Cunningham1

Charles A. Cunningham

Philosophy & Scripture

Professor Tinker

Messenger College, Joplin, Missouri

Extended Annotated Bibliography (In Place of 3X5 Cards)

Brown, Colin. Philosophy & the Christian Faith. A Historical Sketch from the Middle
Ages to the Present
Day. Illinois: Intervarsity Press. Copywrite ©1968. ISBN 0-877784-
712-6. Pp. 137-141,
142, 145, 183, 218ff., 233.

Colin Brown discusses Friedrich Nietzsche on the pages listed above. He

says of Nietzsche, “that he was bitterly opposed to religion and whose thought has
also been utilized in the twentieth century for political purposes”(p.137).
“Nietzsche is being feted as the founder-member of the Death of God school in
theology”(p.138), but in the footnotes he notes that “the romantic poet Jean Paul
(1762-1825) had already sounded the death-knell in his Siebenkäs (1796-97) which
contained a ‘Discourse of the dead Christ from atop the cosmos: there is not
God’”(p.139). Nietzsche’s “superman (German: Übermensch)…is the man who
realizes the human predicament, who creates his own values, and who fashions his
life accordingly”(p.140).

Robinson, Daniel N. Ph.D. The Great Ideas of Philosophy. Part V. Lecture 41. Dark
Corners of the Soul:
Nietzsche at the Twilight.

“Nietzsche’s world is not a world of ‘sweetness and light,’ it is a world of light

and dark, of opposing polarities and tendencies.” “Nietzsche believed mankind was
in a very dark tunnel. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. Men must simply
accept their dark existence and recognize it for what it is. From this place then one
can create their own values and passions and character. One sets the standard for
their integrity. It is a superman who excels in working this out.” “Regarding which
Greek Nietzsche would truly appreciate, perhaps Media, the mother that poisoned
all her children and Dionysus. (This is an excellent lecture that lasts almost an hour.
Dr. Robinson speaks on the psychological mores of Nietzsche and how he was a
very learned man, translating both great Greek and great Latin works into German
and English).

URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche
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“Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844. He was a German Philologist and
Philosopher. Nietzsche’s key ideas include interpreting tragedy as an affirmation of life.” The
wikipedia.org online article goes on and on for several pages, but then it lands on something very
important especially to the idea of Philosophy and the Christian Faith. It is his concept of
master/slave-morality:
Slave-morality, in contrast, can only come about as a reaction to
master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the
Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the
contrast between good and evil: good associated with charity,
piety, restraint, meekness, and subservience; evil seen in the cruel,
selfish, wealthy, indulgent, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-
morality as an ingenious ploy among the slaves and the weak (such
as the Jewish slaves in Egypt or the Christians dominated by
Rome) to overturn the values of their masters and to gain value for
themselves: explaining their situation, and at the same time fixing
themselves in a slave-like life.
Whatever its cleverness, Nietzsche sees slave-morality as a
sickness which has overtaken Europe — a derivative and resentful
sort of value, which can only work by condemning others as evil.
In Nietzsche's eyes, Christianity exists in a hypocritical state where
people preach love and kindness but find their real enjoyment in
condemning others for enjoying the impulses they themselves are
not allowed to act on. Nietzsche calls for the strong in the world to
break their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health,
and vitality on the world.
The Nietzsche Reader. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large – Editors. Maryland:
Blackwell.
Copywrite © 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0-631-22653-6. (570+ pages
including writings, index and prefix).

This book is a reasonable compilation of many English translations of

Nietzsche’s writings and many of those which were originally written by him in
English. Not everything that Nietzsche wrote is in this reader, but enough to fully
comprehend the scope of his writing and his thought processes throughout his
lifetime. One of the editors noted that “during the early part of the nineteenth
century he was widely taken as a ‘modern master of suspicion’ (a phrase coined by
Paul Ricoeur).” Not everything that Nietzsche wrote was totally about darkness, but
even what seems to speak of good is under laced with a belief in no real God. Page
360, later writings, #295:

The genius of the heart, a heart of the kind belonging to

that great secretive one, the tempter god and born Pied
Piper of the conscience whose voice knows how to
descend into the underworld of every soul, who does not
utter a word or send a glance without its having a crease
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and aspect that entices, whose mastery consists in part in

knowing how to seem – and seem not what he is, but
rather what those who follow him take as one more
coercion to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever
more inwardly and completely: the genius of the heart
that silences everything loud and self-satisfied and
teaches it how to listen; that smoothes out rough souls
and gives them a taste of a new longing (to lie still like a
mirror so that the deep sky can mirror itself upon them);
the genius of the heart, that teaches the foolish and over-
hasty hand to hesitate and to grasp more daintily; that
guesses the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of
kindness and sweet spirituality lying under thick, turbid
ice and is a divining rod for every speck of gold that has
long lain buried in some dungeon of great mud and sand;
… I the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus…

