What did Nietzsche mean when he said, \u201cGod is dead?\u201d He meant that the idea of a world beyond this one, from whose vantage point everything here \u201cdown below\u201d is to be judged, is no longer a credible idea\u2014even though many people continue to believe it. . . .\u00a0Nihilism is what results from the separation of time and eternity, when eternity is no longer available and all that is left is a realm of pointless, empty transience. If nihilism is to be overcome, time and eternity must be rejoined, but not in the way that Christianity joins them\u2014as separate realms connected by a Savior and a church. They must be rejoined in a more intimate way\u2014as the form and moving matter of one world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In short, \u201cNietzsche\u2019s doctrine of the eternal return is an attempt to put time and eternity back together again, after their long Abrahamic separation. This is a promising possibility, more attractive to me than either resignation or revival.\u201d<\/p>\n
This represents a thin, thoroughly Nietzchean distortion of Christianity. Perhaps the Christianity Nietzsche encountered had connected the \u201cseparate realms\u201d of eternity and time with a Savior and a church, but that\u2019s hardly characteristic of the Christian tradition as a whole.\u00a0It certainly doesn\u2019t reflect the biblical Abrahamic faith, which is trust in a promise of land and seed, a promise that Abraham will be, in\u00a0Paul\u2019s phrase, \u201cheir of the world.\u201d Christianity insists that the eternal kingdom is precisely\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0world transfigured into the kingdom of God (to quote Schmemann, the anti-Nietzschean).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A decade ago, self-proclaimed \u201cborn-again pagan\u201d and New Yorker-proclaimed \u201cSage of Yale Law\u201d Anthony Kronman responded to critics in Comment with this: What did Nietzsche mean when he said, \u201cGod is dead?\u201d He meant that the idea of a world beyond this one, from whose vantage point everything here \u201cdown below\u201d is to be judged, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1548],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nietzsche"],"yoast_head":"\n
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