Like many people, I met Friedrich Nietzsche in a graduate seminar where we perused his writings, both published and private. The professor who led the seminar evinced a love and charity toward Nietzsche with an equal amount of suspended horror at some of his less satisfying bits (e.g. eternal recurrence). Once you have read Nietzsche, you quickly understand his lure. He seems to be onto something, even if he does a piss poor job of articulating it. He is adamant and he is quick to denounced the limitations or Alexadrian Blindness to reality.
In matters of theology, I have become particularly enamored with Nietzsche because of his critique of Christianity and his relentless regard for the body. First, I do believe that if the church looks or acts like what Nietzsche describes in the substance of his critique, then we ought to be rebuked by him. As I lay out in my “World Fleeing Theology” series, I am firmly convinced that Nietzsche’s view of the church is mainly funded by a back channel conversation with Franz Overbeck’s esoteric theology. But that does not mitigate his ire, but rather explains some of its morphology. If the church is based on pity and world-fleeing spiritism, as Overbeck and Nietzsche suggests, then on what grounds could we rebut Nietzsche? Much of Nietzsche’s critique could be seen more properly as admonition for those who have incorporated these pagan notions of spirituality into the religion.
Second, Nietzsche will not let us get away from the body. His rugged somaticism is the centerpiece of all philosophy and I believe that the church needs to hear this as well. Nietzsche is not a mentalists or spiritualist, he earnestly believes that our primary encounter with this world is through our body and that seems to be the centerpiece of biblical theology as well. We have not taken the creation and redemption story seriously enough in the Western church and have been content with spiritual ascendence to God with a dash of gnostic renewal to keep us on the up and up. The body was formed by God and that appears to be a shared concern with Nietzsche.
Finally, and more tentatively, Nietzsche’s epistemology is probably more biblically oriented than most that are espoused in the church today, especially the epistemologies that underwrite apologetics. Nietzsche’s view of the Dionysian begins to display an epistemology that takes the entirety of bodily experience seriously.
