American Idol's Kelly Clarkson, Germany's Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Worldwide Abuse of Aphorism

"What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger." - You've heard it many times. I would bet it is one of the most popular aphorisms and because of this it has been overused, reused, and abused countless times.

From Tupac Shakur to the lovely Kelly Clarkson whose pop song is currently a number one for the past six weeks and uses the words in its chorus, no where is the aphorism safe.  It is the latter which actually brought me to re-examine this piece of “truth” that makes so many rounds with so little thoughtfulness that those who have heard it believe that exposure is equal to knowledge.

The aphorism itself comes from the 19th century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of cultural nihilism and critic of moral idealism. As for the quote, it is always quoted incompletely, and therefore loses something one would argue that is integral to its decoding. It reads as follows:

“From life’s military school - that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

One finds the first part an almost obscene intrusion because it is so unfamiliar with respect to the more popular last half. What is life’s military school? Could it be a portend of the school of hard knocks? Most likely not.

Tracy B. Strong points out that Twilight of the Idols, from which the quote is extracted, writes Nietzsche, is a “declaration of war.” Perhaps than the military reference ought to be understood within this broader context. But a war against what? Strong suggests Nietzsche declares a war against oneself from becoming too deep. Depth is a problem that continually finds itself in the crosshairs of Nietzsche’s criticisms. In another place, Nietzsche pokes fun at the depth attributed to women. It is a woman, he says, the essence of mystery that is a foolishness culture perpetuates unreflectively, for, after all, mystery itself is inaccessible to reflection. How can one say anything about mystery? And if one cannot access mystery, how can it be? Nietzsche, the existentialist, dismisses this idealism, this shadow of life. Here, instead of Kelly Clarkson, Nietzsche might track better with Talk Talk, the pop 80s band, who sung the song, “Life’s what you make it.”

So, as Tracy B. Strong reminds, “anytime one thinks he knows what Nietzsche means, the first thing to do is to stop and ask oneself what precisely this is that one thinks he means.”  But since it is this very kind of aphorism that begs to be reinvented, redefined, segmented, and even forgotten, Strong suggests that Nietzsche intends the kind of activity and re-reading that becomes democratic, so that the possibility of misinterpretation is written into the interpretation.




Though, one becomes acquainted with a shadow of Nietzsche, but not Nietzsche.  It is a prophecy he himself predicts. “Whoever has thought to have understood me, has made me in his own image.”  But in doing so, this is something of the existentialist mode, the unattainable individual who is not but is always becoming. If this is hard enough to grasp, consider then how misappropriated his aphorisms must appear. Till next time...



For more info: Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration.

Jesus's sin is our redemption: Overcoming Otherness as a Good Friday Reflection

Otherness - the word has an absolute and terrifying abstractness that confronts us even before we have pause to define the terms. The word has grandiose philosophical power. In the German theological tradition, the Andere (Other) is always expressed with the gravest of profundity.

As we enter into Good Friday, I'm thinking about the Otherness of those around me. Racism, bullying, profiling - all are aspects of defining myself against the other person. This Otherness is built into the critique of transcendence that is profoundly crucial to the Christian tradition. Otherness is the distance between a holy, just, and perfect God and a sinful humanity. But Otherness is also built into our verticality - our relationship with others. As Bonhoeffer discusses this, he senses in the story of Adam that in Adam's attempt to become an individual, to undercut God with abstract logic rather than remain in obedience, this desire and reality cuts him off from the life of God. But in becoming an Other - one which is like God, this radically puts him at odds with himself as well, which inevitably means other individuals too are at odds with themselves and with others. Individuality is the curse built into the Creation story. Bonhoeffer does not discuss Trinity as this point, but there is a tempting aspect here as well.

Overcoming Otherness in Christ is not simply being kind to others, sympathizing, or even empathizing with others. Jesus shows us that the only possibility of overcoming Otherness is not my proximity to another individual but overcoming the gulf of transcendence by bringing together that which is perfect and holy in God with that which is imperfect and profane in humanity. Jesus Christ does this in the cross. The cross does not reveal this to us outrightly. It is a life obediently taken up in service to the Other that reveals in the cross (the full express of servitude) that the incarnation reveals this truth. The Incarnation as the joining of humanity and God is the overcoming of this Otherness.


