A few folks have posted this excerpt from Nate Wilson’s Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, and I do the same since it is right on the money:
“Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ in 1888. Along with many other things, he had this to say about pity: ‘Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.’
One year later Nietzsche entered into madness. True or false, the story is that he was overcome by the sight of a horse being whipped. Unhinged by pity. He wouldn’t die until 1900. For a decade he was kept alive and maintained through his insanity, strokes, and incapacitating illness. At the age of fifty-five, partially paralyzed, unable to speak or walk, he discovered what life waited for him beyond the grave. Nietzsche lashed out at his Maker with his tongue, the only notable muscle he had—his greatest gift. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
There was little that Nietzsche loathed more than the heritage of his Lutheran father. I have never been irritated by Nietzsche, never annoyed. At his most blasphemous, at his most riotously hateful and pompous, I have only ever been able to laugh.
But even then, there is something bittersweet about the laughter. I know his story. I know how his bluff was called, how he was broken. Again from The Anti-Christ: ‘The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.’ Spake the paralytic. The man fed with a spoon by those who loved him.
‘What is more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity….’ And yet, because I see the world through my eyes and not his, I have sympathy for Nietzsche himself. Bodies and minds are not all that can be botched in a man. Souls can be hollow, twisted, thrashing, more bitter than piss.”
“Dogmatics lies at the periphery of modern Anglo-American Protestant divinity, and I am acutely aware both that what many of my contemporaries regard as self-evident I find to be puzzling or unpersuasive and that matters which I regard as self-evident make many of my contemporaries feel bewildered. I console myself with the fact that I can find good company in some of my forbears. In 1935, Günther Dehn, who two years previously had been ejected from his chair in Practical Theology in Halle, gave a rather startling set of Dale lectures in Oxford under the title Man and Revelation. His hearers were certainly startled: in his preface to the published version, Dehn remembers the gentle head-shaking of the audience, and goes on to say:
I have endeavored to deal with certain questions of Christian thought and life, not as a free scholar but as a theologian bound to the Church. This must seem strange to those who are told that theology is to be ranked among the branches of general knowledge, and that its problems can be treated in the same manner as those in other branches of spiritual knowledge, i.e. in accordance with the cultural consciousness of the age. The theologian most assuredly participates in the cultural consciousness of his time, but for his work this has none but formal significance. Theology is not promoted by culture but by the belief in God’s revelation as an event beyond all human history, to which Scripture bears witness and which finds confirmation in the Confessions of our Church. Only a theology that clings inexorably to these most essential presuppositions can help build up a Church that really stands unshaken amidst all the attacks of the spirit of the age. And such a Church alone will be the salt of the earth and the light of the world; any other Church will perish along with the world.”
[John Webster, quoting Günther Dehn, in Holy Scripture, 2]
