NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, ANDTHE NATURE OF GOD

BENJAMIN D. CROWE

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

In this essay, I treat of a type of moral objection to Christian theism that is formulatedby Friedrich Nietzsche. In an effort to provoke a negative moral-aesthetic response tothe conception of God underlying the Christian tradition, with the ultimate aim ofrecommending his own allegedly ‘healthier’ ideals, Nietzsche presents a number ofdistinct but related considerations. In particular, he claims that the traditionaltheological interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus expresses the tasteless, vulgar,and morally objectionable character of God, thus rendering Him unworthy of belief.In response to Nietzsche’s worries, I first of all argue that his account of the origins ofthe belief in God is both prima facie implausible and historically false. At the sametime I recognize that Nietzsche is expressing, in his typically bombastic manner, agenuine and widely held worry about what the crucifixion, as an event in salvationhistory, says about the nature of God. In response to this worry, I draw on the work ofWilhelm Dilthey in order to support the contention that the concept of divinetranscendence, which underlies Nietzsche’s concern, has its proper place within theGreek metaphysical tradition, rather than in Christian faith. Building on the work ofFranz Rosenzweig and Jurgen Moltmann, I outline a conception of God that moreaccurately reflects the claim that the cross is the definitive revelation of the divinenature while at the same time foreclosing on the possibility of the kind of responsethat Nietzsche articulates.

‘Atheism cannot be taken seriously enough. [. . .]. Only at the abyss of atheismdo we have to learn to fly’.1

Among the varieties of worries about Christian theism, two generaltypes can be distinguished. The first might be termed evidentialist.Evidentialist worries turn on the strictly epistemicmerits (or lack thereof)of Christianity. The question here is a variation on the following: arethere reasons sufficient enough to warrant believing in the basic claims ofthe Christian religion? The second sort of worry might be called moral.Historically, Roman apologists for paganism were the first to level thesesorts of charges against Christianity in a systematic way. More recently,one reads Marx and Feuerbach worrying about the ‘otherwordliness’ ofChristianity, either on account of its deleterious effects on human self-improvement, or for its abuse by those who possess economic andpolitical power.

r The author 2007. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2007. Published byBlackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ,UKand 350Main Street,Malden,MA 02148, USA.

HeyJ XLVIII (2007), pp. 243–259

In this essay, I am concerned with a worry that belongs to this lattertype. It is explicitly formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, who is troubledby, and who wants us also to be troubled by, the nature of God astraditionally conceived by Christian theists. An immediate difficulty forassessing this worry is Nietzsche’s philosophical style, which occupies ahazy middle ground between pure philosophical argumentation andrhetoric. That is, he produces considerations tending towards aconclusion (like a philosopher), but his ultimate goal is, in many cases,to provoke a sense of moral or aesthetic revulsion (like a skilled orator).2

This reaction is intended by Nietzsche to help one along the way towardsforming a judgment, namely, that the Jewish-Christian-Platonic traditionis ‘unhealthy’ and ought to be replaced by a new set of fundamentalvalues. Nietzsche maintains that the standard theological interpretationof the crucifixion of Jesus exemplifies a general problem with the nature ofGod as conceived by Christian theists. His worry is not, in this instance,that there is insufficient evidence for believing in the God worshipped byChristians, but rather that He is not worth believing in.

In response to Nietzsche’s worry, I argue the following. First, one ofthe principal strategies that Nietzsche uses to motivate moral revulsionagainst God does not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, theunderstanding of ancient Hebrew religion that plays a large role in thisargument is at once deeply implausible, demonstrably false, andconceptually confused. Nietzsche’s bombast does, however, express adeeper worry that could be expressed in more sober terms and whichdeserves consideration by sincere Christians. The deeper worry is that theconception of God as a distant, monarchial judge is morally objection-able. Thus, my second response to Nietzschean worries is to sketch out aconception of the divine nature that not only avoids these objectionablequalities but also accords more closely with the truths of Biblical religion.

1. NIETZSCHE ON THE CRUCIFIXION

Nietzsche’s polemics against all things Christian are scattered throughoutvirtually all of his writings. His overarching concern is with Christianityas an instantiation of the ‘ascetic’ ideal, i.e., of an unhealthy psychologicaltype characterized by unfulfilled longings for revenge and by the denial oflife. Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity are not so much concerned withthe rationality of Christian theism, as with the alleged psychological,social, and moral damage wrought by the ascetic ideal on Europe. Theultimate hope is to replace this deleterious system with a new, more‘healthy’ ideal. One of Nietzsche’s principal strategies for affecting thesegoals is to attack the conception of God that lies at the very center of theJewish-Christian tradition. Nietzsche’s intuition here is, no doubt, a

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sound one; if it can be shown that there is a problem with God, then thewhole system falls under suspicion.

As is the case in Nietzsche’s work as a whole, it is difficult to discernany one clear line of argument that tends towards the conclusions hedesires. This is mostly a function of Nietzsche’s philosophical style, whichemploys disconnected aphorisms and historical observations in anattempt to blast away at whatever idea or system of ideas he happensto be critiquing. That said, with respect to at least some of Nietzsche’sattacks on Christianity, there is clearly a general strategy at work. Thestrategy is to arouse moral and aesthetic revulsion towards the notion ofGod that underwrites the whole system of Christian life. For Nietzsche,the problem is not so much with the rationality (or lack thereof) ofChristian belief, as with its moral or practical effects on human life.Because of this concern, Nietzsche employs strategies for evoking moralattitudes.3 Three such specific strategies can be discerned in two of hismost important anti-theistic works, The Gay Science (1882) and theappropriately titled Antichrist (1888).