Notice - here the god Dionysus is the same as “that great secretive
one, the tempter god.” Nietzsche does not equal him to the devil but
to his own self – and to the philosopher Dionysus (perhaps one in the
same for Nietzsche). A fully human tempter and a fully human god in
terms of man in general as gods/philosopher or at least as the creative
thought process for the basis for the idea of the Greek god Dionysus.
Reading on it seems that he does not actually believe in this Greek
god, but rather sees in the attributes attributed to and struggles
attributed to this Greek god his own human condition.

The Nietzsche Reader. Page 236. #340 is quoted from The Gay
Science (1882) Book IV.
The dying Socrates.

Nietzsche derides Socrates dying words and says that what he

said was blasphemous: “O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster” (Socrates).
Nietzsche said, “O Crito” means “life is a disease.” He then says,
“Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks.”

URL http://mb-soft.com/believe/txn/deathgod.htm

These URL web blog pages discuss the history and outcomes of the Death
of God school of Theology that seemed to sprout and die off itself in the
1960-70’s. Under the subtitle HISTORY there is a sentence dedicated to
Nietzsche, which reads: “Such atheistic existentialist philosophers as
Nietzsche despaired even of the search of God; it was he who coined the
phrase "God is dead" almost a century before the death of God
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theologians.” The rest of the article is fairly good, but departs from what I
am looking for on Nietzsche.

URL
http://www.malaspina.edu/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/beyondgoodandevil5.ht
m

The following information is a direct quote from this website, which in

turn is a quote of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:

192
Anyone who has followed the history of a particular
science finds in its development a textbook case for
understanding the oldest and commonest events in
all “knowing and perceiving.” There, as here, the
rash hypotheses, the fabrications, the good, stupid
will to “believe,” the lack of suspicion and of
patience develop first of all — our senses learn late
and never learn completely to be subtle, true, and
cautious organs of discovery. With a given stimulus,
our eye finds it more comfortable to produce once
more an image which has already been produced
frequently than to capture something different and
new in an impression. To do the latter requires more
power, more “morality.” To listen to something new
is embarrassing and hard on our ears; we hear
strange music badly. When we hear some different
language, we spontaneously try to reshape the
sounds we hear into words which sound more
familiar and native to us: that’s how, for example, in
earlier times, when the German heard the word
arcubalista he changed it into Armbrust [arcubalista .
. . Armbrust: crossbow].
Something new finds our senses hostile and
reluctant, and in general, even with the “simplest”
perceptual processes, the emotions like fear, love,
hate, including the passive feeling of idleness, are in
control. — Just as a reader nowadays hardly reads
the individual words (let alone the syllables) on a
page — he’s much more likely to take about five
words out of twenty at random and “guess” on the
basis of these five words the presumed sense they
contain — so we hardly look at a tree precisely and
completely, considering the leaves, branches, colour,
and shape; we find it so very much easier to imagine
an approximation of the tree.
Even in the midst of the most peculiar experiences
we still act in exactly the same way: we make up the
greatest part of experience for ourselves and are
hardly ever compelled not to look upon any event as
“inventors.” What all this adds up to is that basically
from time immemorial we have been accustomed to
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lie. Or to express the matter more virtuously and

hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: we are
much more the artist than we realize.
In a lively conversation I often see in front of me the
face of the person with whom I am speaking so
clearly and subtly determined according to the idea
which he expresses or which I think has been
brought out in him that this degree of clarity far
exceeds the power of my ability to see: — thus, the
delicacy of the play of muscles and of the expression
in his eyes must be something I have made up out of
my own head. The person probably had a totally
different expression or none at all.
I found this section of Nietzsche’s writings on Good and Evil enlightening as
he is discussing the whole issue of the science of morality. I find it interesting that
Nietzsche thinks that he is fully capable of challenging every thought process of
mankind from the dawn of time throughout history on any subject, which he has a
right to do, but is it right to do? He challenges the idea that morality can be
thought of in scientific terms. He sees morality as an allusive, changing with times
and societal structures and acceptability. The idea that one group of people can
claim authority over what is or is not morally acceptable and enforce this in any way
shape or form on another group of individuals or an individual is offensive to
Nietzsche. He recognizes the influence on his own mind and psyche of this, but
chooses to reject those influences. He desires the raw artistic roughness of the
discovery of his own path over restrictions that might protect him from
consequences. He does not mind discovering pain; in fact he looks forward to it.
He runs roughshod over anyone who would fall in line with any moral acceptability
modalities and calls them “uneducated” or “badly educated” because they are not
thinking for themselves and experiencing for themselves.

