God is dead," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886, tossing a spiritual bombshell whose fallout lasted well into 20th-century Europe. "God remains dead," the German philosopher continued, "and we have killed him."

A master of the shocking statement-as was his disciple Adolf Hitler a generation later-Nietzsche explored the nature of a psychological crisis that comes on people when they refuse to believe that God exists.

Nietzsche helped set the stage for a collapse of belief in God in 20th-century Europe. He was a proponent of a philosophy that came to be known as existentialism. According to this view man exists in a world that simply is; man cannot know why he exists because God doesn't exist. Alone in the universe, said Nietzsche, man must make his own rules to live by, forge his own meaning for the universe and abandon the concept of a living God who divinely and deliberately influences history.

You and I live in such a world. It is a confused place. God is spoken of but only amid a babel of traditions, theologies and denominations. We can trace much of this confusion to a 2,000-year history of abuse and manipulation of the name and authority of God and Christ, but stripped of obedience to the teachings and practices of Jesus.

Although Christianity springs from the Middle East, Europe has been its primary home for 2,000 years. The startling truth about Europe's view of Christ, however, is that it bears little resemblance to the teachings and practices of Jesus we read about in the New Testament. A history of nearly 2,000 years of forced conversions, church-state alliances, absorption and adaptations to paganism, pogroms and persecutions has left millions of people dead in persecutions and holy wars.

We can find many individual exceptions, but the typical European does not believe in the God described in the Bible. Why not? What stands in the place of God in the European mind?

The silent superpower

To understand Europe, we must know the European mind.

The Continent is the home of multitudes of brilliant people, spectacular scenery, stunning architecture and beautiful music. Its cultural achievement is unmatched in variety and extent. It is the birthplace of many of humanity's highest achievements. Yet the history of much of the last 1,500 years is a list of horrors against humanity, many of them perpetrated in the name of Christianity.

We need to understand why Europe's ideas and perspectives remain important to the future of the world. If some of its nations decide to again become a dominant force in the world, again bringing it into direct confrontation with the United States, civilization as we know it could end.

The European Union, with its collective population of 370 million people, is functionally a superpower now, though largely a silent one. It tolerates U.S. economic and military policy, but to believe this situation will always be so is to be naive. The unspoken fear of American foreign-policy experts is that the days of voluntary European submission to American leadership are numbered.

Deep in the heart of Christianity

As you study history, you come to understand how it is possible-and likely-that the greatest wars of the future will emanate from Europe.

How so? you might ask. Do not the European and North American continents share the values of human dignity and the Christian heritage?

That was the precise opinion of Americans and Europeans at the beginning of the last century. But consider the facts. It is from Europe, this most historically Christian of continents, that the greatest wars in history have come.

Nearly all the great wars of Europe have one element in common. Messiahs of one stripe or another are almost always at the heart of European wars. Leaders arise from time to time who claim a superior calling from God, or the gods, to implement and exercise universal rule.

During wars of aggression under the emperors, Rome claimed the right to bring Pax Romana to the world. Medieval crusades were promulgated by a papacy that even now claims for the church continuous universal power over the salvation of everyone. Monarchs invaded their neighboring European kingdoms to consolidate the Holy Roman Empire and preserve a universal faith. Napoleon's messianic vision fueled his ambition to rule not only France, Africa and the Middle East, but the entire European Continent all the way to Moscow. Most recently, of course, came the tyrannical rule of Hitler.

Trouble in Europe almost always starts with a politically powerful messianic visionary who claims the right of world supremacy.

A Christian continent?

Europe is where Christianity has had its biggest impact for the last 2,000 years. However, Jesus' authentic teachings and practices have not held sway in Europe (or anywhere else) for long. Jesus Himself predicted that a great conflict, the mother of all holy wars, will yet flow from Europe to the rest of the world (see "Coming: A Religious Revival With Deadly Consequences").

Nietzsche, too, saw a coming religious war. A pan-Europeanist, he believed Europe should work for unification. His would not be a Europe that believed in Christ as the functional ruler of the world. In Nietzsche's Europe man would replace God after faith in God was stripped away.

He predicted a future fraught with danger. "The story I have to tell," he wrote, "is the history of the next two centuries ... For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey ... Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist."

Nietzsche's abyss

Nietzsche predicted his nihilistic way of thinking would lead Europe into an abyss of violence. "There will be wars," he said, "such as have never been waged on earth ..." Again: "I foresee something terrible, chaos everywhere. Nothing left which is of any value."