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s famous madman trumpets the ‘deathof God’, earning the author a justifiable place within the pantheon ofatheistic thinkers. In this work, one finds a potent mixture of arguments,historical observations, bare assertions, and intemperate jeremiads, alldesigned to provoke passion every bit as much as reason. Three clearstrategies emerge in the course of his discussion. First, Nietzsche presentsa rough ‘genealogy’ of the Jewish-Christian tradition as a whole, drawingan explicit contrast between the healthy psychology of ‘Greek antiquity’and its antipode, a ressentiment-infected psychology that he characterizesas ‘too Jewish’ and ‘too Oriental’.4 The clear thrust of this roughhistorical outline is aimed at arousing (at the very least) our suspicionsabout a system with such an unsavory pedigree.

A second strategy utilized by Nietzsche is to highlight certain featuresof the conception of God as worthy of suspicion. Here, it is not so muchthe origins of the conception that make it problematic; rather, the worryis that there is something simply offensive (morally) or tasteless about theconception itself. Hence, Nietzsche writes: ‘What is now decisive againstChristianity is our taste, no longer our reasons’.5 What is it that Nietzschefinds so tasteless? It is the assumption of a ‘powerful, overpowering beingwho enjoys revenge’.6

Notable here is Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Christian conceptionof God as analogous to the classical conception of a monarch. The accenthere is clearly on God’s transcendence, on His remoteness fromhumanity, except when it comes to His own honor. ‘Sin’ and ‘repentance’,then, are concepts that have their place in a celestial version of theusual protocols of court. For Nietzsche, the Jewish world, shaped as itwas by these ideas, was a depressing landscape ‘over which the gloomyand sublime thundercloud of the wrathful Jehovah was brooding

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continually’.7 Such is the conception of God as Nietzsche finds it. Such isthe conception of a being that Nietzsche finds not only tasteless but alsounlovable. ‘Wrathful Jehovah’ is simply not worth believing in forNietzsche:

If God wanted to become an object of love, he should have given up judg-ing and justice first of all; a judge, even a merciful judge, is no object of love.8

A third strategy that can be detected in The Gay Science involves thesuggestion that believing in such a being as God has deleterious effects onhumanity. OnNietzsche’s reading, the idea of a remote monarch obsessedwith His own honor seems to warrant ‘[c]ontrition, degradation, rolling inthe dust’ as the only proper responses. Unlike the ‘healthy’ Greeks, whowere willing to recognize the occasional utility of sacrilege vis-a-vishuman interests, the ‘unhealthy’ Jews, and their spiritual descendents,opted instead for an ideological system of self-laceration and contrition.9

In The Gay Science, then, Nietzsche attempts to undermine the Judeo-Christian tradition and its ascetic ideals by targeting the conception ofGod that lies at the very heart of this tradition. He employs threespecifiable strategies to achieve this end: (1) ‘genealogy’, i.e. acombination of historical reflection and psychological explanation; (2)assertions designed to highlight the morally or aesthetically objectionablefeatures of the conception of God by itself; and (3) claims that belief insuch a God is somehow or other harmful to humanity as a whole.

Nietzsche revisits some of these issues later on in his aptly titledcollection of aphorisms, The Antichrist (1888). Unlike in The Gay Science,Nietzsche zeroes in on the crucifixion of Jesus and its usual theologicalinterpretations. In the passages I will consider here, the object of hisattack is the conception of God that is employed in these interpretations.The genius of Nietzsche’s critique lies in the fact that it takes aim at thevery heart of Christianity, i.e., its understanding of God. The claim is thatthe conception of God as a transcendent judge is the expression of theflawed psychology of a group that Nietzsche calls ‘priests’. The‘genealogical’ account that is only alluded to in The Gay Science is morefully developed in The Antichrist. The account proceeds in the followingway. First, Nietzsche asserts that a people’s original notion of God issimply a notion of themselves, of ‘the strength of a people’, of ‘everythingaggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people’.10 When, however, aparticular people (e.g., the Jews) are subjected to the cruel vicissitudes ofgeopolitics, there is a subtle shift in the conception of God. Now, insteadof a God who affirms the ‘healthy’ instincts of a people, there is the ‘godwho demands [. . .]’.11 Nietzsche suggests that this conception of God wasdevised by the ‘priests’ as a way of maintaining their power in light of thetransformed situation of their people. The ‘healthy’ God is replaced now

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with a ‘stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, andpunishment; of piety before Yahweh, and reward’.12

On this account, this priestly psychology reasserts itself in Christianityin an even more nefarious form in the way in which the death of Jesuscame to be understood after the fact. According to Nietzsche, Jesus’sdeath was a foregone conclusion, given that he had decisively challengedand then broken with the whole ‘priestly’ economy of ‘repentance andreconciliation’.13 ‘All evidence is lacking’, says Nietzsche, ‘however oftenit has been claimed, that he died for the guilt of others’.14

The ultimate fate of this ‘correct’ understanding of Jesus’s life was,however, sealed by the event of the cross. His disciples remained and they,quite naturally, sought to understand what had happened. Unfortu-nately, they apparently lacked Jesus’s magnanimous freedom from thepoison of ressentiment.15 Hence, the ‘priestly’ move was made again:

