Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Genuine Christianity

I believe religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow citizens happy. My own mind is my church, and to do good is my religion.

Thomas Paine

Nietzsche critized Germany’s most prominent Christians, like the Kaiser and Bismarck, as those who profess to be Christians but are “antichristians in their deeds”, but he thought there was such a thing “possible in all ages” as “genuine Christianity”. He opposed moral hypocrisy not morality. Writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, he thought the Germans, as Christian then as the US is today, held to a religion that was not religious, truths that were not truthful, and goodness that is not good. The parallel with the USA today seems perfect.

Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s best biographer and interpreter (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist), cites Goethe to illustrate “the resentful bourgois morality that purports to be Christian, even while it insists on throwing the first stone”:

I let Gretchen be executed and Ottilie starve to death. Don’t people find that Christian enough?

As Kaufmann puts it, what Nietzsche denounced “was not sincere Christianity but insincere Christianity—those who are unchristian in their practice but profess Christianity, as well as those who superficially seem Christian in their practice but whose motivation and state of mind are unchristian”. These latter effect an appearance of pious humilty and devotion to others but for their own purely selfish reasons. Many clergymen fall into this category.

Christians seek a reward for doing nothing much. As Hegel, a minister himself, said:

You want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your brother.

You are required in any even half decent society to nurse a sick mother and not to kill others on some whim or imagined slight, but Christ made the requirements explicit and extended them to everybody, even the least among us, and our enemies. The reward was the kingdom of God, an ideal world, all right, if not now soon, perhaps for your children—but not without putting in the effort!

In The Gay Science[†]Gay does not mean homosexual, Nietzsche describes the best kind of disciple as being one who believes in his master’s cause so strongly that he would question it in every possible respect confident that, if it were truly good, it could withstand every test. Moreover, the master would welcome it, knowing it was meant constructively, and would even provoke his disciples to criticize him, so that he could expose weaknesses and right any wrongs he had not considered. Accepting criticism was the highest sign of culture, the sign of the übermensch[†]Overman. Most often translated “superman” but corresponding to a Christ, someone trying to be perfect.

The inference is plainly that Christian refusal to criticize their beliefs is no sign of culture, and does no favours to their Lord and Master, who was utterly misrepresented by poor disciples, or, more likely, later disciples particularly Paul, when the religion passed out of the hands of the original disciples into the Roman sphere. Nietzsche suggests they should be asking, in response to their claim to have had some experience of God, questions like:

1. What precisely did I experience?
2. What happened in me and around me?
3. Was I thinking and reasoning clearly, or did I get confused?
4. Am I sure I could not be mistaken?

None of them has raised such questions. All the dear religious people do not raise such questions even now. Rather they have a thing for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it.

Nietzsche, Gay Science

Nietzsche held that conviction was no proof of truth, so the death of martyrs never showed their beliefs were right. Maybe they died morally, in that they believed they were not deceived, but it requires them to have tested their beliefs honestly to show they have not actually been deceived, or deceived themselves.

Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity is an attack on its hypocrisy, its failure to measure up to the gospel teachings of Christ, and the way he lived and died himself:

There was only one Christian and he died on the cross. The “evangel”[†]Evangel. Greek for “good news” or “glad tidings” died on the cross. What has been called “evangel” from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived.

Jesus had rebelled against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees… “the disbelief in ‘higher men’, the No to all that was priest and theologian”.

Nietzsche said, in Antichrist, that resist not evil was the profound phrase that was the key to the gospels. The Christian should not want to retaliate. Christ did not, and he was showing Christians how they were to be. The “Glad Tidings” were to exist here and now in love, love of everyone near or far, without “subtraction or exclusion” and irrespective of their position in life:

Everyone is a child of God… and as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone.

Christ called himself “Son of Man”. His followers called him “Son of God”. Who then is God but Man—human society?

The “bringer of glad tidings” died as he had lived, as he had taught. Not to “redeem men” but to show how they must live… He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no steps to ward off the worst—on the contrary, he provokes it. And he begs, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who do him evil. Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible—but to resist not even the evil one—to love him.

Nietzsche, Antichrist

Faith

So, Nietzsche admired what Jesus taught, and how he lived. What he criticized was faith in Christ, particular in its use in suppressing Christian action—which is more than mere charity as Christians understand it—and against reason. He opposes faith because Christians profess it, but hypocritically hardly ever think it implies them doing anything, except going to communion:

Christians have never practised the actions Jesus prescribed to them. The impudent, garrulous talk about the justification by faith, and its supreme and sole significance, is only the consequences of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.

Nietzsche, Will to Power

The Church is precisely that against which Jesus preached.

