This is an extended quote from Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks (p 116, the italics reflect Nietzsche’s underlining in his hand written notebooks):
What advantages did the Christian moral hypothesis offer?
1. It endowed man with an absolute value, in contrast to his smallness and contingency in the flux of becoming and passing away.
2. 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.
3. It posited that man knows about absolute values, thus giving him adequate knowledge precisely of what is most important.
It shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation - in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.
I take it for granted that points 1 & 2 can both be correct and uncontroversially used to argue for or against Christian morality. However, point 3 is quite remarkable, for I tend to agree with Nietzsche here and see this as a current sin of the Church. My only concern would be that man can know absolute value versus knowing about absolute value. It we take him to mean the Christian morality can equip us with a kind of knowledge that is absolute, then I’m not sure what biblical warrant or situation we will be able to find in support of this.
The great deceit of certainty extends into our sense of the moral and the Body of Christ must be clear as to what our epistemology is like. What sense does it make to say that we can know some moral in an absolute way when every law of morality has to be transgressed in order to maintain its coherence (sans the worship of God)? As I often point out, the command to ‘not murder’ is given by a God who just murder thousands of children and Egyptian soldiers and is planning the systematic slaughter of the people of Canaan. Further, this God gives that commandment through the hands and prayers of a man who is established an enraged murderer himself. What absolute value do we gain from such a narrative and its embedded codes?
If the goal is to walk away from canon with a knowledge of absolute values transferred to your mind, then Nietzsche’s words here ought to cut you to the bone. That kind of knowledge can only act as an illusory antidote to nihilism. But I will suggest that our retort to Nietzsche is to argue against abuse of absolutism in favor of an epistemology that does allow us to know what is moral, but not contain or domesticate that morality. In the end, our morality is based in the worship of Yahweh, His Son through the Spirit given to us. That is, after all, the intent of the first commandment. All attempts at absolutizing morality will rightly fall under Nietzsche’s admonition here.
As I began to read Nietzsche for the first time (beyond his renowned Thus Spoke Zarathustra), I immediately realized that I was in over my head. I took a seminar on Nietzsche where we read and discussed many of his major works, including the recently published Writings from the Late Notebooks. The more that I read, the more I became enamored with his iconoclastic motivations and bizarre methodology. His resistance to non-somatic epistemology is very refreshing. In many ways, I very much identify with what he was trying to do.And you have to love someone who has so much unashamed hatred for academics, Socrates, and Christianity alike. His aphorismic flights are almost as fantasical as they are disturbing. For instance, he list these top three destroyers of Europe (source: 