How than do we overcome Otherness as Christians? We must still represent ourselves in this humanity, our proclivity to sin, yet in the salvation of Christ, which is anticipated in God taking up humanity not as something that is to come but something that is. In practicality we struggle with sin because final redemption awaits us. But in those moments where righteousness breaks through, that interpretation is the life of God in me, domesticated in the person of Christ. Sinfulness is not only some failure of the moral commandment, it is separation. Paul can say that Jesus becomes sin because Jesus can also say My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Sin is separation from the life of God. Yet what Jesus has over us is that if Jesus is sin he nevertheless remains obedient. We keep the life of God in tension with our own humanity. It is a tension the Bible tells us that Jesus himself takes up, in God and man, in righteousness and sinfulness. This is why sin has no final power as the moral commandment. And this is what Easter is about. As the old Easter hymn goes:

The strife is ov'r, the battle won, now is the victor's triumph won, oh let the song of praise be sung. Hallelujah!

The General Resurrection Theologies of Paul and Matthew: An Easter Exegetical Reflection on Righteousness Outside of Christ, , Death and Resurrection, Possible Historical Background, and Zombie Apocalypses

So in enters Holy Week! The most important time of celebration and reflection for the Christian world – for nominal believers it marks the promise of chocolate rabbits and the inconvenience of dashing to Church in their Sunday best, to mythicists, Easter is that all-important time to remind the world that Jesus is an amalgam of thematic responses to resurrection, death, and savior-types in other Mediterranean and Near East ancient religions. But to those of us who believe, he remains the resurrection and the life. But in what way he is the resurrection and the life remains is what I want to look at today, and it comes in the form of the doctrine of the general resurrection.

I remember listening to a debate between the late Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig on the question of God’s existence a few years back. During the Q&A session, in which Hitchens and Craig could ask one another questions, Hitchens became obsessed with reductio ad absurdum examples, pointing to the most extraordinary accounts in the Bible in an attempt to show their distance from the modern world. One that he picked out was the incident in Matthew 27 in which many righteous people in Jerusalem are said to rise out of their graves after Jesus dies by crucifixion.

I was actually surprised when I remember Craig’s hesitation and bewilderment at the question. I can imagine for a highly analytical Christian philosopher who is immersed in the big problems of metaphysics and reality, such a silly theological illustration would seem so childlike that it actually had the potential to create pause in him.

What could this event, which prefigures our fascination with zombie apocalypses, possibly mean? One thing I believe most scholars who attempt to salvage its meaning focus on is its link to the general resurrection, that second-century doctrine in sectarian Judaism, which asserts a salvation at the end of all things for those who would rise from the dead en masse.  

Well, for my Easter exegetical reflection, I’ve been thinking about Matthew 27 alongside my conversation partner the Apostle Paul, who has a few things to say about resurrection, and what I’ve discovered is that a unified understanding of Paul and Matthew’s general resurrection doctrine does not exist.

Let’s first consider that Paul’s most important reflections on resurrection occur in 1 Corinthians, an epistle written at least twenty years before the gospel of Matthew. Here Paul uses the allegory of a seed to explain the process of death and resurrection. His famous figurative image is that of Jesus being the “first fruits of our salvation.” This has invariably come to mean among most scholars that while Jesus was not the first to raise from the dead, he is the forerunner of the general resurrection for the kind of glorification that can only occur in the bodies of those who will follow. Thus, in cross-gospel comparisons, his walking through walls to show up in rooms, his vanishings, and his concealing his appearance are all elements of the supernaturalism he’s taken up in his own post-resurrection glorified body.  Therefore, resurrection is not simply resuscitation to one’s old body, but the full participation in a new life through a new body.

By 70 AD, following the Bar Kochba revolt in 64 AD, Jerusalem became a shadow of its former self. Its religious center, the Temple was in ruin, and its civil order was in disarray. For the Jew at the time, the collapse of the Temple was the collapse of his religious world. The Romans clamped down and dug in, and the Pharisaical order moved its operation entirely. Perhaps in this chaos it was easier for a small insignificant sect to suggest a story of walking zombies – perhaps because nobody took notice. But for whatever reason there are some marked contrasts between the later Matthew and the earlier Paul that don’t fit well.

Now my problem:  The creed that Jesus rose from the dead in three days and at the same time was the forerunner of the general resurrection seem to go hand in hand, at least when one attempts to piece together the resurrection narrative. But Matthew creates problems for Paul and vice versa. If Matthew’s account is one of general resurrection, then it seems that the righteous dead actually rise to the general resurrection before Jesus, nullifying Paul’s claim to being the first fruits or forerunner, and the captain of our salvation. Regardless of the interpretative landscape (metaphor, symbolic, literal), this fact remains. After Jesus himself raises from the dead then Matthew reports all the other righteous ones are seen walking about in Jerusalem as well.

