Nietzsche, Jesus, and the Task of Being Human 

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from a lecture given in March 2026 at Thales College in Wake Forest, North Carolina. 

All human beings have a shared project: to navigate the world in the best way we can. This shared task reveals that the most important question for anyone to answer is: What sort of person should I be?

I call this the most important question for two reasons. First, it connects essentially with every other important question in life, questions about what it means to be human, what is real, and what has value. Second, it is a question that each person answers either consciously or by default. Each person reveals her answer to this question by how she lives her life. We all have some idea or vision of what the good life is. Living intentionally in accordance with such a vision is made difficult by the complexity of our lives. We are each embedded in a network of relationships and responsibilities that rightly demand our attention. In addition, everywhere we turn, we bump into conflicting visions of the best life. 

Now, suppose you wander into a coffee shop, grab your coffee, and sit down. You begin to hear a conversation at the other end of the room. You glance over and do a double take. You’ve never seen either person before, but you recognize them immediately. Sitting right across the room are Nietzsche and Jesus.  

You are stunned.  

The first thing that strikes you is their excellent facial hair. Nietzsche has possibly the greatest mustache ever grown. Jesus has a thick, full beard like that guy from the TV show, The Chosen. Nietzsche’s build is both tight and thick. Although he is not tall, there is a sense of power in his stature. You expect him to pounce with exuberance any second. Jesus is taller. He inhabits his seat with a curious serenity that invites Nietzsche to continue his train of thought.  

It is unmistakable to you, even in your brief glance. No one else seems to notice, but it really is Nietzsche and Jesus, sitting right there. Their conversation is animated and punctuated by laughter. You can’t quite make out what is said, but you strain your ears. This conversation is one you do not want to miss. 

Nietzsche and Jesus are among the most provocative thinkers in history. To think about them in a conversation raises extraordinary possibilities. One claims to be God, the other that God (and the very idea of God) is dead. One claims that the humble people are those who are truly flourishing, while the other thinks humility is weakness. You take a sip of your coffee and wonder: What are they talking about?  

Of course, Jesus never met Nietzsche in a coffee shop. If they met in this way, I suspect they would talk about the central questions of life: What is it to be a good and true human being?   

If you ask people who they think Nietzsche is, you will hear terms like “Existentialist” or “Postmodernist” or “Nihilist.” If you ask what his main message is, you will hear the “death of God” or the “Übermensch.” Some will say “the will to power.” All of these themes are developed throughout his works. Nietzsche’s fundamental project, however, is about saying “yes to life.” His posture is one of thorough life affirmation. This posture toward life is deeply connected to all the themes that come to mind when people think of Nietzsche.  

For example, he begins his most developed attack on traditional morality by asking: What is the value of morality? In pursuing the answer to this question, he reveals his criterion of evaluation:  

[U]nder what conditions did man invent the value judgements of good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing? Are they a sign of distress, poverty and the degeneration of life? Or, on the contrary, do they reveal the fullness, vitality and will of life, its courage, its confidence, its future? 

The whole project of morality has value, for Nietzsche, only if it promotes the flourishing of human life.  

Let us turn for a moment to Jesus. If you ask a dozen or more people who Jesus is or what he is about, you will also get a variety of answers. Some will say he is a great teacher, a moralist. Some will say he was God Incarnate or the world’s Savior. Many will describe his message as a call to love one another. Still others will say it was about how to have forgiveness or a connection with God.  

These themes are important, and as with Nietzsche, all the important themes in Jesus’s teachings are connected. The central theme of the message of Jesus, however, is also life. In the Gospel of John, Jesus uses the word “life” numerous times. Jesus did not claim merely to teach about life or to point the way to it, but he claimed that he brings life. He says things like, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). So, Jesus, too, is a teacher whose message is fundamentally about life.  

Here, we see a strange convergence in the teachings of Nietzsche on one hand and the teachings of Jesus on the other. Both Nietzsche and Jesus see life as the central issue. Each offers a specific path as the means to the best life. Each has a particular notion of what human flourishing is and how to achieve it.  