Nietzsche used words deliberately designed to play off the prophetic words of Jesus. Only days before His crucifixion Jesus' disciples asked Him what would be the signs of His coming to establish the Kingdom of God. "... Many will come in My name," He replied, "saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars ... for nation will rise against nation ..." (Matthew 24:5-7).

Nietzsche was a masterful manipulator of language. He used terminology from the Bible, but he cleverly twisted it and adapted its meaning to suit his own ends.

He and his protégés of the 20th century intended to turn biblical teachings inside out. He even described himself as an Antichrist. In his last book, The Antichrist, written six months before he went insane, he advised that "one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable."

Ironically, Nietzsche had been a brilliant Bible student as a youth, intent on following his father's footsteps as a Lutheran pastor. His adolescent classmates had even ridiculed him as "little pastor."

In the famous "God is dead" passage of his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche designed a blueprint for a European future shaped by leadership that would despise the biblical prophets and Jesus. These leaders would be supermen, the übermench who would become gods, creators of a way of life and a world power structure without God.

For that to come about, the elite of Europe had to be stripped of real faith in a real God.

The aftermath of Nietzsche

Europe in 1900 was ripe for a collapse of faith. The major European religions, beyond appropriating the name of God and theological terminology from the Bible, were never built on the authentic teachings and practices of Christ. If they had been, two world wars would never have been fought.

Confidence in God shatters when people believe in leaders who claim to represent Christ but don't heed what He said and don't do what He practiced. Belief in God disintegrates when people live through impossibly horrible events and personal trauma, then are encouraged to attribute them to acts of God rather than their own failure and sins. When built on the sands of wayward traditions and religious institutions, faith crumbles.

And God often gets the blame.

What is the foundation of your beliefs?

Is it the teachings and practices of Jesus Christ? Jesus said: "... Everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house ... and great was its fall" (Matthew 7:26-27).

Europeans' faith at the beginning of the 20th century lay in their kings and their religious hierarchies, denominations and traditions. They trusted in politics and the supposed righteousness of national superiority. They prided themselves on their military genius, their advanced arms and their nations' economic strength.

"The outbreak of war in 1914 was generally accepted with confidence and jubilation by the masses; few people imagined how long or how disastrous a conflict of the great powers would be. The war was greeted patriotically, as a defensive one imposed by national necessity ... [and] idealistically, as one for right against might, for the sanctity of treaties, and for international morality," says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1971 edition, Vol. 23, "World War I," p. 692).

European Christians were certain God was on their side in the conflict. He was not. Christ did not pull the trigger. Misguided humans did.

By World War I, Nietzsche's influence was widely felt. The kaiser in Germany sent a copy of Nietzsche's Zarathustra to the battlefront with each German soldier along with a copy of the New Testament. The Germans were to mingle Christ with Europe's supermen.

Most people in 1914 believed the war would quickly end. Churches were crowded with people praying that God would deliver their soldiers from evil and conquer their enemies. Christians all over Europe prayed to the same God for His assistance in killing each other. German and Austrian Catholics prayed in the name of Christ for their soldiers' success against French Catholics and members of the Russian Orthodox Church. British Anglican and Baptist Protestants prayed with Scottish Presbyterians against German Lutherans.

Whose side was God on?

All were sincere. All were full of faith. The problem was that they had the wrong interpretation of the Christian faith. Christ did not endorse their killing. Their faith was woefully misguided.

In four years 10 million German, French, Russian, Austrian and British soldiers, and many more from outside Europe, died in unbelievable carnage that stretched from Turkey and Russia to the outskirts of Paris.

In today's terms the war destroyed $20 trillion of property, infrastructure and other resources. The flower of European youth and much of its elite were dead or maimed. God was not dead. The old Europe was. This carnage glorified no one-God, country or man. In the end, millions had died in vain.

Europeans asked: If God exists and is all-loving, how can He allow horror and suffering? Hadn't God anointed the German's kaiser and the Russians' czar?

But in the war's aftermath Germany lost territory (a prelude to further losses after World War II), and Russia was taken over by Bolshevik atheists who systematically murdered the nation's aristocratic elite, an act not seen on that scale in hundreds of years of European bloodshed.

Events by 1920 had left many Europeans' faith in God shattered. Then the Nazi movement gave birth to the ferocious dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and eliminated the vestiges of the sentimental faith among many Europeans that the Continent enjoyed God's blessing.

Hitler's rise to power was a near-religious event for many Germans. He projected himself as the Führer, the "leader," a messiah promising 1,000 years of German world rule. Germany's embrace of Hitler resulted in the greatest war in history and a nightmare for his people. European belief in God as a supernatural restraint on evil was even more severely damaged. European theology lay in a shambles.