Nietzsche. The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings. Aaron
Ridley and Judith
Norman – Editors. New York: Cambridge University Press. Copyright © 2005.
ISBN-13
978-0-521-81659-5. (298 pages).

This book is a compilation of some of Nietzsche’s writings, which was

translated into English by Judith Norman, who was also one of the editors.

In the preface of The Anti Christ Nietzsche writes,

The conditions required to understand me, and which in

turn require me to be understood, - I know them only too
well. When it comes to spiritual matters, you need to be
honest to the point of hardness just to be able to tolerate
my seriousness, my passion. You need to be used to
living on mountains – to seeing the miserable, ephemeral
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little gossip of politics and national self-interest beneath

you. You need to have become indifferent; you need
never to ask whether truth does any good, whether it will
be our undoing . . . The sort of predilection strength has
for questions that require more courage than anyone
possesses today; a courage for the forbidden; a
predestination for the labyrinth. An experience from out
of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes
for the most distant things. A new conscience for truths
that have kept silent until now. And the will to the
economy of the great style: holding together is strength,
its enthusiasm . . . Respect for yourself; love for yourself;
and unconditional freedom over yourself . . .

I think most interesting when someone takes him up on this artistic

experimentation that he in turn derides on them for having done it. He says in
Nietzsche contra Wagener, of Wagner’s music: “Everything about Wagner’s music
that has become popular, even outside the theatre, is in questionable taste and
ruins the taste (p.246).” He mentions this, “strongly appreciating Wagner himself –
I just hate what he does to music” (p.247) (This last is extremely interesting sense
he wrote many derisive remarks towards Wagner and not just about his music for
several years before this writing, and seeing that he already had said, “you need…
New ears for new music (p.3),” which is exactly what Wagner was doing by
stretching the boundaries of music so that it effected the senses and seem to cause
specific reactions from the audience that Wagner was intending it to do.

Since beginning this research subject, I found it extremely interesting to

begin to recognize the influence of Nietzsche on our modern culture. I heard a song
being sung by a rather unknown, but growing in popularity singer on Good Morning
America’s Spring Concert Series on Friday, April 25, 2008. I did not catch the
singer’s name unfortunately, but I did hear the lyrics of his song. He was singing
Nietzsche’s philosophy of life: “No one is going to come to save you, you are
completely on your own, everything in this world is horrible and dark, once you
accept your condition then you can begin to shine, you can overcome where you
are.” Then while listening to the song being sung by Minnie Driver, the actress who
played Carlotta (Phantom of the Opera), during the ending credits of that movie, her
words are “child of the wilderness, born into emptiness, learn to be lonely, learn to
find your way in darkness. Who will be there for you, comfort and care for you,
learn to be lonely, learn to be your one companion, never dreamed out in the world
there are arms to hold you, you’ve always known your heart was on its own, so
laugh in your loneliness, child of the wilderness, learn to be lonely, learn how to love
life that is lived alone, life can be lived, life can be loved alone.” The Nietzsche
Reader, quoting from The Gay Science Book I, #26: “What is life? – Life – that is:
continually shedding something that wants to die. Life- that is: being cruel and
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inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak – and not only
about us. Life – that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who
are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer?” (The Nazi’s used
that thought process as their position for doing what they did to the Jews and to
Europe – a subject for further study) “– And yet old Moses said: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
Nietzsche certainly believes that suffering is the best thing that can happen to us;
accepting it in its rawest forms is coming to grips with reality. He believes that this
is where the human is, lonely, without a Saviour, without true friendships or true
relationships. He believes everyone is simply self-centered and lying to each other.
If and when they do anything for each other it is in order to force the other to be
obliged to them, or to have some power over them. He recognizes political
authority, but mocks the fools that follow their leaders blindly and without question
(in this case the Nazi’s did the opposite of what Nietzsche taught).

The Nietzsche Reader. Page 137. On The Utility and Liability of History. #9.