Nietzsche fascinates us, in part, because he is provocative and iconoclastic. He is not afraid to declare bold and unpopular claims—at least they were unpopular in his day. He was born in 1844 into a long line of Lutheran pastors and he was a motivated and gifted student. At age fourteen, he won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. In this school, he was first introduced to the discipline of philology. Here he also lost his Christian faith. Nietzsche studied philology at university and at age twenty-four, he was appointed professor of philology at Basel University. (In contemporary terms, this post is something like an endowed chair.)  

Nietzsche suffered his whole life from terrible health. In a few years he had to retire from Basel with a small pension. He spent the rest of his life moving around Europe searching for a climate that would ease his maladies so he could write. In 1889, at the age of forty-four, he collapsed in the street and never regained his lucidity. He eventually died in 1900.  

To this day, Nietzsche’s work continues to inspire different intellectual movements. His work has been appropriated by a variety of political factions, most famously by the Nazis. Nietzsche would have objected to their use of his work, as he was a strong opponent of anti-Semitic regulations being enacted in his own time. Today, he is taken as a hero by some on both the hard right and the hard left.  

As I said, Nietzsche is about life. In his mind, the biggest obstacle to life is that people live in the grip of forces that are deeply anti-life. He introduces this notion with a vivid image: 

After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. And we—we must defeat his shadow as well! 

God is dead in that he is no longer an option. Thinking people have rejected his reality, but they are still under his shadow. They remain trapped in the remnants of belief in God. It will take work and time, Nietzsche thinks, ultimately to defeat this shadow.  

Defeating the shadow of God requires a revolution in our understanding of life itself. We shall discuss three aspects of the shadow of God that must be overcome: traditional morality, metaphysical truth, and Christianity itself.  

Traditional Morality 

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche launches his most sustained attack on morality. He tells the story of how the nonmoral notions of good and bad became transformed into the moral notions of Good and Evil. The strong, he argues, equated what was good and valuable with what was like themselves. So, goodness consisted in strength, courage, decisiveness, and the exercise of power. Anything opposite to these qualities was bad, such as weakness, fear and servitude. Goodness and badness were not at first primarily moral categories.  

Along the way, the majority who were weak and unable to challenge the power of the strong undertook what Nietzsche calls the “radical revaluation of all values.” They turned values upside down and began to call goodness what was most like themselves—the weak rather than what was most like the strong. They called the characteristics of the strong and powerful not simply bad, but evil. They turned an aesthetic category, or even a preference category, into a moral category. Nietzsche explains: 

Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment, no doubt about it … and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into “goodness”; timid baseness is being turned into “humility”; submission to people one hates is being turned into “obedience” … not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness.

In other words, morality is something invented by the weak so that the weak can exert power over the strong. They cannot defeat the strong on their own terms, so they have changed the terms of the game and inverted all values. Once morality is seen to be simply a strategy of survival for the weak, most enlightened people will rethink its value. How, then, do we assess its value? For Nietzsche, the fundamental question is whether morality obstructs or promotes human flourishing. 

Morality demands that we turn away from those desires that characterize the strong and the powerful. It obligates us to embrace the weak and impotent. Nietzsche is claiming that morality takes all that promotes life and rejects it as evil. All that is anti-life is raised to the level of virtue and obligation. The assumption that our purpose and obligation is to embrace weakness and servitude is what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal, which demands that we turn from our desires to be strong and embrace humility and weakness. It is the ascetic ideal that is the great enemy of life. He writes, “without any exaggeration we are entitled to call it the real catastrophe in the history of the health of European man.”  

Metaphysical Truth 

The second feature of the shadow of God that must be defeated is metaphysical truth. Nietzsche asks where opposition to the ascetic ideal is to be found. Up to this point he has launched his criticism of the ascetic ideal in such a way that the reader assumes it to be specifically a criticism of Christian morality. He turns on those who take his point as an affirmation of scientific rationalism against religion. On the contrary, Nietzsche claims that science itself is “not opposite the ascetic ideal but rather the latter’s own most recent and noble manifestation.” He further claims that “our faith in science is still based on a metaphysical faith.” Why is science no antidote to the ascetic ideal? Because science, just as much as religion and morality, is grounded in the will to truth. 

