nietzsche reference laughing at the abyss

Nietzsche: Master of Suspicion
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Written by Tim Garrett
Christianity: Religion of Hate?
In the last decade, it has become increasingly common to hear the accusation that Christians are hateful. In the United States, this type of comment has become the mantra of homosexual rights groups who are outraged that Christians would claim that homosexuality is a sin. With the murder of homosexual Matthew Shepherd in 1999, Christians were blamed for creating a hostile environment and provoking violence against homosexuals by claiming that homosexuality is immoral. Homosexuals often scoff at Christians who say, "Hate the sin, love the sinner," insinuating that the two cannot be separated. Consequently it has become increasingly difficult to dialogue with these individuals due to their suspicion that Christians, in spite of their expressions of love, actually hate homosexuals.
Of course, accusations of hatred against Christians are nothing new. This charge was leveled at the first century church as a preamble to the state sanctioned persecution that occurred off and on throughout the Roman Empire until the fourth century. But today many of those who accuse Christians of hate take their marching orders from their understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Christian priests "the truly great haters in world history . . . likewise the most ingenious haters."{1} Nietzsche was absolutely contemptuous of Christians and pulled no punches when it came to his polemic against them. He is infamous for his announcement of the death of God in his writings and was known to be Hitler’s favorite philosopher. Consequently, Christians typically distance themselves from Nietzsche due to his hostility to the Christian worldview.
But while Nietzsche’s writings are often blasphemous, this does not mean that Christians should ignore his insights. Rather than dismissing his critique, we should ask ourselves if he may have something to say to the church. Perhaps we need to be reminded that Jesus’ harshest words were directed toward those who put on an impressive outward show of religiosity, but whose hearts were not right with God. We need only read Jesus’ letters to the seven churches in Revelation chapters two and three to see that some of His most severe rebuke is found there, directed towards His own. Unfortunately, one major school of interpretation has determined that the seven churches represent different ages of church history, of which the first five have already transpired. This interpretation tends to distance us from the Lord’s rebuke, as if evangelicals are the praised church of Philadelphia, and the lukewarm Loadiceans are the apostate church of the end-times. It is no wonder that we reject the blistering critique of someone like Nietzsche when we comfort ourselves by assuming that the "gentle" Jesus would never speak harshly to us!
Just as Jesus spoke out against those who hid behind the façade of religion, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is based on the assertion that Christianity is not motivated by love, but rather by a hateful envy, driven by the need for power over others. And since Nietzsche is the inspiration for many today who call Christianity hateful, it would seem that listening to Nietzsche’s critique is especially important. By understanding Nietzsche, we can be better equipped to respond to the accusations of hatred against Christians that have become common today. Furthermore, we may find that Nietzsche, rather than being just a cranky despiser of religion, actually has a prophetic message for contemporary Christians.
The Good, the Bad, and the Evil
Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota made headlines by claiming that religion is for weak-minded people who are incapable of getting through life without some sort of crutch. The governor quickly apologized for any offense he may have caused, but his claim that religion is just a crutch for the weak is certainly not new. Karl Marx said essentially the same thing by calling religion the opiate of the masses. However, no one has been more creative than Nietzsche when it comes to a critique of Christianity. His contention is not just that Christians are weak, but that Christianity itself was the vehicle by which the weakest members of society were able to overcome the dominance of those more powerful than them. Thus the very basis of Christianity is said to be hatred for, and envy of, the rich and the powerful.
It is important to recognize that Nietzsche was a trained linguist with a deep interest in the history of words. In his book On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche claims that the concept of good originally was a synonym for nobility and therefore referenced the noble aristocrats of ancient times. At the same time, those who belonged to the lower strata of society, those who were originally referred to as plain and simple, were designated as bad.{2} Nietzsche’s point in all this is that when we look at the original sense of the words good and bad they were descriptive of one’s social status, rather than being a moral evaluation.
