Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and the Death of God
By: Ronald H. Nash,
When the question of whether the Western world is functionally godless is raised in the context of the
thought of Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, several interesting points emerge. For one thing,
the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provides important perspectives for viewing a major problem of
modern Western society. For another, their writings make clear significant implications of the answer,
implications that are easily overlooked. And finally, their positions point to what may well be the two
major responses to the functional godlessness of the West. For the purposes of this essay, I will allow
Nietzsche to provide the major introduction to my topic. But the much shorter space I give Kierkegaard
should not be taken as a sign I attach less significance to his views of this subject.
Nietzsche and the Death of God
In his book, The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche paid the following compliment to the Judeo-Christian
worldview—
In the end, there is a metaphysical faith at the base of our faith in science . . . . We all, atheists and
antimetaphysicists, take our flame from the great fire which has been kindled by faith—the Christian
faith and also that of Plato, the faith that claims that God is Truth. What are we going to do when all this
becomes unbelievable?[1]
Nietzsche recognized that Western civilization has been built upon the foundation of the Judeo-Christian
worldview. He also realized that this worldview had been all but rejected by the Western intellectuals
of his day. Far from welcoming this rejection, Nietzsche realized that Western civilization was
confronted by perhaps the most serious challenge in its history, a challenge to which Nietzsche himself
would propose an answer.
Perhaps the best place in Nietzsche's writings to see these ideas at work is in a section of his work, the
Gay Science, entitled "The Madman."[2]
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place,
and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were
standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his
way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or
emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his glances. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are
his murderers . . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and stared at him in
astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I come too early,"
he said then; "my time has not come yet . . . . this deed is still more distant from them than the most
distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."
Nietzsche's startling statement that God is dead was not an assertion of his own personal atheism. It was
not so much a piece of speculation about the non-existence of God as it was a diagnosis of the
civilization of his day. What Nietzsche meant was that humankind no longer believes in God. For all
practical purposes, Western men and women have destroyed their faith in God; they have killed God.
It is interesting to note that the very men in Nietzsche's story who began by ridiculing the madman's
search for God were also shocked by his apparent blasphemy. Nietzsche's point has even more force in
our own society, wherein, with few exceptions, men and women live their lives as if there were no God
and yet still carry on a profession of being religious. In Nietzsche's dramatic picture, there is something
tragically absurd about the man who is shocked by someone else's atheism when it is impossible to
discover any genuine religious faith in him. For the average American today, as for the average
individual in Nietzsche's Germany, it simply makes no practical difference whether God exists or not.
This is true in spite of those polls that show that 98 percent of Americans believe in God.
However, Nietzsche's main concern was not religion, but ethics. Even though humans no longer
believed in God, they had not yet become fully conscious of the extent of their unbelief. Moreover, the
morality of the Western world was still grounded on the principles of the Christian faith. Nietzsche
realized that if civilization were to survive, humanity needed standards and values by which to live. But
he also realized that traditional morality, that is, the morality of Western Europe, went hand in hand with
the Christian faith. What will happen, Nietzsche was asking, when men and women see the
inconsistency between their rejection of God's existence and their acceptance of a morality grounded on
the nature and being of God? What will happen when men and women finally understand that the
foundations of Western morality are no longer solid rock but only sinking sand? Nietzsche feared what
would happen when modern men and women finally realized that they were continuing to cling to a
morality the foundations of which they had abandoned years before. Nietzsche's special term for what
would happen next is nihilism.
Nihilism is a condition in which all ultimate values lose their value. That is, traditional moral values
will become obsolete with the knowledge that their logical ground (God) is non- existent. Thus,
Nietzsche feared, when humans awaken from their sleep-walking, civilization will collapse and
nihilism will result. If Nietzsche's diagnosis is correct, what is needed is a new foundation for morality;
the old one has been destroyed. Much of his philosophy should be understood as an attempt to provide
just such a new foundation—in Nietzsche's terms, "a revaluation of values." In one of his books,
Nietzsche has his prophet Zarathustra say, "To value is to create; hear this, you creators! Valuing itself
is of all valued things the most valuable treasure. . . . Change of values—that is a change of creators.
