Nietzsche and Me: Loneliness and Writing

By Douglas Groothuis, PhD

As a Christian, I feel an odd affinity with the most famous atheist in history. While a freshman in college, I was assigned to read the work of Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900), and I had never read anything like it, before or since. Unlike some other philosophy, this wasn’t abstract, or abstruse, or arid, but invigorating. I felt intellectual adventure, discovery, and risk. I read about him in the main textbook, but then read his own words—far more than was assigned—in a collection of his writings, which I still own fifty-one years later. It is tattered from age and frequent reading. I have quoted and sparred with this lonely German philosopher for nearly my entire ministry as a Christian philosopher and apologist. He said that a serious thinker needs “good enemies,” people who will challenge your deepest beliefs. He has been one for me.

Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran minister and as a child was called, “the little minister.” Yet Nietzsche lost his faith in college and abandoned the church. His brilliance as a scholar was so refulgent that his university awarded him a doctorate without requiring him to write a dissertation. This was unheard of, especially in an officious German university. This lonely man died in 1900, unmarried and imprisoned by the insanity that rendered him unable to write, read, or speak coherently. For eleven years, he was tended to my his devoted mother and then, after her death, by his opportunistic, insufferable, and antisemitic sister, Elizabeth, who twisted his ideas and lived off his writings and growing reputation.

Because of ill health and academic discontent, Nietzsche resigned his professorship early and was given a pension. This is where the pathos of Nietzsche’s story kicks in. He suffered terribly from headaches, sensitivity to light, and gastrointestinal upheavals. These generally worsened as he aged. He traveled alone through Europe, in hopes of finding a climate that would being better health. He took a trunk of books with him, but lived humbly in various boarding houses with few visitors and much solitude. He embraced solitude and his physical suffering as a condition for philosophical greatness. Although in bad health otherwise, he walked as much as possible and said you should never trust a thought that was birthed outdoors. (As a great indoors-man, I’m betting against it.)

Although he was a roving hermit during the fifteen years of his life before becoming insane for the last eleven, Frederick Nietzsche, possessed a huge personality brimming with iconoclastic and world-shaking ideas. No short essay can summarize the man’s life or thought. Thus, we address only his atheism and his embrace of loneliness as a writer.

God and Nietzsche

As my student, Kaon Serjani, argues, Nietzsche denied and defied God and Christianity more than offering any cogent case against the faith given once for all to the saints (Jude 3).[1] Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity denies the value of life, physical vitality, and creativity (all of which he affirms), is premised on atheism being true and coupled with a caricature of Christian teaching as morbidly ascetic and live-denying.[2] He also asserted—against the historical evidence—that the radical teachings of Jesus was corrupted by the church which added the idea of his atoning death, and that “There has only been one Christian, and he died on a cross.” Sadly, one of my students years ago said she left the faith because of reading Nietzsche in my course. I wanted to talk to her about it, but she ignored me. Nietzsche can be intimidating at first, but his arguments against Christianity ultimately fail.

However, Nietzsche understood that if there is no God, then we should have the philosophical and moral courage to admit the consequences that follow. We cannot continue to believe in ideas dependent on Christianity, such as meaning to history, objective morality, or free will. Of course, there is no life after death. Instead of an afterlife, Nietzsche tried to find meaning in his idea of eternal reoccurrence. All that happens has happened before and will happen again. This is not reincarnation, but a strict and repetitive determinism. All we can do is love our fate (amore fati). He also tried to sculpt meaning out the ideal of the Übermensch (or Over-man), one who throws off traditional morality and create values for oneself. Somehow, these convictions gave him the godless fortitude to continue to write through horrible health and intense aloneness, which he preferred. He sought solace neither in community nor in faith nor in anything besides writing out his vision, even though his books were neither well received nor sold well. After he became insane, his sister, Elizabeth, promoted his writings, often twisting their meaning to the make them antisemitic, but that is another story.[3]

Kinship With Nietzsche

How can a Christian philosopher and apologist, a man who has, by God’s grace, followed Jesus for half a century, feel any kind of kinship or sympathy for Frederick Nietzsche, a man who wrote a book against Christianity called The Anti-Christ? It is because of our common passion to make ideas known through writing, even amidst lonely and difficult times. While Nietzsche sought out loneliness, I did not. It came unbidden and unwanted, yet God has taught me through it.

