American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Nietzsche’s significance for theologians, Patton sug gested, was not his hostility to Christianity as such but rather his questioning of Christian moral standards. Patton pointed to Nietzsche’s discussion of the origin of Christian values in On the Genealogy of Morals as an example of how historicism, pushed to its logical conclusion, enabled him to “impugn the validity of all moral ideas by tracing their origin.” The problem with Nietzsche, as with all those caught up in this genealogical impulse, is that he employed it not to better understand scriptural authority but to undermine it. By arguing that divine ideals had a human origin, Nietzsche sought not simply to criticize Christian moral values but to “put in question the value of these values.” Having stripped Christian values of any divine authorship, Nietzsche had no recourse but to fall either back onto a biological basis of morality, or forward into the abyss of no morality at all.