However, it is Nietzsche’s contention that this all changed when priestly religions such as Judaism and Christianity were able to attain power in society. He suggests that not only did they transform the conceptions of good and bad to include a moral dimension, but that they went even further by creating the concept of evil as well. Out of their hatred and envy for the ruling elite, and their desire for power, the priests transformed the word good to refer to the poor and lowly members of society and had the audacity to refer to the rich and the powerful as evil! When we read the beatitudes in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke we see how Nietzsche indicts Christianity for this reversal. It is not the rich and the powerful who are blessed, but the weak and the poor! Nietzsche believed that Christ’s praise of the powerless was an act of subversion, an attempt by the weak to exact revenge against the elites of society for their natural superiority. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, there was no other way to account for how Christianity had become a major world religion than to suggest that Christianity created concepts such as sin and guilt to cut the rich and powerful down to size.
It was Nietzsche’s suspicion that all human relationships are driven by the desire for power over others. He found Christianity to be especially insidious because, rather than admitting that it desires power over the minds of all humanity, it proclaims itself to be a religion of love. But in fact, Scripture tells us that Christ willingly became powerless so that human beings might know the power of God. Christ set aside the prerogatives of deity to become a servant; He became poor that we might become rich. Perhaps Nietzsche is correct in arguing that human relationships are often governed by the desire for power. However, it is clear that in the encounter between God and man, it is the infinite God who submits Himself to the limitations of humanity.
Sin and Guilt as Human Conventions
One of most disturbing aspects of contemporary culture is the nihilistic worldview of many of our youth. The horrible assault on Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999 revealed how deeply alienated many young people are from society. It is apparent that Harris and Kleybold felt entirely justified in killing their classmates out of a sense of outrage at how they had been treated by the more popular students at school. Incredibly, they were convinced that their heinous act would be glorified in Hollywood and entertained themselves by asking who would portray them in the blockbuster movies that would follow their killing spree. What is especially disturbing is the question of how such sociopathic tendencies arise in a prosperous Colorado suburb.
According to Scripture, human beings are sinners in need of redemption. All of us stand guilty before a holy God and only the shed blood of the sinless Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, can cleanse us from the power and penalty of our sin. Therefore, a guilty conscience can be a positive thing in that it enables us to respond to the gospel message. But in contemporary culture, as Senator Daniel Moynahan has stated, there has been a tendency to "define deviancy down." Acts that were considered immoral or even criminal in the recent past have been accepted as normal, so that our threshold of what is morally acceptable continues to lower. Additionally, in our therapeutic society anything that makes a person feel better about herself is exalted, while feelings of guilt and shame are discouraged. In a certain sense, this thinking is part of the heritage of Nietzsche.
According to Nietzsche, human beings developed a sense of guilt out of the ]financial relationship between a creditor and a debtor.{3} Nietzsche maintained that the similarity between the German words for guilt and debt were indications that financial obligations were the original source of a sense of obligation toward others. Of course, a debtor is obligated to his creditor, and in ancient times the debtor would pledge some form of collateral in case he were unable to repay the debt. This of course gave the creditor power over the debtor, even to the extent that he could inflict cruelty upon the debtor to extract his "pound of flesh." According to Nietzsche, this gave rise to the idea that suffering could balance out our debts and is the basis for the biblical account of Christ’s work of the cross.{4} The problem arose when human beings somehow internalized the original sense of financial obligation, so that what had previously been simply a matter of external punishment evolved into the guilty conscience.
Nietzsche’s contention was that a feeling of guilt is destructive and prevents us from acting in accordance with our noble instincts. But the question is, How can human beings be noble without acknowledging their own limitations? The denial of a sense of guilt, the denial of conscience, inevitably leads to pride and the arrogant assumption that we are accountable to no one. While it would be unjust to suggest that Nietzsche encouraged acts such as the Columbine shootings, it is also clear that Nietzsche recognized that a sense of guilt leads us to conclude that we are accountable to someone else for our actions. Wanting to insure that human beings did not conclude that they were accountable to God for their actions, his only option was to conclude that the guilty conscience is a figment of our imaginations. Unfortunately, incidents such as Columbine are not.
