The meaning of this statement is that since, as Nietzsche says, "the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable", everything that was "built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it", including "the whole [...] European morality", is bound to "collapse".
Other philosophers had previously discussed the concept, including Philipp Mainländer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Discourses of a "death of God" in German culture appear as early as the 17th century and originally referred to Lutheran theories of atonement.
The phrase "God is dead" appears in the hymn "Ein Trauriger Grabgesang" ("A mournful dirge") by Johann von Rist.
[3] The poem is an adaptation into a verse of a dream-vision that appears in Jean Paul's 1797 novel Siebenkäs under the chapter title of 'The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God'.
[4] In an address he gave in 1987 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the literary scholar George Steiner claims that Nietzsche's formulation 'God is dead' is indebted to the aforementioned 'Dead Christ' dream-vision of Jean Paul, but he offers no concrete evidence that Nietzsche ever read Jean Paul.
Murty continued that commenting on Kant's first Critique, Heinrich Heine who had purportedly influenced Nietzsche spoke of a dying God.
"[10] Hegel's student Richard Rothe, in his 1837 theological text Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, appears to be one of the first philosophers to associate the idea of a death of God with the sociological theory of secularization.
[14] In Mainländer's more than 200 pages long criticism of Schopenhauer's metaphysics, he argues against one cosmic unity behind the world, and champions a real multiplicity of wills struggling with each other for existence.
Now we have the right to give this being the well-known name that always designates what no power of imagination, no flight of the boldest fantasy, no intently devout heart, no abstract thinking however profound, no enraptured and transported spirit has ever attained: God.
Heidegger argued that metaphysics, which had structured Western thought from its inception, had now reached its maximum potential and, in doing so, had exhausted its relevance.
[22] Heidegger viewed the death of God as a pivotal moment in the history of thought, representing a transformation in humanity’s relationship to "Being."
This shift, he argued, invites a new mode of engagement with existence, one that transcends human-imposed structures of meaning and value.
[23] Instead, Heidegger advocates a contemplative approach, suggesting that we "let Being be"—appreciating existence without the constraints of human valuation or the demand for purpose.
This approach marks a philosophical divergence: while Nietzsche encourages the active creation of values in a world absent of divine authority, Heidegger calls for a more fundamental openness to Being itself, free from valuation.
[24] The German-born theologian Paul Tillich, for instance, was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, especially his phrase "God is dead".