that they’re irrelevant until after the tractor is invented and hundreds of
millions stop starving. In any case, by the time Nietzsche entered the picture,
in the late nineteenth century, the problems Christianity had left unsolved had
become paramount.
Nietzsche described himself, with no serious overstatement, as
philosophizing with a hammer.^142 His devastating critique of Christianity—
already weakened by its conflict with the very science to which it had given
rise—involved two main lines of attack. Nietzsche claimed, first, that it was
precisely the sense of truth developed in the highest sense by Christianity
itself that ultimately came to question and then to undermine the fundamental
presuppositions of the faith. That was partly because the difference between
moral or narrative truth and objective truth had not yet been fully
comprehended (and so an opposition was presumed where none necessarily
exists)—but that does not bely the point. Even when the modern atheists
opposed to Christianity belittle fundamentalists for insisting, for example,
that the creation account in Genesis is objectively true, they are using their
sense of truth, highly developed over the centuries of Christian culture, to
engage in such argumentation. Carl Jung continued to develop Nietzsche’s
arguments decades later, pointing out that Europe awoke, during the
Enlightenment, as if from a Christian dream, noticing that everything it had
heretofore taken for granted could and should be questioned. “God is dead,”
said Nietzsche. “God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we,
murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest
and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under
our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?”^143
The central dogmas of the Western faith were no longer credible,
according to Nietzsche, given what the Western mind now considered truth.
But it was his second attack—on the removal of the true moral burden of
Christianity during the development of the Church—that was most
devastating. The hammer-wielding philosopher mounted an assault on an
early-established and then highly influential line of Christian thinking: that
Christianity meant accepting the proposition that Christ’s sacrifice, and only
that sacrifice, had redeemed humanity. This did not mean, absolutely, that a
Christian who believed that Christ died on the cross for the salvation of
mankind was thereby freed from any and all personal moral obligation. But it