It was Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that Tillich had turned to as a twenty-nine-year old military chaplain with the German army stationed in France, to make sense of the unspeakable death and carnage around him. Nietzsche helped him see that in man’s worship of false institutions the “God of theism” was dead, because modern man, in his arrogance, had killed Him. Throughout the 1920s and into his exile in the United States, Tillich continued to draw from Nietzsche as he encouraged other searching moderns to “shak[e] … the foundations” of official religion grown sinful from its separation from “the
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