Whoever must be a creator always annihilates."[3] In other words, the creation of new values must be
accompanied by the annihilation of old ones. And so Nietzsche attacked traditional morality like a man
possessed. Christian morality, he wrote, is the morality of weak, decadent people. What we need in its
place is a morality of strength and power—the will to power. In place of what he called the "slave-
morality" of Christianity, Nietzsche proposed to substitute a "master-morality" in which the chief virtues
would be strength, dominance, and the will to power.
"What is good?" Nietzsche asks. "Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to
power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that
power is growing, that resistance is overcome."[4]
The final result for the few who would understand Nietzsche and were able to follow him would be the
Superman (übermensch). This term, which occurs so often in Nietzsche's writings, is better translated as
"Overman." What Nietzsche was trying to say is that man in his current condition is only a bridge to a
higher form of life. "I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall overcome. What have you
done to overcome him?"[5] Again he wrote: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman—a rope
over the abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on- the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous
shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."[6] Behind man is
the beast from which he came; ahead is the being he can become if only he allows Nietzsche to guide
him. But if man should falter, look back, and fail to move ahead to the Superman, he will fall from his
precarious perch into the bottomless pit of nihilism.
But it is still not clear what Nietzsche meant by "the will to power" and "the Superman." The Superman,
or Overman, is the strong man whose will refuses to submit to the values and standards of others,
especially God. He is the powerful man who creates his own values. Nietzsche's strong man never says,
"I ought." That is, he never submits to rules laid down by God or anyone else. Rather, the Superman is
the person who says, "I will!" It is a mistake to read advocacy of moral libertinism into Nietzsche's
words. Nietzsche would warn that people who are dominated by their lusts, who cannot control their
passions, are not strong; they are hardly models of the will to power. The Superman will be master both
of himself and of his environment. Actually, Nietzsche taught the value of an action lies in the agent and
not in what the agent does. Nietzsche did not really care whether people lived lives of self-control or
licentiousness as long as it was done out of strength and power, as long as it was a reflection of their
autonomy! Nietzsche's Superman begins to remind us of the ethics of the early Jean-Paul Sartre who did
not care what choices people made as long as they were their own choices.
So Nietzsche's transvaluation of traditional morality emphasizes egoism, individualism, and autonomy.
The good man is not the heteronomous person who does what other humans want or the theonomous
person who does what God wills; the good human is the autonomous individual who does what he wills
to do!
It is not difficult to see enormous problems with Nietzsche's new model of morality. When one begins to
consider what the world would be like if it had many of Nietzsche's supermen in it, his transvaluation of
morality seems destined to bring about moral anarchy and nihilism more quickly than the so-called
decadent morality he attacked. It also seems clear that Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality was
superficial and based on many serious misunderstandings. Had Nietzsche really understood the man
whom he called "the first and last Christian," he might well have regarded Jesus Christ as the true
übermensch.
But suppose we concede, for the sake of argument, that Nietzsche was right when he proclaimed that
God is dead. Suppose Western civilization was founded upon presuppositions of the Christian
worldview. And suppose that it is only now, a century later, that we, the people in Nietzsche's parable,
are gradually becoming conscious of the message of Nietzsche's madman—that God is dead and that we
have killed him!
What all this reduces to, of course, is the claim that constitutes the theme of this issue of BRIDGES,
namely, that the Western world (the world we still call "Christendom") is functionally godless. The
question before us, then, is simply this: what are we going to do about it? Nietzsche's philosophy points
us in one direction. But suppose we forget Nietzsche for a while and consider the remarkably similar
views (similar, that is, up to a point) of Nietzsche nineteenth- century predecessor, Sören Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard's Attack on "Christendom"
Much can be learned from trying to see Kierkegaard's thought in light of what has already been said
about Nietzsche. While Kierkegaard's problem was different, it can nonetheless be expressed in
Nietzschean terms. One good place to begin an examination of Kierkegaard's views is in a section of his
book, Attack Upon "Christendom", titled "the Religious Situation." Kierkegaard writes:
We are what is called a "Christian" nation—but in such a sense that not a single one of us is in the
character of the Christianity of the New Testament, any more than I am, who again and again have
repeated, and do now repeat, that I am only a poet. The illusion of a Christian nation is due doubtless to
the power which number exercises over imagination. I have not the least doubt that every single
individual in the nation will be honest enough with God and with himself to say in solitary conversation,
"If I must be candid, I do not deny that I am not a Christian in the New Testament sense; if I must be
honest, I do not deny that my life cannot be called an effort in the direction of what the New Testament
calls Christianity, in the direction of denying myself, renouncing the world, dying from it, etc." . . I have
not the least doubt that everyone will, with respect to ten of his acquaintances, let us say, be able to hold
fast to the view that they are not Christians in the New Testament sense, and that their lives are not even
an effort in the direction of becoming so. But when there are 100,000, one becomes confused.[7]
Kierkegaard was distressed by the condition of Christianity in his native Denmark. He was convinced
that the state church—to which most Danes belonged from birth—had departed from the teachings of
early New Testament Christianity. Consequently, not a single citizen of Denmark—the "Christian"
nation of Denmark—was a Christian in the New Testament sense of the word. In a subsequent section of
his book entitled, "A Proof that the New Testament is no Longer Truth," Kierkegaard states:
In the New Testament the Saviour of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, represents the situation thus: The
way that leadeth unto life is straightened, the gate narrow—few be they that find it!