God is Dead! Now We Can Really Live!
Who can forget the famous cover of Time magazine, which asked the question "Is God Dead?" Many people may have dismissed such an absurd question, as if it makes sense to say that the eternal God could pass away. But that is precisely the point. In Nietzsche, the announcement of God’s death is simply to force people to acknowledge that they no longer care about God. He has been removed from His throne by the advancements of science and technology and has little to say to modern man. According to Nietzsche, God choked to death on pity.{5}
On the other hand, Nietzsche claims that we have killed God. It is not that these statements are contradictory, but that Nietzsche viewed "God" as a concept, not as a person. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with Zarathustra setting out to deliver the startling news that God is dead, but his first words are directed to the sun. While to the casual reader this may seem absurd, this is actually a vivid reference to the philosophy of Plato. And according to Nietzsche, Christianity is nothing more than Plato’s philosophy dressed up as a religion. The whole point of Nietzsche’s philosophy is to deliver us from the teachings of Christianity, which he called the "Platonism of the people." Nietzsche believed that both Plato and Christianity overemphasized the distinction between human existence and the realm of eternity; in order to effectively demolish Christianity, he felt it necessary to destroy the foundations of Plato’s philosophy as well.
Plato lived in an era that was concerned about the implications of change. Because Plato denied that we can truly know anything that is changeable, he conceived of an ideal world populated by what he called "forms." The forms were eternal and unchanging models for the objects that we experience every day, and Plato’s concern was with how we can come to know these forms. Part of his answer to that question was his conception of the ultimate form, the form of the Good. The form of the Good is what illumines the soul's understanding, so Plato utilized the sun as the most fitting symbol for this form. Later, some Christian theologians baptized Plato’s philosophy by claiming that the forms were ideas in the mind of God, but what critics like Nietzsche find so disturbing is that both Plato and Christianity seem to place more emphasis on an afterlife than on day-to-day existence. It was his desire that we recognize the value and pleasures of this life, but to do so he completely rejected a transcendent world. The question is whether he is justified in claiming that Christianity denies the validity of this life by focusing solely on a heavenly afterlife.
While it is true that a variety of movements within Christianity, such as the monastics, have devalued earthly existence as a mere prelude to the afterlife, this is a far cry from claiming that Christianity itself is the religious equivalent of Plato's other-worldly philosophy. St. Augustine, who was a devoted student of Plato, claimed that Plato was a valuable tool that helped lead him to Christianity. But the one thing that he found lacking in the Platonists was the teaching of Scripture that in Jesus Christ the Word of God became flesh. God himself has come to live amongst us! The incarnation of God in Christ means that human existence is vitally important. God himself lived as a man. Rather than devaluing life, Christ came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly.
Nietzsche the Prophet?
As we close our examination of Friedrich Nietzsche's thinking and its consequences for Christian faith we should note his conviction that terms such as sin, morality, and God are simply human conventions with no reality supporting them. He hoped to overcome these concepts by taking us back in history to discover how we came to these "erroneous" beliefs. According to Nietzsche, the concept of a God who rewards believers with eternal life has devalued human existence. Consequently, he attempted to devalue any belief associated with a transcendent being or an afterlife and emphasized overcoming Christian standards for morality. His ideal was the overman, unique individuals who were not restrained by what society conceived as right or wrong. The problem is that, when taken to its extreme, his philosophy has been utilized to justify a wide variety of crimes. In 1924, two students at the University of Chicago justified their murder of a twelve-year-old boy by quoting from Nietzsche. And of course, Hitler assumed that Nietzsche's philosophy called for world domination by Germany and the ruthless elimination of all its enemies. Many therefore assume that Nietzsche was some type of proto-Nazi.
