Ross Posnock reviews the new book by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen:
[Ratner-Rosenhagen] notes that for [George Burman Foster, a Baptist minister and University of Chicago professor], Nietzsche “had shown that modern man should not try to deny his messianic urges, but instead become an Ubermensch worthy of them.” Foster argued that despite the philosopher’s hatred of Christianity, Jesus and Nietzsche would have been friends, for Jesus too was a “revaluator of values” and “lived dangerously.” In Foster’s “functionalist” view, Nietzsche had helped him realize that Christianity had to be reinvented for the new century, its absoluteness and otherworldliness irreconcilable in a world “where the fixed had yielded to flux.” Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that for Foster, Nietzsche is “a saviour who teaches man to find the saviour in himself.” And “like so many other early twentieth-century liberal Protestants,” Foster “enlisted Nietzsche to come to terms with what his own Christianity meant to him.”
(Image by Rafael Branco)
The Dish 