HeyJ XLVIII (2007), pp.

243259

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND

THE 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 formulated
by Friedrich Nietzsche. In an effort to provoke a negative moral-aesthetic response to
the conception of God underlying the Christian tradition, with the ultimate aim of
recommending his own allegedly healthier ideals, Nietzsche presents a number of
distinct but related considerations. In particular, he claims that the traditional
theological interpretation of the crucixion of Jesus expresses the tasteless, vulgar,
and morally objectionable character of God, thus rendering Him unworthy of belief.
In response to Nietzsches worries, I rst of all argue that his account of the origins of
the belief in God is both prima facie implausible and historically false. At the same
time I recognize that Nietzsche is expressing, in his typically bombastic manner, a
genuine and widely held worry about what the crucixion, as an event in salvation
history, says about the nature of God. In response to this worry, I draw on the work of
Wilhelm Dilthey in order to support the contention that the concept of divine
transcendence, which underlies Nietzsches concern, has its proper place within the
Greek metaphysical tradition, rather than in Christian faith. Building on the work of
Franz Rosenzweig and Jurgen Moltmann, I outline a conception of God that more
accurately reects the claim that the cross is the denitive revelation of the divine
nature while at the same time foreclosing on the possibility of the kind of response
that Nietzsche articulates.
Atheism cannot be taken seriously enough. [. . .]. Only at the abyss of atheism
do we have to learn to y.1

Among the varieties of worries about Christian theism, two general

types can be distinguished. The rst might be termed evidentialist.
Evidentialist worries turn on the strictly epistemic merits (or lack thereof)
of Christianity. The question here is a variation on the following: are
there reasons sufcient enough to warrant believing in the basic claims of
the Christian religion? The second sort of worry might be called moral.
Historically, Roman apologists for paganism were the rst to level these
sorts of charges against Christianity in a systematic way. More recently,
one reads Marx and Feuerbach worrying about the otherwordliness of
Christianity, either on account of its deleterious effects on human selfimprovement, or for its abuse by those who possess economic and
political power.
r The author 2007. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2007. Published by
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

In this essay, I am concerned with a worry that belongs to this latter

type. It is explicitly formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, who is troubled
by, and who wants us also to be troubled by, the nature of God as
traditionally conceived by Christian theists. An immediate difculty for
assessing this worry is Nietzsches philosophical style, which occupies a
hazy middle ground between pure philosophical argumentation and
rhetoric. That is, he produces considerations tending towards a
conclusion (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 towards
forming a judgment, namely, that the Jewish-Christian-Platonic tradition
is unhealthy and ought to be replaced by a new set of fundamental
values. Nietzsche maintains that the standard theological interpretation
of the crucixion of Jesus exemplies a general problem with the nature of
God as conceived by Christian theists. His worry is not, in this instance,
that there is insufcient evidence for believing in the God worshipped by
Christians, but rather that He is not worth believing in.
In response to Nietzsches worry, I argue the following. First, one of
the principal strategies that Nietzsche uses to motivate moral revulsion
against God does not hold up under scrutiny. In particular, the
understanding of ancient Hebrew religion that plays a large role in this
argument is at once deeply implausible, demonstrably false, and
conceptually confused. Nietzsches bombast does, however, express a
deeper worry that could be expressed in more sober terms and which
deserves consideration by sincere Christians. The deeper worry is that the
conception of God as a distant, monarchial judge is morally objectionable. Thus, my second response to Nietzschean worries is to sketch out a
conception of the divine nature that not only avoids these objectionable
qualities but also accords more closely with the truths of Biblical religion.

1. NIETZSCHE ON THE CRUCIFIXION

Nietzsches polemics against all things Christian are scattered throughout

virtually all of his writings. His overarching concern is with Christianity
as an instantiation of the ascetic ideal, i.e., of an unhealthy psychological
type characterized by unfullled longings for revenge and by the denial of
life. Nietzsches attacks on Christianity are not so much concerned with
the rationality of Christian theism, as with the alleged psychological,
social, and moral damage wrought by the ascetic ideal on Europe. The
ultimate hope is to replace this deleterious system with a new, more
healthy ideal. One of Nietzsches principal strategies for affecting these
goals is to attack the conception of God that lies at the very center of the
Jewish-Christian tradition. Nietzsches intuition here is, no doubt, a