—Now, on the contrary, to speak only of Denmark, we are all Christians, the way is as broad as it
possibly can be, the broadest in Denmark, since it is the way in which we all are walking, besides being
in all respects as convenient, as comfortable as possible; and the gate is as wide as it possibly can be,
wider surely a gate cannot be than that through which we are all going en masse.[8]
While Jesus had taught that the way to the kingdom of God was a narrow road travelled by a few, the
road in Denmark was as wide as the entire nation and no one was excluded. The New Testament
stressed the need for conversion, sacrifice, and personal faith but the Danish state church taught that
everyone, by virtue of baptism at birth, was a Christian. If the state church of Denmark is correct, then
Kierkegaard insisted, "The New Testament is no longer truth."[9] But if Jesus and the New Testament
are correct, then Denmark is not a Christian nation and the state church of Denmark is no longer a
Christian church! And the members of the state church are not Christians. They are citizens of something
else—call it "Christendom." When everyone is a Christian, Kierkegaard goes on to say, then
Christianity does not exist.[10]
Hence in his own way, Kierkegaard was really saying that so far as Denmark was concerned, God was
dead. Kierkegaard would have regarded Nietzsche's parable of the madman as an apt picture of the
religious bankruptcy of his own land. And to make things worse, because of its de-emphasis on faith,
personal commitment, and conversion, the Danish church was the chief culprit. The form of religion that
existed in Kierkegaard's Denmark should no longer be called Christianity; it was totally different
religion—Christendom.
The Functional Godlessness of the Contemporary West
The conditions noticed by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are even more aggravated in late twentieth-
century Christendom. Most men and women in the West go on acting as if God does not really exist. Let
us not forget that all (or almost all) of the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust had their names on some
church roll or other. But under no reasonable conditions could such people be viewed as Christians!
For all practical purposes, God is dead in the part of the world that is usually thought of as Christian. If
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were somehow to return for awhile, they would undoubtedly agree on their
diagnosis of the spiritual/religious condition of the West.
But while they would agree on the diagnosis, they would assuredly disagree as to the cure. Nietzsche, as
we have seen, was willing to destroy the old foundations of morality and substitute a new naturalistic
basis of value. Had Kierkegaard lived to see Nietzsche's proposals, he would have objected. While you
may be able to save some lives by amputating an arm or leg, he would argue, you can never save a life
by removing the patient's heart. If God is dead, the only way to save society from nihilism is to confront
modern men and women with their unbelief and secularism and challenge them to recover and reaffirm
their faith in the living God. If men and women no longer believe in God, it will not do to bury God.
One must bring men and women to a dynamic and living faith which, for Kierkegaard, can only happen
by means of a return to New Testament Christianity.
Anyone familiar with the intellectual climate of our day will recognize that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard
represent two major options confronting us. We stand at the crossroads in a world to which God is
functionally dead. Some like Marx, and Sartre (at least Sartre prior to his last hours on Earth), Dewey,
and others urge us (for different reasons, of course) to abandon the supernatural assumptions of the past
and ground our lives, our values, and our society on naturalistic premises. Others, convinced that
naturalism is a false worldview and afraid that it can only lead to the very nihilism that terrified
Nietzsche, urge a return to the controlling assumptions of a Christian worldview. But as Kierkegaard
argued, even this is insufficient unless accompanied by a genuine personal religious faith. Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard each made their choice, as indeed must each of us. The option is a momentous one and
fraught with dangerous consequences should we err and take the wrong turn.
