5 - Nietzscheanism and theology

Summary

God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?

(GS 125)

In 1966, a cover of the popular American magazine Time presented the question, in bold red letters against a black background, “Is God Dead?” The story was not on Nietzsche, but on a movement in theology known as “death of God”, or “radical” theology. Nietzsche's thought, however, was a central reference for this movement. It may seem the height of irony that the thinker best known for his proclamation “God is dead”, the author of The Anti-Christ, has had a significant influence on theology, which is precisely the study of God. The cover of Time in the mid-1960s was Nietzschean theology's most public moment. But, as Vattimo has noted, “the idea that Nietzsche could be read as a Christian thinker [goes] back to the earliest years of his reception” (Vattimo 2001: 184). Significantly, in her book on Nietzsche, Salomé stated that he retained a religious attitude in spite of his alleged atheism (cited in Diethe 2006).