Explain Nietzche’s challenge to religious authority, and religious responses to him (45 marks)

Religious authority is an ultimate source of authority containing accurate and authoritative knowledge about God or a deity who can give guidance on how their followers should behave. There are numerous forms of authority in religion, with God being widely perceived as the ultimate origin of authority (principium essendi). The other three main forms of authority are scriptures, prophets and tradition. Nietzsche challenges the authority of religion through his claim that ‘God is dead’. A claim which yields his entire argument against religious authority, arguments which I will examine further in this essay. This question of the ‘genealogy’ of nihilism leads Nietzsche to adopt an essentially psychological approach to truth claims. However its important to note that psychology for Nietzsche, should not be understood in merely mental terms. Rather, our psychological drives are not essentially separate from the world we inhabit, but continuous with it. Nietzsche crucially distinguishes between two types of psychology, the psychology of the strong ones, i.e., what he calls masters or noble men, who represent strength and power and challenge and victory. And then a slave type psychology, ones who cannot look reality in the face without turning away or needing a ‘comforting figure’. Nitezsche offers two pictures of Jesus whom he viewed as an ‘Ubermensch’ (Superman like). One from the outside - a polemical attempt at reconstructing history, and one from the inside, and equally polemical attempt at what Nietzsche provocatively called‘ the psychology of the Redeemer’, which was essentially an attack on the authority of Jesus Christ. Nietzsche’s depiction of Jesus is intended to suggest indirectly our inability to find the real Jesus underneath all the interpretations of his