> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Bringing Up Nietzsche - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/bringing-up-nietzsche/ - Published: 2026-08-27T11:00:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T11:00:52.000Z - Description: We desperately need popular-level engagement with skepticism, especially the Nietzschean kind, in our churches. 'The Devil Reads Nietzsche' is a timely resource for many Christians, who might feel beaten down by the skepticism and even nihilism of our times. - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Book Reviews, Culture, Family, Vika Pechersky, Journal, Summer 2026 **Michael McEwen. *The Devil Reads Nietzsche: A Public Theology for a Post-Christian Age*. B&H Academic, 2025\. $27.99\. 224 pp.** As a young parent, I was not prepared for how early my children exhibited skeptical tendencies and posed very difficult questions. My son was four years old when he told me, in all seriousness, that he was bigger than God. It happened during a very tense moment, when he repeatedly refused to obey me and finally demanded that I tell him why he should do what I asked. I was not prepared for a metaphysical discussion on the nature of obedience, but I knew that a simple “because I told you so” would not suffice. The situation demanded a good answer, as I faced an open revolt from a very serious four-year-old. I fumbled through something along the lines of how obeying our parents helps us learn to obey God, our heavenly Father. It is at this point that my son proclaimed that he is bigger than God, hence no obeying is required. How did I get a little Nietzsche on my hands? It was, of course, a very comical situation, but the seriousness with which my son was speaking scared me. Really, I thought, questioning faith can start this early! In the years since that day, more questions followed. Some were not openly skeptical. When he was about six years old, he asked me where he was before he was in my belly. At this point, I already knew that my kid could handle abstract talk. Recognizing that he was deeply troubled by the question of his existence, I told him that before he appeared in my belly, he was in the mind of God. That answer actually satisfied him, for it was better to think that he was somewhere, rather than nowhere at all. Still, another time, when I felt it was my duty as a Christian parent to encourage my son to pray more for a specific situation, he asked me, “What if, when I pray, I just talk to myself and nothing more?” How did I end up with a young Nietzsche and Feuerbach in one? I really had a hard time answering that one, as I could sense the depth of that doubt and the void that was opening up in front of my son. One misstep on my part, and he might fall into it. The best I could do on that occasion was to explain that ultimately God permeates all of creation and our whole being, for he is a creator of everything. Therefore, even when it feels like we talk to ourselves, we, in fact, speak to God. As his younger sister grew older, she too joined in with questions that were far more difficult for me to handle. As a middle schooler, she asked me why God doesn’t just free everyone from hell and save everyone. If, as we were taught in weekly sermons, God is truly good and there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, He has to save us all. I realized then that I have a little skeptic, who listens to Sunday sermons, analyses them, and looks for logical inconsistencies. Imagine for a moment that I told her that God, a supreme being, has the right to send those who disobey him to eternal torment. Would this be a satisfying answer to a skeptic? In her question, the issue was not only the fate of helpless human beings and apparent unfairness, but the very character of God. What kind of God is it, and would she want to believe in that God? Once again, I knew that I had to tread carefully and give an answer that would be satisfying to a young, skeptical mind. I told her that it is good to wish that everyone would be saved. It is something we should hope for and pray for whenever we can. But we cannot tell God what he should or shouldn’t do, for he is indeed God—and is greater than all our thoughts about Him. What I found most striking about all these questions is that my children asked them when they were fairly young, before these questions could be appropriately attributed to profound cultural influence. In other words, their questions arose not from the outside culture, but internally, from their own interactions with church and experiences with Christianity. Now, suppose I did not answer these questions, perhaps shut them down, or gave a simplistic answer that they found unsatisfactory. How would my children have thought and felt once they got older and came into direct contact with the raging atheistic culture all around? Most parents or Sunday school teachers are not prepared intellectually or emotionally to answer the difficult questions children so naturally ask. Oftentimes, they can’t answer them for themselves, let alone for little schoolchildren or defiant teenagers. As a result, we desperately need popular-level engagement with skepticism, especially the Nietzschean kind, in our churches. Michael McEwen’s new book *The Devil Reads Nietzsche* is a timely resource for many Christians, who might feel beaten down by the skepticism and even nihilism of our times. To engage Nietzsche is no small feat; he is a fierce and powerful opponent whose writing aims to intimidate, demoralize, and even hurt anybody who wishes to stand up to him. Therefore, McEwen deserves due respect for approaching such a formidable adversary. He also, it must be noted, approaches Nietzsche charitably, in good faith, wishing to understand Nietzsche’s line of thought and arguments, rather than operating with flat generalizations or, worse, false pretenses. Treating Nietzsche charitably is the only way to approach such a thinker, not only because our faith demands such treatment of human beings or out of pity (Nietzsche’s capacious mind drove him to madness), but, more important, because Nietzsche rebelled against a lifeless