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HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
with diligence, and as I have often heard it said that in the end every human
being has a religion of his own, nothing seemed more natural to me than that
I should fashion one for myself, and this I did with much satisfaction.” No
doubt, he believed that the creation of individual religious belief presupposed
the concept of “natural religion”, something that should form the core of any
religion.
The Gottingen lawyer Johann Stephan Pütter (1725-1807) was closer to the
Church than Goethe and many of his contemporaries. As a regular church¬
goer, he never worked on Sundays. But even for him religious belief was a
thoroughly personal matter. His distinct intellectual, rational religiosity was
based on the claim that he had come of age in religious affairs. Like Goethe, he
created his own religious system which was “useful” and “properly ordered”.
“For years”, Pütter wrote in his autobiography, “I had made it my business, de¬
voting every Sunday to this invention, to draw up a religious system in a way
which seemed to me most usefully to permit a properly ordered overview of
the whole and its application to my condition. I achieved this by diligent use of
the Bible and all the teachings which I could glean from the sermons, writings
or conversations of experienced theologians.”
Finally, we should mention, both as the peak and as the end of the Enlight¬
enment process of the privatization of religion, Friedrich Schiller’s well known
verses, titled “My Belief”: “Which religion do I confess? None of those that
you mention! And why none? Because of religion.”*' The claim of the educated
classes (Gebildeten) that they had come of age in matters of religion could
hardly be better illustrated. The consistent privatization of religion in the age of
Enlightenment raised individual sophistication in rebus religionis to a program.
Thus the focus of religion shifted quite logically from the idea of God to the
believing subject, from fides quae creditur to fides qua creditur.
The coining and dissemination of the terms “private religion”, “private the¬
ology”, and “private Christianity”, etc.** demonstrate that in the second half
* GOETHE, Dichtung und Wahrheit, part HI, book 15, in id., Saémtliche Werke, Jubilaumsausgabe,
Stuttgart — Berlin, [no date], (hereafter cited as GOETHE, Werke JubA), Vol. 24,. 228; cf. also
201, 209. This English translation is from STEELE SMITH, Minna —BREUL, Karl (trans.), J. W. von
Goethe, Poetry and Truth. From my own Life, Vol. 2, London, G. Bell & Sons, 1908, 175.
PUTTER, Johann Stephan, Selbstbiographie zur dankbaren Jubelfeier seiner SOjährigen Profes¬
sorenstelle zu Göttingen, vol. 2, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1798, 599f.
51 FRICKE, Gerhard -GÖPFERT, Herbert G, (eds.), Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Gedichte/
Dramen I, 4th ed. vol. 1, München, Carl Hanser, 1965, 130.
Cf. HÖLSCHER, Lucian, Religion im Wandel. Von Begriffen des religiösen Wandels zum Wandel
religiöser Begriffe, in W.Gräb (ed.), Religion als Thema der Theologie. Geschichte, Standpunkte
und Perspektiven theologischer Religionskritik und Religionsbegründung, Gütersloh, Kaiser, 1999,
45-62.
* 100 +