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

245

sound one; if it can be shown that there is a problem with God, then the
whole system falls under suspicion.
As is the case in Nietzsches work as a whole, it is difcult to discern
any one clear line of argument that tends towards the conclusions he
desires. This is mostly a function of Nietzsches philosophical style, which
employs disconnected aphorisms and historical observations in an
attempt to blast away at whatever idea or system of ideas he happens
to be critiquing. That said, with respect to at least some of Nietzsches
attacks on Christianity, there is clearly a general strategy at work. The
strategy is to arouse moral and aesthetic revulsion towards the notion of
God that underwrites the whole system of Christian life. For Nietzsche,
the problem is not so much with the rationality (or lack thereof) of
Christian belief, as with its moral or practical effects on human life.
Because of this concern, Nietzsche employs strategies for evoking moral
attitudes.3 Three such specic strategies can be discerned in two of his
most important anti-theistic works, The Gay Science (1882) and the
appropriately titled Antichrist (1888).
In The Gay Science, Nietzsches famous madman trumpets the death
of God, earning the author a justiable place within the pantheon of
atheistic thinkers. In this work, one nds a potent mixture of arguments,
historical observations, bare assertions, and intemperate jeremiads, all
designed to provoke passion every bit as much as reason. Three clear
strategies emerge in the course of his discussion. First, Nietzsche presents
a rough genealogy of the Jewish-Christian tradition as a whole, drawing
an explicit contrast between the healthy psychology of Greek antiquity
and its antipode, a ressentiment-infected psychology that he characterizes
as too Jewish and too Oriental.4 The clear thrust of this rough
historical outline is aimed at arousing (at the very least) our suspicions
about a system with such an unsavory pedigree.
A second strategy utilized by Nietzsche is to highlight certain features
of the conception of God as worthy of suspicion. Here, it is not so much
the origins of the conception that make it problematic; rather, the worry
is that there is something simply offensive (morally) or tasteless about the
conception itself. Hence, Nietzsche writes: What is now decisive against
Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.5 What is it that Nietzsche
nds so tasteless? It is the assumption of a powerful, overpowering being
who enjoys revenge.6
Notable here is Nietzsches interpretation of the Christian conception
of God as analogous to the classical conception of a monarch. The accent
here is clearly on Gods transcendence, on His remoteness from
humanity, except when it comes to His own honor. Sin and repentance,
then, are concepts that have their place in a celestial version of the
usual protocols of court. For Nietzsche, the Jewish world, shaped as it
was by these ideas, was a depressing landscape over which the gloomy
and sublime thundercloud of the wrathful Jehovah was brooding

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

continually.7 Such is the conception of God as Nietzsche nds it. Such is

the conception of a being that Nietzsche nds not only tasteless but also
unlovable. Wrathful Jehovah is simply not worth believing in for
Nietzsche:
If God wanted to become an object of love, he should have given up judging and justice rst 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 the
suggestion that believing in such a being as God has deleterious effects on
humanity. On Nietzsches reading, the idea of a remote monarch obsessed
with His own honor seems to warrant [c]ontrition, degradation, rolling in
the dust as the only proper responses. Unlike the healthy Greeks, who
were willing to recognize the occasional utility of sacrilege vis-a`-vis
human 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 JudeoChristian tradition and its ascetic ideals by targeting the conception of
God that lies at the very heart of this tradition. He employs three
speciable strategies to achieve this end: (1) genealogy, i.e. a
combination of historical reection and psychological explanation; (2)
assertions designed to highlight the morally or aesthetically objectionable
features of the conception of God by itself; and (3) claims that belief in
such a God is somehow or other harmful to humanity as a whole.
Nietzsche revisits some of these issues later on in his aptly titled
collection of aphorisms, The Antichrist (1888). Unlike in The Gay Science,
Nietzsche zeroes in on the crucixion of Jesus and its usual theological
interpretations. In the passages I will consider here, the object of his
attack is the conception of God that is employed in these interpretations.
The genius of Nietzsches critique lies in the fact that it takes aim at the
very heart of Christianity, i.e., its understanding of God. The claim is that
the conception of God as a transcendent judge is the expression of the
awed psychology of a group that Nietzsche calls priests. The
genealogical account that is only alluded to in The Gay Science is more
fully developed in The Antichrist. The account proceeds in the following
way. First, Nietzsche asserts that a peoples original notion of God is
simply a notion of themselves, of the strength of a people, of everything
aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people.10 When, however, a
particular people (e.g., the Jews) are subjected to the cruel vicissitudes of
geopolitics, there is a subtle shift in the conception of God. Now, instead
of a God who afrms the healthy instincts of a people, there is the god
who demands [. . .].11 Nietzsche suggests that this conception of God was
devised by the priests as a way of maintaining their power in light of the
transformed situation of their people. The healthy God is replaced now

