There is, at the very least, considerable reason given here to suspect that Overbeck’s world-fleeing theology was partially informing Nietzsche’s construct of essential Christianity.  At the fore of this essay, we posited the idea that Nietzsche’s interpretation is a particularized view of essential Christianity; one that Overbeck felt Nietzsche sometimes misrepresented.[1] 

            Nietzsche intends to tear down the idol of Christianity and supplant it with his particular naturalism.  To do this, his critique of Christianity must have

 a theological grip to it.  But one could easily point to many and thorough Christian/Judaic views of theology that fundamentally affirm the world and body in their very soteriology.  If the body is the starting point, and there are ample theologies that share Nietzsche’s starting point, then Nietzsche’s particular attack has no grip on those theologies.  In fact, the apostle Paul himself could be easily demonstrated to make the same attack on Platonic syncretism in Christianity as Nietzsche attributes to the whole of Christianity.[2]

            This leaves us with the two prongs of Nietzsche’s scorn.  On the one prong, there is the possibility that Nietzsche is describing a Christianity that exists, but is anomalously outside the teachings of the sacred texts (i.e. desperately anti-somatic).   The other prong of his attack suffers from the possibility that Nietzsche’s particularized theology has become an attack on a straw cathedral.  It aims at a specific development of dogma-from-denial and ends up striking at nothing.

            If Nietzsche’s essential Christianity turns out to be an fundamentally unclaimed theology, then his attack fundamentally fails because it does not capture what is considered essential to historic Christianity.  If his attack smacks at a claimed theology, then that theology must be reconciled to the somatic and world-reclaiming nature of the sacred texts.  As N.T. Wright recently referenced in a rebuff of Gnostic strands within John’s Gospel, “John did not write, ‘God so hated the world that he sent his only son, so that all the pre-existent sparks of light might discover their true identity and be rescued for a disembodied salvation.”[3]  While it is easy to claim world-flight, it may prove too rough to substantiate from the sacred texts of Christianity.

 

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[1] James Arwin Overbeck, “History Against Theology: An Analysis of the Life and Thought of Franz Overbeck.”, 114.

[2] In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, the focus is on the body as it now is in reference to what it will be.  The body is portrayed throughout the Gospels and Pauline corpus as persevering through eternity.  This is the basis for moral action today, not that the body will be left.  Also see Matthew 24, Luke 17, and 1 Corinthians 15.

[3] N.T. Wright, Belden Noble Lecture Series, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA: http://www.memorialchurch.harvard.edu/publications/archive.shtml, 2006.