Nietzsche, Will to Power

Faith, to Nietzsche, is opposed to Jesus’s glad tidings. Jesus taught and demonstrated a practice, a practice that remains possible and necessary. A large number of people, perhaps even a majority, instinctively practice it in a small but natural way, both Christians and even more so non-Christians. Those who do not practice it at all, or practice it falsely, particularly the Christian hypocrites, need to be taught it afresh without the intervening false interpretations of the Pauline Churches. Christians indeed ought to be willing to expose the hypocrisy of the people, especially in high places, in positions of leadership and trust, who use Christianity as a screen. They certainly ought not to defend them, and, worse, put them into positions of trust when they are manifest hypocrites.

Paul is “the first Christian” for Nietzsche. To follow Christ, to put doing good to others before self was too hard for Paul, but he wanted to be a Christian, so he invented faith in the body of Christ as a substitute for faith in the teaching and practices of Christ. The latter meant doing something, practising what Christ had preached.

Faith in the body of Christ was a cynical crib of the ancient dying and rising faiths of those Hellenistic times. It was the mystical nonsense Hellenized Jews, his original main audience, were surrounded by. It required them doing nothing except attend communion, and proselytizing, the success of which gave them an assurance of heavenly favour, for which the bishops who lived off the platter were ever grateful. It was a great way to convert pagans to Christianity, especially as Christ was simultaneously being given attributes typical of the solar gods and tribal fathers they already worshipped.

All the pagan convert had to do was essentially what they had done before. They had then had faith in one or another god—even in polytheistic systems people had a preferred god—and they merely changed to the new god, Christ, or even just took Christ to be a version of the old god. Nothing could have been simpler once Paul had made faith and not deeds into the criterion of Christianity. Paul had substituted faith in Christ for living like Christ, a much harder prospect. The change was a negation of Christ’s life and preaching:

It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mask of the Christian in a “faith”, for instance in the faith in redemption through Christ. Only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross is Christian.

Nietzsche, Antichrist

W Kaufmann says it seemed to Nietzsche the idea of God giving His son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, “the trespass sacrifice”, in its “most revolting, most barbarous form—the sacrifice of the guiltless for the guilty” was “gruesome paganism” and faith in it a travesty of Christ’s message.

Christ blessed people for their lives, the meek, the poor, the righteous, the peacemakers, all of those who by their actions were creating the kingdom of God, a kingdom that began in the heart and appeared on earth, not after death. To postpone it until after death betrayed Christ far more seriously than did Judas. Making death the gateway into a better life depreciated and deprecated this life into something of no importance, so then it could be freely abused, whether your own or someone else’s.

Christ taught that people should aim for perfection here on earth, but Christians consider that all that matters is faith, an imagined guarantee of entry to life after death. What could be more cynical? The doctrine of two worlds allowed the Christian to maintain a double standard. And, built by Paul, this negation of Christ was doubly emphasised, in the Protestant revolution, by Luther, who told his followers that, by having faith, they were assured of Christ bearing their sins—they were thereby, with no effort at all, justified—made just, meaning righteous—and so automatically saved! Christ was no more than an old fashioned apotropaic human sacrifice—a human scapegoat carrying away sins, with no effort on the part of the sinner. Instead of trying to live lives free of sins as Christ taught and demonstrated, the Christian just says, “Thanks a lot, Christ, take my sins too!” And Lo! he is saved. This is a travesty of Christ’s teaching and God’s will, and surely it is obvious!

Christians since Paul have taken God as an idiot, and as a consequence the world has suffered horribly at the hands of Christians, the people meant to improve it. Do these Christians think their God was really saying, “Do as you like, forget everything I used to say about righteousness, and everything I said when I incarnated in person on earth, just have faith in yonder image of a dying man, for he will carry off every sin you commit”. Such a belief is amoral if not utterly immoral. Christ made it multiply clear that God incarnate was not just him, Christ, but was incarnate in every human life, even the most insignificant and objectionable. Whatever you did to the least person in the world, you did to Him because mankind is God.

Once society is seen as God, and a God that can be corrupted, then religion is plainly the attempt to keep society good and not corrupt, an attempt that began within oneself, as Christ was plainly teaching. It is hypocrisy to want to blame society’s ills on to others, and therefore to want to change them, until you have perfected yourself. That is where humility comes in. It is not at all humble to to claim you have perfected yourself, and so have the right to judge others. Judge not that thou not be judged. Once you feel able to judge others, they will feel they too have the right to judge, and judge you.

Antichrists

Paul’s revaluation of Christ’s message into its negation was tempered by his desire to seem to hold on to Christ’s message:

And now abideth faith hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity.

1 Cor 13:13

For the benefit of ignorant Christians, charity is love. It translates agape which is “love” in Greek, and Germans like Nietzsche had only liebe to translate it. The word that agape translates in Hebrew means “lovingkindness”. Charity has come to mean token giving to a good cause, a charity, but Christ meant sincere lovingkindness extended to everyone—compassion, kindness and care.