The work of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche help us see that no philosopher looks at the human
condition in isolation from underlying views about God and reality. For one of our two philosophers,
humans are animals rising from their primitive beginnings. Humans must be careful not to stop where
they are now. Freed from the shackles of a decadent morality and religious superstition, they must
proceed to build a society without God—a society based on naturalistic principles and the assertion of
the will to power. For our other philosopher, man is a pitiful being estranged from his creator and too
blind even to see his unbelief. Kierkegaard's belief in the objective truth of Christian theism[11] and the
power of that truth to transform humans existentially points to an option that remains alive at the end of
the twentieth century. As numerous publications attest, it is a live option intellectually.[12] Our century
has yet to see what the citizens of modern Christendom can achieve morally and spiritually if they but
renounce the death of God in their personal lives and seek to work out the fruits of their salvation in
society.
Notes-------
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, III, 26 (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 288.
2. The full text from which I quote can be found on pages 95-96 of The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking
Press, 1954).
3. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 171.
4. Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 570.
5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 124.
6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 126-27.
7. My quotations from Attack Upon "Christendom" come from A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (New York: Modern
Library, 1946). This long quote appears on p. 437.
8. Attack Upon "Christendom", p. 442.
9. Ibid., p. 443.
10. See pp. 446ff.
11. One continuing sign of the sloppy state of Kierkegaardian scholarship is the inability of some to see that for Kierkegaard, Christianity
must be true both subjectively andobjectively. Those who doubt this should consult C. Stephen Evens, "Kierkegaard on Subjective Truth:
Is God an Ethical Fiction?" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion VII (1976): 288ff, and C. Stephen Evans, "Kierkegaard's
Attack on Apologetics," Christian Scholars Review (1981): 322ff.
12. For my own efforts to support this claim, see Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1988); Ronald
Nash, The Concept of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983); Ronald Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding
(Dallas: Word, 1990); and Ronald Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Dallas: Word, 1990).
By: Ronald H. Nash,
When the question of whether the Western world is functionally godless is raised in the context of the
thought of Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, several interesting points emerge. For one thing,
the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provides important perspectives for viewing a major problem of
modern Western society. For another, their writings make clear significant implications of the answer,
implications that are easily overlooked. And finally, their positions point to what may well be the two
major responses to the functional godlessness of the West. For the purposes of this essay, I will allow
Nietzsche to provide the major introduction to my topic. But the much shorter space I give Kierkegaard
should not be taken as a sign I attach less significance to his views of this subject.
Nietzsche and the Death of God
In his book, The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche paid the following compliment to the Judeo-Christian
worldview—
In the end, there is a metaphysical faith at the base of our faith in science . . . . We all, atheists and
antimetaphysicists, take our flame from the great fire which has been kindled by faith—the Christian
faith and also that of Plato, the faith that claims that God is Truth. What are we going to do when all this
becomes unbelievable?[1]
Nietzsche recognized that Western civilization has been built upon the foundation of the Judeo-Christian
worldview. He also realized that this worldview had been all but rejected by the Western intellectuals
of his day. Far from welcoming this rejection, Nietzsche realized that Western civilization was
confronted by perhaps the most serious challenge in its history, a challenge to which Nietzsche himself
would propose an answer.
Perhaps the best place in Nietzsche's writings to see these ideas at work is in a section of his work, the
Gay Science, entitled "The Madman."[2]
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place,
and cried incessantly, "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who do not believe in God were
standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his
way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or
emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his glances. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are
his murderers . . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and stared at him in
astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I come too early,"
he said then; "my time has not come yet . . . . this deed is still more distant from them than the most
distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."
Nietzsche's startling statement that God is dead was not an assertion of his own personal atheism. It was
not so much a piece of speculation about the non-existence of God as it was a diagnosis of the
civilization of his day. What Nietzsche meant was that humankind no longer believes in God. For all
practical purposes, Western men and women have destroyed their faith in God; they have killed God.