[. . .] it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him fromthemselves – precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against theirenemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him.16

It is important to note here that Nietzsche locates the ultimate problemin the conception of God’s transcendence. In so doing, his complaintechoes the work of Feuerbach, who had in turn drawn inspiration fromHegel’s well-known analysis of the ‘unhappy consciousness’.17 UnlikeHegel or Feuerbach, Nietzsche offers a historical-psychological explana-tion of divine transcendence in terms of ressentiment. His point seems tobe that, when the ‘healthy’ idea of God is altered in this way, an ideal ofimpossible justice is erected along with it. Indeed, he seems to regarddivine transcendence as a necessary condition for the latter. Once thisoccurs, the ‘healthy’ human instinct for self-assertion is perverted into an‘unhealthy’ form of self-laceration. In the case of Jesus, this tendencyultimately triumphs over his own alleged Feuerbachian denial of ‘anycleavage between God and man’.18 It was thus that the cross became, forNietzsche, a symbol of everything tasteless, wanton, and barbarous:

And from now on, an absurd problem emerged: ‘How could God permit this?’To this the deranged reason of the small community found an altogetherhorribly absurd answer: God have his son for the remission of sins, as asacrifice. In one stroke, it was all over for the evangel! The trespass offering – inits most revolting, most barbarous form at that, the sacrifice of the guiltless forthe sins of the guilty! What gruesome paganism!19

On Nietzsche’s view, the meaning of Jesus’s death was co-opted by thediseased ‘priestly’ mind, characterized by an obsession with propitiating atranscendent God of impossible justice. Thus, according to Nietzsche, thetheological reading of the crucifixion reveals the lack of belief-worthinessof the Christian God, and so undermines the entire theological edifice thatrests upon belief in such a God. In both The Gay Science (1882) and The

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Antichrist (1888), Nietzsche’s strategy is to evoke a moral or emotionalresponse to the idea of God within the Jewish-Christian tradition. This isclearly not the same approach that is sometimes employed by classicalevidentialist objectors to Christian theism. Nietzsche nowhere suggeststhat there is insufficient evidence for believing that God exists. Instead, heemploys a battery of specifiable strategies all designed to evoke moralrevulsion towards the God of Christian belief. His ultimate aim, ofcourse, is to overthrow the last vestiges of the cultural and intellectualhegemony of the Christian tradition in the name of a higher state ofhuman existence. Nietzsche’s ideal of a ‘higher type’ is not, however, mymain concern. I am interested in his more proximate goal, which is simplythe arousal of moral revulsion against God. Nietzsche tries to achieve thisby (1) exposing the flawed psychology at the roots of Christianity, (2)highlighting the tasteless or morally problematic aspects of the concept ofGod itself, and (3) decrying the human costs of holding to belief in such aGod. For Nietzsche, the most startling demonstration of the flaws in theconcept of God is the traditional theological interpretation of thecrucifixion of Jesus. Since this is, of course, the core of Christian theism(as opposed to Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu varieties thereof), my responseto Nietzsche will be particularly focused on the meaning of the cross.

2. ANSWERING THE ANTICHRIST

Nietzsche’s target is the idea that God is dangerous, unapproachable,inclined to wrath and to extra-judicial killing. At the same time,conformity to the will of God is the only way that human beings canhope to escape God’s wrath as manifested in all manner of human andnatural disasters. God’s impossible justice is a function of Histranscendence. To put it differently, the transcendence of God impliesthat God’s justice surpasses anything that human beings could ever hopeto achieve. God is, quite simply, unavailable to normal human ways ofsettling accounts. The upshot is that God, by His very nature, puts a claimon rational beings to conform to His justice. But this justice is animpossible justice, and the claim is one that cannot be fulfilled. Hence,there arises the need for a mediator, for someone who can ‘take the heat’for humanity as it were, for a being that puts a gentler face on God so thathuman beings might approach Him. Thus, divine transcendence seems toentail one of two equally worrisome outcomes: (1) humanity, inherentlyunable to fulfill God’s impossible justice, is nonetheless condemned byGod, or (2) an innocent person must suffer a cruel death so that God’simpossible demand for justice might be fulfilled.

As the debate has been framed so far, God in Himself is still self-sufficient, all-powerful, and just. And his justice seems to be an impossiblejustice. More worryingly, this justice does not seem like justice at all, for it

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issues in the condemnation, torture, and murder of an innocent man.Even if one does not go this far, there are still plenty of things to worryabout here. For example, one might suggest that the surrender of Jesus todeath is a mere expedient, and that a God who adopts such a method iswell worth wondering about. Nietzsche’s worry, however, is that the verynature of God, as expressed in the traditional interpretation of Jesus’sdeath, is morally or aesthetically revolting.

I now want to argue that Christian theists have no particular cause foralarm when faced with Nietzsche’s entertaining yet vitriolic fusillades. Myargument will proceed in two stages: (1) first, I will deal with some of thedetails of Nietzsche’s own strategy for evoking moral-aesthetic revulsionagainst God, and (2) then I will dig a bit deeper into a consideration of away of thinking about God which undergirds Nietzsche’s strategy.