Paul paid lip service to love while otherwise emphasizing the central importance of faith for salvation, but Luther had no hesitation or compunction in declaring faith “infinitely much greater and more sublime” than charity, though charity is a “beautiful” virtue. Luther proved his own satanic origins by often repeating faith expressed through love was devilish and “confuses us into Turkish and Jewish errors”. So, love was only for Moslems and Jews, but Christians had faith! So, Luther proclaimed:

Faith alone, without any works, makes just before God.

Works of love are not necessary to salvation at all. Then he says:

He does not have a truthful faith in whom the works of love do not follow faith.

Faith alone saves. But no faith is true that does not engender love. If “true” faith means faith that justifies, then true faith both engenders love and justifies. Unless the faithful person loves as well as having faith, it is not true faith and so cannot save. Therefore love is necessary for salvation. Faith alone is not sufficient to save.

It is a contradiction unless false faith, the sort that does not engender love, saves just as well as faith that is true and does engender love. The love then is irrelevant, just something that sometimes comes of faith but not always, and the truth of the faith is an irrelevant matter too in respect of justification. Faith simply has the side effect of making some people loving, or charitable. Plainly, Protestant Christians take him to have repudiated love as the whole point of Jesus’s teaching, and they spout out, “Sole fide, faith alone”, yet he does, from the last citation seem to think that love is an incidental consequence of faith, not necessary for justification but inevitable with faith nevertheless. It seems a confusion.

Luther, like all Christians thinks he knows God’s brain better than anyone else, and went further than anyone else in repudiating Christ, yet seems utterly confused and contradictory in his statements. He plainly contradicts himself with bald statements like these:

Faith without works, ie a sentimental thought, a mere delusion, and dream of the heart, is false and does not justify.

Faith without works is nothing and useless. This is understood by the papists to mean that faith without works does not justify.

So, despite all that sole fide stuff, faith without works is “nothing and useless”. How can Lutherans say they believe all this incomprehensible rubbish? Nietzsche considered Lutherism the ultimate withdrawal from Christ because it implied the believer was scared to do anything at all for fear of it being sinful. The answer therefore was to do nothing except to sing hymns and praise God, stimulating recreations no doubt, but not anything that God ever said helped anyone to be saved, however big the church you do it in.

Luther, Calvin, Knox, Mather, Swaggart, Torquemada, Loyola, and a host of others, Catholic or Protestant and still hailed by many as model Christians, did not live lives remotely like Christ’s. For Nietzsche their professed Christianity was a screen beyond which they could hide their incapacity for Christian love, their complete inability to treat people like God.

And, of course, these Christians could not allow their followers to conclude by rational thought that they were charlatans. Catholics could not read their bibles for themselves and were conditioned to respect the interpretation of it given them by the doctors of their faith, but Protestants could read their bibles and think about what they contained. So Luther added to his rejection of Christ:

Whover wants to be a Christian should tear out the eyes of his reason.

Reason and the wisdom of our flesh condemn the wisdom and the word of God.

You must part with reason and not know anything of it, and even kill it, else one will not get into the kingdom of heaven.

It is plain why modern US Protestants are so irrational. Luther added to faith being unreasonable as a necessity for salvation. “I believe because it is absurd”, as Tertullian said. “No”, retorted Nietzsche, “You mean ‘I believe because I am absurd.’” Surely Christians who believe in the Devil as well as God cannot accept any rejection of thinking and reason as anything other than satanic. If God made mankind in His own image, He must have made them complete with the organ of thinking in their heads. He must have expected them to use it try to figure things out. That means reasoning. Why then would he have said, “But do not reason about faith, and I have sent Paul and Luther to tell you so”? Or do they think God has no brain, and it was the Devil who gave it to us?

It must be simpler to think God gave you a brain, but that opponents of God want to discourage you from using it. Paul and Luther tell you not to use it, and so are agents of the Devil. In Christ’s terms, Man is God. So, when he is good, God is good, but when he is bad, then God becomes Satan, so men who are opponents of the good God must be wicked men, satanic men. They are men who do not want the best for all of mankind, but something that helps only some, unscrupulous types like themselves, to live off the mites of widows, the very types Christ condemned—theologians and clergymen—but also today corrupt politicians and businessmen. Nietzsche saw that Protestantism was a paralysis of reason, and that faith was a veto against science. They negated the Christianity of Christ.

Ascending to Naturalness

Being social is natural to human beings. To regard society as God is therefore to explicate a return to Nature, but not a return to the wild. It is society that stops us from being brutes, that makes us other than brutes. Nietzsche saw this “return to Nature” as an “ascent to Naturalness”. Living harmoniously together to our mutual advantage brings to us every advantage that society can bring, without any concomitant loss through the destruction of conflict.

