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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY... came to designate a more comprehensive context in which doctrine was of only partial significance. "Religion" became the most general category of an undogmatic definition of Christianity. Eventually, it came to mean an individual, Enlightened religious feeling as opposed to dogma, theology and doctrine. The foreword to Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744-1803) Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebräuchen provides a good example of this usage: “Any word that is about religion should be written religiously, that is, conscientiously, and also demands to be read in the same way. ... Religion addresses human feelings; it speaks to impartial conviction. In all groups and classes of society man is permitted to be man only in order to perceive and practie religion. Religion intervenes in all human preferences and drives them in order to harmonize them with itself and direct them to the right path. When religion parts company with a doctrine, it leaves every doctrine in place; but religion does not want to be doctrine. Doctrines separate and provoke bitterness; religion unifies: for in all human hearts it is but one.”®’ The distinction between theology and religion, between private and public religion, runs through the entire religious theory of the Enlightenment. For Kant, “statutory church belief” contrasted with “pure religious belief". And even in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770-1831) earliest fragments, which helped him establish his own opinions on the crucial theological questions of the day, we find, among other things, a differentiation between public and private religion.* He also discussed it as the difference between objective and subjective religion. Against the background of Semler’s writings in particular, the historical origins not only of individual points, but also of the whole construction of Hegel’s theological argument become clear. This applies especially in passages in which Hegel does not represent the special interest of the professional, free, rational theologian, but argues in favour of the subjectivity of religion. Unlike Semler, however, Hegel thought this difference through, seeing Wilhelm Jerusalem (1709-1789) in seiner Zeit, Braunschweig, Klosterkirche Riddagshausen, 1989. HERDER, Johann Gottfried, Christliche Schriften. 5. Sammlung: Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen und Gebräuchen, in B. Suphan (ed.), Sämmtliche Werke, Berlin, Weidemann, 1876, (herafter quoted as HERDER, Werke) vol. 20, 133-265, here 135.; cf. WOLFES, Matthias, “Das höchste Gut, was Gott allen Geschöpfen geben konnte, war und bleibt eigenes Daseyn.“ Herders Ideal freier Religiosität, inM. Keßler - V. Leppin (eds.), Johann Gottfried Herder. Aspekte seines Lebenswerkes. Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, Vol. 92, Berlin - New York, 2005, De Gruyter, 193-308. 38 Cf. KANT, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft; Schriften AA, Vol. 6, 109-111. % On this cf. OELMÜLLER, Unbefriedigte Aufklärung (note 14), 79ff. See also KRÜGER, Hans Joachim, Theologie und Aufklärung. Untersuchungen zu ihrer Vermittlung beim jungen Hegel, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1966, and TımM, Hermann, Fallhöhe des Geistes. Das religiöse Denken des Jungen Hegel, Frankfurt/M., Syndikat, 1979. + 97 +
