About this episode
This is episode 6 - Towards a Functionalist Understanding of Religion pt. 3Part 1 - ThesisWhich Christianity?Before we get started, I need to explain the format of this talk, in which I will outline a sketch of what a Christo-Nietzschean synthesis might look like. Christian theology is a vast body of thought and action spanning two thousand years and over a billion people, though we could argue about the quality of many of those people in the current year. Nietszche was only one man, but his oeuvre is dense and multilayered and multifaceted, and I think you could spend your whole life studying it and still find something new.So the most I can do is give you an outline of how and why these two things ought to come together, in the hope that it inspires others to explore the territory which I can at this time only sketch.I am going to start by explaining a very concrete mechanism in our modern world which serves to sever people from Christianity, and it may not seem immediately clear what this has to do with the promise I am makingIn the following segments I am going to talk about some relatively abstract philosophical considerations which might seem a bit disconnected from the first segment, but they inform our pursuit of the goal of synthesis In the final segment I will explain how these things come together and how we can come to view Nietzsche as a theologian, as the most important theological actor since Martin Luther at least,(And I can already hear the Catholics rankling at that and they are just going to have to get over it. People who view ideologies as a series of sports teams to cheer at or jeer at are not seeking truth. Go treat Christianity like football somewhere else) So I am going to ask for your patience.When we talk about integrating a particular idea into Christianity, we have to start with this question: which Christianity? There are so many Christianities, and often the only thing they have in common is the name of Christ, If we operate inside of a functionalist frame, then we recognize that the name a group gives to itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as the pattern of their thought processes, their mode of coexistence, the form of their integration with being and the dynamics of their actions.That is, two groups could call themselves Christian and even affirm the same creed, but be different entirely in their outlook toward life, in the way they socially litigate their day to day actions, in their theory of what is moral and so on.One of the reasons Christianity is able to spread so widely is that it’s able to accommodate wildly different peoples with incommensurate ways of living and thinking under the same banner, precisely by eliding all of these functional differences and defining itself under this narrow criteria.Christians want to believe—and in fact they have to believe—that if you sincerely pray to J