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

247

with a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, and

punishment; of piety before Yahweh, and reward.12
On this account, this priestly psychology reasserts itself in Christianity
in an even more nefarious form in the way in which the death of Jesus
came to be understood after the fact. According to Nietzsche, Jesuss
death was a foregone conclusion, given that he had decisively challenged
and then broken with the whole priestly economy of repentance and
reconciliation.13 All evidence is lacking, says Nietzsche, however often
it has been claimed, that he died for the guilt of others.14
The ultimate fate of this correct understanding of Jesuss life was,
however, sealed by the event of the cross. His disciples remained and they,
quite naturally, sought to understand what had happened. Unfortunately, they apparently lacked Jesuss magnanimous freedom from the
poison of ressentiment.15 Hence, the priestly move was made again:
[. . .] it was their revenge to elevate Jesus extravagantly, to sever him from
themselves precisely as the Jews had formerly, out of revenge against their
enemies, severed their God from themselves and elevated him.16

It is important to note here that Nietzsche locates the ultimate problem

in the conception of Gods transcendence. In so doing, his complaint
echoes the work of Feuerbach, who had in turn drawn inspiration from
Hegels well-known analysis of the unhappy consciousness.17 Unlike
Hegel or Feuerbach, Nietzsche offers a historical-psychological explanation of divine transcendence in terms of ressentiment. His point seems to
be that, when the healthy idea of God is altered in this way, an ideal of
impossible justice is erected along with it. Indeed, he seems to regard
divine transcendence as a necessary condition for the latter. Once this
occurs, the healthy human instinct for self-assertion is perverted into an
unhealthy form of self-laceration. In the case of Jesus, this tendency
ultimately triumphs over his own alleged Feuerbachian denial of any
cleavage between God and man.18 It was thus that the cross became, for
Nietzsche, 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 altogether
horribly absurd answer: God have his son for the remission of sins, as a
sacrice. In one stroke, it was all over for the evangel! The trespass offering in
its most revolting, most barbarous form at that, the sacrice of the guiltless for
the sins of the guilty! What gruesome paganism!19

On Nietzsches view, the meaning of Jesuss death was co-opted by the

diseased priestly mind, characterized by an obsession with propitiating a
transcendent God of impossible justice. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the
theological reading of the crucixion reveals the lack of belief-worthiness
of the Christian God, and so undermines the entire theological edice that
rests upon belief in such a God. In both The Gay Science (1882) and The

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

Antichrist (1888), Nietzsches strategy is to evoke a moral or emotional

response to the idea of God within the Jewish-Christian tradition. This is
clearly not the same approach that is sometimes employed by classical
evidentialist objectors to Christian theism. Nietzsche nowhere suggests
that there is insufcient evidence for believing that God exists. Instead, he
employs a battery of speciable strategies all designed to evoke moral
revulsion towards the God of Christian belief. His ultimate aim, of
course, is to overthrow the last vestiges of the cultural and intellectual
hegemony of the Christian tradition in the name of a higher state of
human existence. Nietzsches ideal of a higher type is not, however, my
main concern. I am interested in his more proximate goal, which is simply
the arousal of moral revulsion against God. Nietzsche tries to achieve this
by (1) exposing the awed psychology at the roots of Christianity, (2)
highlighting the tasteless or morally problematic aspects of the concept of
God itself, and (3) decrying the human costs of holding to belief in such a
God. For Nietzsche, the most startling demonstration of the aws in the
concept of God is the traditional theological interpretation of the
crucixion of Jesus. Since this is, of course, the core of Christian theism
(as opposed to Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu varieties thereof), my response
to Nietzsche will be particularly focused on the meaning of the cross.

2. ANSWERING THE ANTICHRIST

Nietzsches 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 can
hope to escape Gods wrath as manifested in all manner of human and
natural disasters. Gods impossible justice is a function of His
transcendence. To put it differently, the transcendence of God implies
that Gods justice surpasses anything that human beings could ever hope
to achieve. God is, quite simply, unavailable to normal human ways of
settling accounts. The upshot is that God, by His very nature, puts a claim
on rational beings to conform to His justice. But this justice is an
impossible justice, and the claim is one that cannot be fullled. 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 that
human beings might approach Him. Thus, divine transcendence seems to
entail one of two equally worrisome outcomes: (1) humanity, inherently
unable to fulll Gods impossible justice, is nonetheless condemned by
God, or (2) an innocent person must suffer a cruel death so that Gods
impossible demand for justice might be fullled.
As the debate has been framed so far, God in Himself is still selfsufcient, all-powerful, and just. And his justice seems to be an impossible
justice. More worryingly, this justice does not seem like justice at all, for it