Some readers take comments like these to support a postmodern reading in which Nietzsche rejects all truth. I do not think this reading is right. Nietzsche clearly thought his own views were true, and so he does not reject all truth. Rather, he rejects what he calls “metaphysical truth.” In an earlier book, Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche describes his rejection of “metaphysical philosophy,” which seeks a higher source for the important features of human experience. This higher source is what he calls “metaphysical truth.”  

In Christianity, human beings are thought to be created in the image of God. Human nature is rooted in something higher, in the divine nature. Traditional morality is thought also to be grounded in God according to Christianity, or it is grounded in rationality, as Kant thought or, following Aristotle, in a fixed and stable human nature. Nietzsche rejects these approaches because there are no higher sources. Because there are no higher sources, we realize that the things we used to think had supernatural or metaphysical sources are completely natural. They are, to use the title of the book, Human, All too Human. In other words, they are as non-supernatural or as un-metaphysical as digestion.   

The ascetic ideal is not merely a religious or a moral ideal. It is the dominant story of Western civilization. From Plato to the present, knowledge of reality as well as of God and of goodness have been thought to be ideals to which we must aspire. We must sacrifice our desires to achieve these goals. This is a metaphysical faith because it is the faith that metaphysical truth is of ultimate value; that truth is divine. 

Christianity 

It is not surprising that the third place the shadow of God is seen is in Christianity. Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity focus less on his claim that the central tenets of Christianity are false and more on the claim that it is one of the most severe enemies of life:

Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed, it has made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of a strong life; it has corrupted the reason of even the most spiritual natures by teaching people to see the highest spiritual values as sinful, as deceptive, as temptations.  

Christianity as much as traditional morality holds forth the ascetic ideal. It commands the strong to turn away from the very things that bring life and to turn toward the things that are life-denying. Christianity is to be rejected because it is weak, trivial, and disgusting. He thinks that no one can want to be a Christian. “Our age knows better … What used to be just sickness is indecency today, it is indecent to be a Christian these days. And this is where my disgust begins.”

Nietzsche’s disgust arises, in part, because Christianity commands that we treat those who are weak with pity and compassion. For Nietzsche, compassion is a strategy to trap the strong. The Christian call to compassion makes the strong person doubt his right to be strong and happy. Rather, he must feel deeply for those who are weakest. The very nobility of the strong is called into question. For Nietzsche, this possibility is devastating. The suffering of the weak must be treated like an infectious disease. The strong must quarantine themselves for their own protection. He cries out, “And so we need good air! Good air!” 

It is striking that compassion is the Achilles’ heel of the strong. In every other context, they remain noble and secure. They are completely independent of the condition of anyone else. The strong simply ignore those who suffer. Weak people do not matter. But there is a danger lurking under the surface. Unless the strong are vigilant, they are susceptible to being infected by the weak. Their independence and stability are at risk. It is almost as though there is a reversal of power here: the strong turn out to be the vulnerable. It is no wonder that Nietzsche exclaims: “The sickly are the greatest danger to man: not the wicked, not the ‘beasts of prey’.”  

Life as the Antidote 

The shadow of God includes the great enemies of life: traditional morality, metaphysical truth, and Christianity. These must be defeated. With what does Nietzsche replace them? With life! Life is, for Nietzsche, the ultimate criterion of evaluation. Every feature of human experience is brought before the judgment seat of life. Nietzsche rejects the project of showing that life was worth living. To show that life is of value is to weigh it against some other criterion of evaluation. Nietzsche rejects this project because there can be no higher standard than life itself. To attempt to justify life against some other standard is a symptom of a devaluation of life: 

Judgments, value judgments on life, for or against, can ultimately never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they can be taken seriously only as symptoms,—in themselves, judgments like these are stupidities. You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. 

The fact that life is the ultimate criterion of evaluation allows us to see that Nietzsche should not be identified with nihilism. In fact, Nietzsche insists that nihilism is one of the things that must be defeated. Nietzsche appears to be a nihilist because he rejects the task of justifying life. The nihilist, in contrast, requires that life be justified. Christians may argue that life has the justification that it needs in God. Atheists may argue that life fails to have sufficient justification and is therefore meaningless. Nietzsche rejects both of these options as nihilistic. Life itself needs no external justification; it is its own justification. 