The problem of course is that if both Paul’s and Matthew’s account are ones of general resurrection then they don’t agree on who rises first, and by implication one most question the inveterate position that Jesus rises in three days.

Now my solution (or possible resolution):

I think most likely Matthew was trying to approximate something like the general resurrection or at least capture its essence in Jesus’ resurrection but fails to work out any an acute logic in the theological sequencing of the events. This is only a hunch because the majority of scholarship on general resurrection focuses almost exclusively on Paul as a reliable witness to the form.

There is also the issue of audience. Matthew is traditionally considered a gospel written to a Jewish audience. If this is the case, then the fact that Jesus fulfills righteousness in his death for Matthew might not have necessitated his priority over the righteous dead. The point may have been to show that Jesus should also be well-represented among those within a general resurrection that was reserved only for those righteous dead in God.  I might add that this notion of righteousness in Matthew does not come through Christ (contra Paul) but appears to be locked up in the traditional community.

If, as most scholars believe, Matthew’s Jewish community was likely of post-Temple origin, then the historical background might offer some insight as well. With the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD, no doubt the center of the Jewish world had also been destroyed. One finds in the Jewish Talmud, verses equating the Temple to salvation. We know that the Temple and synagogue still played some role in the Synoptics and that by the gospel of John, the exclusion of Christians from the synagogue was complete, which makes sense since it is the latest of the four gospels. So, the promise of the general resurrection was the promise of a continued resurrection life in the community, and that all had not been lost. But given Christ’s bewildering status and rejection by most Jews, there may have been concerns and doubts, even among his followers now that the Temple was gone. It was one thing to practice Judaism in Christ and another thing to practice Christ without Judaism. Now that they no longer had the Temple to grip onto, while the Pharisaical order was busy playing damage control and enlisting the Torah as the new medium between God and humanity, perhaps the link Matthew creates through Jesus to the righteous dead is an intentional move to alleviate the concerns of his own community, given the absence of the Temple.

On the other hand, Christ without Judaism likely was not the problem in Grecian Corinth that it was in Jerusalem. Paul could speak to the Jewish mystery prophet as the first fruits of a general resurrection that was as uncontestable as it was foreign and filled with intrigue. Scholars on Near East religions know that the attractiveness of Christianity was in large part due to the collapse of the Olympian gods, which resulted in the Roman world romancing foreign religions. Of course, this did not represent all peoples. For example, Paul’s greatest challenge in 1 Corinthians 15 section on death and resurrection is not convincing his audience of Jesus’ status, but of the physical preservation of the body with the soul.  And scholars are well aware that this was a Greek concern.

Now of course, one might attempt to save Matthew and argue that it took Jesus’ dying for these other ones to raise, and for that reason Jesus is the first fruits. But this is only possible if we somehow combine death and resurrection into one event, a popular tactic among Germany systematic theologians of the past century like Rudolf Bultmann, but hardly satisfying here.  To this, I say with Barthian resolve: Nein! Death is not resurrection unless something occurs in between. Paul’s agricultural imagery confirms this. And at least for Matthew, the “something” that is needed occurs first in the righteous dead in Jerusalem. Jesus has not entirely replaced the traditional forbearers like Moses or Abraham, he is a part of that elite order.

But if he is of the same station as Moses or Abraham, what do we make of his godhead? Another topic, and perhaps another time.

In closing, I think what we have here are two theologies of the general resurrection in the Bible that do not fit. This shouldn’t be surprising, especially since the doctrine of general resurrection itself first crops up in those years and was most likely still being worked out.  

Palm Sunday Reflection

Here's my Palm Sunday reflection:

Palm Sunday is often taught as the day of Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem coupled with the soon-to-be-shattered expectations of his earthly rule -- for the people welcomed Jesus as a King but would not understand his "spiritual" kingship. What often is not taught in modern sermons fixated on personal salvation-heavy preaching of the other-worldly Jesus that completely lose touch with the historic Jesus is that in antiquity the entry of a king is understood as one who comes to conquer a city. The "good news" (evangelion) was that this foreign king was now in charge. Depending upon your feelings about your new boss, this was a mixed blessing. But in keeping with the historical-symbolic meaning of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, his entry cannot be about personal salvation that was to come at Easter...at least not in that week prior...but was about the material liberation of the oppressed. 