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

249

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 worry
about here. For example, one might suggest that the surrender of Jesus to
death is a mere expedient, and that a God who adopts such a method is
well worth wondering about. Nietzsches worry, however, is that the very
nature of God, as expressed in the traditional interpretation of Jesuss
death, is morally or aesthetically revolting.
I now want to argue that Christian theists have no particular cause for
alarm when faced with Nietzsches entertaining yet vitriolic fusillades. My
argument will proceed in two stages: (1) rst, I will deal with some of the
details of Nietzsches own strategy for evoking moral-aesthetic revulsion
against God, and (2) then I will dig a bit deeper into a consideration of a
way of thinking about God which undergirds Nietzsches strategy.
As I have already described, Nietzsche tells his own particular story
about the roots of divine transcendence. While this story is similar to that
previously told by Feuerbach, in that divine transcendence is rejected on
the grounds of its deleterious effects on human life, it is much closer in
spirit to the version later offered by Freud, which locates the roots of the
concept of a transcendent God in a neurotic psychology.20 Nietzsches
version of the story is that the idea of a transcendent God betrays the
triumph of the priestly type over healthy self-promotion of primitive
peoples, in that this concept makes possible a deleterious sort of penitential
religiosity. 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-fantasies
and control-fetishes. However, aside from its wit, Nietzsches argument is
also notable for its deep implausibility. The claim that a secret conspiracy
of world-denying priests lies at the origins of an entire culture seems to be
the sort of claim which, when judged by the immanent standards of
historiography that are appropriate in this case, fares poorly.
Moreover, a long-standing consensus among scholars of the Hebrew
Bible suggests that the heart of Nietzsches argument is simply mistaken.
Recall that, according to Nietzsche, the notions of sin, atonement, and
sacrice were the creations of a sick priesthood that wanted to assert
control over a people that had been conquered and pillaged by stronger
neighbors. The scholarly consensus is that the earliest text of the Hebrew
Bible, the so-called Yahwist document, was written during the tenth
century before the Common Era, during the peak of the Davidic
monarchy.21 This document was clearly not the product of a defeated
people. More damningly, one quickly notices that it makes free and
frequent use of concepts like sin, atonement, and sacrice. As the
earliest textual witness to the history, culture, and religion of ancient
Israel, the Yahwist text seems to refute Nietzsches claim that the primal,
healthy religion of a vigorous people was betrayed by priests who
introduced notions like sin, atonement, and sacrice. For example,
the Bibles earliest mention of sacrice occurs in this source, viz., in the

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:116). Similarly, large portions of the
Flood narrative cycle, in which punishment for sin is clearly a recurring
theme, come from this very early stratum. The same is true for the story of
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 1819).22
Nietzsches strategy is also undermined by his misunderstanding of the
ancient sacricial cult in Israel. This misunderstanding involves the
conation of two distinct concepts: (1) propitiation, and (2) atonement.
According to Nietzsche, the twisted genius of the priests was to construct
a view of God such that a servile populace would contribute to the
livelihood of the elite by making propitiatory sacrices. Propitiation is an
action aimed at deecting the anger or displeasure of someone in a
position of power. Atonement, on the other hand, is an action aimed at
restoring a relationship that has suffered some kind of rupture by means
of self-sacrice. Israels sacricial cult clearly falls under the heading of
the latter concept. Contrary to Nietzsches animadversions, it seems that
atonement is a perfectly healthy way of repairing a broken relationship.
To atone, one gives of oneself, or offers up something of value, as a means
of overcoming the alienation that has crept into a relationship. For an
ancient agricultural people, offering up the fruits of the land or ones
livestock involved relinquishing something of almost inestimable value,
and so clearly is an act of self-sacrice. Israels sacricial cult is best
understood as a matter of atonement, one that presupposes not the threat
of divine wrath, but rather the pre-existing covenantal relationship
between God and His people.
While I think that Nietzsches story about divine transcendence and
divine justice is clearly wrong, I nevertheless want to grant that
Nietzsches general worry about the crucixion is worth taking seriously.
While the priestly conspiracy theory is both prima facie implausible and
historically false, the notion of God as a transcendent being who demands
impossible justice is very much a part of the tradition that Nietzsche and
others like him are criticizing. The crucixion, as a glaring example of
innocent suffering brought on by impossible divine justice, still stands as a
rock of offense. However, it might be urged that there are plenty of ways
of responding to the problem of innocent suffering from within a theistic
framework. For example, one could offer a traditional greater good
type of defense. Thus, when Hume, for example, suggests that a God able
but unwilling to avert suffering is malevolent, one might reply that the
balance of goods and ills linked to the crucixion in particular makes the
charge null.23 Good reasoning notwithstanding, there still remains for
many the strong intuition that a properly sensitive, moral, and rational
person cannot help but rebel against the spectacle of innocent suffering
impelled onwards by divine logic. Moreover, it seems hard to fully accept
the claim that a balance of goods and ills will really help such a person to
overcome her revulsion for a God who demands such evil. Indeed, one
might even laud such a person for having such a reaction, and rightly so.