Nietzsche’s posture on life being its own highest standard is deeper than the claim that it is beyond evaluation, however. Any view that aims to justify life puts something else above life. To hold that something is above life is, in fact, to degrade life. It is a rejection of life. The role of God in the Christian story is especially degrading. Nietzsche describes the Christian conception of God in just this way: 

God having degenerated into a contradiction of life instead of its transfiguration and eternal yes! God as declared aversion to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every slander against “the here and now”, for every lie about the “beyond”! God as the deification of nothingness, the canonization of the will to nothingness!  

God is the eternal no to life because God stands above all things human. He is a slander against “the here and now” because God puts the justification of life in another world altogether. How can life—which is wholly located in the here and now—be justified by something as far from the here and now as can be? It is not that God would be adequate to justify life, if only God existed. Nietzsche sees God as antithetical to the value of life.  

What Is Life?

What is this life that is beyond evaluation? In short, life is the will to power, one of Nietzsche’s most famous themes. When Nietzsche develops the claim that life is the will to power, he often draws from biological observations. The main claim of Darwinism, as Nietzsche understands it, is that life strives for survival. Nietzsche denies this claim:  

Physiologists should think twice before positioning the drive for self-preservation as the cardinal drive of an organic being. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength … self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this. 

The will to power operates on the level of our basic drives. Nietzsche does not think of a human being as a unified substance. Each person is an aggregate of competing drives that operate under the conscious level. Some drives are strong, and some are weak. The will to power, then, is not simply one drive among many others. Each drive embodies the will to power. Each drive fights to be expressed and to dominate other drives. When one drive dominates sufficiently, the organism or the person acts.  

On the interpersonal scale, it is tempting to see Nietzsche’s will to power as a license to exploit everyone who is weaker than yourself. I do not think that this posture is his emphasis. Rather, the will to power allows you to ignore everyone else. It is aimed at maintaining your own equilibrium. It takes power, strength, and discipline to stand solitary and unaffected by those around you. There is a fierce independence in this vision. We saw this in Nietzsche’s rejection of pity and compassion. If I allow myself to get sucked into the needs of people around me, I will become weak, dependent, and entangled in the very kind of moral stance that pulls me away from my desires. 

The person who achieves this independence can truly affirm life. Nietzsche borrows from the Stoics the phrase amor fati, the love of fate. To love one’s fate in the way Nietzsche recommends is much more than simply being content with one’s life. A general satisfaction with life is nowhere near what Nietzsche is holding forth: 

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that you do not want anything to be different, not forwards, not backwards, not for all eternity. Not just to tolerate necessity, still less to conceal it … but to love it. 

Amor fati is the posture of life affirmation. Saying yes to life, then, involves an absolute acceptance and celebration of every detail of one’s life. It is connected to Nietzsche’s notion that there can be no higher standard by which to evaluate life. If there can be no standard other than life itself, then there can be no standard for me other than my life. Few people are strong enough to embrace this life affirmation. 

Life is the only thing that matters to Nietzsche; everything that gets in the way of life is to be rejected. We are still trapped under the shadow of God. This shadow may be around for centuries, but we must defeat it in the end. 

Jesus on Life 

Jesus shares with Nietzsche his emphasis on life and flourishing. From this common starting point, Jesus and Nietzsche part ways dramatically. The shadow of God that must be defeated, for Nietzsche, turns out to be the very path of life for Jesus.  

That Jesus is a teacher of flourishing is evident in his most famous sermon: the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). The theme of the whole sermon is how his followers, citizens of his kingdom, are to live. The sermon begins with the famous “Beatitudes” or “Blessings.” We all recognize the phrase “Blessed are the meek.” The term translated as “blessed” involves a pronouncement of objective flourishing. It is the right path for human life. New Testament scholar Jonathan Pennington argues that “the Sermon on the Mount is Christianity’s answer to the greatest metaphysical question that humanity has always faced—How can we experience true human flourishing?” 

Jesus pronounces this blessing on people who embody a variety of character qualities. Those who are objectively flourishing include those who are poor in spirit, that is, those who recognize their own spiritual inadequacy. It includes those who mourn for the sorrows of the world, those who are meek, those with a strong desire for righteousness and justice, and those who are merciful and who are peacemakers. The character qualities Jesus extols reflect the many-faceted profile of a citizen of the kingdom of God. This picture of flourishing includes the very qualities Nietzsche rejects. Rather than power, strength, and independence, Jesus extols humility and a posture of serving one another.  

