An extended reflection on Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and how it stacks up to a close reading of John.
I. Christ doesn’t want blind faith, he wants “truth”
Rather than demanding blind faith (as Nietzsche alleges), Christ presents a surprisingly sophisticated theory of truth and evidence.
He doesn’t claim authority based on divinity; he repeatedly says he has only come to tell the truth.
Even Pontius Pilate seems to agree that Christ is speaking truthfully. Pilate does not accuse him of lying, he only mocks the idea of the truth. “What is truth?” he infamously says.
Christ seems to be introducing the provocative idea that telling the truth is intrinsically good.
II. The miracles are stories about evidence
Miracles in the Gospels aren’t superstitious magic tricks, but almost the exact opposite.
The miracles are there to demonstrate a real fact about our world, which is that literally unbelievable things will happen if you pursue the truth.
I’m not saying the miracle stories were metaphors—I’m saying literally real miracle stories happen to this day, so why would they not really happen back then?
Many engineering achievements we enjoy today were once seen as physically, scientifically impossible for the entire time until they were produced. Then they were produced, specifically by individuals who believed in the existence of a rational order beyond human consensus.
A reusable rocket, for instance, is epistemologically comparable to a miracle in the Gospels. I think miracles happened in the time of Christ, because I think they happen today (and everyone knows it). The only difference is that we’ve become confused by our own words.
III. The truth will set you free
Sin is not disobeying arbitrary orders, but as acting as if the truth isn’t real—pretending you can pause or escape the natural order of reality.
The famous line from John, that “the truth will set you free,” takes on new meaning: only by submitting to objective reality does one escape confusion and slavery.
Christianity is not about trusting on faith the superstitious dictates of a man claiming to be God—as the idiotic conventional wisdom would have it.
Christianity is about seeking the truth at all cost, acting on the truth no matter what other human beings say, having faith that the results will be good, realizing that there is no particular reason the world must be this way, then realizing that a living, speaking man literally said all of these things more than 2000 years ago, then realizing that they killed him for saying these things, and then inferring that this man probably was God himself because how else could any of this make sense?