Why Nietzsche loathed Christianity
And why I think he got it wrong.
Beneath Friedrich Nietzsche’s numerous polemics against Christianity runs one common thread, a theme that encapsulates nearly everything he criticized about the beliefs and practices of that religion: Christianity renounces life.
At its core, Nietzsche thought, Christianity is hostile to society, philosophy, art, human flourishing and excellence—in a word, to reality. Was he right? All of Nietzsche’s thought sprang from the fundamental supposition that “God is dead!” And if God is dead, everything that came with God must go also—beginning with Christianity. This was Nietzsche’s great philosophical enterprise, to draw the death of God to its furthest logical conclusions.
Of course, Christianity rests on precisely the opposite supposition: that God exists and providentially sustains the world. Christians also believe that God somehow overcame death through the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. From such disparate vantages, it seems Christians may have trouble engaging with Nietzsche’s critiques, at least insofar as they are committed to basic Christian belief. Nonetheless, this essay aims to demonstrate how the theological significance of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (hereafter “the resurrection”) furnishes Christians with specific replies to Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity renounces life. For the resurrection enables Christians to meaningfully grapple with Nietzsche as Christians—neither to dismiss him nor abandon one’s Christian principles. To this end, my claim is that, because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Christian religion is neither the renunciation of life nor religious escapism, but rather life’s deepest affirmation.
The argument unfolds in three steps. I begin by considering two key instantiations of Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity as a religion renounces life: (i) through its “slave morality” and (ii) through its “hatred of the world.” Next, I respond to these critiques by appealing to the resurrection, employing its pertinent theological and philosophical implications. And finally, after addressing some objections to my thesis, I suggest ways Christians today may nevertheless learn from Nietzsche’s philosophy.
First, Nietzsche claims Christianity renounces life through its slave morality. On the one hand, Christian slave morality finds its clearest expression in the person and teachings of Jesus—viz., in the embodiment of charity, humility, forgiveness, love for the destitute, and the like. Nietzsche notes that such moral sentiments and practices celebrate weakness and shun strength. They teach, for example, that it is good to “turn the other cheek” or to “love your enemy.” Nietzsche “wages war” on Jesus’ ethic in The Anti-Christ, where he likens Christian morality to a form of sickness among the world’s weakest classes of humanity. This sickness praises the twisted values of the “kingdom of God,” and, as Nietzsche asserts, “life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins.”
On the other hand, Nietzsche locates the genesis of this slave morality prior to Christ—in the history of the Jews. Slave morality began when Israel found itself under the thumb of oppressive nations, for it was only then, according to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, that they learned to decry their oppressors as “evil” and to identify themselves as “good,” even chosen by God. Nietzsche claims this fabricated good/evil dichotomy supplanted the natural, classical aristocratic dichotomy of good/bad, and that it represents the birth of “the denaturalizing of natural values.”
Slave morality, then, renounces life in two ways: first, it spawns ressentiment in lower social classes toward the stronger, more noble classes. This resentment renounces what Nietzsche sees as the natural greatness of the noble with their “instinct for life”; it is a spiteful disposition to the external world: “Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed.” The weak resent the strong, and, because they cannot face the natural disparities between themselves and the strong, they fabricate a moral category called “evil,” to which the strong belong de facto.
As a consequence, slave morality also renounces life when it baptizes its weaker, illusory values and virtues, calling them “good” and enshrining them in religious dogmas, which they hold in judgment over the noble and well-born. Indeed, Christian talk of “sin” and “salvation” is nothing but a twisted attempt by the weak to console themselves and gain a modicum of power over the strong. Nothing, for Nietzsche, could be so unnatural.
Second, Nietzsche claims Christianity renounces life through its hatred of the world. This point only follows from the first, for generations of slave morality—of resentment toward the natural and noble—can only culminate in a wholesale rejection of the world itself. Nietzsche believes Christians despise reality because they are weak, no doubt, but also because they have constructed an imaginary world (call it “Heaven”) which, by design, “falsifies, disvalues and denies actuality.” They have done so because they cannot face “actuality” in this life for what it truly is: suffering that terminates in death. In Nietzsche’s view, when faced with suffering and death in this world, Christianity opted neither for a Schopenhauerian nihilism nor a Nietzschian (or Greco-Roman, for that matter) will to power; it rather fabricated a new world, a new “salvation” which would redeem believers from the outside. But this salvation required a negation of this life. He writes:
To be able to reject all that represents the ascending movement of life, well-constitutedness, power, beauty, self-affirmation on earth, the instinct of ressentiment here became genius to invent another world from which that life-affirmation would appear evil, reprehensible as such.
