Friedrich Nietzsche was a famous German philosopher, nearly a contemporary of the Bab- and a rabid atheist. He didn’t start out that way. His father was a Lutheran minister and he was raised very close to the church, even starting his advanced studies in theology with hopes to be a clergyman. While at college, he began to encounter the new “historical criticism”  as applied to the Bible. In that approach, the Bible was not studied as a mythic text, but as an historical document.  Nietzsche- and many others from this period- began to question whether the Bible could really be trusted, and he eventually lost his faith. 

To say Nietzsche simply lost his faith is to understate it to the extreme.  He treated his faith like he was a jilted lover, and turned on it completely, spending most of the rest of his life railing against religion. In his sometimes brilliant writings, he strove to understand himself and the world without the faith he had previously loved, seeking to reconstruct everything the Christian faith had brought to civilization in a new light, now that “God” was “dead”.  He tragically went insane at the age of 44, and spent his remaining years in the upstairs bedroom of his sister’s home, completely dependent on her care.

But what had Nietzsche lost when he lost his faith?  What was his faith based on in the first place?  Had he thought he knew an unknowable Reality, and now didn’t? 

The truth is that Nietzsche lost his faith in the God he had conceived as a child and youth growing up in a happy Christian family. When he lost his faith, he had lost his Christian faith, and he wasn’t able to find another way of thinking about God that satisfied his adult person. 

Nietzsche’s story illustrates something that the Bab is going to make very clear.  Our concepts of God are our concepts of God, but we shouldn’t think that our concepts are God.  It also illustrates another point about our relationship to God- that it is almost always mediated by a Person in our world who claims to have a unique relationship to God.  For Nietzsche, that was Christ, and when he questioned the authenticity of Christ, he could no longer find God at all. 

The experiences of Nietzsche are emblematic of much of the Christian western culture in the middle of the 19th century into the 20th.  “Atheism” was directly tied to the rejection of the Bible as a source of reliable truth.  Another famous German atheist- Ludwig Feuerbach- published his atheistic philosophy under the title “The Essence of Christianity”.  A later influential early 20th century British atheist, Bertrand Russell, published his atheist views in a book titled- “Why I am not a Christian”. 

All of these authors, and many more, saw the reality of God through the lens of Christianity and the Bible generally, and when they perceived that that lens was broken, they thought that what they were looking at through that lens was also gone. In reality, they just needed a new lens.