He believes all the leaders of history and of every religion simply created for
themselves their own right and wrong, good and evil. He feels that the human
thought process has always accepted the old as good and anything new as evil. He
feels evil is simply another word for new and changing. Then reading on you find
that he thinks of sin and debauchery as simply something untried and new,
something to try because you don’t want to allow someone else to dictate the
morals that are or are not acceptable to you. If these activities come with
consequences this is ok, because one had the opportunity to experience.

The Niezsche Reader. Pages 42-46. The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
(1872)

Nietzsche had no problem with the Greek god Bacchus and Dionysian
impulses. He believed in the party and in the acceptability of the sexual freedoms
that the river god promoted in its dances and drinking. I wonder if he also believed
that the babies produced in these sexual orgies should have been thrown into the
river in an act of freedom from responsibility. He had to know that this is also part
of that religious practice. Perhaps this is why Dr. Robinson mentioned that
Nietzsche would have promoted the Greek god Media, who poisoned all of her
children. Perhaps that is what Nietzsche was promoting when he quoted Silenus to
king Midas, “Why do you force me to tell you what it is best for you not to hear?
The very best of all things is completely beyond your reach: not to have been born,
not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is – to meet an early
death” (page 49). Nietzsche also talks about this ritual as a time of excruciating
pain and suffering as well as one of pleasure and sexual freedom. Was he
recognizing that many of these people were willingly throwing their babies into the
river so that they would drown; the sounds of the screaming and crying for the
innocent dead babies was heard from earth to heaven. That thought did not bother
Nietzsche. He embraced it as easily as he would a pricked finger on a rose bush.
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Life is simply a path leading to death. The quicker death comes to humans the
better, because life is harsh and lived in suffering and loneliness. With God dead,
Nietzsche does not have to worry about the eternal consequences of murder and
sexual immorality. He does not have to face eternity in hell. He believes that God
is a fantasy created by human thought and in fact he believes all the gods are
equally a creation of human thought. He believes that what we live here and now is
it. For him there is nothing more after this life. No eternal life or eternal
consequences. Therefore whatever pain or pleasure can be acquired (or inflicted)
during this lifetime is to be experienced and appreciated to the fullest.

(From URL: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/bambach.htm):

Bambach, Charles. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press. 2003. XXVI + 350 pages and
notes. ISBN 0-8014-4072-6. Reviewed by: Roderick Stackelberg,
Department of History, Gonzaga University. Published by: H-German
(October, 2004) The Politics of Bodenstaendigkeit : Heidegger’s
National
Socialism.

At the heart of this book is Heidegger's (mis)reading of

Nietzsche in his Nietzsche lectures from 1936 to 1943, later
published in two massive volumes in 1961.[4] His encounter
with Nietzsche had been decisive for Heidegger's philosophical
turn toward rethinking the essence of truth in 1929-30 (by
recovering the originary pre-Socratic, pre-rational experience of
truth as disclosure or unconcealment of being, not as logical
certainty or correspondence with reality) as well as for his
political commitment to National Socialism in 1933. Read
against the background of the Great War as a metaphysical
struggle about the meaning of history, Nietzsche's critique of
Platonic values and their post-Christian "enlightened" offshoots
served as Heidegger's guide to what had gone wrong in the
Western tradition. Heidegger enthusiastically embraced
National Socialism as the Nietzschean counter-movement to the
nihilism and vulgarization of modern life (liberal democracy,
technical-rational dominion, mass consciousness, the
rootlessness of urban life) that appeared to have triumphed in
the Great War. Only a Volk committed to its roots could provide
a bulwark against the forces of nihilism and reawaken the
power of philosophy. But Heidegger's ambitious goal was not
shared by Nazi officialdom, with whom he frequently clashed
after 1934, not least in his capacity as a member of the
commission overseeing the Historisch- Kritische Ausgabe of
Nietzsche's works. As Heidegger became increasingly
disenchanted with the Nazis in the mid-1930s, he again turned
to Nietzsche for inspiration in his efforts to bring about the more
profound spiritual and metaphysical revolution that he had
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hoped for and expected. Until 1938 Heidegger read Nietzsche

