In case you forgot that Christianity is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,” here’s a little gem from Friedrich Nietzsche to jog your memory:
“When we hear the ancient bells growling on Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! this, for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God’s son. The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed – whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions – is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous intervention; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function of the ignominy of the cross–how ghoulishly all this touches, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed” (Human, All Too Human, 113)?
As it is written, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21).
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