“I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth… The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul… the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself…”[1]
These fiery words represent Friedrich Nietzsche’s final and most scathing attack on Christianity, penned in 1888, the last year of his lucid life. They emerged from his profound scepticism, one of the cornerstones of his philosophy: “The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism.”[2]
But who was Nietzsche, and how did he arrive at such a dramatic conclusion?
Born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, Prussia, Friedrich Nietzsche is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of modernity and postmodernity. Raised in a deeply religious family—his father a Lutheran pastor and his grandparents staunch defenders of Protestantism—Nietzsche’s formative years were marked by rigorous discipline, shaping the thinker he would become.
He attended Schulpforta, one of Germany’s premier Protestant schools, and began studying theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn in 1864. The following year, he transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he was mentored by Wilhelm Ritschl, one of his favourite professors.
After a brief stint in military service in 1867, cut short by an accident, Nietzsche resumed his studies at Leipzig, where he was introduced to philosophers like Schopenhauer. In 1869, with Ritschl’s support, Nietzsche earned his doctorate and was appointed professor of classical philosophy at the University of Basel.
A year later, Nietzsche volunteered to serve in the medical corps during the Franco-Prussian War but was struck by dysentery and diphtheria. The aftermath of this misfortune haunted him for nearly a decade, ultimately leading to his resignation in 1879. During his time in Basel, he published some of his earliest works, including The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Human, All Too Human (1878).
The following decade, from 1879 to 1889, marked a period of worsening health and frequent relocations to Switzerland, France, and Italy. Despite these challenges, Nietzsche continued to write prolifically. This era saw the publication of several seminal works: The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), and in his final lucid year, 1888, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo.
In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a complete mental breakdown on a street in Turin. A Christian friend, Franz Overbeck, travelled to Turin and brought him back to Basel. Nietzsche spent the last eleven years of his life in Basel, Naumburg, and Weimar, where he passed away on August 25, 1900, in Weimar, Thuringia.
Nietzsche, Christianity, and Jesus
Nietzsche devoted his life to identifying the ideas he believed had negatively shaped Western culture, and at the top of his list stood Christianity. He “discovered” in history the legacy of a strong and virile European ascendancy—embodied by the Greeks, Romans, and barbarian tribes—led by free-spirited and superior individuals. Yet, he argued, these peoples were weakened and ultimately “destroyed” by a shared historical development: Christianity. “Christianity,” he said, “has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man… Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous.”[3]
To Nietzsche, Christianity was a decadent movement, devoid of the will to power, with its essence rooted in pity born of weakness. He asserted that gods are national expressions, reflecting the state of the nation itself. A powerful nation, he argued, creates a god who is aggressive and awe-inspiring, while a nation that has lost its will to power and fallen under subjugation transforms its god into a kind, cosmopolitan figure who loves all people.[4]
In Nietzsche’s view, the Jews were a proud, “chosen” nation, fighting for survival even under the rule of the priestly caste. By contrast, Christians—descendants of the Jews—had created the most decadent god in history: one that denied the will to live in the real world[5] and prevented the creation of any noble or powerful deity for the last 2,000 years. Instead of inspiring people to fight, assert themselves, and embrace their bodies and nature, Christianity, he argued, teaches retreat from reality and promotes the triad of “faith, hope, and love”—which Nietzsche saw as self-deception, illusion, and delusion.[6]
How does Nietzsche view Jesus? Does Jesus share the same rejection Nietzsche levels at Christianity? Nietzsche posits that Christianity began with Jesus of Nazareth as “a rebellion… against caste, privilege, order, and formula.” He describes Jesus as “that holy anarchist who called out to the lowly, the outcasts, and the ‘sinners’… to rise in opposition to the established order—using language…that even today would warrant exile to Siberia. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof lies in the inscription above it. He died for his own guilt. There is no evidence—despite how often it is claimed—that he died for the guilt of others.”[7]
Nietzsche was not concerned with the historical existence of Jesus or resolving contradictions in the Gospel narratives. Instead, he developed a “psychological type of the Saviour,” which he believed the Gospels preserved “just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends.” Nietzsche rejects psychological portrayals of Jesus as a genius or hero, such as those offered by Renan. To him, Jesus was not a hero but a man unable to fight, who transformed this weakness into a moral ideal. Jesus called others to “resist not evil!”[8]
Rather than offering hope for a future or eternal life, Nietzsche’s Christ proclaims that the Kingdom of God “is within you,” inviting humanity to retreat from reality into an inner, unreal world.[9] For Nietzsche’s Christ, “the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a state of the heart—not something to come ‘beyond the world’ or ‘after death’.” As “an experience of the heart,” the Kingdom of God is “everywhere” and “nowhere.”[10] This is why Jesus proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was not a future promise but had already arrived, that it was in the heart, that everyone is a child of God, that enmity and division had ended, and that a new way of life within the Kingdom of God was truly possible.[11] Alongside non-resistance, this universal pacifism formed the essence of Jesus’s good news, Nietzsche believed. It was, in Nietzsche’s view, a naïve approach to life, yet Jesus lived it with unwavering consistency, even to the point of death. In doing so, Jesus created a new god of love and universal tolerance.[12]
However, according to Nietzsche, while it may be possible to live as a Christian, no one has ever truly lived like Jesus. He asserts that Jesus was the only true Christian to have ever existed: “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The ‘Gospels’ died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the ‘Gospels’ was the very reverse of what he had lived.”[13] Other Christians, Nietzsche argued, followed their own instincts, intuitions, and what they referred to as “faith.”[14]
In the philosopher’s view, the problem with Christianity began with the disciples of Jesus and the Apostle Paul, and worsened over the subsequent centuries of Christian history. Christians, Nietzsche argued, “had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying”, which was free from “any ressentiment” and superior to all of it. According to Nietzsche, the followers of Jesus not only misunderstood him, but also distorted his gospel by being unable to forgive “this death.” For this reason, they fell into a decadent, priestly, Judaic religion, promoting concepts such as “the Kingdom of God,” “sin,” “guilt,” “substitutionary atonement,” “sacrifice,” “the last judgement,” “the resurrection of Jesus,” “the resurrection of all,” and “the second coming.”[15] Nietzsche’s problem with these concepts of Jesus and salvation is that they place the “focus not in life itself, but in ‘the beyond’—in nothingness.” For Nietzsche, “the vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct.”[16]
However, Nietzsche was optimistic. He believed that, although Christians throughout the centuries had failed to truly understand Jesus and instead had distorted his life and gospel, Nietzsche and the free spirits of the 19th century were finally capable of restoring the true psychological profile of Jesus of Nazareth.[17]
A critical perspective
In the view of many readers, Nietzsche is an original, passionate, erudite, and provocative writer. However, Nietzsche himself would not have been flattered by such praise, as he was primarily concerned with uncovering the truth. Likewise, the Christian reader would not be content with simply enjoying a well-crafted literary text. Since Nietzsche claimed to write in defence of the truth, his opinions and assertions about Jesus and Christianity must be carefully evaluated. Below are some such evaluations.
