Seinfeld in the Pulpit

I would imagine the average American is more familiar with the 90's sitcom "Seinfeld" than with the ideas behind nihilism. But the two are closely tied.

"Seinfeld" was popularly known as "the show about nothing." Nihilism, at its core, is the belief that nothing in life matters. It is the paradoxical idea that everything is meaningless. I say, "paradoxical" because even the word has a meaning. Nihilists ascribe meaning to words in an attempt to prove that everything is without meaning.

Nihilism says, "everything is meaningless."

But Nihilism has a way of forcing its pessimism into the hearts of disillusioned and frsutrated men and women. It is a way to flatten everything and say that everything matters (or does not matter) equally.

Nihilism sets births, funerals, careers, puppies, babies, and worms at the same level. While there may be differences of functions and purposes, there is not difference in importance - all things matter or do not matter equally to the nihilist.

In the television show, Seinfeld, the stars would often be equally upset about being unable to buy soup as they were about the loss of a family member. Nihilism flattens everything and sets it all at a zero. "Your husband died?" the nihilist scoffs. "That's nothing. I missed the train this morning."

Passionless Creatures?

The problem with a person becoming a nihilist is that they are lying about their ontology. We were not made as emotionless beings. We are meant to feel, to hurt, to love, to weep.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-3, To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

This is why nihilism cannot stand. The attempt to flatten everything, to set it all at a zero, goes against the grain of who we are. We may laugh for an hour or so each week at the nihilistic fools on television, but anyone who actually lives that way will ruin their own lives and the lives of those around them.

Nihilism, then, is not pragmatic. It is not something that just "works." It's a denial of "how" things work. We should perhaps say it is an imbalance in the passions. C.S. Lewis gave a wonderful illustration to show that lust is really an imbalance of the sexual appetite.

The things that excite us can help us to know if our passions are properly ordered or disordered.

“You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act - that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?” ~ C.S. Lewis

Just as lust is a symptom of people with disordered affections, nihilism is a symptom of a people with disordered passions. A man who has rightly ordered passions will act one way when his shoe is missing, but a very different way if his child is missing. You cannot flatten all things and live happily in this life.

But what happens when passions get disordered for the Christian? What happens when we forget that there is a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to speak and a time to listen?

Nihilists in the Pew

One of the subtle ways this cultural flattening of all things has affected believers is that, in an attempt to react to this foible of our countrymen, we take a verse like Philippians 4:4 to say we should be always be jolly and bouyant. The verse reads like this:

Philippians 4:4, Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.

Some people with a more melancholic temperament can often feel bullied by those who are more generally bubbly. In fact, I have known more than a few people who fake a kind of cheery, happy-go-lucky attitude because they have come to believe it is spiritual.

It's almost as if denying themselves the right to ever feel low is a spiritual discipline. Perhaps they feel, "If I'm not blithe and bubbly, it means I am in sin and far from God." I know this because I have felt that same temptation throughout my life. As a younger man, I often gave into it due to a pharisaical worry about what the other lightsome folks around me might think.

I'm so thankful for grace and for those who gave me room to grow. Our personalities are gifts from God and we are not meant to deny our actual feelings. Denying our feelings is as much a disordered passion as giving in to them.

So, if we recognize nihilism as a flattening of the importance of all events (cranking everything to a zero), we ought to recognize that cranking everything to an 11 is equally flattening.

When your monitor settings are either all the way up or all the way down, your screen is equally useless.

Turn every setting on your monitor to zero and the screen goes black. Run them all up to 100 and the screen goes white. But both screens are blank. The guy who does not react to anything may appear to be more of a nihilist than the person who overreacts to everything. But they both flatten the meanings of everything.

In essence, the nihilist and the anti-nihilist do the same thing. They make everything equally meaningful. The nihilist says everything is meaningless. The anti-nihilist says everything is equally important.

Perhaps you've met Mrs. Spiritual. She says, "I woke up at 5:30 this morning so I opened my Bible to Isaiah 5:30 and it said God would roar against his enemies and then my husband snored and it was like a roar and I prayed, 'Oh God! Is this man your punishment against me?!?!'"

I'm being a little facetious, but if I use actual examples, it might hurt some feelings. I suspect that this kind of thing may plague charismatic congregations more than (say) a congregation like ours at Emmanuel. But I still see enough of this sort of thing playing out in our friends and families.

I really do think it's a reaction to the pessimism of our day that says nothing really matters. And, while I believe everything matters, we have to recognize it does not all matter equally. I would rather break my toe than my back and it's better to have an argument than a divorce.

Jerry Seinfeld in the Pulpit

This is where we need faithful men of God who preach Christ crucified, risen, and returning. The people of God need some eternal perspective in order to be delivered from this snare of our culture.

If you have a faithful pastor or elder who brings God's word to you each week, be glad! If you your faithful bishop preaches the gospel every Sunday and teaches you how to apply it to your life, rejoice!

It is funny to me how easy it is for any person to be sidetracked from the gospel. We must each preach it to ourselves and have others in our lives who bring this singular truth before us constantly: Christ died and rose again so that he might be Lord of the living and dead. Christ the Savior, Christ the Judge - that is the point of the gospel.

When that is lost, all we have to replace it with is celebrity, exuberance, reactions, energy, etc... Pastors are tempted to bring high energy sermons, clever illustrations, high quality music, or personal celebrity in order to "sell" people on the gospel.

But this can never cure the problem of nihilism. Cranking everything up to its highest settings for an hour on each Sunday could NEVER properly order our disordered passions.

God's people need to learn to value what God values. His values schedule needs to be mapped onto us through the faithful communication of his revelation of himself (I.e., the Bible).

When I see a woman "pastor" like, Jenny Weaver, losing her fake eyelashes in a church service and the congregation absolutely losing their ever-lovin' minds over it, it tells me something (link provided: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIo3-BjPGGD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==). It tells me she is presiding over a group of people who claim to be Christians, but who have no control over their passions.

Sheep need shepherds who will lead them into truth and away from the danger of disordered passions.

There is something wrong with a group of people who have lost all sense of what is important. But it is tragic when there is no shepherd over that flock. It's also tragic when the one who claims to be their shepherd leads them right off the cliff of disordered passions.

Again, this is where the gospel of Jesus Christ is so important. It reminds us of what is important and what we should get excited about. Jesus said,

Luke 10:20, Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.

It is the gospel that helps us to keep things in balance, to order our passions, and to refrain from the nihilism that flattens everything down or the anti-nihilism that flattens everything up! May God give us grace to keep the plain things the main things and the main things the plain things. And may he, by his gospel, raise us up to spiritual maturity.

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Matthias Knopp