Nietzsche’s Writing Against Religion and the Crisis of Faith

“Paul Bishop chronicles the effort of serious religious thinkers who ‘speak back’ to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra on the proclamation that God is dead. Here finally is a study that unpacks the religious dimensions of modernity’s most anti-religious philosopher, of an active nihilist who reinvents his own demigod Dionysus, champion of anti-faith, as a counter to Christ. Bishop produces a rich catalog of Christian thinkers who took lessons from Nietzsche’s elevation and sublimation of Dionysus, his quasi-religious doctrines of eternal recurrence, the superhuman, self-overcoming and amor fati. Pondering the fact that shallow atheists fail to register emotion at the news that God is dead and we humans have killed him, Bishop reveals how some religious thinkers responded more sympathetically and dialectically to Nietzsche’s challenge. This is a timely study, and it raises the hope that it might help restore thinking into the religious and atheist communities that traditionally valued thinking. “

—Adrian Del Caro, Professor of German Studies, University of Tennessee, and General Editor, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche

This book offers an exercise in reception theory and investigates the key figures in the reception of Nietzsche’s critique of Judeo-Christianity in the course of the twentieth century. It has often been remarked upon — but rarely, if ever, explained — why Nietzsche, the author of the famous parable in The Gay Science in which a madman announces the “death of God” and a self-proclaimed opponent of organised religion, should have been a figure of such profound interest to writers, thinkers and theologians who were of a Christian persuasion. In order better to understand the attractiveness of Nietzsche to practitioners of faith, this book undertakes an analytical study of the reception of Nietzsche by around a dozen writers and thinkers working within the discourse of twentieth-century theology in the European tradition (French, Italian, German, Polish, and Swiss).

Paul Bishop is William Jacks Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on Nietzsche and related figures, including German Political Thought and the Discourse of Platonism: Finding the Way out of the Cave (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).