Faith After Belief, Meaning After God
Modern Christianity does not fail because it is false. It fails because it continues to explain where it must now undergo. Its deepest inadequacy is neither moral weakness nor institutional decay, but a fundamental category error: Christianity has come to treat itself as a system of answers in a historical moment that demands symbolic truth capable of bearing nihilism. In doing so, it mirrors—often unconsciously—the same medicalized, managerial, and therapeutic logics that have already hollowed out modern meaning.
Nietzsche diagnosed this failure more than a century ago when he claimed that Christianity had defeated itself morally. What survived the “death of God” was not faith, but moralized habit—guilt, obligation, sentiment—cut loose from transcendence. Modern Christianity largely accepts this condition and attempts to repair it through explanation, reassurance, and relevance. Yet explanation cannot restore what explanation itself helped dissolve. The crisis is not intellectual. It is existential.
Christianity’s original power lay not in explanation but in initiation. It was never primarily a worldview—a coherent set of propositions about reality to be defended, communicated, and chosen. It was a way of life structured by ritual, sacrifice, suffering, and transformation. It did not answer the question “Why is there suffering?” It answered the far more dangerous question: How shall suffering be borne?
The shift from way to worldview is fatal. When Christianity becomes explanatory, it relocates itself to the level of belief just as belief itself is losing its psychic authority. Jung saw this clearly when he observed in Civilization in Transition that “the churches stand empty because the modern man has lost the sense of the numinous.” The problem is not disbelief but irrelevance at the level of the soul. Modern apologetics attempts to persuade consciousness that belief is reasonable, but nihilism is not an argument to be refuted—it is a condition to be endured. The soul no longer experiences God as necessary. When Christianity tries to justify itself as true, it has already conceded defeat.
This failure becomes even more visible in Christianity’s transformation into moral therapy. Much of contemporary Christian life now functions as encouragement, self-improvement, emotional regulation, and community belonging. None of this is inherently wrong, but all of it is insufficient. The Cross becomes a lesson, resurrection becomes optimism, and sin becomes bad behavior. Christianity thus competes directly with psychology, wellness culture, and medicine—and predictably loses.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer named this reduction with brutal clarity when he warned against “cheap grace”: “forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline, communion without confession.” Cheap grace is not simply moral laxity; it is meaning without cost. It promises relief without transformation. Christianity becomes indistinguishable from therapeutic reassurance or recovery slogans precisely because it no longer wounds. Yet the Cross does not make suffering easier—it makes it conscious. The moment Christianity aims to help people feel better rather than to help them tell the truth about existence, explanation replaces transformation.
At this point the problem deepens. According to Wolfgang Giegerich, Christianity’s failure is not that it lost power, but that it refused to undergo its own negation consciously. Modern Christianity attempts to survive intact within a psychic structure that no longer supports mythic belief. In The Soul Always Thinks, Giegerich insists that the death of God is not a mistake to be corrected but “a historical achievement of consciousness.” Secularization is not an enemy to be defeated; it is a destiny to be suffered.
Yet Christianity treats this destiny defensively. It attempts to retrieve belief, restore certainty, and revive meaning rather than learning how to live after belief. The result is a loud, anxious, moralistic faith clinging to certainty because it secretly knows certainty is gone. Christian explanation becomes inadequate precisely because it refuses to say the one thing now required: God must be suffered inwardly, not believed outwardly.
Nowhere is this evasion clearer than in Christianity’s treatment of the Cross. The Cross is the point at which Christianity should have met nihilism without remainder. Instead, it is often transformed into reassurance: proof that suffering has purpose, that everything will be okay, that God is in control. But the Cross is not reassurance. It is abandonment. Jesus’ cry—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—is not answered in the text. Christianity’s truth is not that God explains suffering, but that God enters meaninglessness without explanation.
Jung grasped this with precision when he wrote that “the Christian symbol does not solve the problem of suffering; it deepens it.” Modern Christianity does the opposite. It resolves what must instead be borne. By explaining the Cross rather than inhabiting it, Christianity deprives itself of its only remaining power: the capacity to accompany humanity into meaninglessness without denial.
This loss becomes final when Christianity attempts to compete with science, psychology, and medicine on their own terms. It offers alternative explanations, alternative ethics, alternative therapies. But Christianity is not an alternative explanation of reality. It is a contradiction of the demand that reality be explainable at all. T. S. Eliot understood this when he warned in Christianity and Culture that “if Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.” This is not triumphalism but diagnosis. Once Christianity becomes one option among many, it loses its authority to shape suffering, time, sacrifice, and death.
Christian explanation fails because Christianity is not meant to explain the world. It is meant to judge the world’s compulsive need for explanation.
What is required now is not better theology, louder belief, or increased relevance, but witness: the willingness to live truthfully without guarantees. Nihilism is not refuted by belief. Addiction is not cured by reassurance. Suffering is not redeemed by explanation.
Nietzsche lived the collapse.
Jung named its psychic cost.
Giegerich insisted it be endured consciously.
Christianity, at its best, does not resolve the darkness. It walks into it without explanation. If Christianity has a future, it will not be as an answer to nihilism, but as the courage to remain human after meaning collapses.
Brenton L. Delp
Leave a Reply