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

251

Alvin Plantinga has recently made a similar point.24 As he correctly

recognizes, the real issue here is not that of leading people to a reasoned
conclusion, but rather of eliciting an emotional response. Such a
procedure is a legitimate part of everyday moral reasoning. This is
exactly what Nietzsche does. Recall that it is taste, rather than reason,
which revolts against the spectacle of the crucied Christ. For Plantinga,
and no doubt for many others, it is, however, precisely because a
Christian has faith in a God who reveals Himself in the shame of the cross
that she is able to resist a Nietzschean reaction.
It is, then, what the crucixion ultimately says about the nature of God
that is the heart of the issue. If Nietzsche is right about Gods utter
transcendence and impossible justice, then his reaction to the crucixion
still seems reasonable. Nietzsches case can, however, be signicantly
weakened by getting a handle on just where his conception of the divine
nature comes from and why it might be the case that Christian theists are
under no compulsion to take this conception on board. Understanding
where a deeply held idea comes from is often a good way to go about
loosening its grip on the mind. In some cases, it might also uncover
something about the inappropriateness of this idea in certain theoretical
contexts. Indeed, this is the sort of genealogical strategy that Nietzsche
himself famously employs. In what follows, I want to turn this strategy
against Nietzsche by offering a more plausible genealogy of the
conception of Gods transcendence, one which will, I hope, show that
there is little reason for a Christian to hold to the view of God that
motivates Nietzsches concerns. Once we see where Nietzsches God
draws life, we can see that Christian theists have no reason to believe in
such a being. Moreover, it becomes clear that a God whose nature
permits Him to suffer can avoid Nietzschean disgust.
My account here will be assisted by, in the rst instance, Wilhelm
Dilthey (18331911), an intellectual historian who, at least in this case,
gets the story right. According to Dilthey, the project of working out a
systematic, speculative metaphysics has its roots in the work of the Ionian
Greeks.25 As Dilthey tells the story, metaphysics was born at the twilight
of a period dominated by mythical ways of thinking.26 The coherence of
the picture of the world possessed during this period was gradually
eroded, and the task was now to articulate a new basis for conceiving of it.
The Ionian natural philosophers, then, tried to construct a picture of
reality be tracing back to a primal rst cause, a primeval nature that
generates the totality of the cosmos as an ordered whole of appearances.
During this early period, various candidates for the primal nature of the
universe still had something of a mythic quality.27 At the same time, these
principles, and the natural order itself, came to exert a kind of conceptual
hegemony that, at least amongst philosophers, replaced the capricious
interventions of the lusty Olympians. One result was a family of views
that can be called philosophical monotheism.28

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

Dilthey goes on to attempt a reconstruction of the inner law that

guided the development in ancient Greek metaphysics.29 The rst stage is
the awareness that the totality of worldly phenomena are caught up in a
ceaseless process of arising and passing away. Just as clouds seem to
form in the sky and then pass away, so too do individual things. In Greek
myth, the gods themselves were generated in time.30 In this temporal
play, Greek thinkers could locate no xed point, that is, nothing that
could plausibly fulll the role of the primal stuff that both generates and
arranges the cosmos. In a world increasingly conceived as orderly, the
gods had less and less of a role to play.31 There was, in effect, a kind of
naturalization of thought: The whole content of the highest feelings,
religious life, moral consciousness, the feeling of beauty and of the innite
value 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 the
movements of celestial bodies as in the organized forms of human society,
seems to require an explanation. The traditional gods, as inhabitants of
the cosmos, could themselves no longer provide this explanation. Hence,
something transcendent was required. For some ancient thinkers, these
reections took on a decidedly theological cast. This is particularly true,
Dilthey notes, in the case of Xenophanes. For him, it is impious to
imagine the death of the divine, and yet, whatever exists in time must both
come to be and pass away. Therefore, an eternal and unchanging status
must be ascribed to divinity.33 Similarly, an awareness of the power and
completeness 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 concept
of God in Xenophanes, and in other thinkers with similar views, such as
Aristotle, has little to do with religion. This claim is set within the context
of Diltheys more general rejection of what he calls metaphysics. The
problem with metaphysics, as Dilthey sees it, is summarized quite clearly
in this passage:
A metaphysics is consistent only when it is, as its form dictates, a rational
science, i.e., when it seeks a logical world-system. Rational science was thus the
backbone, as it were, of European metaphysics. But the feeling of life of a
genuine and vigorous individual and the richness of the world given him cannot
be exhausted in the logical system of a universally valid science.34