as a comrade in arms against the Nazis for a more authentic
form of National Socialism; thereafter, he saw him as "merely a
forerunner of the fallen and inessential versions of National
Socialism" put forward by the Party and its subservient
intellectuals (p. 266). Nietzsche's diagnosis of the modern crisis
remained valid, but his prescribed cure no longer promised a
way out. If Nietzschean will to power had previously appeared
to Heidegger as the appropriate formula to reverse the course
of modern degeneration, it now seemed hopelessly entangled in
the very degeneration it was meant to combat. He now came to
see Nietzsche not as the herald of the future who had decisively
broken with the Platonic tradition, but as the last metaphysician
whose doctrine of will to power had merely brought the Western
tradition of nihilism (the metaphysical legacy of
Seinsvergessenheit) to a catastrophic dead end. An ever more
critical reading of Nietzsche eventually turned into a polemic
against Nietzsche. Heidegger's rejection of Nietzsche mirrored
his disappointment with the Nazis. As the fortunes of war turned
against Germany, Heidegger came to see the Nazi movement
not as the counter-movement to modern nihilism, but as its
quintessential expression. Even more than communism or
Americanism it now embodied for Heidegger the destructive will
to technological control and dominion that was the legacy of
Western metaphysics and the ultimate source of the modern
crisis.

There are a lot of arguments as to what level of actual influence Nietzsche’s

philosophy had on German Nazi thought processes, especially that of Hitler, himself.
But the connection is not denied by any scholar, just questions arise by nature of
Nietzsche’s actual philosophy or a less than perfect understanding of his writings.
The above book being discussed is an attempt at understanding the influence from
someone named Heidegger, who was there and would have known by nature of his
position as official historian. Certainly Nietzsche had a profound influence on the
Nazis whether or not he willingly would have admitted this or not is another issue.

Having even cursory reading of the writings of Nietzsche I have recognized

the heart of a true fool. He is incredibly smart, but incredibly stupid. He is so full of
himself that he mocks everyone around him and everyone throughout history. He is
absolutely the most arrogant person that I have ever read about or studied the
writings of. I love to read, but I have found that most of his words are like putrid
regurgitation. I feel as if they truly aren’t worth the paper they are printed on. His
writings are barely worth using for the paper that dogs use for urine and stool to
protect the floor and then being carefully thrown into the trash; recognizing the fact
that they have a stench that immediately needs removed from the house. He is
utterly vile and revels in his vileness. He utterly enjoys being evil. He makes his
life’s purpose to be full of ruin and arrogance. The more I read his writings the
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more his droning sickened me. I thought it might be fun to study someone whose
thoughts were opposite of those with whom I have come to trust and care about,
but in fact this exercise has further confirmed within my spirit that there are things
not worthy of my time or efforts. The only purpose I carry from this is that the world
is in such a need of a Saviour. The scriptures say, “The fool hath said in his heart,
there is no God…” (Psalm 14:1; Psalm 53:1 KJV) “Do not let your heart envy sinners,
But be zealous for the fear of the LORD all the day; For surely there is a hereafter,
And your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:17-18 NKJV). “When wisdom enters
your heart, and knowledge is pleasant to your soul, Discretion will preserve you;
Understanding will keep you, To deliver you from the way of evil, from the man who
speaks perverse things, From those who leave the paths of uprightness to walk in
the ways of darkness; Who rejoice in doing evil, And delight in the perversity of the
wicked; Whose ways are crooked, And who are devious in their paths;”(Proverbs
2:10-15 NKJV). When the world intentionally rejects God and the things of God, the
word of God, then they become utterly evil in every thought and action.

The purpose of writing for a hearing should come with some accountability to
the truth. Nietzsche cared nothing for the truth as it was given in God’s Holy Word
or presented by the churches represented in the country he lived in. He saw the
churches as sepulchers to a dead god:

The Nietzsche Reader. Page 224. The Gay Science #125.

“Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you.” We have killed him – you and I.
All of us are his murderers…God is dead… “What after all are these churches now if
they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

I am quite certain some of them are sepulchers of human religiosity – people

who go through motions without any real relationship with the Divine. The problem
is that Nietzsche never met anyone who had a real relationship to the Saviour,
someone excited and passionate about Jesus. What he experienced was most likely
a religious bigotry and rule making religious elitism. Do this, don’t do that – instead
of let us meet Jesus – the one who fulfills our needs. Nietzsche believed in tearing
down all of the ancient landmarks, he even said this. The scriptures tell us “Do not
remove the ancient landmark” (Proverbs 23:10). By Nietzsche’s intentional
willingness to turn his back on God he set himself up as an authority figure for
humanism, existentialism, secularism, Nazism and for every fool that like him
follows after their own way:

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its

end is the way of death. Even in laughter the heart may
sorrow, and the end of mirth may be grief. The backslider
in heart will be filled with his own ways, but a good man
will be satisfied from above. The simple believes every
word, but the prudent considers well his steps. A wise
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man fears and departs from evil, but a fool rages and is
self-confident.
(Proverbs 14:12-16)