Theopedia

Friedrich Nietzsche

Overview

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher and classical philologist known for his sustained attack on Christian morality. Herman Bavinck names him as the point at which antinomianism, the rejection of God’s moral law altogether, “achieved its greatest triumph,”1 and Craig Carter treats him as a hinge figure in the wider modern turn from Christian metaphysics toward nihilism and relativism.2

Life and Ministry

Nietzsche trained as a classical philologist and was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at the unusually young age of twenty-four.3 Chronic ill health forced his resignation a decade later, and he spent the 1880s, the period of his major books, as an independent scholar living on a small pension.3 In January 1889 he suffered a mental and physical collapse in Turin from which he never recovered, and he spent his last eleven years incapacitated, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, until his death in 1900.3 Elisabeth’s own editing of his unpublished notes after his collapse, including the posthumous compilation published as The Will to Power, later shaped how his work was read.3

Theological Contribution

Nietzsche’s quarrel with Christianity was above all a quarrel with its morality, not simply a denial that God exists. Bavinck treats him as antinomianism’s own modern spokesman: “In our time antinomianism achieved its greatest triumph in Friedrich Nietzsche, who called good evil and evil good, and enthroned moral anarchism.”1 Bavinck adds that Nietzsche restricted this reversal of moral categories to an elite: “Even Nietzsche considered his morality to be fit only for ‘supermen.’”1 Elsewhere Bavinck classes him with the “spokesmen for anarchism” as one of the modern interpreters of the same antinomian impulse.4

That reversal reached one of Christianity’s own central commands directly. J. Alan Branch reports Nietzsche’s objection to the Golden Rule and its call to neighbor-love: he “insisted the Golden Rule and the concept of neighbor love are ways weak people force their morality upon the strong.”5

Nietzsche’s opposition to Christianity was bound up with an equally sharp opposition to the Platonist metaphysics the church fathers had drawn on to state the doctrine of God. Craig Carter observes that “Nietzsche, for example, could never make up his mind whether he hated Platonism or Christianity more,”6 and John R. Betz places him in the modern sequence of philosophers dismantling classical metaphysics: “after Nietzsche’s repudiation of all ‘lying’ forms of Platonism.”7

Historical Significance

Carter credits Nietzsche with articulating what he calls the “hidden truth of modernity”: once the will to power of the strong replaces any transcendent standard of value, “life and the world are meaningless; nihilism is the hidden truth of modernity. Plato loses to Nietzsche.”2 He traces the same line into the twentieth century, from Kant through “a rapid descent into epistemological relativism in Nietzsche and the postmodernists,” and from there to politics: “the collapse of Christianity” left, in his account, “the rise of Nietzschean will to power in the great totalitarian systems of the twentieth century.”6 Carter treats Nietzsche’s relativism as an antecedent of the postmodernism that denies any objective, mind-independent truth.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Craig A. Carter, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 3. ↩ ↩2

  3. Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩

  5. J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 5, “Is the Golden Rule Practical Today?,” 38-40. ↩

  6. Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. John R. Betz, “After Heidegger and Marion: The Task of Christian Metaphysics Today,” Modern Theology 34, no. 4 (2015): 569-70, quoted in Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 2, “The Metaphysics of Divine Beauty.” ↩