love in truth, think with clarity, and live in hope. Materialism makes these impossible, but in the Lord Jesus they are offered in unending abundance.
By Tyler Conrad
Associate Pastor, Youth and Families
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Hastings, UK: Delphi Classics, 2015) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, chap. Introduction by Mrs. Forster-Nietzsche. How Zarathustra Came Into Being, Kindle.