Machine summary:
Freud himself saw religion as an illusion which had struck neurotics, while Slavoj Žižek viewed it as some sort of ―perversion‖ which functioned in the cycle of law-transgression.
I argue that Luther‘s emphasis on Christian faith as a remedy for ―Jewish‖ guilt reached Friedrich Nietzsche via the exegesis of the nineteenth-century Tübingen School.
James Dunn also demonstrated that Paul only criticized a certain particularist aspect of the Jewish people: ―Paul‘s critique of the Law was primarily directed against its abuse by sin, and against his fellow kinsfolk‘s assumption that the Law‘s protection continued to give them before God a distinctive and favored position over the other nations, which they were responsible to maintain as such‖ (Dunn 1998, 363) In this way, the traditional interpretation of legal observance was turned on its head.
If the Christian perspective on Judaism can be attributed to the Lutheran understanding, rather than Paul‘s own words, it is better to focus on Luther‘s own words on the Jewish law.
While for Paul guilt lay in legalistic perfectionism, for Nietzsche it was part of Christian and modern morality.
8 Nietzsche functioned as a bridge to transfer these essentialist views of Pauline Christianity from the nineteenth-century ecclesiastical discourse to the pathological readings of religion in psychoanalysis as well as philosophy.
V. Paul, according to Sigmund Freud The relation between human guilt and the origins of religion resurfaced in Sigmund Freud‘s work.
(Žižek 2003, 113) In this sense, love is the (Real) surplus that sustains the Law in both Judaism and Christianity.