What Nietzsche Got Right – by William C. Green

Friedrich Nietzsche, the scapegoat of both “godless liberalism” and authoritarian extremes, deserves another look. It is not his conclusions that endure, but his methods. Calling himself a psychologist of the soul, he sought to uncover why people cling to beliefs, deceive themselves, and fear freedom, seeking to regenerate rather than destroy, or see reality through illusion.

When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he was not gloating. He was sounding the alarm. Only the madman in his parable understood the danger. Without transcendence, humanity chooses comfort over meaning and drifts toward the path of least resistance.

His answer was the will to power, not domination, but the urge in life to expand, create, and surpass who we were yesterday. True power is not in controlling others, but in mastering yourself, the ability to take what destroys you and transform it into something important.

in his classic Zarathustra said:this vision becomes a poem. Zarathustra is God’s prophet of life after life, urging humanity to resist becoming “the last men,” comfortable conformists who desire no risk, no depth, no greatness, and who blink with contentment at a world without aspirations. In response to such smallness, Nietzsche said, Amor Fati: Accept life, including the pain, and live as if you had a choice again. “In order to produce a dancing star, a person must still carry confusion within himself,” he wrote.

Even Zarathustra expects his followers to surpass him. Nietzsche does not tell his readers what to think, but how to think. His works are not dogmatic, but provide discipline at the core of humanity.

While Nietzsche despised the spiritual pride of St. Paul, a genius who turned weakness into virtue and sin into strength, he admired Jesus, who affirmed life without excuse or reward. He drew a line between contempt for the church and respect for the man who said this. yes Until Paul and the church turned that “yes” into a condemnation, he thought.

in antichrist, A fiery late work, he attacks Christian doctrine with surprising intensity. The son and grandson of a Lutheran minister, he sounds like Luther in reverse. But in the midst of the attack, he stopped. He says he hates Christians but admires Jesus.

For Nietzsche, Good Friday was not about sacrifice or guilt. At its core it was about love. The cross was not the appeasement of an angry God. It was freedom from fear. Life was lived so fully that even death became an expression of love.

Here he discovered unexpected similarities with Ralph Waldo Emerson. For both, God was immanent and present in the world, relationships, and flesh. Emerson’s “oversoul” and Nietzsche’s “divine humanity” shared the belief that life itself carries something sacred. What the church had externalized as doctrine, both sought to reclaim as experience.

Nietzsche argued that traditional atonement theology (the view that God required the suffering of Christ as payment for sin) led believers away from love by fixating on punishment, an instinct that Jesus never shared. The urge to punish Le Saint-Entiment: A desire to hurt while calling it justice.

Jesus’ example became a religion of guilt. On the cross, his followers looked for someone to blame. Jesus didn’t blame anyone. His first words were forgiveness.

Nietzsche thought that the church could not follow him there. When hate could not turn outward, it turned inward. Believers were taught to feel guilty for killing God. Piety became self-punishment disguised as devotion.

For Nietzsche, this was a betrayal. The man who forgave the murderer was recast as the victim who demanded payment. Love became guilt. Unity turned into division. Jesus, he writes, lived the gospel of unity between God and humanity. The belief that God required the death of His Son to obtain forgiveness led Nietzsche to conclude that the Gospel was lost.

For Nietzsche, the crucifixion revealed a life free of fear, a love so defenseless that even death could not dampen it.

Such a vision changes the way we see each other. If God can dwell in our flesh of our flesh and our bones of our bones, then no life is insignificant. The ethical corollary is to love rather than hate our fellow material beings, including ourselves. To love them is to honor God in the flesh. Theologically speaking, creation promised salvation. In Jesus, that promise is waiting to be recognized.

This eliminates pride and despair alike. Love, not resentment, is what it means to follow Christ. Even Nietzsche’s harshest criticism ends with a call to return to the center.

What Nietzsche missed was not faith. in Faith other than Jesus of Jesus: Trust in God. Jesus personified what Nietzsche could not accept: surrender of self to a greater power. Even when he was about to be crucified, he prayed: your Please finish. ”

The cross proclaims what Emerson saw and what Nietzsche could not deny despite all his protests. Divinity is not just elsewhere; herephysically.

God is still with us. Believe it or not.

notes and reading

Jesus— “You never said you were the answer/You said you were the way…” — From a prayer of the ecumenical Iona community, a favorite of founder George MacLeod. The Beginning of Wisdom: Prayer for Growth and Understanding―Thomas Becknell (1995), 96 years old.

death of god—Nietzsche’s “death of God” names not a theological negation but a cultural fact, a loss of faith in the transcendent sources of truth and values ​​that once formed the basis of life. —gay science §§108–109, 125; Zarathustra said:Prologue §3. On the genealogy of morality III §27.

will to power–Nietzsche rejects the metaphor of “vital force” that treats vitality as a hidden substance. For him, “life” is an interpretation in itself, not some mystical energy behind it.
—beyond good and evil §36.

reason and revelation–Reason is still faith. It is not the truth, it is seeking refuge, a release from chance. Reevaluate this will to truth as a will to power. It’s about making use of it in your life, rather than mistaking it for being the highest good in life.gay science §§335–336, 344.

moral–Nietzsche does not deny that there are acts that cause harm and acts that help. We still need distinctions, he says, but we should derive them from the flourishing of life, not from obedience to dogma.dawn §103.

• Friedrich NietzscheLou Andreas-Salome (1894, English 1988). An intimate portrait. Salome was a Russian-born free-thinking philosopher, writer, and the first female psychoanalyst. femme fatale In intellectual Europe, it is impossible to ignore. Despite her open relationship, her marriage lasted. Nietzsche felt a strong affinity for her and asked her to marry him, but Salome was deeply attracted to his ideas and fell in love with a younger man, Rainer Maria Rilke. She became Rilke’s lover, mentor, and muse. Freud considered her not a lover but an admired ally, the most insightful analyst of her generation.

  Nietzsche considered “Lou” to be the most important person in his life – an emotional and intellectual force that shaped both his work and the world.

  —Selected letters of Friedrich Nietzscheed. And trance. Christopher Middleton (1969), 157–163.

theology notes—For a rigorous approach, see David Bentley Hart. endless beauty (2004), 93–124. Hart takes Nietzsche’s “will to power” (now effectively a modern worldview) seriously, and rather than denying it, he reconstructs the genealogy of Nietzsche’s nihilism. For Hart, Nietzsche is a thinker whose theology confronts the most formidable challenges of antiquity, modernity, and postmodernity, even as his rejection of transcendence ultimately narrows his vision. (Elsewhere, with great humor, Hart dismisses the now fading “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.)

Meaning without illusion

called by name

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