On one occasion, two of his followers asked if they could have positions of power when Jesus finally established his Kingdom. Jesus’s response can be seen as a direct challenge to Nietzsche on the will to power: 

You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be the slave of all. (Mark 10: 42-44) 

Independence is not a mark of greatness for Jesus. He taught that the path to true greatness lies in serving others. 

Jesus did not merely teach his followers to adopt the posture of serving one another; he took this posture himself. The custom at that time was that a servant would meet guests at the door and wash their feet. Then the guests could recline at the table. At the Last Supper, there was no servant. Not one of Jesus’s friends would get up to serve the others. As they were about to recline, Jesus got up, stripped to his waist, and washed the feet of each disciple. The story continues: 

So when He had washed their feet, and taken His garments and reclined at the table again, He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you.” (John 13:12-15) 

Note that Jesus recognizes his own position as Lord and Teacher. It was not in spite of his position that he took the role of a servant. It was because of his position. Note also that he did not ask them to wash his feet, but to wash one another’s feet.   

Jesus comes to bring life, and he calls those who would follow him into service to others. In Jesus’s mind, there is no conflict between what is life-affirming and putting yourself under others in order to serve them. In fact, unless we embrace the life of service, we wind up losing our lives. “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).  

To follow Jesus is to refrain from grasping at one’s life. It is not through trying to carve out an arena to express your power that real life is found.  It is here we see that the call of Jesus does not demand that we turn away from life. It is a turn toward life. In this way, Jesus utterly rejects Nietzsche’s picture of the ascetic ideal. 

Jesus on Metaphysical Truth 

Jesus assumes throughout his ministry that God is the source of all life. The best human life is found in being rightly related to God. He does not argue for this claim. Apart from a few Romans, everyone with whom Jesus interacts held the same assumption. There was a shared theological orientation to reality on which the Jewish world was built.  

God created human beings, as the Scripture says, “in his image.” This fact means, among other things, that God has purposes for human beings. These purposes give people both value and meaning in an objective, global sense. The nature of human beings is a reflection of God’s nature. The various capacities we share are pictures of God’s capacities. In a way similar to God, human beings have knowledge, the ability to act for reasons, a moral nature, and other personal attributes. God created us to reflect the divine nature, although we are limited in many of these features. Not only are we to reflect God’s capacities, but we are also to display God’s moral nature. God is good and the source of all goodness. Moral goodness, at its most fundamental level, consists of mirroring God’s moral character. God’s moral nature includes love, patience, generosity, compassion, and other moral virtues.   

It is also the case that the image of God is related to the task given to human beings. This task is given when God said: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1: 28). Human beings were given the world to cultivate. Part of the divine plan is for human beings to bring good and true and beautiful and useful things out of the good world into which we have been placed. As God creates the cosmos and sustains it in existence, human beings are to cultivate and develop the world they were given.  

Jesus’s position is deeply tied to the kind of metaphysical truth that Nietzsche rejects. Nietzsche disdains any position that thinks there is a higher source for human beings, for life, for flourishing. The source for everything must be found in the here and now. But Jesus points in the opposite direction. Metaphysical truth is critical to our flourishing, as we see in his words to his disciples: 

If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You shall be made free’?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” (John 8:31-34) 

Truth liberates us. What enslaves us is sin. To grasp what Jesus is saying, we must recall that human beings are made for a mutual relationship with each other and for a dependence on the creator. These relationships constitute our objective purpose. We choose either to live in this dependent relationship with God or to rebel and walk away. What Jesus calls “sin” in this passage is this walking away. Throughout the theological story, sin is our rebelling against God and rejecting the dependence on God that is appropriate to created beings.  

Now why might Jesus insist that rejecting our dependence on God brings slavery? Since we were created for the purpose of relationship with God, we fulfill our purpose in that relationship. Our rejection of God’s purposes ruptures our relationships not only with God, but with each other, with ourselves, with the rest of created reality. Anything that disrupts our dependence on God disrupts our flourishing. We walk away, and we step out of the source of freedom. This is how sin produces slavery. The person who steps out of the source of flourishing is not fully free to flourish. 