Nietzsche would have had little sympathy for Hitler and was not an anti-Semite as some have claimed. These accusations are common, but cannot be the result of actually reading his works. What we can say is that Nietzsche attempted to replace the good news of Jesus Christ with a pseudo-gospel based on the assertion that Christianity was a fabrication that has hindered mankind for centuries. The Bible tells us that Christ has set us free through His atoning work on the cross; Nietzsche insists that such a story is what has placed us in bondage. Like many utopians, Nietzsche denied the inherent sinfulness of the human heart and insisted that the idea of God was what had prevented mankind from reaching its highest potential. Obviously, evangelical Christianity and Nietzsche are in severe disagreement on most subjects.
Still, Nietzsche does have a message for the Christian community. Considering Nietzsche's contempt for Christianity, that would seem to rule him out as a mouthpiece for God. However, we also note that pagan kings such as Cyrus of Persia (Ezra 1:1-4) and Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:34-35) were spokesman for God in particular instances. So to paraphrase John 1:46, "Can anything good come out of Nietzsche?"
Perhaps the most valuable aspect of reading Nietzsche is his emphasis on our motives. Just as Jesus accused the Pharisees for disguising their hardened hearts with outward acts of service and sacrifice, Nietzsche demonstrates keen awareness of the subtle ways we can deceive even ourselves. One of Nietzsche's favorite accusations is that Christians can speak about loving their enemies, but they have also been known to comfort themselves with thoughts of those same enemies roasting in eternal hell-fire. Perhaps then one of the reasons Christians avoid reading Nietzsche is that he can make us feel so uncomfortable. Do we give to the Church out of love for God or perhaps simply for the tax deduction? What about our service in the church? Are we motivated by the applause of man, or by our love for God? The Christian cannot read Nietzsche without feeling challenged on these questions. Rather than simply dismissing his radical critique of Christianity, the church would be well-served to understand how Nietzsche has influenced modern culture, and in turn to reflect on how we can demonstrate the love of God to a dying world.
Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Moralstrans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books: New York, 1967), 33.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 27-28.
3. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 62.
4. Ibid., 65.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954)
©2000 Probe Ministries.
About the Author
Tim Garrett is a former research associate with Probe Ministries. He has a B.A. in religion from George Fox University and an M.A. in the philosophy of religion from Denver Seminary. He served as a youth pastor for several years while in seminary.
What is Probe?
Probe Ministries is a non-profit ministry whose mission is to assist the church in renewing the minds of believers with a Christian worldview and to equip the church to engage the world for Christ. Probe fulfills this mission through our Mind Games conferences for youth and adults, our 3 1/2 minute daily radio program, and our extensive Web site at http://www.probe.org/.
Further information about Probe's materials and ministry may be obtained by contacting us at:
Probe Ministries1900 Firman Drive, Suite 100Richardson, TX 75081(972) 480-0240 FAX (972) 644-9664


Beyond meaning: Laughing at the Abyss
Donald J Allan. Free Inquiry. Buffalo: Winter 2001/2002.Vol.22, Iss. 1; pg. 48, 2 pgs
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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)
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Donald J Allan
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Free Inquiry. Buffalo: Winter 2001/2002. Vol. 22, Iss. 1; pg. 48, 2 pgs
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Abstract (Document Summary)
While in the grip of pessimism, Allan studied the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and began to see Nietzsche's own struggle with pessimism as a central motivating force in his career. For Nietzsche, it doesn't matter how pernicious the world is; he still embraces life and all of existence, even suffering.
Full Text (1886 words)
Copyright Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism Winter 2001/2002
My resentment about life first became conscious in 1994 during my initial intensive period of primal therapy, when I began to delve deeply into my past. In confronting my pain, I discovered feelings of rage buried beneath the surface that I never knew were there. But the rage felt like a positive step toward vitality compared with the gloominess of the depression I had lived with for so many years before.
