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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ——o— HANS ERICH BÖDEKER For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), as one among many, the Enlightenment, most aptly summarized perhaps as the rise of the faith in the ability of the individual to think for oneself, was primarily a struggle against theology. This was one of the most constant factors in his worldview, and in the worldview of many of his German contemporaries. Kant saw the “regulations and forms” of theology as the “shackles of an internal state of tutelage.”’ He thus considered the main thrust of the Enlightenment to lie in religious matters, an opinion he expressed several times, and not only in his 1784 essay on the Enlightenment.” Advocates of the Enlightenment aimed to be able to exercise reason openly and freely, and to think for themselves without being directed or influenced by anyone else. Attaining one’s “maturity” in this sense was understood as the freedom to “[make] public use of one’s reason in every respect”. And rational thinking expressed itself precisely both in doubts about dogmas and in criticism of the social face of institutional Christianity. For the German Enlightenment too, Christianity was no longer a self-evident truth; it subjected theology and church to a continuous process of criticism. ' Quoted from LIEPERT, Anita, Aufklärung und Religionskritik bei Kant, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 22 (1974), 359-70, here 362.; cf. CRUMBACH, Karl-Heinz, Theologie in kritischer Öffentlichkeit. Die Frage Kants an das kirchliche Christentum, München - Mainz, Kaiser, 1977.; WINTER, Aloysius, Der andere Kant. Zur philosophischen Theologie Immanuel Kants. Europa memoria, Vol. 1, Hildesheim, Olms, 2000.; HÖFFE, Otfried (ed.), Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, Berlin, Akademie, 2010. ? _KANT, Immanuel, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? in Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1902, 35. (hereafter cited as KANT, Schriften AA, i.e. Akademiausgabe) + 87 +
