“God is Dead” Nietzche and Christianity
March 21, 2023
Recently at Boulder, I have seen Christian representatives on busy campus intersections. They will often ask if I have a moment to discuss religion, and will ask questions along the lines of “if you died today, do you believe you would go to heaven?” I answer the best I can, saying I am not religious, and then they inevitably extend an invitation to church, which I politely decline. To be honest, they are fighting quite the uphill battle on campus as young and progressive as Boulder. These missionaries remind me of one of philosophy's most famous and most cited quotes- “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a late 1800s philosopher most well known for his critique and suspicion of traditional values. His philosophy, which mostly concerns itself with morality and religion, is often seen as a development of existentialism. Nietzche was extremely critical of Christianity and its nonsecular claim to moral truths. Many philosophers, dating all the way back to Plato's “Erythropro”, have criticized religion's role in ethical theory, but rather than the typically somber and respectful appeal to develop a secular understanding of morality, Nietzche famously and aggressively states “God is dead.”
The idea behind this statement is not so much a defense of atheism as it is a criticism of Christian ideology. Nietzche does not mean to say that there was a God and He is now dead, but rather that "the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable" (Nietzche). Throughout history, Christianity united society as a framework for grounding ethical commitments. God was the basis for the collective, immutable, and fundamentally good life. As modern philosophy’s secular influence became increasingly ubiquitous, the foundation of “truth” that Christianity provided suddenly seemed unstable. This is Nietzche’s meaning is saying that God is dead and that we indeed killed him. Nietzche sees God not as an eternal being, but as a functional aspect of human culture like currency or government. “God” is a fiction fully reliant on faith, and just as a currency fails if people do not believe in its worth, God dies when there is no reason to have faith in Him.
It should be noted that while Nietzche is extremely critical of Christianity as a whole, he does deeply respect Jesus. Jesus is very close to what Nietzche calls an ubermensch, or a person able to overcome nihilism and develop their own new values. He says, in a beautiful quote, “Jesus’ death is to be understood as a telling confirmation, as a consummation of his life and message. In his death, as in his life, there was no resistance, no opposition, no anger, no negative trait in word and deed; only unalloyed love.” Nietzche takes issue, however, with Jesus’s martyrdom, and his later ties to an eternal existence away from earth. In Nietzche’s view, the ubermensch discards herd morality in favor of his or her own values which are rooted only in life on this earth. Naturally, Nietzche hated Christianity, as the promise of God and an afterlife serves to oppose the beauty he saw in Jesus’s life. Nietzche even more strongly criticized Christianity’s manipulation of Jesus’s word into an institution used to justify religious and cultural superiority. Funnily enough, although an atheist himself, Nietzsche would have equally loathed the priests of modern atheism and their sense of intellectual superiority. Nietzche would encourage you to be introspective, and to focus on the development and commitment to your own values, as long as they are informed, aware, and tie you to life, rather than a fictional promise.