On Diltheys view, religion, as a personal experience, does not suffer

from the defect of negating the immediate reality of life in the way that
metaphysics does. Nonetheless, religion has been historically compromised by metaphysics. The mixture of Christianity with ancient science
affected the purity of religious experience.35 Dilthey relates how each
metaphysics has had to contend with the protest of religious experience,
which is clearly rooted in the will, from the rst Christian mystics who

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

253

opposed medieval metaphysics and were no poorer Christians on that

account 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 the
project of mastering reality through theoretical reason. Aristotles rst
philosophy is a prime example. This is a science that attempts to grasp
the primary causes or principles that ground the whole of reality.
Metaphysics is the quest for an ultimate unconditioned framework.37
On Diltheys view, such a project is bound to unearth only what conforms
to logical necessity, thus there exists for it neither the God of religion
nor the experience of freedom.38
To summarize Diltheys account, for the ancient Greeks, the
transcendence of God was dened in a strict sense in order to avoid the
aws inherent in older mythical ways of thinking. The ultimate purpose,
however, was to ground an autonomous construction of reality as an
ordered cosmos. The concept called god by Xenophanes and Aristotle
has absolutely nothing to do with the archaic nature religions of the
Greeks, nor with the civic cults of their city-states. This concept was never
meant to play the role that the gods did in traditional Greek life in
antiquity. This is clear from the fact that traditional polytheism coexisted
quite comfortably for centuries alongside this sort of philosophical
monotheism. As has been frequently noted, these essentially Greek ideas
(i.e., philosophical monotheism) had a profound impact on the way in
which Christian theological reection cam to formulate its own ideas
about the nature of God. For the Greek mind, there must be a radical
separation between God, eternal and self-sufcient, and everything nite
and mortal. Were it no so, then the notion of god could not play the
metaphysical role that it was meant to play for the Greeks.
Diltheys story seems entirely plausible, particularly the portion of it
concerned with the unhappy t between religion and metaphysics. The
Bible testies to the uneasiness of the link between the two (Colossians
2:8, 1 Corinthians 1:19ff., Romans 1:1922). As Dilthey has noted, this
unease has occasionally blown up into outright hostility in the work of
people like Luther and Pascal. Other gures, not mentioned by Dilthey,
like Kierkegaard or Barth, provide similar testimony to this fact. Given
the plausibility of Diltheys story, it is reasonable to conclude that the
interests of theoretical reason are, if not incompatible, at least clearly
distinct from those of religious proclamation.39
How does this discussion of intellectual history relate to Nietzschetype worries? Recall that, on Nietzsches reading, the traditional
interpretation of the crucixion of Jesus expresses an underlying
conception of God that is morally and aesthetically problematic, i.e.
the conception of a remote monarch whose immutable will demands
impossible justice. However, given the story that I have traced out in the
preceding pages, the conception of God as remote and incapable of

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suffering that underlies Nietzsches reaction may have no real purchase

on the nature of God as expressed by the Bible. In other words, Christian
theists, qua Christian theists, are in no way committed to conceiving of
the nature of God as remote, transcendent, indifferent, or incapable of
suffering, all features of god on Greek philosophical monotheism.40
Indeed, pace Nietzsche, the crucixion of Jesus, if interpreted as an
event in salvation history, clearly presents an incompatibility between the
nature of God on philosophical monotheism and the nature of God on
Biblical religion. Jurgen Moltmann has expressed this worry, in the
process diagnosing the underlying source of the sort of reaction Nietzsche
has to a particular conception of God:
The ability to identify God with Christs passion becomes feeble in proportion
to the weight that is given to the apathetic axiom in the doctrine of God. If
God is incapable of suffering, then if we are to be consistent Christs passion
can only be viewed as a human tragedy. For the person who can only see
Christs passion as the suffering of the good man from Nazareth, God is
inevitably bound to become the cold, silent, and unloved heavenly power. But
that would be the end of Christian faith.41

In the work of Moltmann, and in that of one of his inspirations, Franz

Rosenzweig, one can discern an attempt to conceive of the divine nature
not on the model of Greek philosophical monotheism but rather in a way
that remains more faithful to the religious life of Jews and Christians over
the millennia.42 My claim here is not that such a conception can do all the
work needed to adequately respond to Nietzsche, nor that more
traditional conceptions of the divine nature held, for example, by the
Thomistic tradition, cannot provide good grounds for a response to
Nietzsche. What I am claiming is that the sort of conception worked out
by Moltmann and Rosenzweig can easily evade the Nietzschean reaction
that I sketched out at the beginning of the paper.
On Rosenzweigs account, God is a being dened by relationships.43
God manifests Himself rst of all in the act of creation, and then in the
event of revelation. Rosenzweig contends that this can only be rendered
intelligible by applying the concept of love. Only the love of a lover is
such a continually renewing self-sacrice; it is only he who gives himself
away in love. [. . .]. So God loves too.44 That is, according to Rosenzweig,
Gods actions of creation and revelation are only intelligible if God is
conceived of as a being who surrenders himself, who puts himself, as it
were, at the disposal of another.
In a lecture on the science of God, Rosenzweig suggests that we
rethink the common philosophical way of conceiving of divine
transcendence. God, he suggests, must be more than eternal.45 God
decided to become the God of the human being and of the world, the God
of 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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255