Had I not accessed those bitter feelings during therapy, I might have been stuck for the rest of my life in the numbness of depression. I found a constructive outlet for my rage through writing. But as I continued to put my rage into words, I became lost in a swamp of pessimism. I tried to find writers who could express what I felt. There in the center of the swamp was Schopenhauer, one of few thinkers with the courage to write the truth as I experienced it:
... children can sometimes seem like innocent delinquents, sentenced not to death but to life, who have not yet discovered what their punishment will consist of.'
For Schopenhauer, the universe is matter in chaos, and life itself is blind and purposeless. I could see that Schopenhauer was right about human existence. Blind will dictates human behavior through unconscious drives. My parents, like millions of other irresponsible humans on the planet, followed the impulses dictated by their neurotransmitters and hormones and conceived me in a reckless act of passion.
Schopenhauer's pessimism nurtured my spirit; I saw myself as part of a community of sufferers. I could see in his writing a synthesis of the emotional and intellectual truths in my life. Yet I wanted more than to live authentically with others who agreed that we are trapped in lives hardly worth living. I could not accept his solution to the human predicament: asceticism and renunciation of will, life, and self.
I kept reading and searching for inspiration, trying to find a way out of the trap called life. Still, I could find no writer who could match Schopenhauer's intellect and courage in speaking the truth of human existence. I started to look at other writers who were influenced by Schopenhauer.
I knew Nietzsche had been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, because several years earlier I had done my master's thesis on Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's metaphysics. But Heidegger Heideggerized Nietzsche-he led me to pay attention to aspects of Nietzsche's thinking that were relevant to his own specialized interests in the history of Being in Western thought. I decided to reexamine Nietzsche to see what Nietzsche had to say about Schopenhauer.
To my surprise, I found that Nietzsche struggled with the issue of Schopenhauer's pessimism in a manner very similar to my own. I began to see Nietzsche's own struggle as a central motivating factor in his career. His reaction against Schopenhauer ignited Nietzsche's passion for life in a way that turned Nietzsche into one of life's greatest champions.
Nietzsche's early view closely paralleled Schopenhauer's. One of the most powerful statements of the pessimistic reality of human existence is contained in section three of The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche tells a Greek fable. For a long time, King Midas hunted the wise demon, Silenus. When the king finally caught Silenus, he asked him what was the best and most desirable thing for all of humankind. At first Silenus was silent, but eventually the king forced him to speak:
Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you-is to die soon.'
This dilemma presented by Silenus-the preference of nothingness over human existence-was my own dilemma. This was the core of my resentment and pessimism.
Yet I was fascinated to see how, later in his career, Nietzsche moved to a position diametrically opposed to Silenus' words. Nietzsche developed a radical affirmation of life which he called amor fati, love of fate:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it ... but to love it.'
For Nietzsche, it doesn't matter how pernicious the world is; he still says "yes" to life and to all of existence. Human greatness demands that suffering be embraced along with life. A great person, a tragic person, is strong enough to accept "even a monstrous amount of suffering."' Unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche sees no reason to turn away from the chaos of a Godless universe; he chooses to embrace this universe, which includes life and all the suffering life causes. Nietzsche jumps into the turmoil of existence with an awareness that says "Yes, I love it!" no matter how great the pain.
He seizes the opportunity to celebrate life and interpret it in a way that will maximize his identification with the power of instinct and blind force. He allows into consciousness the darkest and most terrifying forces of the unconscious, forces most people find necessary to filter out through cultural and moral restraint. The result is a new vision of what human beings can become if they utilize the raw power of the unconscious-a vision that transcends good and evil in ways that are immensely more creative and destructive than what most humans have thus far imagined.
I agree with Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's characterizations of the chaotic universe we inhabit, and I know that to embrace life means to accept the horrendous suffering life causes. Yet I want to minimize suffering, not celebrate it.