Christianity’s creative act, Nietzsche says, was tantamount to shifting the “center of gravity” out of life and into nothingness. Hatred of the body, contempt for pride and sex, the denigration of humanity through concepts like sin and guilt—nothing but escapism cloaked in one clever chimera: “salvation of the soul.” Hence Nietzsche asserts that “Christianity is a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed.” Together with its slave morality and its hatred of the world—the only world humans have ever known—Christianity renounces life itself.
Now, before attempting to respond to these charges, we must grant that, on one level, Nietzsche’s assessment of Christianity is sharply correct. He is right in the first place to call Christian morality “anti-natural.” Why else have the life and teachings of Jesus exercised such influence over the centuries, if not in virtue of their radically counterintuitive, other-worldly charm? And yet, in what time or place has love for one’s enemies been normative, much less natural? Furthermore, Jesus himself claimed, “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36), and his disciples were even accused of turning the world “upside down” through their teaching (Acts 17:6).
In this light, Nietzsche’s appraisal rings true: there is something fundamentally unnatural about Christianity. What, then, does the resurrection bring to this discussion?
First, the resurrection rejects Nietzsche’s story of slave morality. It rejects this story because Christianity holds that, through the resurrection, God vindicated the life and ministry of Jesus with all of its ethical implications. To be sure, this is not to deny that Jews or Christians have cast resentment on the powerful and well-born; the Old Testament makes that clear enough. Rather, as the vindication of Jesus’ life and ministry, the resurrection ushers in and affirms the kingdom of God and its norms which take after Jesus.
Crucially, however, the norms of the kingdom of God do not contradict reality, because, as Saint Paul taught, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead represents a reversal of that which corrupts reality—namely, Adam’s sin and fall into suffering and death. Oliver O’Donovan argues this point in Resurrection and Moral Order, claiming that the resurrection “is God’s final and decisive word on the life of his creature, Adam. It is, in the first place, God’s reversal of Adam’s choice of sin and death.”
Nietzsche rejects the concept of sin and, by consequence, concludes that suffering and death are natural, unavoidably so. Accepting these tragic dimensions of existence—indeed, affirming one’s life in the face of them—becomes the only avenue to a purposive life, and the only alternative to nihilism or escapism. However, the resurrection rejects suffering and death as strictly natural; in fact, it calls them utterly unnatural, subverting them by reversing Adam’s fall. It is, as O’Donovan again observes, “a new affirmation of God’s first decision that Adam should live.” The norms of God’s kingdom, then, outline the parameters within which God’s new humanity is to live. Through the resurrection, God calls “good” Jesus’s life and ministry—his love for the lost, humility, and so on. Christianity calls these norms natural because they reflect God’s life-giving intentions for the world, not the sin which has, since Adam, tragically corrupted the human heart and defined normativity throughout history.
Moreover, the resurrection rejects Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity renounces life through its hatred of the world. For the resurrection represents not only God’s reversal of Adam’s sin, but also God’s reaffirmation of the world as such—as his good creation. Indeed, it recapitulates God’s words in Genesis 1:31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” O’Donovan notes that the resurrection rules out the gnostic supposition that Christian salvation means redemption from creation—from the material, the bodily. On the contrary, Christ’s (bodily) resurrection from the dead declares that God’s salvation means redemption of creation, which precludes the notion—in theory, at least—that Christianity as a religion hates the world. The resurrection enables Christians to affirm this existence, to call good what God calls good, even to embrace a form of the “ascending movement of life.” On this view, Christianity has not fabricated another “world” to which the faithful will fly, as it were, upon death. No, the final vision of Christian salvation entails God’s redemption and re-creation of this world. The resurrection is God’s cosmic “yes” to this life.
Even so, this life remains fraught with suffering and death, and Nietzsche is correct that Christians look beyond this life to finally deal with them. This, however, does not negate the meaning of the resurrection I am sketching here or denigrate the significance of life now; rather, because God raised Jesus from the dead, Christians have hope that they, too, will know life even beyond the grave—a fact which enables members of God’s kingdom to face honestly the inevitabilities of suffering in this life. Commenting on Saint Paul’s treatment of the resurrection in the book of Romans, Richard Hays writes:
Paul passionately awaits the Creator’s final act of liberating the whole creation from ‘bondage to decay.’ In the meantime, believers stand in a relation of solidarity with the pain of an unredeemed creation. If anything, the shared pain is sharpened by the tension between hope and reality.
Hays observes that redemption is finally understood in “bodily terms” for Paul, such that Christians can stand “in a relation of solidarity” to the world in its sufferings now. This posture, grounded in the resurrection, hardly amounts to escapism. In fact, it looks something like clear-eyed care for the world, not hatred.
Perhaps here one could object that my argument overlooks the many voices within the Christian tradition that plainly endorse hatred of the world—including Scripture itself. 1 John 2:15, for example: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” For his part, John Calvin encouraged Christians to “ardently long for death, and constantly meditate upon it, and in comparison with future immortality, let us despise life.” Do not notions like these warrant Nietzsche’s critique that Christianity renounces life? Do they endorse escapism?