As I have already described, Nietzsche tells his own particular storyabout the roots of divine transcendence. While this story is similar to thatpreviously told by Feuerbach, in that divine transcendence is rejected onthe grounds of its deleterious effects on human life, it is much closer inspirit to the version later offered by Freud, which locates the roots of theconcept of a transcendent God in a neurotic psychology.20 Nietzsche’sversion of the story is that the idea of a transcendent God betrays thetriumph of the ‘priestly’ type over healthy self-promotion of primitivepeoples, in that this concept makes possible a deleterious sort of penitentialreligiosity. I think that there is something to be said for the worry that‘God’ is often a term that functions as an expression of revenge-fantasiesand control-fetishes. However, aside from its wit, Nietzsche’s ‘argument’ isalso notable for its deep implausibility. The claim that a secret conspiracyof world-denying priests lies at the origins of an entire culture seems to bethe sort of claim which, when judged by the immanent standards ofhistoriography that are appropriate in this case, fares poorly.

Moreover, a long-standing consensus among scholars of the HebrewBible suggests that the heart of Nietzsche’s argument is simply mistaken.Recall that, according to Nietzsche, the notions of ‘sin’, ‘atonement’, and‘sacrifice’ were the creations of a sick priesthood that wanted to assertcontrol over a people that had been conquered and pillaged by strongerneighbors. The scholarly consensus is that the earliest text of the HebrewBible, the so-called ‘Yahwist’ document, was written during the tenthcentury before the Common Era, during the peak of the Davidicmonarchy.21 This document was clearly not the product of a defeatedpeople. More damningly, one quickly notices that it makes free andfrequent use of concepts like ‘sin’, ‘atonement’, and ‘sacrifice’. As theearliest textual witness to the history, culture, and religion of ancientIsrael, the ‘Yahwist’ text seems to refute Nietzsche’s claim that the primal,‘healthy’ religion of a vigorous people was betrayed by priests whointroduced notions like ‘sin’, ‘atonement’, and ‘sacrifice’. For example,the Bible’s earliest mention of sacrifice occurs in this source, viz., in the

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story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:1–16). Similarly, large portions of theFlood narrative cycle, in which punishment for sin is clearly a recurringtheme, come from this very early stratum. The same is true for the story ofthe destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18–19).22

Nietzsche’s strategy is also undermined by his misunderstanding of theancient sacrificial cult in Israel. This misunderstanding involves theconflation of two distinct concepts: (1) propitiation, and (2) atonement.According to Nietzsche, the twisted genius of the priests was to constructa view of God such that a servile populace would contribute to thelivelihood of the elite by making propitiatory sacrifices. Propitiation is anaction aimed at deflecting the anger or displeasure of someone in aposition of power. Atonement, on the other hand, is an action aimed atrestoring a relationship that has suffered some kind of rupture by meansof self-sacrifice. Israel’s sacrificial cult clearly falls under the heading ofthe latter concept. Contrary to Nietzsche’s animadversions, it seems thatatonement is a perfectly healthy way of repairing a broken relationship.To atone, one gives of oneself, or offers up something of value, as a meansof overcoming the alienation that has crept into a relationship. For anancient agricultural people, offering up the fruits of the land or one’slivestock involved relinquishing something of almost inestimable value,and so clearly is an act of self-sacrifice. Israel’s sacrificial cult is bestunderstood as a matter of atonement, one that presupposes not the threatof divine wrath, but rather the pre-existing covenantal relationshipbetween God and His people.

While I think that Nietzsche’s story about divine transcendence anddivine justice is clearly wrong, I nevertheless want to grant thatNietzsche’s general worry about the crucifixion is worth taking seriously.While the priestly conspiracy theory is both prima facie implausible andhistorically false, the notion of God as a transcendent being who demandsimpossible justice is very much a part of the tradition that Nietzsche andothers like him are criticizing. The crucifixion, as a glaring example ofinnocent suffering brought on by impossible divine justice, still stands as a‘rock of offense’. However, it might be urged that there are plenty of waysof responding to the problem of innocent suffering from within a theisticframework. For example, one could offer a traditional ‘‘greater good’’type of defense. Thus, when Hume, for example, suggests that a God ablebut unwilling to avert suffering is malevolent, one might reply that thebalance of goods and ills linked to the crucifixion in particular makes thecharge null.23 Good reasoning notwithstanding, there still remains formany the strong intuition that a properly sensitive, moral, and rationalperson cannot help but rebel against the spectacle of innocent sufferingimpelled onwards by divine logic. Moreover, it seems hard to fully acceptthe claim that a balance of goods and ills will really help such a person toovercome her revulsion for a God who demands such evil. Indeed, onemight even laud such a person for having such a reaction, and rightly so.

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Alvin Plantinga has recently made a similar point.24 As he correctlyrecognizes, the real issue here is not that of leading people to a reasonedconclusion, but rather of eliciting an emotional response. Such aprocedure is a legitimate part of everyday moral reasoning. This isexactly what Nietzsche does. Recall that it is taste, rather than reason,which revolts against the spectacle of the crucified Christ. For Plantinga,and no doubt for many others, it is, however, precisely because aChristian has faith in a God who reveals Himself in the shame of the crossthat she is able to resist a Nietzschean reaction.