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 that
these predicates seem to be misapplied. In renouncing His eternity in
order to become the God of creation, God has become, in effect, more
than eternal.
Moltmann develops a similar line of argument, though within the
context of a Trinitarian theology. Indeed, Moltmann contends that it is
only within such a context that one can make sense of God suffering on
the cross.47 He roots his Trinitarianism, rst of all, in the claim that God
is love (1 John 4:16). Because love cannot be consummated by a solitary
subject, the nature of God must itself involve self-differentiation.48 But,
beyond this inner differentiation in the divine life itself, Moltmann
contends that It is in accordance with the love which is God that he
should 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 the
discussion, Creation is a fruit of Gods longing for his Other and for
that Others free response to the divine love.50 Creation exists, then,
because God, as eternal self-communicating love, seeks a true Other that
can respond in freedom.
Moltmann goes on to argue that, with the creation of a world that is
really 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 is
genuinely distinct from His own eternal being. Only a suffering love, i.e. a
non-coercive love, can adequately respect the freedom of the non-divine
Other. God has to endure the non-responsiveness of His creation, for His
desire is for a freely given reciprocity. Moltmann puts it this way:
Freedom can only be made possible by suffering love. The suffering of God
with the world, the suffering of God from the world, and the suffering of God
for the world are the highest forms of his creative love, which desires free
fellowship with the world and free response in the world.52

The most blatant declaration of Gods suffering love for creation is, at
least for Christians, precisely the crucixion of Jesus. Considered through
the lens of philosophical monotheism, however, this event can only be
viewed as, at best, a tragedy, and, at worst, a tasteless, wanton expression
of a diseased conception of God. Recall that for Nietzsche, it is not so
much that reason compels us to withhold assent from belief in God, but
rather that the heart compels us to turn away from the cruelty of a God
who in the end is not worth believing in. I have suggested that this worry
is rendered more plausible by an entrenched way of thinking about God,
one rooted not in a dubious psycho-history, but in the facts of intellectual
history. On the standard picture, God is utterly transcendent and is
eternally self-sufcient. At the same time, God both created the world and
is somehow involved in human affairs. God stands, then, in a variety of

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BENJAMIN D. CROWE

relationships to a reality that is both wholly dependent on Him, and

ultimately indifferent to Him qua God.
One of the relations in which God, though sufcient unto Himself, is
said to stand vis-a`-vis the world, is that of a perfect lawgiver. For most
theists, who are not also deists, there is a certain way that God wants
things to go in the moral sphere. The perennial difculty, of course, is that
the world in general, and human beings in particular, seem to be poor
performers. And yet Gods will is still there, immutable and unalterable.
Nietzsches ultimate problem is that a God who is transcendent in this
way is a God of impossible justice. Everyone admits, both theists and
Nietzsche, that human beings fail to live up to the standards of Gods
justice. Nietzsches concern with that belief in a God who demands the
impossible leads to perpetual self-laceration on the part of human beings,
who could better spend their time being the free, creative, and lifeafrming beings that they ultimately are by nature. Things become even
more worrisome when it becomes clear that, since humanity cannot fulll
its obligations, an innocent man must be tortured to death. For
Nietzsche, this is a woeful symbol of the psychological cost of belief in
the God of traditional theism. In his eyes, the spectacle of Jesus on the
cross is the denitive testimony to the arbitrary, despotic nature of God.
While I certainly do not want to go so far as to say that all of this
follows from the notion of God as utterly transcendent and dispassionate
(in the sense of being incapable of suffering), I do think that there is a
clear connection between this venerable idea and the sorts of worries
typied in this case by Nietzsche. If there is reason to be suspicious the
notion in question, then there is less reason to be particularly moved by
Nietzschean worries of the sort that I have described. Dilthey,
Rosenzweig, and Moltmann (among others) have, I think, given us
ample reason for this suspicion. Dilthey has made the plausible
suggestion that the notion of a God sufcient in Himself has its roots
not in Biblical religion, but in Greek metaphysics. In the latter context, it
seems perfectly sensible to stress the transcendence and self-sufciency of
God, for Xenophanes, Aristotle, and their ilk were concerned with
explaining the apparent order of the universe, not with proclaiming an
experience of salvation.
The latter, however, is precisely the aim of most of the talk about God
in the Bible. Both Rosenzweig and Moltmann suggest that a proper
conception of God, i.e. one that is proper to Biblical faith, is of a God
who, by His very nature, freely undergoes diminution for the sake of a
beloved other. If God is understood in this way, not only can creation be
interpreted as an expression of the divine nature, so too can the crucial
event in the drama of redemption, i.e. the crucixion of Jesus. Nietzsches
problem is that, from his perspective, the crucixion seems to ow
inevitably from the nature of a God who rules the world by arbitrary
whim, and who subjugates humanity with an impossibly cruel justice.

