Nietzsche as Christian theologian?

I've recently read Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist for teaching in my Freshman religion course.  We're teaching Nietzsche, along with Karl Marx, as part of a set of "modern challenges" to Christianity.  Until fairly recently, I wasn't really a "Nietzsche person" and I thought that engagement with postmodern readers of Nietzsche, the intellectual craze at Duke while I was there, was a weird trend that wasn't very fruitful for Christian theology.  The only Nietzsche I've read in the past was when a crazy atheist neighbor of mine lent me The Antichrist to read back in undergrad.  I've been surprised in going back to him in teaching this course.

Particularly, I've been startled by how "Christian" Nietzsche is - not in terms of personal belief - but in terms of how steeped Nietzsche was in the basic ideas and grammar of Christian theology.  The terminology, the setting, the basic concerns in Nietzsche's work all come from Christian theology, and the questions he raises about Christianity are incredibly helpful.

In my teaching Nietzsche I keep reminding my students to keep from saying "this one thing is what Nietzsche means."  The poetic, under-determined quality of Nietzsche's work has really struck me.  For instance, it's possible to read Nietzsche's account of master morality/slave morality in the Genealogy of Morals as simply "amoral," but it's equally possible to read this account as a critique of his German society’s own racist, "Christian" outlook on the marginalized/the poor/factory workers, etc. I think Nietzsche uses his discussion of "slave morality" to point to some of the more sinister ways in which Christianity functions to legitimate or theologize oppression through stirring up fear of dangerous "others."

Nietzsche also challenges a lot of the modern scholarly ideas of "objectivity" that are still present in university settings today.  Nietzsche, in some of his writings on history and historiography, shows how universities and academic settings create their own ends and goals that sometimes trick writers and thinkers into writing for the university, rather than writing to help people (or help the Church/preach the Gospel, for theologians).