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We can see the point of trying to do this with Nietzsche. Surely few honest Christians can read the psychological observations of Nietzsche, to give one example, without acknowledging that he penetrates rather deep into human realities, including religious ones. When, in his earlier years, he adhered to Schopenhauer and to Wagner in a campaign to vitalize German culture, there is plenty there to stir the conscientious Christian to some enthusiasm. When, in his later years, he undertook the demolition of Christian morality, there is plenty there to cause the conscientious, by now uneasy, Christian observer to suspect that there is something we need to learn. If there are unexpected and unexplored religious possibilities here, we should be glad to hear of them.
But has Alistair Kee persuaded us? The book is well-written, a pleasure to read, more interested in getting to the inside of his subject's thought than parading learning. There are other works around which emphasize Nietzsche as a religious thinker, but usually written for fellow-members of the guild of Nietzsche scholars. This one certainly contains resources to make us think again, particularly by returning to the work of Karl Jaspers, whose interpretation of Nietzsche has so influenced the author. Nevertheless, the argument does not persuade.
The more thorough scholars will complain that you need to tackle the work of Michael Allen Gillespie if you want to be persuasive on nihilism in connection with the noble deity; that you need to know the Greeks as well as did Nietzsche and those like Patrick Moroney who have produced monographs delving into the classical sources, before taking Nietzsche at his word on the originality of his doctrine of eternal recurrence. They might worry that Kee implicitly dates the waning of Schopenhauer's influence too early, and explicitly dates the break with Wagner too late. However, as one who does not belong to their number, I pass over such things.
Not that we can rise above the former years and ignore the scholarly habits of two millennia. For less thorough scholars, there is yet plenty to make them worry about careless treatment of Nietzsche's texts. 1886 is given as the publication date of Human, All Too Human, but what happened in that year was that Nietzsche turned it into the first of a two-volume work and wrote a new preface. Kee tells us that Nietzsche asked in his earliest book the question: "What kind of figure does ethics cut once we decide to view it in biological perspective?" Not so: this was a question added to a new preface to the book, 14 years later. Check the first essay in The Genealogy of Morals, where we are told that we shall find the saying that "the true Redeemer will come," and you do not find it; actually, the saying comes at the end of the second essay in that work. Nietzsche supposedly styles himself as this "defiant prodigal," the phrase cited as found in Kaufmann and Hollingdale's translation of The Will to Power. But what Nietzsche actually says here is that there is an "imperiled kind of man" who is "stronger, more evil, covetous, defiant, prodigal." Kee has excised a comma and converted an adjective into a noun in his zeal to convert a prodigal Nietzsche into a son who, however conventionally irreligious, still really cares about religion.
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