Perhaps the most famous saying attributed to Nietzsche is, “God is Dead.” Sure, the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” probably comes in a close second, but most people don’t realize that comes from Nietzsche, and not Kelly Clarkson! In any case, the declaration, “God is dead” has caused many Christians to recoil in horror from Nietzsche. But when seen within the context that Nietzsche is speaking about, I think Christians can appreciate, at least to a certain degree, what Nietzsche is saying.
The Enlightenment Background to “God is Dead”
The cultural context in which Nietzsche declared, “God is dead” was the culture of 19th Century Europe: a direct result of the flood of Enlightenment ideas that came about just a half-century earlier with the likes of Rousseau, Voltaire, and the events of the French Revolution. The Enlightenment was essentially a movement that condemned religion as irrational superstition, the Catholic Church as oppressive, and that purposefully and successfully mischaracterized the previous few centuries of European innovation and achievement as “medieval.” It was a movement that declared the ever-progressing advancement of human society which now had achieved such a high level of scientific and rational success, that it was time to cast off the shackles of superstition, religion, and of course, Christianity.
Therefore, anything good that came out in Europe precisely because of the Christian worldview—like universities, hospitals, charitable organizations, advances in orchestration and choral music, the list can go on—had to be glossed over; and anything seemingly bad that happened—be it the Crusades or the Inquisition—had to be mischaracterized and sensationalized as insane religious zealotry, and the entire time period was slandered as backwards and medieval.
And so, Enlightenment thinkers and the 19th Century philosophers that were children of the Enlightenment declared that it was time to do away with superstitious organized religion, and progress ever-forward with science and reason. But they couldn’t quite completely do away with the idea of God. Hence, we had Deism: a sort of head-nod to the idea of a creator God, but that nevertheless pushed him completely out of the picture regarding human history and involvement. Or we had the “god” of George Hegel, who equated with sort of a “grand idea” that was all of human existence, and that human existence was just the evolution of that idea until it achieved “total being.”
So the feeling in 19th Century Europe was, “Let’s get rid of religion, but let’s not quite get rid of the notion of ‘God.’ We’ll say we have ‘God-given rights,’ like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that make up what morality is, but we won’t have to bother with that ‘God’ actually revealing himself, or being actually involved in history!” (Remember, the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence? Those were Enlightenment times and Enlightenment ideals dressed up in “God language”).
Given that climate, given those nice, fuzzy, warm “God-feelings” coming from the hearth with the Enlightenment cottage, Nietzsche came along and essentially pissed in that fireplace. Yes, it’s a vulgar image, but one that is quite fitting. The famous “God is dead” quote comes from his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the one who declares that God is dead is a madman. He says, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him! How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves?”
That is something very important to realize, for the “death of God” is not a condemnation of Christianity (although Nietzsche certain does do that elsewhere), but a condemnation of the European Enlightenment.
Nietzsche saw the Enlightenment narrative of the “inevitable progress of humanity by means of science and reason” as just another example of the will to truth that substituted the reliance on a God as the source of truth with the reliance on science and autonomous human reason as the source of all truth. He saw the Enlightenment worldview as simply “still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests…We godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame [of] Christian faith” [The Gay Science 344]. It was just another crutch—therefore, when the Enlightenment philosophers “purport to know that God does not exist, they are not speaking from a more advanced perspective than that of the madman who searches for God in vain. On the contrary, because Nietzsche maintains that to settle on the truth is to be deluded, we may assume that the madman is in fact closer to the truth because he has yet to find its source (An Introduction to Nietzsche, Huskinson 39).
Nietzsche and Nihilism…and Christianity
Simply put, for Nietzsche, life is meaningless and chaotic—any attempt to claim absolute truth, be it coming from God or from science and reason, is a futile and delusional exercise in the will to truth. This idea from Nietzsche brings us to another concept closely associated with him: nihilism. “Life is meaningless and chaotic, just accept it,” Nietzsche declares. If that statement seems to you to be pessimistic and depressing, Nietzsche says it doesn’t have to be. Given the nihilism of life, one can face it pessimistically, and just curl up and die, or optimistically. To that end, Nietzsche essentially says, “Exercise the will to power, play a part in the endless flux of life, be creative and live your life, although it will inevitably end.” Or as Huskinson says, “After the death of God we can approach life either passively, in despair or in denial (unaware of the need for radical change), or actively, as dynamic creators continually refashioning our lives” (53).
Ironically, there is an aspect in Nietzsche’s outlook and goals that, despite his condemnation of Christianity, is actually thoroughly Christian. Christianity teaches that life is chaotic (just look at Genesis 1:1-2); Christianity teaches that human beings are slaves to the elemental things of the world; and Christianity challenges us to become united to Christ in order to mature and grow into the fullness of humanity that reigns with Christ over his creation.
To re-work Huckinson’s previous quote, we should realize that the Christian challenge is for us to be dynamic co-creators with Christ who continually reign and cultivate the New Creation that Christ as brought about. Christianity teaches that those who submit to the lordship of Christ will be empowered by the Holy Spirit, and will be able to grow into maturity in Christ—we will be able to walk on the waters of chaos, and “kick the darkness ‘till it bleeds daylight” (U2, God, Part 2). And what makes that possible? The love of Christ that has been poured out into our hearts.
The reason why the Christian message ultimately works, and why Nietzsche was ultimately wrong, is that what Nietzsche separates as the will to power and the will to truth only works as a unity within a resurrected human heart. The truth of God is not something “out there” that is imposed on us from the outside–the very notion that God is “out there” (a notion that Nietzsche ultimately takes for granted) is an unbiblical and Enlightenment/Deistic notion. The truth of God is among us, it is here. We do not need to go seeking it “out there,” for God has written it on our hearts. And we discover that truth as we love God and love our neighbor as ourselves, when we give of ourselves to help others. And when we do that, we also discover that it is the Holy Spirit within us who is empowering us to do just that.
As much as Nietzsche railed against the Enlightenment certainty/delusion of absolute truth, he still nevertheless was a slave to its teaching of the autonomous human being as the measure of all things. “Make your own measure and create your own life according to your own rules,” Nietzsche basically said. But taken to its ultimate conclusion, that gets you where it got Nietzsche–loneliness and insanity. And why? Because one can’t do it alone–humanity is not just a collection of individuals trying to exercise their own will to powers. Humanity is a unity, where the individuals only have purpose, meaning, and creativity when they live in a truthful, empowered, and loving relationship with each other and the Living God who created them.
This key difference will lead us into discussing another aspect of Nietzsche’s: that of the Ubermensch—the superman.
