A story once reached my ears that is almost certainly apocryphal, yet it conveys truth. The story is this: A man was approaching the entrance to a New York City subway station when he looked up and saw a billboard that read: "God is dead. -- Nietzsche." The man read the sign and promptly forgot the message. Hours later, he returned home and as he ascended the subway stairs to street level. He saw the same billboard. It had been defaced. Crossed out was the original message and painted over it were these words: "Nietzsche is dead. -- God."

Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th-century German university professor, a philosopher and best known for his repudiation of Christianity.

What may surprise many is that Nietzsche, perhaps the poster boy for the "God is dead" movement, actually was a student of theology at the University of Bonn in his early 20s. However, he gave theology up after a single semester and switched to philosophy.

He was not a particularly healthy man. He suffered a bad horse riding accident that made him unfit for military service. He contracted diphtheria and dysentery. He suffered from frequent migraine headaches and occasionally severe stomach attacks. Several biographers claim he also had syphilis; if true, this would help explain the deterioration of his mind in his mid-40s and his early death at age 55. Nietzsche wanted to find a wife but never did. He had no children. By all accounts, Nietzsche was brilliant and lived with a lot of physical and emotional pain.

Nietzsche didn't understand Christmas. In his 1888 book "Antichrist," Nietzsche wrote: "I call ... an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it."

Long story short, Nietzsche did not understand Jesus' willingness to face crucifixion. Christ could have run from it but did not. Nietzsche could not fathom that mindset. Nietzsche rejected the idea that people were motivated by a God-directed desire for unity nor did he accept the notion that people were energized by a desire for utilitarianism (e.g., "the greatest good for the greatest number"). Instead, he believed all human behavior was motivated by a "will to power," meaning a desire and longing for power -- seen in warfare and all manner of competition.

What seems clear in reading his works is that he was quite an admirer of Jesus Christ but had little use for the church and the clergy.

The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche are not something to cozy up to in front of a warm fire. He despised Christianity for breeding what he called a weak, sick type of human being; he attacked it for lifting up the virtues of pity and compassion.

It is one thing to know the Bible in the sense that you can memorize Scripture passages and arrange them into themes. Nietzsche could do that. It is quite another to understand the mind of Christ, a mind not attuned to the values of this world but to a "kingdom not of this world," (John 18:36). That countercultural sensibility, self-sacrifice rather than a will to power -- for all of Nietzsche's brilliance, he never was able to grasp.

When Nietzsche tries to make Jesus like everybody else, he misses the point. Jesus is not like anybody else. That's why his birth is, and has always been, such a big deal.

Jeff Long is pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Cape Girardeau. Married with two daughters, he is of Scots and Swedish descent, loves movies and is a lifelong fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.