What liberates us from the oppression of sin is truth. “The truth will make you free.” How does the truth liberate? First, Jesus is the source of all truth. We can see this theme in the prologue to John’s Gospel: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). As the source of all reality, he is the source of all truth. Thus, right relation to truth and the source of all truth is liberating.   

Second, the truth about who we are and our place in the cosmos is foundational to our freedom. What contributes to flourishing depends on what sort of thing a human being is in reality. It depends also upon what moral reality is like, if there is any. It depends on whether there are facts about human purpose. Answers to these questions about our condition underlie any plausible idea about what liberation looks like. Such answers go beyond the domain of the empirical world. Jesus’s answer to these questions reflects that the flourishing life is found in our dependence on God.  

Third, an accurate diagnosis of what oppresses is necessary to any successful view of human freedom. The people to whom Jesus first declared that everyone who sins is a slave to sin had completely misdiagnosed their condition. They thought of freedom and slavery only in political terms. They did not recognize that their own rejection of God caused them to be oppressed. They needed to grasp their condition before they could have any hope of being liberated. Regardless of whether a person thinks that Jesus’s diagnosis about sin is correct, she will recognize the principle. An accurate diagnosis of what is wrong is necessary to understand what will make it right. It is in this way also that truth liberates.  

Jesus on Life in God 

For Jesus, life is found in growing into our dependence on God and our love for one another. He is the source of this life, and he gives it to those who respond by trusting him. The one who joyfully embraces the offer of Jesus is the one who flourishes. Jesus’s vision of life invites people out of their rebellious self-focus into the shalom of restored relationships. What rebellion ruptures, his gift of life restores. Where fractures injure, his touch heals. Where our wounded souls would hide themselves, he invites us into health and an overflowing, everlasting joy. He gives life. He is the life. 

As we saw, Nietzsche vehemently rejects any external impositions, whether they are moral, metaphysical, or religious. All of these put something above life and thus degrade it. In Jesus’s vision of life, not every external source of meaning will suffer in these ways. The Christian source of meaning for life is grounded in the nature, purposes, and actions of God. These features are secure. Life is a gift from God. Flourishing does not depend on our abilities to achieve it.  

The fact that meaning and values are gifts from God guarantees that they cannot be lost or canceled by any human being. It is something we do not have to achieve, so we cannot fail to achieve it. 

The Choice Before Us 

Toward the end of the book of Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Scriptures, Moses addresses the nation of Israel before they enter the promised land. He is appealing to them not to forget their covenant with the God who took them out of Egypt and kept them alive for forty years in the wilderness. He proclaims: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity” (Deuteronomy 30:15). 

We can say that both Jesus and Nietzsche announce in the same sort of bold terms their own visions of life and death; prosperity and adversity. They set before us two paths to consider: one leading toward the flourishing life and one leading toward death. One toward liberation and one into oppression. Which path will we choose? 

While both Nietzsche and Jesus offer views that I think can be plausible, let me mention briefly three reasons to think that the vision that Jesus offers is a better vision.

First, Nietzsche’s vision is only for the few, the strong, those who can exert power to remain independent. But Jesus’s vision is available to all people. Nietzsche stands consistently in opposition to any kind of equality or egalitarianism. Jesus affirms the value of every person, even the outcasts.

Second, we all want relationships characterized by love, compassion, mercy, and joy. The vision of life Jesus holds forth captures these desires. Nietzsche is concerned that the Christian vision requires us to turn away from our desires. Reflection on what we most deeply want reveals that Christianity affirms the exact kind of relationships for which we long.  

Finally, Jesus does not offer teachings alone. He offers himself. He said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Somehow it is he himself and not only what he says that is the key. This has to do with his claim to be God come to earth and his death for us. If Jesus is who he claimed to be, then he is the path to human flourishing.  

Although Jesus and Nietzsche are not the only thinkers who offer a vision of life, they represent two of the most intriguing pictures. Two visions of life, death, and flourishing. Each is attractive in some ways. We each have only one life. We cannot pursue every competing vision of life. In the end, we must choose. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.