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257

But, if we are willing to follow Moltmann and Rosenzweig, then things

appear quite different. Viewed in this new light, the crucixion is an
expression of Gods nature as a love that denies itself for the sake of
another. Nietzsche was right about one thing, namely that the crucixion
is the denitive revelation of the nature of God. But, what Nietzsche
failed 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 Nietzsches writings quite accurately in this
regard. See his comments on p. 136 of Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000):
[Nietzsche] writes with a ne coruscating brilliance, his outrageous rhetoric is sometimes
entertaining, 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 the
sober truth, we shall certainly have to look elsewhere. While I concur in large part with
Plantingas 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 Nietzsches proximal goal
might be the arousal of a moral-aesthetic response, he employs strategies to this end that involve
historical, psychological, and philosophical claims which can be assessed as to their truth or
cogency.
3 Given Nietzsches idiosyncratic style of philosophizing, it is difcult to determine exactly
what criteria should be employed in evaluating his argumentative strategies. As I mentioned in
the introductory remarks, Nietzsches work occupies a kind of middle position between pure
philosophy and rhetoric. A valid aim of a rhetorician is to arouse the emotions of her listeners,
for emotions have a clear inuence on judgments. At the same time, emotions are not sufcient
for judgment, but reasons also must be offered. In the present case, I hope to show that the
reasons which Nietzsche provides need not be accepted by Christian theists, and so the revulsion
towards God that they generate need not be troubling.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 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 Feuerbachs 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. 1232. For Hegels discussion of the unhappy consciousness, see Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977): pp. 126138.
18 Ibid., p. 616.
19 Ibid., p. 616.
20 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1961): pp. 14, 215.

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21 For a summary of the conclusions of the source theory of the Hebrew Bible, see
R.E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987). For a
discussion of the Yahwist document in particular, see R.B. Coote and D.R. Ord, The Bibles
First History: From Eden to the Court of David with the Yahwist (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1989).
22 Recent scholarship also gives the lie to Nietzsches contention that Jesus rejected the
sacricial system of the Temple. See E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Minneapolis: Augsburg
Fortress 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. See
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 1980): p. 63.
24 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 484489.
25 Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1: Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften:
Versuch einer Grundlegung fur das Studium der Gesellschaft und Geschichte, ed. Bernhard
Groethuysen (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1959): p. 134f. Some of the material quoted from this
work can also be found in the most recent English translation, Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof
Rodi, 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 this
translation, 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 detheologized 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 philosophical
monotheism. See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology: Towards a Postmodern
Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).
41 Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret
Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993): p. 22.
42 Neither Moltmann nor Rosenzweig were the rst to make the kind of move that I am
outlining here, though both develop their critiques of philosophical monotheism with a high
degree of clarity and consistency. Both draw some inspiration from Hegel, whose kenotic
theology had a profound inuence on subsequent reection. See Hans Kung, The Incarnation of
God: An Introduction to Hegels Theological Thought as a Prolegomena to a Future Christology,
trans. J.R. Stephenson (New York: Crossroad, 1987). The gure who looms largest here for both
Moltmann and for Hegel is Luther, whose theology of the cross can be partially understood as a
way of responding to another way of thinking about God not unlike that described by Nietzsche.
See Walther von Loewenich, Luthers Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J.A. Bouman
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1976) and Alister E. McGrath, Luthers Theology of the
Cross: Martin Luthers Theological Breakthrough (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). For a discussion of
Luthers inuence on Hegel, see Cyril ORegan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press,
1994), especially pp. 189234.
43 See, for example, Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William H. Hallo
(Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985): pp. 1136, 159ff.
44 Ibid., pp. 162f.
45 Franz Rosenzweig, God, Man, and the World, p. 50.
46 Ibid., p. 51.

NIETZSCHE, THE CROSS, AND GOD

47
48
49
50
51
52

Jurgen Moltmann, Trinity, p. 25.

Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 106.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 60.

259