On Learning from Nietzsche
One of my favorite philosophers, Merold Westphal, suggests that Christians should read the great modern atheists Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as a lenten exercise. We need their dissonant voices just as wayward Israel needed the prophets.I recently came across a quote that I had noted several years ago from Nietzsche's The Antichrist. While there is a certain sense of inadequacy to Nietzsche's statement, there is, nevertheless, something profoundly true about it as well. Nietzsche writes:
"The only thing that is Christian is the Christian mode of existence, a life such as he led who died on the Cross. To this day a life of this kind is possible; for certain men, it is even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible in all ages. To reduce the fact of being a Christian, or of Christianity, to a holding of something for true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is tantamount to denying Christianity."
Friedrich Nietzsche- The Antichrist
Nice one. You may be interested in checking out a paper I recently had published on this very issue, dealing with Ibsen, Nietzsche and PT Forsyth. It's in the latest edition of the European Journal of Theology (15/2, 2006). The piece is entitled 'Bitter Tonic for our Time - Why the Church Needs the World: Peter Taylor Forsyth on Henrik Ibsen', pp. 105-118.
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