What I see from German idealism all the way through Heidegger/Jung is a continuity of metaphysical thought. What is the common element of thought from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte through to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, through to Steiner, Husserl, Heidegger, and Jung? These thinkers were vastly different in the way they derived and formulated their epistemological and ethical systems of thought (Jung thought of himself a scientist more than philosopher, but that is debatable), yet they all held to some form of idealist metaphysics. Some were much more explicit than others, but that conclusion is rather undeniable at this time. And Nietzsche was smack dab in the center of that entire contiguous tradition, temporally and conceptually.
So what does any of that have to do with Christianity? Well, if Nietzsche's concern was primarily metaphysical-ethical, then there was something about the metaphysical framing of Christianity over the last 1900 years, and especially over the last 400, which rubbed him the wrong way, even if he did not explicitly speak of it in those terms. I assert that his primary concern was it's metaphysical rationalism/dualism (which also seemed to be his concern with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), most forcefully expressed in Descartes. Christian theology was dividing the world up into mutually exclusive dualities which are all related to each other - matter and mind, natural and supernatural, life and afterlife, evil and good.
There are clearly important, even fundamental, distinctions to be made in some of these conceptions, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge would call 'polar opposites', "two forces of one power", but that is worlds apart from the severing and separating of the polar opposites into increasingly isolated dualities, and both Christianity and materialist 'humanism' were leading the way in that regard in the 19th century. We could rightly call it the anti-Christ to Christ, as nothing the latter did or said necessitated any sort of metaphysical dualism. Nietzsche was an extremely keen observer of this process, perhaps the most insightful who has ever lived apart from Steiner. The latter writes beautifully about Nietzsche as a "Fighter for Freedom".
What Nietzsche despised the most, similar to Schopenhauer, were the intellectuals, religious, secular, and everyone in between, who acted as if they had transcended their subjective influence on the 'objective world'. That they can study the 'truths' of science, religion, etc. without bringing their own unconscious instincts, values and motivations to the table. He doesn't even bother with a 'rational' evaluation of the 'truths' they are putting forth - if it reeks of cold detached 'objectivity' and/or life-negating propositions, he is done with it. Such detached moralistic views have absolutely zero value for him; negative value in fact. And can we really blame him for that?Rudolf Steiner wrote:Friedrich Nietzche characterizes himself as a lonely ponderer and friend of riddles, as a personality not made for the age in which he lived. The one who follows such paths as his, “meets no one; this is a part of going one's own way. No one approaches to help him; all that happens to him of danger, accidents, evil and bad weather, he must get along with alone,” he says in the preface of the second edition of his Morgenröte, Dawn. But it is stimulating to follow him into his loneliness. In the words in which he expressed his relationship to Schopenhauer, I would like to describe my relationship to Nietzsche: “I belong to those readers of Nietzsche who, after they have read the first page, know with certainty that they will read all pages, and listen to every word he has said. My confidence in him was there immediately ... I understood him as if he had written just for me, in order to express all that I would say intelligibly but immediately and foolishly.”
A good modern day example would be the anti-natalists, who put forth the most 'rock solid' intellectual arguments for why humans should stop procreating and let the species die out. Everything from utilitarian ethics to scientific ecological arguments are employed by them. Humanity is clearly a blight on the planet Earth, they say. But none of those arguments matter, according to Nietzsche, because the conclusion reached is life-negating and therefore fundamentally wrong in a manner that cannot be captured by pure rationality. We do not need to adopt any sort of moral relativism to affirm what Nietzsche is affirming. Keen observers would also note the significant parallel between Nietzsche and American pragmatism here.
So, returning to the question at hand, given what we now know about this long and rich tradition of metaphysics in the Western world, what needs to happen for Christianity and the Church to reform? I would suggest nothing less than the total forsaking of any dogmatic, metaphysically dualist versions of Christianity which have dominated the Western spiritual landscape for many centuries. The so-called "Reformed" traditions are especially problematic, as they have flattened out and demythologized Christianity to the extent where it is nearly impossible for anyone within such traditions to recognize what was discussed above.
They make the 'otherworldly' values so fundamental that they become indistinguishable from nihilism. They set up 'objective' standards of behavior which cannot possibly be met and are so foreign to us that adhering to them necessarily causes a deep anxiety - they make us feel mechanistic, mindless and unfree. So the farther back we go in the Christian tradition, the better. Roman Catholicism certainly has its fair share of flaws, but there is still a clear mythological and participatory aspect to it. Eastern Orthodox is even better in that regard. And if we can reimagine the teachings of Christ, the Biblical authors and the early Church fathers in this light, we may have a slim chance of recovering much of what was lost.
'Darwinian' thinkers who recognize a deep continuity of spiritual experience throughout human history, like Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and Owen Barfield, to name a few, have already done much of the intellectual heavy lifting here - we just need to pick up their baton and run with it. None of this should be taken as a plea to regress towards the past, not at all. Rather it is a challenge to integrate our entire spiritual history with our scientific-technological outlook and ethical individualism. A challenge to discard the experiential and cognitive shackles which have been prepared for us, and to instead "become who we are".