It is, then, what the crucifixion ultimately says about the nature of Godthat is the heart of the issue. If Nietzsche is right about God’s uttertranscendence and impossible justice, then his reaction to the crucifixionstill seems reasonable. Nietzsche’s case can, however, be significantlyweakened by getting a handle on just where his conception of the divinenature comes from and why it might be the case that Christian theists areunder no compulsion to take this conception on board. Understandingwhere a deeply held idea comes from is often a good way to go aboutloosening its grip on the mind. In some cases, it might also uncoversomething about the inappropriateness of this idea in certain theoreticalcontexts. Indeed, this is the sort of ‘genealogical’ strategy that Nietzschehimself famously employs. In what follows, I want to turn this strategyagainst Nietzsche by offering a more plausible ‘genealogy’ of theconception of God’s transcendence, one which will, I hope, show thatthere is little reason for a Christian to hold to the view of God thatmotivates Nietzsche’s concerns. Once we see where Nietzsche’s Goddraws life, we can see that Christian theists have no reason to believe insuch a being. Moreover, it becomes clear that a God whose naturepermits Him to suffer can avoid Nietzschean disgust.

My account here will be assisted by, in the first instance, WilhelmDilthey (1833–1911), an intellectual historian who, at least in this case,gets the story right. According to Dilthey, the project of working out asystematic, speculative metaphysics has its roots in the work of the IonianGreeks.25 As Dilthey tells the story, metaphysics was born at the twilightof a period dominated by mythical ways of thinking.26 The ‘coherence’ ofthe picture of the world possessed during this period was graduallyeroded, and the task was now to articulate a new basis for conceiving of it.The Ionian natural philosophers, then, tried to construct a picture ofreality be tracing back to a primal ‘first cause’, a primeval ‘nature’ thatgenerates the totality of the cosmos as an ordered whole of appearances.During this early period, various candidates for the primal nature of theuniverse still had something of a mythic quality.27 At the same time, theseprinciples, and the natural order itself, came to exert a kind of conceptualhegemony that, at least amongst philosophers, replaced the capriciousinterventions of the lusty Olympians. One result was a family of viewsthat can be called ‘philosophical monotheism’.28

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Dilthey goes on to attempt a reconstruction of the ‘inner law’ thatguided the development in ancient Greek metaphysics.29 The first stage isthe awareness that the totality of worldly phenomena are caught up in aceaseless process of ‘arising and passing away’. ‘Just as clouds seem toform in the sky and then pass away, so too do individual things. In Greekmyth, the gods themselves were generated in time’.30 In this temporalplay, Greek thinkers could locate no ‘fixed point’, that is, nothing thatcould plausibly fulfill the role of the ‘primal stuff’ that both generates andarranges the cosmos. In a world increasingly conceived as orderly, thegods had less and less of a role to play.31 There was, in effect, a kind ofnaturalization of thought: ‘The whole content of the highest feelings,religious life, moral consciousness, the feeling of beauty and of the infinitevalue of the world were now themselves present within this world-nexus.All the properties that religious and moral life had ascribed to the gods,now fell to this cosmic order’.32 Yet, this order, as clearly present in themovements of celestial bodies as in the organized forms of human society,seems to require an explanation. The traditional gods, as inhabitants ofthe cosmos, could themselves no longer provide this explanation. Hence,something transcendent was required. For some ancient thinkers, thesereflections took on a decidedly theological cast. This is particularly true,Dilthey notes, in the case of Xenophanes. For him, it is ‘impious’ toimagine the death of the divine, and yet, whatever exists in time must bothcome to be and pass away. ‘Therefore, an eternal and unchanging statusmust be ascribed to divinity’.33 Similarly, an awareness of the ‘power andcompleteness’ of divinity is incompatible with a multiplicity of gods.Hence, the eternal god must also be singular.

Elsewhere, Dilthey urges us to consider the possibility that the conceptof God in Xenophanes, and in other thinkers with similar views, such asAristotle, has little to do with religion. This claim is set within the contextof Dilthey’s more general rejection of what he calls ‘metaphysics’. Theproblem with metaphysics, as Dilthey sees it, is summarized quite clearlyin this passage:

A metaphysics is consistent only when it is, as its form dictates, a rationalscience, i.e., when it seeks a logical world-system. Rational science was thus thebackbone, as it were, of European metaphysics. But the feeling of life of agenuine and vigorous individual and the richness of the world given him cannotbe exhausted in the logical system of a universally valid science.34

On Dilthey’s view, religion, as a personal experience, does not sufferfrom the defect of negating the immediate reality of life in the way thatmetaphysics does. Nonetheless, religion has been historically ‘compro-mised’ by metaphysics. ‘The mixture of Christianity with ancient scienceaffected the purity of religious experience’.35 Dilthey relates how ‘eachmetaphysics has had to contend with the protest of religious experience,which is clearly rooted in the will, from the first Christian mystics who

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opposed medieval metaphysics – and were no poorer Christians on thataccount – to Tauler and Luther’.36 The ultimate reason for these protests,according to Dilthey, lies in the very nature of metaphysics itself.Metaphysics, from its very origins in ancient Greece, has always been theproject of mastering reality through theoretical reason. Aristotle’s ‘firstphilosophy’ is a prime example. This is a science that attempts to graspthe primary causes or principles that ground the whole of reality.Metaphysics is the quest for an ‘ultimate unconditioned framework’.37

On Dilthey’s view, such a project is bound to unearth only what conformsto ‘logical necessity’, thus ‘there exists for it neither the God of religionnor the experience of freedom’.38

