American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

But Nietzsche’s misguidedness offered salutary lessons about the failures of Protestantism. His failures demonstrated how Protestantism’s rationalist approach to the Word of the Bible and its historical openness to scientific thinking stretched biblical authority too thin. By hoisting will above Word, and by failing to appreciate human intellect as a finite and imperfect faculty, Luther had sent early modern theology along a dangerous course that led straight to Nietzsche. What they both failed to realize, and what the Roman Catholic Church had always stressed, is that true free will is not intellect unhindered but human will working in cooperation with God’s grace. Catholic interpreters thus felt compelled to highlight the Protestant roots of Nietzsche’s errors, employing his philosophy as evidence of the dangerous worldliness of the liberal Protestantism that dominated American public life during the Progressive Era.