Within a decade of its initial publication, the “greatest and most persistent problem” of Kaufmann’s Nietzsche became the focal point and rallying cry of a small but visible group of American religious thinkers, who came to be known as “Death of God” theologians. Drawing on the religious existentialism of Paul Tillich, the ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and even the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth, these liberal theologians sought to examine whether Christian views of the universe were still tenable after the horrors of World War II. Though they came from different Protestant denominations and
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