Such passages cannot be denied, but observed through the lens of the resurrection, once more, they are not damaging to my thesis. That the resurrection represents God’s cosmic “yes” to the world nowise implies that everything in the world is as it should be. For the time being there remains, as we saw, residual suffering—thorns and thickets of sin yet unraveled by God’s redemption through Christ. The eschatological promise of the resurrection points to the day this world will be decisively renewed by God; until then, however, the life of God’s kingdom will look, as Nietzsche well saw, anti-natural—like a “radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality.” Jesus said it may even look like hatred (Lk 14:26), but only because this world has for so long loved the unnatural.
God only says “yes” to this world through the resurrection after he says “no” to its sin in Christ’s crucifixion. Sin is that which negates the goodness God gave life at creation. Likewise, then, Christians do not love or affirm that which is sinful in the world (or in themselves); they love the world as God’s good creation on its way to redemption. In his book God Matters, Herbert McCabe proposes the provocative thesis that Jesus was the first truly human being to walk earth. How could this be? McCabe suggests that Jesus was the first to fully embrace what humans were designed for: to love. The reason Jesus’ life and ministry shocked the world as it did—the reason his life ended in crucifixion—was not that Jesus was so unnatural, but because the world had become so tragically unhuman, so averse to the natural, to love. As McCabe puts it: “We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.” But Jesus had no fear of being human. Indeed, one might say he was all too human.
Granting McCabe’s thesis, a final observation regarding the resurrection surfaces: as the vindication of Jesus’ life and ministry, the resurrection unleashes on the fallen world a love which finally transcends suffering and death—a love in the light of which Christianity says “yes” even to a fallen world. It is the same love with which Jesus comforted his disciples: “In the world you will have tribulation. But take courage; I have overcome the world! (Jn 16:33). In overcoming the world through his cross and resurrection, Jesus also secures the world’s restoration despite its present “bondage to decay.” Through the resurrection, therefore, God not only affirms the world for what it is—viz. his good yet fallen creation—but also for what it will be in the “new heavens and the new earth.” So potent, so fearless in its affirmation of life, the resurrection reaches even beyond the grip of suffering and death in its “yes.” With this hope, to borrow Nietzsche’s words, Christianity now “feels illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger…maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea.’”
To be sure, the foregoing study has not attempted to refute Nietzsche’s critiques of Christianity on purely philosophical grounds; it has not, in other words, attempted to philosophize with a hammer. Rather, I have explicated what it might mean theologically that Jesus rose from the dead in light of Nietzsche’s critiques—to demonstrate that Christianity possesses resources internal to its beliefs which allow it to reply to Nietzsche. That Nietzsche would swiftly discard these considerations only corroborates the significance of the theological suppositions which undergird either pole of this discussion: that God is dead, and that Jesus is alive.
Jörg Salaquarda has written that “a Christian doctrine or practice that does not integrate Nietzsche’s criticism cannot survive under the conditions of modernity.” In the present context, we have seen that the resurrection uniquely equips Christians to intellectually grapple with Nietzsche’s criticism that Christianity renounces life. As he draws the death of God to its furthest logical conclusions, Nietzsche compels Christians (albeit unwittingly) to draw the resurrection of Christ to its furthest logical and theological conclusions. In the final analysis, I have argued that the resurrection is indeed the greatest affirmation of life. Yet Nietzsche’s critiques help us probe the degree to which that affirmation also imbues the lives of flesh-and-blood believers. Do Christians say “yes” to life and “no” to suffering and death as God did through the resurrection? Or are they, like Nietzsche lamented, people who ask “little from life in general”? If the resurrection does, in fact, imply what I have suggested, perhaps Christians have something to learn from Nietzsche about asking more from life.
In any event, such a resurrection affirmation—an ascending movement of life—will consist neither in resentment nor hatred of the world. It will be cheerful, to be sure, yet clear-eyed about suffering and death. In this respect, it will indeed be oddly Nietzschian. Of course, this “yes” to life may seem paradoxically tantamount to hatred in our yet fallen world—but only because it will be above all human. And insofar as it is human, it will resemble that love which transcends even suffering and death, the love of Christ made known in his cross and resurrection.
Bibliography
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008.
Hays, Richard B. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. 1st ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
McCabe, Herbert. God Matters. London: G. Chapman, 1987.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Carol Diethe. “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
_______, and Marion Faber. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New ed. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
_______, R. J. Hollingdale, Michael Tanner, and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols: And, The Anti-Christ. Penguin Classics. London New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2003.
_______, Bernard Williams, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
O’Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics. 2nd ed. Leicester: Apollos, 1994.
Salaquarda, Jörg. “Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1996.