Introduction

This introduction presents Nietzsche as a successor, and here a kind of Greek chorus, to powerfully influential Protestant, specifically Lutheran, thinkers. It takes as glosses two of his claims about the decline of Christianity in modern times, that it dies from the head down, and that God is murdered, implicitly by Christians. It outlines the chronology of this decline, from the Reformation through the “mechanical revolution” and culminating in the Enlightenment. It argues that the Protestant heterodoxies examined in the ensuing chapters – Luther’s denial of love for God, Boehme’s alchemical “revelation” of evil in God, Leibniz’s trivialization of evil and suffering, and Lessing’s pantheistic humanism – are not expressly influential upon Nietzsche but model, for him and for us, fatal departures from the Gospel narrative. It concludes with caveats to Nietzsche’s enthusiasts, suggesting that they be as informed as him about Christian Scripture, and that they attain a detached and ironic position toward their guru, such as he himself urges.