Did Nietzsche say God is Dead?

Even though it’s now associated with him, Nietzsche didn’t coin the phrase God is dead. As the son of a Lutheran pastor, he would have heard that line in a Lutheran Holy Saturday hymn. And although Nietzsche had become an atheist, in his aphorism “God is dead,” he doesn’t simply mean that God doesn’t exist. 

Rather, he means that he foresees how belief in God will soon cease to be the organizing principle of European civilization. Nietzsche perceived that the Christian bourgeoisie already lived as if God did not…