Christendom and use it as a means of power, just as, conversely, a Christian life does not necessarily require Christendom. Therefore, a confrontation with Christendom is absolutely not in any way an attack against what is Christian, any more than a critique of theology is necessarily a critique of faith, whose interpretation theology is said to be. We move in the flatlands of the conflicts between world views so long as we disregard these essential distinctions.
In the word "God is dead" the name "God," thought essentially, stands for the suprasensory world of those ideals which contain the goal that exists beyond earthly life for that life and that, accordingly, determines life from above, and also in a certain way, from without. But now when unalloyed faith in God, as determined through the Church, dwindles away, when in particular the doctrine of faith, theology, in its role of serving as the normative explanation of that which is as a whole, is curtailed and thrust aside, then the fundamental structuring, in keeping with which the fixing of goals, extending into the suprasensory, rules sensory, earthly life, is in no way thereby shattered as well.
Into the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching office of the Church steps the authority of conscience, obtrudes the authority of reason. Against these the social instinct rises up. The flight from the world into the suprasensory is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The careful maintenance of the cult of religion is relaxed through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the spreading of civilization. Creativity, previously the unique property of the biblical god, becomes the distinctive mark of human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into business enterprise.
Accordingly, that which must take the place of the suprasensory world will be variations on the Christian-ecclesiastical and theological interpretation of the world, which took over its schema of the ordo of the hierarchy of beings from the Jewish-Hellenistic world, and whose fundamental structure was established and given its ground through Plato at the beginning of Western metaphysics.