My wife and I moved to Michigan in the summer of 2024 for a teaching position at Cornerstone University and Cornerstone Theological Seminary. After thirty-one years teaching at Denver Seminary, I realized I had to resign given disagreements with the leadership. I thought I would remain in Denver to develop a freelance teaching, writing, editing, and mentoring ministry. Instead, we ended in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, living in a small town called Lowell. Although Cornerstone has welcomed me, I had no idea how isolated and abandoned I would sometimes feel living in rural Michigan as a newcomer trying to make new friends with many who were so involved in their families and friends that they had little room for new people. To make it worse, we had to re-home my beloved dog in early 2025, making the home more barren. It felt worse when he died a few months ago. I am not writing to solicit pity, but to explain a new challenge and to reflect on my fellow feeling with my philosophical antipode, Nietzsche, aka, the Anti-Christ.

Driven for What?

Whenever I taught on Nietzsche in my History of Modern Philosophy course at Denver Seminary, I always included the following quote by theologian and apologist Bernard Ramm in my lecture outline, since it rang true and captured his indominable spirit. To set up the quote, the book from which this quote is taken, is called, The Devil, Seven Wormwoods, and God.[4] It is a study of seven non-Christian philosophers who have something to teach Christians. For each thinker, whether Sartre or Hume or someone else, Ramm asks what “the devil’s due” is for each thinker. By common grace, what can we derive of value from their philosophy?

What is the devil’s due Evangelicals can glean from

Nietzsche? It is the willingness to be driven like Nietzsche.  It is the willingness to spare no pains in the search for truth.  It is the willingness. . . .to work into the late hours of the night or to start in the earliest hours of the day; to pick up a new project as soon as we have finished an older one; to grow weary and exhausted in our quest for truth; to have...our eyes watery from too much reading, and our bodies bent over from long, weary hours at the study desk.

No Evangelical whose reading habits are a disgrace to the seriousness of the Christian ministry, or who spends more time before a television set than he does in serious reading in his study has the right to damn Nietzsche from the pulpit to some gruesome place in the Inferno.[5] 

I heard a well-known radio preacher and pastor dismissively refer to Nietzsche as “a syphilitic” several times in a message. Whether or not Nietzsche contracted syphilis—which is doubtful—his philosophy should not be demeaned on that basis—despite his atheism and despite his vitriol for Christianity. This man didn’t have the right to “damn Nietzsche from the pulpit,” not because Nietzsche wasn’t damned (he probably was), but because the speaker had not seriously engaged his philosophy.

The telling quote from Professor Ramm, which I read shortly after the book was published in 1977, has stayed with me all these years. We should “spare no pains in the search for truth,” especially since, we, unlike the tormented philosopher, have accepted the truth of God, the living truth of Jesus Christ (John 14:6) and the written truth of the Bible (2 Timothy 3:15-17). Those called to teach and write, as I am, should, like Nietzsche (and like the prolific Bernard Ramm), “pick up a new project as soon as we have finished an older one” and push ourselves to continue to research, write, and teach. I wonder how many Christian pastors—and even Christian academics—experience tired eyes from “too much reading” and pain in our bodies “from long, weary hours at the study desk” in preparing lessons, sermons, and writings? Some are even using generative AI to produce material absent the deeply human labor required for authentic, smart, and heartfelt communication. Shame on them.

Loneliness with God

Most research and writing requires loneliness. Even those who write in public—say, at a Starbucks—need to be alone in their thoughts in order to write. (I recently wrote for several hours in an open area at Mayo Clinic and was somehow able to concentrate.) This is harder on extroverts than introverts, but even those like myself who need heavy doses of solitude need to drive themselves to continue to study and write—especially when the diversions of the internet call us in other directions. I feel this.