It is interesting to note that the very men in Nietzsche's story who began by ridiculing the madman's
search for God were also shocked by his apparent blasphemy. Nietzsche's point has even more force in
our own society, wherein, with few exceptions, men and women live their lives as if there were no God
and yet still carry on a profession of being religious. In Nietzsche's dramatic picture, there is something
tragically absurd about the man who is shocked by someone else's atheism when it is impossible to
discover any genuine religious faith in him. For the average American today, as for the average
individual in Nietzsche's Germany, it simply makes no practical difference whether God exists or not.
This is true in spite of those polls that show that 98 percent of Americans believe in God.
However, Nietzsche's main concern was not religion, but ethics. Even though humans no longer
believed in God, they had not yet become fully conscious of the extent of their unbelief. Moreover, the
morality of the Western world was still grounded on the principles of the Christian faith. Nietzsche
realized that if civilization were to survive, humanity needed standards and values by which to live. But
he also realized that traditional morality, that is, the morality of Western Europe, went hand in hand with
the Christian faith. What will happen, Nietzsche was asking, when men and women see the
inconsistency between their rejection of God's existence and their acceptance of a morality grounded on
the nature and being of God? What will happen when men and women finally understand that the
foundations of Western morality are no longer solid rock but only sinking sand? Nietzsche feared what
would happen when modern men and women finally realized that they were continuing to cling to a
morality the foundations of which they had abandoned years before. Nietzsche's special term for what
would happen next is nihilism.
Nihilism is a condition in which all ultimate values lose their value. That is, traditional moral values
will become obsolete with the knowledge that their logical ground (God) is non- existent. Thus,
Nietzsche feared, when humans awaken from their sleep-walking, civilization will collapse and
nihilism will result. If Nietzsche's diagnosis is correct, what is needed is a new foundation for morality;
the old one has been destroyed. Much of his philosophy should be understood as an attempt to provide
just such a new foundation—in Nietzsche's terms, "a revaluation of values." In one of his books,
Nietzsche has his prophet Zarathustra say, "To value is to create; hear this, you creators! Valuing itself
is of all valued things the most valuable treasure. . . . Change of values—that is a change of creators.
Whoever must be a creator always annihilates."[3] In other words, the creation of new values must be
accompanied by the annihilation of old ones. And so Nietzsche attacked traditional morality like a man
possessed. Christian morality, he wrote, is the morality of weak, decadent people. What we need in its
place is a morality of strength and power—the will to power. In place of what he called the "slave-
morality" of Christianity, Nietzsche proposed to substitute a "master-morality" in which the chief virtues
would be strength, dominance, and the will to power.
"What is good?" Nietzsche asks. "Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to
power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that
power is growing, that resistance is overcome."[4]
The final result for the few who would understand Nietzsche and were able to follow him would be the
Superman (übermensch). This term, which occurs so often in Nietzsche's writings, is better translated as
"Overman." What Nietzsche was trying to say is that man in his current condition is only a bridge to a
higher form of life. "I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall overcome. What have you
done to overcome him?"[5] Again he wrote: "Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman—a rope
over the abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on- the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous
shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."[6] Behind man is
the beast from which he came; ahead is the being he can become if only he allows Nietzsche to guide
him. But if man should falter, look back, and fail to move ahead to the Superman, he will fall from his
precarious perch into the bottomless pit of nihilism.
But it is still not clear what Nietzsche meant by "the will to power" and "the Superman." The Superman,
or Overman, is the strong man whose will refuses to submit to the values and standards of others,
especially God. He is the powerful man who creates his own values. Nietzsche's strong man never says,
"I ought." That is, he never submits to rules laid down by God or anyone else. Rather, the Superman is
the person who says, "I will!" It is a mistake to read advocacy of moral libertinism into Nietzsche's
words. Nietzsche would warn that people who are dominated by their lusts, who cannot control their
passions, are not strong; they are hardly models of the will to power. The Superman will be master both
of himself and of his environment. Actually, Nietzsche taught the value of an action lies in the agent and
not in what the agent does. Nietzsche did not really care whether people lived lives of self-control or
licentiousness as long as it was done out of strength and power, as long as it was a reflection of their
autonomy! Nietzsche's Superman begins to remind us of the ethics of the early Jean-Paul Sartre who did
not care what choices people made as long as they were their own choices.
So Nietzsche's transvaluation of traditional morality emphasizes egoism, individualism, and autonomy.