I cannot fully embrace amor fati because I suspect this bold idea may be the product of an unhealthy mind struggling to maintain its sanity Nietzsche suffered from a variety of painful ailments throughout his life, and eventually collapsed in madness in 1889 at the age of forty-five; he died in 1900 without ever recovering his sanity. But during his productive years, he was almost certainly incapable of changing some aspect of his social life and his living conditions, so instead he invented-on a grand scale-a new way to adapt mentally to his circumstances. Amor fati is the triumphant attitude of a human being backed into a corner-"Ah, but I love this corner, and there's nothing you can do to make me hate it!"
Still, I must consider whether Nietzsche has recognized a truth I find hard to admit-that suffering cannot be separated from life itself, and that the celebration of life necessarily means acceptance of horrendous suffering for much of humankind. And, perhaps for me, depending on what fate dishes out.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche does not provide an easy way out of the swamp of pessimism. Attempting to dismiss Schopenhauer along with all of Western metaphysics, Nietzsche assigns life the status formerly occupied by God. This deification of life is theological thinking despite the absence of the word God. Here, Nietzsche is just as blindly theological as Schopenhauer's ascetic renunciation of life and will. Why accept life as our fate, which we are supposed to love without question?
Nietzsche presumes that nonexistence, nothingness, has no value, but I see value in nothingness as an alternative to life. Choice creates value. The choice between life and nothingness is simple in principle: if life consists primarily in suffering, why endure it? Exit quickly, and leave life to those who choose to continue the struggle, or those who have better odds of reaping joy and minimizing the pain.
In fact, human beings rarely give nothingness fair consideration as a way out of suffering, because nature stacks the deck against choosing nothingness. Like every living organism human beings are the product of more than three billion years of selection for the will to live. Each of us is biologically programmed to put up with a great deal of suffering before considering suicide as a last resort.
Nevertheless, understanding the subtlety and extent of our programming for the will to live might help us make more informed decisions about how much suffering to tolerate before choosing nothingness. In my view, this is the real ethical foundation underlying the assisted suicide movement inspired by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. It seems to me to be cruel for a society to impose its values on an individual when those values dictate that the individual's suffering must be prolonged.
My view of nothingness as an alternative to life has important implications for the choice about whether or not to have children. When circumstances indicate that a child is likely to have a life of great suffering and little joy, the choice is clear: allow the child to remain in nothingness. No child should be forced into a world of suffering.
Because I recognize value in nonexistence as an antidote to human suffering, I feel miles away from Nietzsche on this issue. But given that my own suffering has not forced me to choose nothingness over life, I have found inspiration in a different aspect of Nietzsche's thinking that examines what is to be valued most highly
Confrontation with the truth of human existence leads to the edge of a cliff, staring into the jaws of an abyss which seems to have no bottom and no other side. Nietzsche's words characterize the predicament: "The deeper one looks, the more our valuations disappear-meaninglessness approaches!"5 But here, in stark confrontation with meaninglessness, he points the way out of the swamp of pessimism:
We have created the world that possesses values! Knowing this, we know, too, that reverence for truth is already the consequence of an illusion-and that one should value more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents.6
What has ultimate value is not truth but human creativitythe force that "forms, simplifies, shapes, invents." In a world lacking in inherent meaning, we choose what to invest with meaning and value. We are all artists, masters of a boundless creative endeavor from which there is no escape (unless we choose nothingness).
I admire Nietzsche's spirit, a spirit that comes wholly from within. His life and work embody for me the spirit of human creativity In a twist of irony, I see him walking along the edge of the cliff-the most sure-footed, the sanest, and the most joyful of human beings-laughing at the abyss. He beckons us, and says in a clear voice for all to hear, "How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit dare?" Those who walk the edge with Nietzsche may find there is no answer but creativity itself.
[Footnote]
Notes
[Footnote]
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1970), p. 47.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 1993), n. 3.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. ft.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 68.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), n. 1052.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, T]he Will to Power, n. 602.
6. Ibid.