To summarize Dilthey’s account, for the ancient Greeks, thetranscendence of God was defined in a strict sense in order to avoid theflaws inherent in older mythical ways of thinking. The ultimate purpose,however, was to ground an autonomous construction of reality as anordered cosmos. The concept called ‘god’ by Xenophanes and Aristotlehas absolutely nothing to do with the archaic nature religions of theGreeks, nor with the civic cults of their city-states. This concept was nevermeant to play the role that the gods did in traditional Greek life inantiquity. This is clear from the fact that traditional polytheism coexistedquite comfortably for centuries alongside this sort of philosophicalmonotheism. As has been frequently noted, these essentially Greek ideas(i.e., philosophical monotheism) had a profound impact on the way inwhich Christian theological reflection cam to formulate its own ideasabout the nature of God. For the Greek mind, there must be a radicalseparation between God, eternal and self-sufficient, and everything finiteand mortal. Were it no so, then the notion of ‘god’ could not play themetaphysical role that it was meant to play for the Greeks.

Dilthey’s story seems entirely plausible, particularly the portion of itconcerned with the unhappy fit between religion and ‘metaphysics’. TheBible testifies to the uneasiness of the link between the two (Colossians2:8, 1 Corinthians 1:19ff., Romans 1:19–22). As Dilthey has noted, thisunease has occasionally blown up into outright hostility in the work ofpeople like Luther and Pascal. Other figures, not mentioned by Dilthey,like Kierkegaard or Barth, provide similar testimony to this fact. Giventhe plausibility of Dilthey’s story, it is reasonable to conclude that theinterests of theoretical reason are, if not incompatible, at least clearlydistinct from those of religious proclamation.39

How does this discussion of intellectual history relate to Nietzsche-type worries? Recall that, on Nietzsche’s reading, the traditionalinterpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus expresses an underlyingconception of God that is morally and aesthetically problematic, i.e.the conception of a remote monarch whose immutable will demandsimpossible justice. However, given the story that I have traced out in thepreceding pages, the conception of God as remote and incapable of

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suffering that underlies Nietzsche’s reaction may have no real purchaseon the nature of God as expressed by the Bible. In other words, Christiantheists, qua Christian theists, are in no way committed to conceiving ofthe nature of God as remote, transcendent, indifferent, or incapable ofsuffering, all features of ‘god’ on Greek philosophical monotheism.40

Indeed, pace Nietzsche, the crucifixion of Jesus, if interpreted as anevent in salvation history, clearly presents an incompatibility between thenature of God on philosophical monotheism and the nature of God onBiblical religion. Jurgen Moltmann has expressed this worry, in theprocess diagnosing the underlying source of the sort of reaction Nietzschehas to a particular conception of God:

The ability to identify God with Christ’s passion becomes feeble in proportionto the weight that is given to the ‘apathetic’ axiom in the doctrine of God. IfGod is incapable of suffering, then – if we are to be consistent – Christ’s passioncan only be viewed as a human tragedy. For the person who can only seeChrist’s passion as the suffering of the good man from Nazareth, God isinevitably bound to become the cold, silent, and unloved heavenly power. Butthat would be the end of Christian faith.41

In the work of Moltmann, and in that of one of his inspirations, FranzRosenzweig, one can discern an attempt to conceive of the divine naturenot on the model of Greek philosophical monotheism but rather in a waythat remains more faithful to the religious life of Jews and Christians overthe millennia.42 My claim here is not that such a conception can do all thework needed to adequately respond to Nietzsche, nor that moretraditional conceptions of the divine nature held, for example, by theThomistic tradition, cannot provide good grounds for a response toNietzsche. What I am claiming is that the sort of conception worked outby Moltmann and Rosenzweig can easily evade the Nietzschean reactionthat I sketched out at the beginning of the paper.

On Rosenzweig’s account, God is a being defined by relationships.43

God manifests Himself first of all in the act of creation, and then in theevent of revelation. Rosenzweig contends that this can only be renderedintelligible by applying the concept of love. ‘Only the love of a lover issuch a continually renewing self-sacrifice; it is only he who gives himselfaway in love. [. . .]. So God loves too’.44 That is, according to Rosenzweig,God’s actions of creation and revelation are only intelligible if God isconceived of as a being who surrenders himself, who puts himself, as itwere, at the disposal of another.

In a lecture on the ‘science’ of God, Rosenzweig suggests that werethink the common philosophical way of conceiving of divinetranscendence. God, he suggests, must be ‘more than eternal’.45 ‘Goddecided to become the God of the human being and of the world, the Godof temporality’. God ‘renounced’ His eternity in the face of creation.Hence, Rosenzweig thinks that it makes perfect sense to say, as the Bible

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so often does, that ‘God repents, God loves, God gets angry, He rejoices,mocks, laughs, wants, desires, hears, sees, scrutinizes, tries and so on[. . .]’.46 It is only with respect to the pagan ‘god’ of onto-theology thatthese predicates seem to be misapplied. In renouncing His eternity inorder to become the God of creation, God has become, in effect, morethan eternal.

