10/15/2025
Happy Birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche
On this day in 1844, the brilliant and troubled atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the village of Röcken in Germany. Nietzsche is best known for the claim “God is dead,” which he storified in two parables.
In "Thus Spake Zarathrustrai," Nietzsche promised the potential if humans would evolve beyond religion. “The Parable of the Madman” was more of a warning, written not to those who believed in God but to those who didn’t:
"Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed."
In the late nineteenth century, many believed in a utopian future without a God weighing us down. Nietzsche, however, believed these children of the Enlightenment had underestimated how significant the death of God was. And so, his madman answered:
"Whither is God?... I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?"
Nietzsche was not claiming that God had once existed and no longer did. Rather, he recognized what the loss of God meant as the central reference point for western life, politics, education, art, architecture, and most other aspects of culture. The death of God had, as he put it, “unchained the earth from its sun.”
Now, life had to be reimagined. Specifically, the death of God held incredible implications for morality and meaning. Without God, what is up and down, forward or back? What will warm us? What can light our way?
Throughout the twentieth century, as the Western World became more secularized and religion increasingly marginalized, God seemed less relevant to much of life and culture. Secular humanists, like the mockers in Nietzsche’s parable, promised a better world without the moral constraints of God, Christianity, or the Bible. Salvation could be found in medicine. Prosperity, comfort, and convenience would be delivered through technology. The existentialists promised meaning, even if life were meaningless. Sexual liberation promised unlimited pleasure, if s*x were untethered from the religious hang-ups of morality, marriage, and children.
When I began teaching worldviews in the early 2000’s, I often highlighted the absurd inconsistencies of attempting to make meaning in a meaningless universe. If truth is relative and words have no fixed meaning, I asked students, what would prevent someone from claiming a stop sign means go? Or up means down? Or a man is a woman? Why can’t murder mean healthcare? Or injustice be justified by redefining oppression and justice?
Today, some of those examples are the substance of Supreme Court cases. The hypotheticals are actuals, just as Nietzsche predicted:
"Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. 'I have come too early,' he said then; 'my time is not yet.' This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves."
Of course, God is not dead. Nietzsche was wrong about that, but he did foresee the coming crises of meaning, truth, trust, and identity. With a clarity unlike most who reject God, he understood that “our only hope in life and death is,” as the Catechism puts it, “that we are not our own but belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Nietzsche did not believe that hope was real. He also did not think that, once lost, the Western World would ever rediscover it. We can pray he was wrong about that, too.
