Nietzsche On Executing Heretics

The delusions of Nietzsche are thorough and numerous, though he can still entertain and interest even serious philosophers.  One of the chief targets of his erratic suspicion is Christianity, something that, like many other things, he addresses in a way that fluctuates between brilliance and sheer stupidity.  His words about then-contemporary Christians might seem odd, considering his atheism.

He wrote that Christians of his day did not go far enough in promoting their worldview, as he thought that those who truly worried about the state of the unsaved in the afterlife would execute heretics.  Nietzsche described this as follows: "If Christians were really passionately concerned for the salvation of their fellow men in the hereafter, they would still burn those whose heresies lead legions into eternal damnation" (84).  This is, indeed, the motivation that many alleged Christians would likely have used to defend extra-Biblical killings of non-Christians during certain points of history.

Of course, any legitimate Christian ethicist would realize that the Bible, though it universally prescribes capital punishment for more than 15 offenses which still deserve execution in the present day, never demands the execution of people for purely ideological reasons.  Ideology is at the root of every human behavior, but the Bible only prescribes the death penalty for outward actions.  Slave trading deserves death (Exodus 21:16), but believing in pantheism does not.  Murder deserves death (Exodus 21:12), but identifying as an atheist does not.

To kill someone for merely expressing allegiance to a false idea about God is utterly contrary to Mosaic Law.  Nietzsche was wrong: according to their own worldview, if Christians do care about the post-mortem state of the unsaved, they will not burn someone for verbal denouncement of a Christian idea.  Since such a thing is not just, it should not be done.  Nietzsche's statement about burning heretics--and many Christians mistake truths for heresies and heresies for truths [1]--interprets Christianity in a utilitarian way, but utilitarianism is irreconcilable to Christianity.

It does not matter if burning heretics would produce enough fear or zealousness to generate a mass acceptance of Christianity.  If such a thing is wrong, the destination cannot justify the road that precedes it, and the Bible clearly condemns executing those whom it does not already prescribe the execution of as immoral (Deuteronomy 4:2).


Beyond Good and Evil.  Nietzsche, Friedrich.  Trans. Kaufmann, Walter.  New York: Vintage Books, 1989.  Print.


[1].  Annihilationism and non-Trinitarianism are two examples of unpopular Biblical doctrines which are often rejected as heretical.  The irony is that the idea of eternal conscious torment for all unsaved beings and the idea of common Trinitarianism are the actual heresies, since they contradict what the Bible clearly teaches about God.