If one takes a course on 19th century philosophy or reads a majority of commentaries on the topic, one will come across the assertion that it was Nietzsche who first, in the modern era, pronounced the death of God and saw clearly the problematics this creates for European man and his conception of himself, for morality and meaning, for man's understanding of his place in the universe.
This assertion that it was Nietzsche who first grappled with this concept rests either on an ignorance of the history of philosophy or its intentional distortion. Either way, the claim that Nietzsche was really the first to think this problem through is factually not true. It is true Nietzsche made this remark, and that he thought about its implications, but it is not true that he was the first. The latter is an oversimplification and distortion, and it serves to bolster the flattering picture of Nietzsche as a profoundly original thinker who picked himself up by his own bootstraps. As to whether this mistake is made in honest or is a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, it's pointless to pursue. There's no point in wasting words about the intentions of those who repeat the mistake. Rather: a correction of the mistake itself.
And more fundamentally than that, assertions like this rest on a faulty conception of philosophy and the history of ideas: it conceptualizes ideas as being something like discrete objects that come from the minds of exceptional and great geniuses who see further than their contemporaries. These ideas are their property and the greatness of the philosopher comes from their inventing these ideas. Philosophers invent concepts, and the task is to trace the origin of a concept back to a thinker. This itself is already a crude romanticist idea about the Genesis and nature of thinking and theorizing, which tears ideas away from the material context in which they arise and treats them as existing in a vacuum. One doesn't attempt to understand concepts and their interpretation, nor does one attempt to see how ideologies arise from the way society is organized, but instead engages in a genealogy of ideas.
If one were to grant this crude presuppostion that ideas are something like a discrete object that is the intellectual property of this or that thinker, even then, the praise for Nietzsche's profound originality misses the mark.
Long before Nietzsche made this pronunciation about the "death of God", this problem had already become a bit of a cliche in various romanticist movements. Furthermore, the "problematic of the death of God" was already also an established topic within German idealism, which was an attempt to overcome the opposition between the Enlightenment and the romanticist criticism of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment and the advances in science and rational knowledge had called into question the authority of church teachings. Much of the widely accepted wisdom had been turned on its head, and new ideas about how the world actually worked gained in popularity within elite circles of the educated and ruling classes. The French materialists and philosophes, and natural science, called into question long held ideas about the world: everything from the medieval humors theory of the body, to the earth being the center of the universe, up to the long held "great chain of being." Seemingly these Enlightenment ideas found their proof in the pudding: great revolutions happened, establishing republics where the ideals of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity overtook old ideas about the natural order of the classes. Industry grew larger and larger by the day, world trade routes had been established, the "discovery" of the Americas, the invention of clever machines and chemical processes to produces fertilizers, the modernization of agriculture and manufacturing-- all of it seemed a fundamental break with the old traditions of feudalism. A new modern epoch had broken free from the old and come to establish its existence on a firm and solid foundation. It had practical results that had transformed the world.
Out of this grew a reaction: Romanticism. The Romantics cursed the mechanization, standardization, and homogenization of the world. It appeared a blight and curse against their aesthetic considerations that the whole world was seemingly become a factory or coal mine, that God's creation was treated as a resource to use to make money, and not as a fundamentally mysterious and awe-inspiring divine creation that was best appreciated and contemplated in tranquil submission, in gelassenheit. The idyllic pastoral world of peasants and lords, kings and queens, of heroic myths and folk fairy tales about spirits and destiny, traditions and customs-- all of it was disappearing under the brutal criticism of enlightenment Reason. Regional dialects and folkways were standardized into a national language and new national histories. And so on.
Marx, who in many ways was a child and heir to the Enlightenment, and also a harsh critic of "reactionary socialism" (i.e. romanticist communalism), in the Communist Manifesto, takes note of this process that was underway:
'The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.'
Out of all this, the Romantics felt a profound sense of loss and melancholy, a nostalgia to escape from the new alienating society to nature or the past. Many of these romantic themes became hotly debated within the "German idealist" movement. Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel all in one way or another deal with the topics: reason vs faith/myth, how modern man was to see himself and his place in the world, what the new discoveries of science and knowledge meant for man's sense of self and meaning. The question of "nihilism", of "the darkening of the world", of traversing a world with no solid foundation in God or morality was already a theme for these thinkers long before Nietzsche wrote his aphorisms.
Note: I put "German idealism" in quotes because it gives the impression that all of these thinkers shared the same fundamental presuppositions and aims, and that is another oversimplification, but nothing I'm going to get into here. (For more information, see: Frederick C. Beiser's "German Idealism", and Terry Pinkard's "Hegel: A Biography".)
Hegel's philosophy of religion starts off with this very problem of the Death of God, the first 25 pages are essentially a long winded laying out of the problem. Hegel contrasts what he calls "the metaphysics of the understanding -- by which he means the universalistic-materialistic-rationalist enlightenment "theology of reason" with positive religion and theology. The enlightenment reason still speaks of God as a creator of reason (think: the deists with their idea of God as being a clock maker and setter), or even as God as substance and subject-- but ultimately God ends up as an empty husk, a blank heading under which the totality of being is placed. In short, it is simply atheism in disguise or an atheism to afraid to call itself that. On the other hand, Hegel could not stand the pious mystical theology of his day which professed loudly the need to know God and religion, but then announces that God is fundamentally mysterious and unknowable.
Hegel couldn't stand either the fanatical philosophers who wanted to do away with religion in favor of rationalist philosophy, nor theologians who wanted to do away with philosophy and reason in favor of empty professions of subjective faith and feeling. He claimed both had valid criticisms of the one-sidedness of the other, but were incapable of overcoming the conflict, the weak spots. He wanted to reconcile the two conflicting sides of modern thought into a higher philosophy of religion, which grounded both the subjective and objective sides of thinking, the empiricist and idealist insights, into a higher unity. He called this "absolute spirit". In other words, Hegel couldn't deny the truths uncovered by the Enlightenment, nor the way they proceeded, but it left a distaste in his mouth that this was clearly pointing the way to atheism.
Hegel's philosophy, even in its youngest and most amateur expression took note of the question of the death of God:
"God has died, God is dead--this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that all that is true is not, that negation itself is found in God, the deepest sorrow, the feeling of something completely irretrievable, the renunciation of everything of a higher kind, are connected with this."
What can one say about this? As much as Hegel constantly criticizes the pious theologians like Fichte or Schliermacher for wanting to ground religion in feeling, here apparently fear is reason enough to search for its higher basis in the absolute. It's subservient thinking, and there's something insulting about that to people who haven't internalized their worthlessness in the form of religious modesty and devotion, but that's not why it's false. It is a circular logic.
What's the mistake, why is it circular? One deduces God's existence directly from one's belief in God. And modern Christians will readily perform this “deduction” functionally: they then put forward what their faith accomplishes – consolation, help, orientation, protection against despair/nihilism, etc. – as an argument, i.e. they simply announce their need for God because God fulfils it. They are quite close to the truth when they say this, although they arouse the suspicion that their faith is not “pure” because it is predicated on a selfish subjective desire but they instead speculate, depending on their general situation, on the Lord's protecting hand. Reason and religion simply must be one.
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