ABSTRACT
As successor to the centuries-long murder of God, Nietzsche culminates it by disparaging Christians – he means Protestants – as devotees of the resentful Jewish Paul. On the assumption that Nietzsche might be more tonic than poison this conclusion addresses two questions: what might Christians say to him? What might he, to their benefit, teach them?
The many vivid contraries in his thinking denote his daring progress into unknown and likely unbearable truths, the deadly and forbidding, nothingness as liberation. This is his Judas-like version of conscience. I argue that Dostoevsky is a necessary Christian respondent to Nietzsche, as are men he revered who were not observant yet shrewd in their own versions of witnessing: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Goethe. Nietzsche’s accusations against Christianity are significant chiefly in showing how far he had gone from home.
In turn, his assaults upon words he considers empty of meaning – God, soul, sin, guilt, immortality – might caution Christians against epistemological hybris, of presuming to know the divine will, of having claims upon afterlife, even of presuming to be Christians, especially if they are participant and predominant in cultures that sustain unchallenged the evils of racism, sexism, war-making, and neo-slavery.