Flavius Josephus reports that such messianic gestures were rife in the 2nd Temple Judaism of Jesus' day and other messiahs did similar things. One messianic movement, for example, was crushed, when the would-be messiah and his followers walked around the walls of Jerusalem in anticipation that God would perform a miracle and cause those walls to fall (an intentional recreation of Joshua's story). Makes one wonder if the gospel writer who relates this to Zechariah was the creator of the link or if Jesus himself really saw himself at that point as a messianic figure in creating his center of action with a view to his own prophetic role carried from the past. What is rather interesting is that those who don't consider themselves oppressed were likely those who will want to kill him (I don't think it was only those who had their dreams of liberation shattered that turn on him as we're led to believe in popular preaching), the same which felt they were experiencing the "good news" of their new ruler. 

Any escapism into symbolism and gesture alone only ignores the fact that Jesus probably did see himself embodying this history. If he did, then it is likely that the proclamation of salvation was not about some confined spiritual liberation only decoded in symbol, but truly about social justice. And in the long line and tradition of conquering kings, along with the inconvenience of kenosis, it was likely to be rejected by many of those who were called to "benefit" from it.

Having said all that, I longingly hope one day to get past the moralizing message, the abstract universal principle of Christian living sermons we are subject to every time this year, that often come at the expense of a rich, historical-symbolic narrative. 

Getting to Know Me - My First Post

I've attempted blogs in the past, but for lack of interest or my own laziness, I've let them disintegrate into the oblivion of the Internet. Yet I've grown tired of the occasional compacted thought on Facebook, which I do visit regularly, so I figured I would open up the throttle and create a new media of reflection, a place of engagement, and I welcome anyone who stumbles on this pebble on the beach to provide feedback.

I'm a writer by trade. I've worked in everything from entertainment journalism to newspapers. I've written music reviews to political commentary. My real passion however remains in academia. I'm finishing my graduate education at the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD. The University and Seminary is the oldest Roman Catholic seminary in the nation. And I just found out that my commencement speaker in May will be N.T. Wright. Not bad!

My graduate thesis work is on Dietrich Bonhoeffer with special attention to his methodological approach to ethics. It's hard to study such a popular figure and not be influenced by him on a personal level. My opinion of Bonhoeffer however is one that foments in the 1920s-1930s Germany of his day, and so treatments of Bonhoeffer as some kind of precursor to American evangelism are deeply offensive.

Strangely, I attend a conservative Baptist Church, although my theological outlook is a mixed bag of progressive, classic liberalism, and evangelical (both American and Continental). I grew up in Roman Catholicism, but had one of those extreme come-to-Jesus experiences in my early 20s through the street evangelism of a charismatic preacher. I left that man's church in rebellion after almost 2 years, and soon left the faith for about 10 years. Since then I've been following a very crooked path to Jesus, which has taken me to the extreme rejection - near atheism/agnosticism, and then back through a Disciples/Church of Christ church. I even spent a few Sundays in a Lutheran church on my way back to Jesus. My own family hasn't fared much better, moving from traditional Roman Catholicism to Charismatic Pentacostalism and then back to a Roman Catholic Church whose priest was influenced by Rick Warren of all people and now is an example of the emerging Roman Catholic movement.

If there is anything I could add, I'm dogmatically opposed to dogma, but I guess because most non-classical Protestant-based churches do not teach or promote dogmatics in their churches (mine included), the high-energy, no dead-space-style of worship and typical simple biblical worldview is mildly survivable.

I'm hoping to pursue PhD studies after taking at least a year off to recover financially. I would like to teach, and have taught both high school and as an adjunct professor of English as a special favor for a former professor at Towson University. I started a graduate degree in philosophy at American University, but the drive (both automotive and motivational) proved difficult at the time.

I've done some serious writing too. If you nose around, I have a review in the Anglican Theological Review, a reflection in Sojourners, and even a poem through InterVarsity's Student Leadership Journal. I've also done a ton of poetry, but nothing in the last handful of years.

As the title indicates, I'm mostly going to focus on theology. So if that's your thing or even if you despise the subject, your occasional peak into my thought process will provide the necessary corrective, conversation partner, or just the helpful sanity check when I dread I'm doomed to talk to myself on this blog for sometime for lack of followers!

Until next time!

Trey Palmisano