Beliefs about God and the Bible

At the beginning of the 21st century most Europeans still call themselves Catholic or Protestant in accordance with state or cultural custom, but surveys show that few believe in a supernatural God. Only a small minority accept the concept of a personal God as described in the Bible.

The overwhelming majority of Europeans believe in the theory of evolution. A small minority accept the supernatural miracles of the Bible, and fewer believe in a literal second coming of Christ. Few believe in the Kingdom of God as Jesus and the apostles taught and explained in the New Testament.

On the whole the spirit of Europe is one of disbelief that biblical laws, prophecies and teachings make any difference to anybody. Regrettably, American televangelism with its glitz, shallowness and biblical illiteracy is cablecast by satellite in Europe, deepening European cynicism regarding the Bible.

However, we need to remember that Christ and other prophets of the Bible predicted this collapse of belief and faith. Remember, Jesus asked, "... When the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?" (Luke 18:8).

Throughout the 20th century thousands of reports of armed conflicts in daily newspapers read like prophecies in the Bible of "wars and rumors of wars" (Mark 13:7).

The 21st century will be no different.

Mystery woman

Much of prophecy is clothed in symbols. When you understand what they mean, they connect God's sayings with world events, governments and prevailing beliefs. Lutherans and supporters of the Church of England nearly 500 years ago recognized in Revelation 17 a remarkable metaphor and symbol. They cited it to describe the nature of the church-state amalgam that had dominated European history since Constantine had made Roman Catholicism the official religion of the Roman Empire more than 1,000 years earlier.

The Bible is blunt. In its prophecies a church is often personified as a woman-in this case a fallen woman, "the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication ..." (verses 1-2).

God's Word describes the abuses perpetuated by such a church-state combine. Europe, to its dubious credit, does not pretend to deny the history of the immorality, abuse of power and untold millions killed in the name of Christ.

In the 16th century Martin Luther cited a biblical passage to illustrate the differences between the biblical teachings of Christ and Catholicism and to justify his decision to break with Rome: "I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (verse 6).

But Europe never returned to the practices and teachings of Jesus. The Protestants, too, continued many of the abuses of Christianity under different guises. This is not to say Europe will not have a significant religious future. This and other biblical prophecies make it clear that it will.

A new leader

Does the Bible tell what will happen next in Europe?

In a fascinating way, the Bible and Friedrich Nietzsche make the same predictions about particular aspects of Europe's future, violent predictions that center on the rise of a new generation of powerful leaders.

"Dead are all gods: now we want the superman to live," wrote Nietzsche in Zarathustra. He predicted the consequences of the rise of a superman at a great moment in European history. The "great noon," he said, would be a day of fire.

The apostle Paul spoke of a great religious leader who will arise immediately before Jesus' return. He, too, will meet his end with fire. He will not believe in the biblical God and will act as if God indeed is dead. He will claim to be God Himself on earth.

"... That Day will not come," wrote Paul, "unless ... the man of sin is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God." Paul says of this deceiver: "... The Lord will consume [him] with the breath of His mouth and destroy [him] with the brightness of His coming" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4, 8).

The woman rides a beast

The book of Revelation describes wars and abuse of Christianity finally coming to an end. After Revelation's description of a religious system symbolized by a fallen woman, the account continues: "I will tell you the mystery of the woman and of the beast that carries her, which has the seven heads and ten horns" (Revelation 17:7).

In Europe religion is often linked to governments. Sometimes the church has functioned politically as a state. It has been part of a church-state relationship-religious and political power combined-symbolized by the woman on a beast that she influences as she "rides" it. Governmental systems are the "beast" in symbolism.

A governmental system involving 10 political leaders is coming. They will be "ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast. These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast" (verses 12-13).

Eventually, though, they will turn their wrath on the system that was once their ally (verse 16). Europe, and the world, is in for a violent future if it continues to act as though God is irrelevant and uninvolved in human affairs-and as if He is dead. The Bible spells out what will happen if we continue to fashion religion and government in our own image rather than believing God in His Word.

The God and Christ of the Bible are alive, as humanity will come to see. The Bible is not psychologically clever fiction.

As verse 14 says of these prophesied leaders: "... These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings." Beyond this time of violent turmoil, shows the Bible, humanity has a spectacularly positive future. Unlike Nietzsche's depressing fiction, the Bible, on balance, depicts mankind's history as bright and uplifting.

Nietzsche, the world will soon learn, was badly mistaken. It isn't God who died. I'm reminded of the T-shirt someone gave me emblazoned with these words: "Nietzsche is dead. Signed, God." GN