What I'm going to talk about in this talk, which I've entitled After Christ, understanding Nietzsche's postmodern critique of Christianity is trying to think about how Frederick Nietzsche is reacting to and trying to situate his philosophy in relation to, maybe as a kind of replacement of what he thinks are classical truths of Christianity, their problems and what his solutions are to the crisis created in the wake of Christianity, their problems, and what his solutions are to the crisis created

in the wake of Christianity. You might say after secularization. So the first part of the talk is

called defining the crisis. For Nietzsche, we live in a time of dramatic upheaval and cultural

redefinition, too deep, in fact, for time of dramatic upheaval and cultural redefinition.

Too deep, in fact, for most of us to truly fathom.

And this is due to the collapse of Christian belief in the modern European West.

We could add in the North American culture.

Although he wrote in the late 19th century,

Nietzsche can be considered a sociologically prophetic figure who predicted

the dawn of secular liberal culture. After the demise of Christianity, Nietzsche believes there's

an often unstated or unconscious problem of meaning in the West. After Christianity, we are still

too semi-Christian, neither believing in the older order of truths that's faded away, nor willing to step forward into the new terrain that we now encounter.

And as a consequence, we're threatened by an unstated spiritual malaise, or what he calls an unconscious nihilism.

And here I read from the first quote that I've given you at the top of the handout.

What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?

It endowed man with an absolute value in contrast to his smallness and contingency

in the flux of becoming and passing away.

So if you think about the modern scientific worldview, which some would harness to argue

that effectively were a kind of a meaningless material blip on the screen, Nietzsche is saying

that Christianity kept us from acknowledging the brutal reality of that.

It served the advocates of God by conceding to the world despite suffering and evil,

the character of perfection, including that freedom, evil, that freedom, evil seemed full of meaning.

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