Friedrich Nietzsche (Short Bio Sketch)
By Brannon S. Howse
“Postmodernism” is a term so widely known these days that you might think it is simply a word arbitrarily attached to a vast but vague set of contemporary ideas. Yet its origin is very traceable. Friedrich Nietzsche, along with Michael Foucault, founded postmodern thought.
Postmodernism holds that truth and reality are created by man and not by God, that something is true “if it works for you.” Truth is neither absolute nor binding over the entire globe but merely situational and subjective. Postmodernism is a dominant worldview in America today, largely because Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely read authors on college campuses.
The Emergent Church has picked up on Nietzsche’s thinking and has incorporated it into its attitude toward Scripture. EC leaders such as Rob Bell have declared that the Bible is not absolute truth. Christianity Today, in November 2004, reported that: “The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself—‘discovering the Bible as a human product,’ as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat.”
How ironic that a church movement would be built on the worldview of a man best known for declaring “God is dead.” Nietzsche said not only that God is dead but that “we have killed him.” Nietzsche hated Christians. “Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet,” he wrote. “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one moral blemish of mankind….I regard Christianity as the most seductive lie that has yet existed.” Nietzsche believed Christianity made his fellow Germans weak, so he described himself as “The Anti-Christian Friedrich Nietzsche” or sometimes as just “The Antichrist” (also the title of one of his books—Antichrist).
It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that Nietzsche’s war on Christianity and Nietzsche’s acceptance within a false dominant church portends the increase in “soft” persecution of Christians in the West. This may well lead to the kind of persecution of the true Church that is common in nations like China and Cuba.
One sure way to lay the foundation for persecution is to dull man’s God-given, internal mechanism for determining what is right or wrong, just or unjust. Nietzsche championed the eradication of guilt from the human conscience and elevated Darwin’s survival of the fittest to the next level. He proclaimed, “Life simply is will to power.” Whatever it takes, one should purpose to be a ruler, a master over the less desirable. Promoting his master-and-slave morality, Nietzsche, in his book Beyond Good and Evil, proclaimed the need to look past Christian definitions of good and evil to whatever it takes to gain power, part of which means endorsing cruelty when necessary to accomplish the goal. Nietzsche explained:
We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes….Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition.
“Master morality” means the strong rule over the weak. Nietzsche includes Christians among the weak because of their compassion for the sick, aged, and vulnerable. Anyone who holds to a fixed morality, he maintained, would become slaves—and deservedly so. Nietzsche thoroughly rejected the Christian worldview, its absolute truth, standards of justice and injustice, righteousness and unrighteousness. For Nietzsche, the only standard that matters is what puts and keeps someone in power. He believed “…that the demand of one morality for all is detrimental for the higher men….” Notice that this is why today’s cultural elite have set one standard for the masses and a completely different one for themselves.
In contrast to Nietzsche, why do Christians have such a strong commitment to the life of the unborn, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly? Because we understand—as did America’s founding fathers—that man is created in the image of God, and therefore every person has a right to life, liberty, and property. With the loss of the Christian worldview and the ever-increasing acceptance of Nietzsche’s postmodernism, Bible-believing Christians in America risk being portrayed as the enemies of the State—intolerant, out of touch, bigoted, extremist, or even domestic terrorists—all because their worldview conflicts with that of “the higher man,” the cultural elite, or the master morality.
America’s sick, handicapped, and elderly will also be at risk as man’s intrinsic, God-given worth is replaced by a value measured only according to what a person can do for the State. Once national healthcare is a reality and the majority of Americans come to see it as a right, only the threat of its removal will be needed to convince younger, postmodern generations that the lifeboat is too full, and it is time to toss the weak overboard.
Nietzsche promoted the concept of a “Superman” race, which Hitler also embraced after studying Nietzsche. Today, the Superman concept is welcomed through “spiritual evolution” which declares that man is evolving to new levels in the spiritual realm as more and more individuals discover their “god consciousness.”
In Germany, a false church not only assisted Adolf Hitler in coming to power but also in maintaining power. Many German “Christians” had accepted the worldviews of Nietzsche and Wellhausen. These same two radicals and their worldviews are now accepted within many churches and denominations throughout the world. This fast-rising, global false church will give credibility to internationally recognized political and spiritual leaders who will in turn give their power and authority to a one-world leader. After appearing to be a man of peace and justice, this one world leader will reveal his true intentions and will rival Hitler’s brutality in immeasurable ways. Like Hitler, he will have largely achieved his position through the help of a global false church that embraced the postmodernism of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Copyright 2012 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.