The good man is not the heteronomous person who does what other humans want or the theonomous
person who does what God wills; the good human is the autonomous individual who does what he wills
to do!
It is not difficult to see enormous problems with Nietzsche's new model of morality. When one begins to
consider what the world would be like if it had many of Nietzsche's supermen in it, his transvaluation of
morality seems destined to bring about moral anarchy and nihilism more quickly than the so-called
decadent morality he attacked. It also seems clear that Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality was
superficial and based on many serious misunderstandings. Had Nietzsche really understood the man
whom he called "the first and last Christian," he might well have regarded Jesus Christ as the true
übermensch.
But suppose we concede, for the sake of argument, that Nietzsche was right when he proclaimed that
God is dead. Suppose Western civilization was founded upon presuppositions of the Christian
worldview. And suppose that it is only now, a century later, that we, the people in Nietzsche's parable,
are gradually becoming conscious of the message of Nietzsche's madman—that God is dead and that we
have killed him!
What all this reduces to, of course, is the claim that constitutes the theme of this issue of BRIDGES,
namely, that the Western world (the world we still call "Christendom") is functionally godless. The
question before us, then, is simply this: what are we going to do about it? Nietzsche's philosophy points
us in one direction. But suppose we forget Nietzsche for a while and consider the remarkably similar
views (similar, that is, up to a point) of Nietzsche nineteenth- century predecessor, Sören Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard's Attack on "Christendom"
Much can be learned from trying to see Kierkegaard's thought in light of what has already been said
about Nietzsche. While Kierkegaard's problem was different, it can nonetheless be expressed in
Nietzschean terms. One good place to begin an examination of Kierkegaard's views is in a section of his
book, Attack Upon "Christendom", titled "the Religious Situation." Kierkegaard writes:
We are what is called a "Christian" nation—but in such a sense that not a single one of us is in the
character of the Christianity of the New Testament, any more than I am, who again and again have
repeated, and do now repeat, that I am only a poet. The illusion of a Christian nation is due doubtless to
the power which number exercises over imagination. I have not the least doubt that every single
individual in the nation will be honest enough with God and with himself to say in solitary conversation,
"If I must be candid, I do not deny that I am not a Christian in the New Testament sense; if I must be
honest, I do not deny that my life cannot be called an effort in the direction of what the New Testament
calls Christianity, in the direction of denying myself, renouncing the world, dying from it, etc." . . I have
not the least doubt that everyone will, with respect to ten of his acquaintances, let us say, be able to hold
fast to the view that they are not Christians in the New Testament sense, and that their lives are not even
an effort in the direction of becoming so. But when there are 100,000, one becomes confused.[7]
Kierkegaard was distressed by the condition of Christianity in his native Denmark. He was convinced
that the state church—to which most Danes belonged from birth—had departed from the teachings of
early New Testament Christianity. Consequently, not a single citizen of Denmark—the "Christian"
nation of Denmark—was a Christian in the New Testament sense of the word. In a subsequent section of
his book entitled, "A Proof that the New Testament is no Longer Truth," Kierkegaard states:
In the New Testament the Saviour of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, represents the situation thus: The
way that leadeth unto life is straightened, the gate narrow—few be they that find it!
—Now, on the contrary, to speak only of Denmark, we are all Christians, the way is as broad as it
possibly can be, the broadest in Denmark, since it is the way in which we all are walking, besides being
in all respects as convenient, as comfortable as possible; and the gate is as wide as it possibly can be,
wider surely a gate cannot be than that through which we are all going en masse.[8]
While Jesus had taught that the way to the kingdom of God was a narrow road travelled by a few, the
road in Denmark was as wide as the entire nation and no one was excluded. The New Testament
stressed the need for conversion, sacrifice, and personal faith but the Danish state church taught that
everyone, by virtue of baptism at birth, was a Christian. If the state church of Denmark is correct, then
Kierkegaard insisted, "The New Testament is no longer truth."[9] But if Jesus and the New Testament
are correct, then Denmark is not a Christian nation and the state church of Denmark is no longer a
Christian church! And the members of the state church are not Christians. They are citizens of something
else—call it "Christendom." When everyone is a Christian, Kierkegaard goes on to say, then
Christianity does not exist.[10]
Hence in his own way, Kierkegaard was really saying that so far as Denmark was concerned, God was
dead. Kierkegaard would have regarded Nietzsche's parable of the madman as an apt picture of the
religious bankruptcy of his own land. And to make things worse, because of its de-emphasis on faith,
personal commitment, and conversion, the Danish church was the chief culprit. The form of religion that
existed in Kierkegaard's Denmark should no longer be called Christianity; it was totally different
religion—Christendom.