Bands or tribes were our natural state, and originally they rarely clashed because they were distributed sparsely in a world big enough to ensure they kept apart—there was no need for rivalry. As the world got smaller and human populations got bigger, clashes began to happen, and rivalries eventually became calamitous. Now we are in the stage of the global tribe, and war is no longer an option. Humanity has the power for self destruction. Humans need to unite in a global culture, with a global God—the recognition that God is mankind, whatever name He has. Only mutual respect, mutual justice and mutual love is possible if we are to avoid mutual destruction.

It means we have to get to know each other, not to be xenophobic or to use pejorative terms about each other. To refuse to meet and get to know the other’s point of view is not loving, and cannot be Christian. Nietzsche explains the love spoken of by Christ as being friendship:

Who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its true name is friendship.

Christ was advocating that everyone was potentially your friend, so everyone must be friendly to others. The friendship he was thinking of was that of classical times, a “deeply and strongly” felt friendship, but all friendships have to begin somewhere, and it makes friendship hard to come by when you begin by hating someone else even though you do not know them at all. It is made all the harder with modern propaganda habitually applied through the press to demonize particular nations for political reasons. It is obvious that it is not Christian, but the politicians who do it, their aids and advisers and the newspaper owners who transmit it almost all profess Christianity. They are just those Christians Nietzsche condemns and Perfects or Übermenschen should call them to order.

Humans try to stand out from Nature in their technology, but they must try increasingly to blend in it, to be symbiotic rather than dominating. Humanity must become more organic, and less mechanical. Love must extend to Nature. Goddess is a metaphor for Nature, God a metaphor for human Society and the Son or Christ is a metaphor for righteous people, those who try to be Christs, who do what society requires to keep stable and everyone secure, and what Nature needs to keep wholesome and provide for human needs—a holy family.

Modern mainstream religions see man as an individual. Their concern is simply to provide people with a personal solace so that they tend to divert attention from our duty to the community and the environment in which we live.

Edward “Teddy” Goldsmith

The Supermen

Nietzsche is often criticized for being hard, perhaps even callous to ordinary people, but his message was that each one of us has to be hard on ourselves to do as Christ wanted. People who are true friends can be hard on each other, in pointing out failings, because they recognize in it an aim for mutual improvement and so will not take offence, and will forgive any given inadvertantly, for example by criticizing in error. In short, true friends can be frank with each other, and the friendship will endure and strengthen. Nietzsche did not advocate hardness against those who were not strong enough not to be hurt:

When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy of the heart—it is his duty.

A “duty” is an obligation to human society, that is to God, once society is seen as being God. Despite 2000 years of Christianity, everyone knows their rights, but few know even what a duty is. The Christ, Nietzsche’s übermensch or superman is dutiful, but they do not seek a witness when they want to flatter themselves by being seen as a Christian. That is the “neighbour love” of modern Christianity, the mutual admiration societies of Christian church memberships. Philosophers since Socrates sought to expose hypocrisy, and so too did Christ, but Christians now do not notice. For them love means self love. They love each other, but hate everyone else. Very Christian today, but not what Christ taught, and particularly not what he did! Nietzsche joined Christ and Socrates in wanting to expose hypocrisy. He aimed to expose what was behind the façade of Christian virtue.

To be kind, humble or obliging out of necessity was a slave’s morality. If the slave was not any of these they were likely to get a whipping. The worshippers of ancient idols served them. They considered themselves slaves to their God, and often were tattooed with the symbol of the God to show it. The sign of the cross with water at a Christian baptism is a relic of it. It is a tattoo that Christians think God can see, but no one else. The are slaves to God, just as the ancient people were, and they attend “services” for their God. Christian morality is a slave morality because God’s slaves will be punished in hell fire if they do not practice Christian morality. Yet they do not practice what Christ taught, a morality that was not a slave morality but a purely voluntary love of mankind. Good Christians are good out of fear of retribution, but Christ tried to teach them to want to be good to others. True virtue, the love of Christ is done for its own sake. So Nietzsche defined duty differently:

Duty means wanting a goal not for the sake of something else[†]

Something else. A reward or to avoid a punishment

but for its own sake.

It is socially valuable in its own right. It is self fulfilling. Christ is said to have abrogated the Jewish law of Moses, but the love he proclaimed he said fulfilled it, thereby disposing of the need for it.

The burden of Christian love falls greatest on to those most conscious of it, on to those with a strong sense of duty and purpose towards society—the strong—Christian leaders. They are the ones who consistently most spectacularly fail to carry it. Nietzsche criticized Kaisar Wilhelm and Bismarck. One could be hard on one’s leaders because they ought to want sincere and constructive criticism. They are not the weak, are they? Bush and Blair are archetypes of modern Christian leaders. They ought to have been Christs but preferred to be Caesars. They could have shown Christian love and demonstrated Christian practice. They failed.

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