Moltmann develops a similar line of argument, though within thecontext of a Trinitarian theology. Indeed, Moltmann contends that it isonly within such a context that one can make sense of God suffering onthe cross.47 He roots his Trinitarianism, first of all, in the claim that ‘Godis love’ (1 John 4:16). Because ‘love cannot be consummated by a solitarysubject’, the nature of God must itself involve ‘self-differentiation’.48 But,beyond this inner differentiation in the divine life itself, Moltmanncontends that ‘It is in accordance with the love which is God that heshould fashion a creation which he rejoices over, and call to life his Other,man, as his image, who responds to him’.49 As he puts it later on in thediscussion, ‘Creation is a fruit of God’s longing for ‘‘his Other’’ and forthat Other’s free response to the divine love’.50 Creation exists, then,because God, as eternal self-communicating love, seeks a true Other thatcan respond in freedom.

Moltmann goes on to argue that, with the creation of a world that isreally distinct from God, God begins a process of ‘self-humiliation’.51

That is to say, God must ‘make room’, as it were, for something that isgenuinely distinct fromHis own eternal being. Only a suffering love, i.e. anon-coercive love, can adequately respect the freedom of the non-divineOther. God has to endure the non-responsiveness of His creation, for Hisdesire is for a freely given reciprocity. Moltmann puts it this way:

Freedom can only be made possible by suffering love. The suffering of Godwith the world, the suffering of God from the world, and the suffering of Godfor the world are the highest forms of his creative love, which desires freefellowship with the world and free response in the world.52

The most blatant declaration of God’s suffering love for creation is, atleast for Christians, precisely the crucifixion of Jesus. Considered throughthe lens of ‘philosophical monotheism’, however, this event can only beviewed as, at best, a tragedy, and, at worst, a tasteless, wanton expressionof a diseased conception of God. Recall that for Nietzsche, it is not somuch that reason compels us to withhold assent from belief in God, butrather that the heart compels us to turn away from the cruelty of a Godwho in the end is not worth believing in. I have suggested that this worryis rendered more plausible by an entrenched way of thinking about God,one rooted not in a dubious psycho-history, but in the facts of intellectualhistory. On the standard picture, God is utterly transcendent and iseternally self-sufficient. At the same time, God both created the world andis somehow involved in human affairs. God stands, then, in a variety of

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relationships to a reality that is both wholly dependent on Him, andultimately indifferent to Him qua God.

One of the relations in which God, though sufficient unto Himself, issaid to stand vis-a-vis the world, is that of a perfect lawgiver. For mosttheists, who are not also deists, there is a certain way that God wantsthings to go in the moral sphere. The perennial difficulty, of course, is thatthe world in general, and human beings in particular, seem to be poorperformers. And yet God’s will is still there, immutable and unalterable.Nietzsche’s ultimate problem is that a God who is transcendent in thisway is a God of impossible justice. Everyone admits, both theists andNietzsche, that human beings fail to live up to the standards of God’sjustice. Nietzsche’s concern with that belief in a God who demands theimpossible leads to perpetual self-laceration on the part of human beings,who could better spend their time being the free, creative, and life-affirming beings that they ultimately are by nature. Things become evenmore worrisome when it becomes clear that, since humanity cannot fulfillits obligations, an innocent man must be tortured to death. ForNietzsche, this is a woeful symbol of the psychological cost of belief inthe God of traditional theism. In his eyes, the spectacle of Jesus on thecross is the definitive testimony to the arbitrary, despotic nature of God.

While I certainly do not want to go so far as to say that all of thisfollows from the notion of God as utterly transcendent and dispassionate(in the sense of being incapable of suffering), I do think that there is aclear connection between this venerable idea and the sorts of worriestypified in this case by Nietzsche. If there is reason to be suspicious thenotion in question, then there is less reason to be particularly moved byNietzschean worries of the sort that I have described. Dilthey,Rosenzweig, and Moltmann (among others) have, I think, given usample reason for this suspicion. Dilthey has made the plausiblesuggestion that the notion of a God sufficient in Himself has its rootsnot in Biblical religion, but in Greek metaphysics. In the latter context, itseems perfectly sensible to stress the transcendence and self-sufficiency ofGod, for Xenophanes, Aristotle, and their ilk were concerned withexplaining the apparent order of the universe, not with proclaiming anexperience of salvation.

The latter, however, is precisely the aim of most of the talk about Godin the Bible. Both Rosenzweig and Moltmann suggest that a properconception of God, i.e. one that is proper to Biblical faith, is of a Godwho, by His very nature, freely undergoes diminution for the sake of abeloved other. If God is understood in this way, not only can creation beinterpreted as an expression of the divine nature, so too can the crucialevent in the drama of redemption, i.e. the crucifixion of Jesus. Nietzsche’sproblem is that, from his perspective, the crucifixion seems to flowinevitably from the nature of a God who rules the world by arbitrarywhim, and who subjugates humanity with an impossibly cruel justice.

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But, if we are willing to follow Moltmann and Rosenzweig, then thingsappear quite different. Viewed in this new light, the crucifixion is anexpression of God’s nature as a love that denies itself for the sake ofanother. Nietzsche was right about one thing, namely that the crucifixionis the definitive revelation of the nature of God. But, what Nietzschefailed to recognize is that the nature of God as he conceived it is, in fact,decisively laid aside by this revelation.

Notes

1 Franz Rosenzweig, God, Man, and the World: Lectures and Essays, trans. Barbara E. Galli(Ithaca: Syracuse UP, 1998): p. 38.