cultural Christianity of his time. As Nikolai Berdyaev said, behind any atheistic rebellion against God is the rebellion *for* a greater vision of God against a low and unworthy view of the Divine. Nietzsche was, first and foremost, a cultural critic, not a metaphysical philosopher. It was Heidegger who first attributed metaphysics to Nietzsche. It is fitting, then, that McEwen reads Nietzsche carefully and points out Nietzsche’s project as the great skeptic himself understood it—that is, dismantling cultural and religious ideologies. While McEwen offers a charitable reading of Nietzsche, he makes his stance clear: He does so with a full commitment to the truthfulness of the Christian metanarrative. McEwen, in other words, offers a critique of Nietzsche, a necessary pushback to his narrative from the point of view of Scripture, exposing the logical inconsistencies in Nietzschean proposals. Building on the work of such giants of contemporary theology as Charles Taylor and John Milbank, McEwen follows the prompting of Christopher Watkin, who calls on contemporary Christians to think critically about the narratives with which secular culture operates, rather than passively absorbing them. This critical posture requires understanding the ideas and ideologies we are exposed to and offering an alternative, thoroughly Biblical narrative in their place. McEwen provides just that: an attempt to understand Nietzsche on his own terms, while pointing out his fallacies, an account of how he has influenced our current culture, and finally a counter-narrative. How does he do that? McEwen follows a twofold pattern of argumentation. First, he demonstrates how Nietzsche borrows and parodies Christian ideas, twisting them to suit his purpose—to challenge Christianity. Second, he shows how Biblical narrative already has answers to Nietzsche’s challenges. For example, in his chapter on *Imago Dei* and human identity, McEwen looks at how Nietzsche addresses the question of what it means to be human. The classical Christian understanding of human nature combined the Greco-Roman idea of rational (unchangeable) essence with *Imago Dei*, or Divine image bearers, to formulate a theological anthropology. Nietzsche offers an alternative vision of humans in his *Ecce Homo.* In this work, he calls for a radical breakaway from the Greco-Christian view of human beings. Human beings, according to Nietzsche, do not have a static essence or unchangeable nature. Rather, they evolve; they become something through their will to power. We do not know ourselves, and the constant becoming means that we change over time. The idea of change and becoming is tied to a particular view of history. Hence, an equally important concept to Nietzsche’s understanding of human beings is the idea of eternal return—a cyclical view of history and human development. While this may sound radically different from classical Christianity, McEwen contends that Nietzsche has retained the idea of eternity and appropriated or re-packaged the Christian concept of sanctification and transformation towards the resurrected body of Christ, but leaving out God. McEwen offers an alternative narrative in order to “out-narrate” Nietzsche and show how the Scripture already has a response to his claims. To summarize his response: The New Testament apostolic witness firmly proclaims our future resurrection in the manner of Jesus Christ. In Col. 1:15-18, Paul brings together Christology, our existence, and our identity so that we would know ourselves as Christ’s. In other words, we know who we are when we recognize ourselves as belonging to Christ. The answer to the question of who we are has already been given to us in Christ. The mode of engagement McEwen suggests and models in his book is a helpful start. It gives Christian readers hope that even Nietzsche is not impervious to a critique; he can even be beaten at his own game. Although McEwen’s retelling of the Biblical narrative is rather short, it points to the depth and breadth of Christian tradition. And yet, his approach left me with a few questions. First, what if our alternative narrative is not that alternative at all, but the same old narrative that Nietzsche reacts against? Nietzsche knew the Bible and came from a religiously devout home. He was well aware of the central role of Jesus Christ in forming our identity and the historical Christian view of human nature. Retelling the same narrative back to Nietzsche may not produce a different result, since this is precisely what Nietzsche is reacting against. How does a Biblical narrative help make sense of the history and human development we, as a civilization, have undergone over the last two hundred years? How does our understanding of our identity in Christ help a skeptical person understand dramatic historical and social changes that a given society, say Communist Russia, had experienced in the last hundred years? Nietzsche was not a theologian, not even a metaphysician, as he understood his own work. He was concerned with human culture, something we build or destroy. Therefore, to counter a Nietzschian skepticism, especially when it is raised against Christianity, we have to extract a vision of human history, human culture, and, crucially, development from a Biblical metanarrative. No less significant, what if “out-narrating” is not enough to address the widespread skepticism and nihilism in our world today? What if what’s required is not only an alternative critical theory, but something much more demanding—love for people, bearing their burdens, compassion, and giving of ourselves in love? When dealing with skeptics, even very young ones, a robust intellectual response is critical. But at some point, our actions will speak louder than our words. McEwen’s book is a much-needed introduction to engaging the intellectual ideas of our time. We need more work like this. Christians can no longer ignore the world of secular ideas. We have entered a new era, where our culture no longer possesses strong Christian intuitions. We will have to learn to live in this culture and engage it anew, drawing from our Christian tradition answers befitting our times.