The Functional Godlessness of the Contemporary West
The conditions noticed by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are even more aggravated in late twentieth-
century Christendom. Most men and women in the West go on acting as if God does not really exist. Let
us not forget that all (or almost all) of the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust had their names on some
church roll or other. But under no reasonable conditions could such people be viewed as Christians!
For all practical purposes, God is dead in the part of the world that is usually thought of as Christian. If
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were somehow to return for awhile, they would undoubtedly agree on their
diagnosis of the spiritual/religious condition of the West.
But while they would agree on the diagnosis, they would assuredly disagree as to the cure. Nietzsche, as
we have seen, was willing to destroy the old foundations of morality and substitute a new naturalistic
basis of value. Had Kierkegaard lived to see Nietzsche's proposals, he would have objected. While you
may be able to save some lives by amputating an arm or leg, he would argue, you can never save a life
by removing the patient's heart. If God is dead, the only way to save society from nihilism is to confront
modern men and women with their unbelief and secularism and challenge them to recover and reaffirm
their faith in the living God. If men and women no longer believe in God, it will not do to bury God.
One must bring men and women to a dynamic and living faith which, for Kierkegaard, can only happen
by means of a return to New Testament Christianity.
Anyone familiar with the intellectual climate of our day will recognize that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard
represent two major options confronting us. We stand at the crossroads in a world to which God is
functionally dead. Some like Marx, and Sartre (at least Sartre prior to his last hours on Earth), Dewey,
and others urge us (for different reasons, of course) to abandon the supernatural assumptions of the past
and ground our lives, our values, and our society on naturalistic premises. Others, convinced that
naturalism is a false worldview and afraid that it can only lead to the very nihilism that terrified
Nietzsche, urge a return to the controlling assumptions of a Christian worldview. But as Kierkegaard
argued, even this is insufficient unless accompanied by a genuine personal religious faith. Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard each made their choice, as indeed must each of us. The option is a momentous one and
fraught with dangerous consequences should we err and take the wrong turn.
The work of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche help us see that no philosopher looks at the human
condition in isolation from underlying views about God and reality. For one of our two philosophers,
humans are animals rising from their primitive beginnings. Humans must be careful not to stop where
they are now. Freed from the shackles of a decadent morality and religious superstition, they must
proceed to build a society without God—a society based on naturalistic principles and the assertion of
the will to power. For our other philosopher, man is a pitiful being estranged from his creator and too
blind even to see his unbelief. Kierkegaard's belief in the objective truth of Christian theism[11] and the
power of that truth to transform humans existentially points to an option that remains alive at the end of
the twentieth century. As numerous publications attest, it is a live option intellectually.[12] Our century
has yet to see what the citizens of modern Christendom can achieve morally and spiritually if they but
renounce the death of God in their personal lives and seek to work out the fruits of their salvation in
society.
Notes-------
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, III, 26 (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 288.
2. The full text from which I quote can be found on pages 95-96 of The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking
Press, 1954).
3. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 171.
4. Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 570.
5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 124.
6. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 126-27.
7. My quotations from Attack Upon "Christendom" come from A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (New York: Modern
Library, 1946). This long quote appears on p. 437.
8. Attack Upon "Christendom", p. 442.
9. Ibid., p. 443.
10. See pp. 446ff.
11. One continuing sign of the sloppy state of Kierkegaardian scholarship is the inability of some to see that for Kierkegaard, Christianity
must be true both subjectively andobjectively. Those who doubt this should consult C. Stephen Evens, "Kierkegaard on Subjective Truth:
Is God an Ethical Fiction?" International Journal for Philosophy of Religion VII (1976): 288ff, and C. Stephen Evans, "Kierkegaard's
Attack on Apologetics," Christian Scholars Review (1981): 322ff.
12. For my own efforts to support this claim, see Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1988); Ronald
Nash, The Concept of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1983); Ronald Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding
(Dallas: Word, 1990); and Ronald Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Dallas: Word, 1990).