First, Nietzsche is a person with a rich and complex personality. He appears genuinely interested in finding truth, purpose, and life. He denounces corruption in politics, art, and especially in culture and religion. He correctly highlights certain compromises within both Judaism and Christianity. Even the most devout Christians, however, acknowledge that Christianity has been affected by doctrinal and practical compromises. One example noted by Nietzsche is the concept of the immortality of the soul, which was adopted by Christianity and tends to diminish the value of the human body and this life. Scripture teaches that humans are unified beings, with their bodies being an inseparable part of their identity. By embracing the pagan concept of the immortality of the soul, along with Greek philosophical metaphysics and the desire to transcend this world, Christianity strayed from the biblical ideal of a world where people were created to enjoy real life in a real world.
Second, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is highly speculative and, as a result, fundamentally flawed. Kaufmann, a scholar of Nietzsche’s works, concludes that Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus “is quite unconvincing… The book is meant to be shockingly blasphemous… The Antichrist is unscholarly and so full of faults that only a pedant could have any wish to catalogue them.”[18]
Third, one of Nietzsche’s conclusions was that the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels is unreliable due to the process of traditional transmission and the intentional distortion of the narrative by Jesus’s disciples and by Paul. The philosopher explicitly states that he sees nothing good in the New Testament.[19] Yet, this does not prevent him from constructing a “reliable” psychological profile of Jesus based on selected passages from the Gospels and his own authority as a 19th-century free spirit. This psychological profile of Jesus is clearly a projection of his own interpretation of religious history and religious psychology. He freely and seemingly intentionally rejects most of the content of the Gospels, thus creating his own version of Jesus and his own gospel. However, both reason and contemporary research into the Gospels affirm that the proclamations of Jesus’s disciples, as eyewitnesses to His life, ministry, message, and resurrection, are credible and take precedence over Nietzsche’s invented gospel and his Christ.
Fourth, Nietzsche tendentiously identifies mercy as the essence of Christianity. Contrary to this assertion, mercy in Nietzsche’s sense (stemming from weakness) is not the essence of Christianity, and Jesus did not die because of it. The New Testament concepts of grace, gentleness, and humility are not rooted in weakness, cowardice, fear, or an inability to fight, but rather in the power, justice, and love of God. The Gospels clearly affirm that Jesus died on the cross not because He had no way to escape (Matthew 26:53), but because He willingly and lovingly gave His life for our salvation (John 10:17-18; 18:4-11; 19:11; Philippians 2:6-9). When Paul describes people as powerless, he is not disparaging humanity but rather describing the reality of humanity’s powerlessness in the face of sin and death (Romans 3:9-12; 7:18-24). Nietzsche is not alone in making a distinction between Jesus and Christianity. Christians themselves are painfully aware that they fall short of God’s glory and that they need their Redeemer, who is different from them, unique, righteous, and loving.
At first glance, Nietzsche’s scepticism and critique appear to be directed solely at the Gospels, Jesus’s disciples, and Christianity in general, rather than at Jesus Himself. However, while criticism of Christians may be justified, scepticism toward the testimony of the disciples (the Gospels) inevitably leads to scepticism about Jesus and to attacks against Him. Nietzsche’s scepticism toward the Christ of the Gospels stemmed precisely from the fact that he knew the portrayal of Jesus—as powerful through love, sacrifice, and righteousness—fundamentally contradicted his ideal of power, which is expressed through domination and transcending personal limitations. Most likely, it was this dissonance between Jesus’s power, based on love and sacrifice, and Nietzsche’s ideal of affirmative power, unconstrained by traditional morality, that led Nietzsche to reinterpret the figure of Jesus, transforming Him into a naive and harmless version that would not threaten the coherence of his philosophy.
Gheorghe Răzmeriţă celebrates the fact that God created us not to leave us alone with our history, but to reveal Himself to us and to have fellowship with us.