Nietzsche’s problem, Johnson argued, was that he was shadowboxing with a fictive Christianity, a “caricature” of God and Christian ethics he inherited from “soulless externalities” of German higher criticism. Nietzsche rightly condemned his own tradition of intellectualized ethics apart from faith, but his mistake was to assume that the modernized Christianity of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism contained any of the truths of scripture. So while Johnson argued that “Nietzsche is the apostle of positive ungodliness,” he also saw in him a helpful “foe” to the “negative ungodliness” of
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