A few months ago, I was asked by a young student what God had been teaching me recently. I said it was how to adjust to loneliness, how to embrace it productively. Especially when my wife is visiting family by herself, and since my dog has departed, our home is quiet and isolated. The neighbors keep to themselves or are actively avoidant. Even Cooper, the beautiful Siberian Husky next door, will not come when I beckon him. Apparently, he picked up the unneighborly neighborhood vibe. As a dog person, I need dog time, and he gives me precious little.[6]

Francis Schaeffer said the quietness of the Swiss Alps helped him sort out this thinking. I think of that often, since he is one of my heroes. Given the depth of insights he communicated in his many books and lectures, it must have served him well.[7] I want the quietness of rural Michigan to have the same effect on me and pray to that end. Even though the L’Abri study center was usually busy and buzzing with people, he took long hikes by himself in the Alps. In that, Schaeffer was like Nietzsche, the walking philosopher. But Nietzsche had little to no community, although he wrote a small group of friends consistently. The community of L’Abri was vital to Francis Schaeffer’s thought, since he spent copious amounts of time listening to and talking with non-Christians of all sorts about the truth and beauty of Christianity.

I lack the community that Schaeffer enjoyed, at least for now. Perhaps that will change. A twenty-five minute commute contributes to loneliness as well, however it gives time for prayer. This experience of being alone and not enmeshed in a supportive community—such as I had in Denver, Colorado, before leaving—is a time of waiting on the Lord. It is active, not passive. We are called to wait eagerly for God’s wisdom and direction. As David wrote:

I remain confident of this:

I will see the goodness of the Lord 

in the land of the living.  

Wait for the Lord;

be strong and take heart

and wait for the Lord (Psalm 27:14-14).

I Am Dynamite

Nietzsche could not wait on the Lord, but he reckoned his writing would destroy old cultural and philosophical mores and usher in an era when some hearty souls would embrace his immoralism as free spirits, live dangerously, and heed the preachments of his anti-prophet, Zarathustra. As he wrote in the megalomaniacal work, Ecce Homo, “I am no a man. I am dynamite.”[8] The dynamite would implode, not explode during the last eleven years of his life of insanity and dependence. However, his ideas would explode into the philosophical, literary, and cultural worlds through his many books, hurling everywhere the poisoned shrapnel of egoism, elitism, perspectivism, irreligion, and atheism.

I Am Not Dynamite

I am a man and I not dynamite. I am a disciple of the one who revolutionized the world for the better through his impact in every area of life, and not only in the church.[9] The living Word of God has the power to destroy arguments and idols, however (Hebrews 4:12; 2 Corinthians 10:3-5). The Gospel is the power of salvation for all who believe (Romans 1:16-17). To that I bear witness, even in the newfound, protracted, and unbidden loneliness of my writing and research. On this, I have staked my life.

Time alone with my thoughts, my books, my magazines and journals, and with my God is the incubator for the ideas and arguments marshalled in my teaching and writing. My Christian philosophy will not drive me insane, but make me more sane, more sober, and more aware of divine reality as I mature as a Christian, whether in loneliness or in fellowship. I will leave the results of all these efforts in God’s good hands, since only he gives the growth (Matthew 6:33; 1 Corinthians 3:6).

[1] Kaon Serjani, A Critique of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christian Nihilism (master’s thesis, Denver Seminary, May 6, 2019).

[2] Douglas Groothuis, “Nietzsche’s Evaluation of Christian Ethics,” Journal of Trinitarian Studies, available at, https://www.douglasgroothuis.com/post/nietzsche-s-evaluation-of-christian-ethics.

[3] See Sue Prideaux, “The Empty Occupant of Furnished Rooms,” I am Dynamite: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018) and H. F. Peters, Zarathustra’s Sister (Random House, 1988).

[4] Bernard Ramm, The Devil, Seven Wormwoods, and God (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1977).

[5] Ramm, 61-62.

[6] See Douglas Groothuis, “Of God and Dogs, with Constant Reference to Sunny,” Christian Research Journal, Vol. 47, no. 3 (2024), https://www.equip.org/articles/of-god-and-dogs-with-constant-reference-to-sunny.

[7] See Douglas Groothuis, “Francis Schaeffer: Pastor, Apologist, Evangelist, Prophet,” Christian Research Journal, volume 39: no: 04 (2016), https://www.equip.org/articles/francis-schaeffer-pastor-evangelist-apologist-prophet.

[8] Frederick Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Moral and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1969), 326.

[9] See Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the Word (Basic Books, 2019).