Eternity after Nietzsche | Peter J. Leithart | First Things

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A decade ago, self-proclaimed born-again pagan and New Yorker-proclaimed Sage of Yale Law Anthony Kronman responded to critics in Comment with this:

In short, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is an attempt to put time and eternity back together again, after their long Abrahamic separation. This is a promising possibility, more attractive to me than either resignation or revival.

This represents a thin, thoroughly Nietzchean distortion of Christianity. Perhaps the Christianity Nietzsche encountered had connected the separate realms of eternity and time with a Savior and a church, but that's hardly characteristic of the Christian tradition as a whole.It certainly doesn't reflect the biblical Abrahamic faith, which is trust in a promise of land and seed, a promise that Abraham will be, inPaul's phrase, heir of the world. Christianity insists that the eternal kingdom is preciselythisworld transfigured into the kingdom of God (to quote Schmemann, the anti-Nietzschean).

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Eternity after Nietzsche - First Things (blog)