After Christ, understanding Nietzsche's postmodern critique of Christianity.

So let me begin by trying to define the crisis or the crisis as Nietzsche sees it.

And I'm relying largely on the later work from the 1880s area.

For Nietzsche, we live in a time of dramatic upheaval and cultural

redefinition too deep for most of us to truly fathom or even bear the weight of admitting

due to the severity of our own self-redefinition that must follow necessarily from the collapse of Christian belief.

Now, although he wrote in the late 19th century, Nietzsche can be considered a sociologically prophetic figure who predicted the dawn of secular liberal culture, and so who in some ways speaks more deeply and acutely to us today than he did

to his contemporaries. After the demise of Christianity as a profound cultural influence, Nietzsche

believes there is an often unstated and unconscious problem of meaning in the West, which we

and our contemporaries have trouble even accepting to articulate.

After Christianity, we are still all too semi-Christian, neither believing in the older

order of truths that we have let drift away, nor willing to step forward into the new terrain that we must embrace.

As a consequence, we are threatened by an unstated spiritual malaise or an unconscious nihilism.

And there's a very powerful quote about this that I'm about to read you that is on your handout.

What advantages did the

Christian moral hypothesis offered? First, it endowed man with an absolute value in contrast to

his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away, which Nietzsche perhaps

tends to think is more the reality in some respects.

Second, it served the advocates of God by conceding to the world despite suffering and evil, the character of perfection,

including that freedom, evil seemed full of meaning.

Life is redeemable even in the face of great evils.

They have meaning.

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