2 Plantinga has captured the elusive style of Nietzsche’s writings quite accurately in thisregard. See his comments on p. 136 of Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000):‘[Nietzsche] writes with a fine coruscating brilliance, his outrageous rhetoric is sometimesentertaining, and no doubt much of the extravagance is meant as overstatement to make a point.Taken overall, however, the violence and exaggeration seem pathological; for a candidate for thesober truth, we shall certainly have to look elsewhere’. While I concur in large part withPlantinga’s judgment, I nevertheless maintain that plenty of people do take Nietzsche as a‘candidate for the sober truth’. Moreover, I think that Nietzsche, in his own idiosyncratic way,expresses a genuine worry that is worth responding to. And, while Nietzsche’s proximal goalmight be the arousal of a moral-aesthetic response, he employs strategies to this end that involvehistorical, psychological, and philosophical claims which can be assessed as to their truth orcogency.

3 Given Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic style of philosophizing, it is difficult to determine exactlywhat criteria should be employed in evaluating his argumentative strategies. As I mentioned inthe introductory remarks, Nietzsche’s work occupies a kind of middle position between purephilosophy and rhetoric. A valid aim of a rhetorician is to arouse the emotions of her listeners,for emotions have a clear influence on judgments. At the same time, emotions are not sufficientfor judgment, but reasons also must be offered. In the present case, I hope to show that thereasons which Nietzsche provides need not be accepted by Christian theists, and so the revulsiontowards God that they generate need not be troubling.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: RandomHouse, 1974): pp. 187, 190.

5 Ibid., p. 186.6 Ibid., p. 187.7 Ibid., p. 189.8 Ibid., p. 190.9 Ibid., pp. 187f.10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in Walter Kaufmann, trans., The Portable Nietzsche

(New York: Penguin Books, 1982): p. 583.11 Ibid., pp. 584f.12 Ibid., p. 596.13 Ibid., p. 607.14 Ibid., p. 599.15 Ibid., pp. 614f.16 Ibid., pp. 615f.17 For Feuerbach’s critique of what he calls ‘the false or theological essence of religion’, see

The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989),especially pp. 12–32. For Hegel’s discussion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, see Phenomenologyof Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977): pp. 126–138.

18 Ibid., p. 616.19 Ibid., p. 616.20 Sigmund Freud,The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (NewYork:W.W. Norton

and Company, 1961): pp. 14, 21–5.

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21 For a summary of the conclusions of the ‘‘source’’ theory of the Hebrew Bible, seeR.E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987). For adiscussion of the ‘Yahwist’ document in particular, see R.B. Coote and D.R. Ord, The Bible’sFirst History: From Eden to the Court of David with the Yahwist (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,1989).

22 Recent scholarship also gives the lie to Nietzsche’s contention that Jesus rejected thesacrificial system of the Temple. See E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: AugsburgFortress Publishers, 1987) and N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis:Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1997).

23 Hume phrases the problem in this way in his summary of the argument from evil. SeeDavid Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing, 1980): p. 63.

24 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 484–489.25 Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften:

Versuch einer Grundlegung fur das Studium der Gesellschaft und Geschichte, ed. BernhardGroethuysen (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1959): p. 134f. Some of the material quoted from thiswork can also be found in the most recent English translation, Rudolf A. Makkreel and FrithjofRodi, ed., Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989). Where relevant, I have made reference to the pagination of thistranslation, separated from that of the German original by a ‘/’.

26 Ibid., p. 144.27 Ibid., p. 147.28 Of course other early Greek thinkers opted for ‘naturalism’, i.e. for a thoroughly de-

theologized vision of the natural order.29 Ibid., p. 151.30 Ibid., p. 151.31 Ibid., p. 152.32 Ibid., p. 153.33 Ibid., p. 153.34 Ibid., p. 395/228.35 Ibid., p. 353/186.36 Ibid., p. 385/218.37 Ibid., p. 131/181.38 Ibid., p. 397/230.39 I do not want to claim that religion and theoretical reason are incompatible in any radical

sense. All I need for my present argument is the claim that they are distinct.40 In a recent collection of essays, Merold Westphal has raised similar challenges about what

he (following Heidegger) calls ‘onto-theology’, and which I am here referring to as ‘philosophicalmonotheism’. See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology: Towards a PostmodernChristian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

41 Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. MargaretKohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993): p. 22.

42 Neither Moltmann nor Rosenzweig were the first to make the kind of move that I amoutlining here, though both develop their critiques of philosophical monotheism with a highdegree of clarity and consistency. Both draw some inspiration from Hegel, whose kenotictheology had a profound influence on subsequent reflection. See Hans Kung, The Incarnation ofGod: An Introduction to Hegel’s Theological Thought as a Prolegomena to a Future Christology,trans. J.R. Stephenson (New York: Crossroad, 1987). The figure who looms largest here for bothMoltmann and for Hegel is Luther, whose ‘theology of the cross’ can be partially understood as away of responding to another way of thinking about God not unlike that described by Nietzsche.See Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J.A. Bouman(Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1976) and Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of theCross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). For a discussion ofLuther’s influence on Hegel, see Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press,1994), especially pp. 189–234.

43 See, for example, Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William H. Hallo(Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985): pp. 113–6, 159ff.

44 Ibid., pp. 162f.45 Franz Rosenzweig, God, Man, and the World, p. 50.46 Ibid., p. 51.

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47 Jurgen Moltmann, Trinity, p. 25.48 Ibid., p. 57.49 Ibid., p. 58.50 Ibid., p. 106.51 Ibid., p. 59.52 Ibid., p. 60.

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