God is Dead, and So is Niezsche

God is Dead, and So is Nietzsche

William Berry

Theology-ish Website

April 7, 2024

Friedrich Nietzsche was a smart man. He was smarter than I am. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? He was a German philosopher with a great mustache in the late 19th century. His ideas about power, about personal autonomy, and about the functions of individuals within a society were very influential in their time. They continue to be influential today. Seldom does a college freshman make it out of their mandatory PHIL1101 without being introduced to Nietzsche’s ideas, in particular his ideas about God. Or perhaps un-ideas about God, for Nietzsche as all good freethinkers of the late 19th century were, was an atheist. But unlike other freethinkers of the time, this was not a joyful liberation from the shackles of organized religion for Nietzsche, it was the death knell for society. Nietzsche, in so far as I understand him, thought that we had progressed beyond a societal need for the supernatural. He thought God had served in times past as a mystical way to subdue the masses, but in a modern scientific age, we could not possibly maintain the charade of religion; as a result we had no hope of maintaining order. All that would be left would be the individual and their will to power. And this terrified him. You can see his terror in what is undoubtedly his best known quote.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

What kind of being is worthy to kill God? Since we have done so, what kind of being must we be? We must be gods ourselves, and if we are not we must become such, or our deicide will have been for nothing and lead us all to ruin. But it has already led us to ruin. If what Nietzsche says is true, then there is no hope for the future. There is no more meaning, because we have killed meaning. There is no more faith, because we have killed the object of faith. There is no more hope, because we have killed that which was hoped for. And there can be no more love, because the source of love itself has been trampled underfoot. Therefore, what a great mercy it is, that Nietzsche was wrong. 

To be sure, Nietzsche’s handwringing was not wholly unfounded. A world drenched in skepticism, scientificism, materialism, and general godlessness would be a world with little room for God. This might create a problem for an inferior religion, but Christianity does not need God to fit into the world, for it teaches that the world fits into God. It is in God that we live and breathe and have our being. If we organize our being to ostracize God from us, then we have simply ostracized ourselves from the fullest experience of ourselves. We are not increased by being more skeptical and scientific, but rather we confine ourselves to materialism, and therefore amputate entire realms of experience. In the name of progress, we become less. 

“Who will wipe this blood off us?” Truly, who can expiate the divine blood? Nietzsche was right to ask, but it seems he did not understand the divine blood had been spilled long before he asked about it. It was shed at Calvary, and it needed no expiation for it was the expiation. “Who will wipe it from us?” he asks. What he does not understand is that the Christian faced with hands stained in godly crimson will commence to lick themselves clean. With jealous self-forgetfulness, they will cry out in bittersweet tears for the blood that has been shed. Truly, whoever does not eat His flesh, and drink His blood has no part in Him. Therefore, they need no one to wipe away this Holy blood, they savor the taste and recognize the cost, eyes fixedly forward on the blessed one who had been made a curse for them. Their hearts are heavy, but their sins have been washed clean by the very thing Nietzsche thought should condemn them. 

“What water is there for us to clean ourselves?” Nietzsche asks, “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” I wish I could tell him, with a laugh I imagine, that we don’t need to invent anything. The waters Nietzsche wanted us to flee to were given to us, again, long before Nietzsche existed to ask such things. In the waters of baptism, we are washed clean, though our sins were red as scarlet, they will be made white as snow through the waters. It is there! There! In the water! Friedrich, don’t you see it? Friedrich, please, look. Set aside the wall of materialism, drop the scales of skeptical thinking from your mind, ignore the process for gathering data that you call science and mistakenly give authority to tell you what is good, beautiful, and true. Look to the waters, Friedrich! Do you see the people, the billions of people, all sinners going to the river, submitting themselves to their brother, and coming out of the waters as saints? I see it. I almost fancy that the waters turn black around them when they are submerged, and when they come up they seem to have a faint glow. That first breath they take when they surface, is the first real breath of their lives. They have been made new, Friedrich. Can’t you see it? That is the water by which we will be made clean, but we do not do it to ourselves. The very one that we killed does it for us. 

But Friedrich Nietzsche cannot hear me. He, like God, has died. Nietzsche has stayed cold in the ground. For 124 years Nietzsche has laid rotting. None of his disciples have been accused of robbing his grave. No one has been skinned alive to death for saying he had returned. No one has left everything they knew to seek out the ends of the earth declaring, with wild eyes, “Nietzsche lives!” No one does much of anything in remembrance of him, let alone eating of his flesh and drinking his blood. No one washes away the guilt of Nietzschecide in festivals of atonement. No one, let alone hundreds of people, has claimed to see him risen in glory. He, unlike God, has stayed dead.