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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
of the eighteenth century piety, religious belief, and thinking were starting to
separate themselves from the church. 1he fact that the individual had come of
age in religious matters meant that during the Enlightenment a Christianity
came into being which was emancipated from the Church. “Church” was no
longer identical with “Christianity”.
III
“Private religion”, the individual, self-reliant appropriation of the truths of
Christianity served as a basic feature of the Enlightenment criticism of dis¬
tinct Christian dogmas. Criticism of the notion of an arbitrary God, which
had begun to develop in theology and philosophy in the late Middle Ages, lay
at the heart of the call for religious subjectivity. Resistance to what had been
called “theological absolutism”®’ was an issue of the Enlightenment from the
start. For such a God, the world was merely a demonstration of the unlimited
sovereignty of His hidden will, not a place in which human aspiration to hap¬
piness and autonomy could potentially be fulfilled.
In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) view, God’s sovereign will was
limited. For him, God was no longer an arbitrary ruler who acted according
to His inscrutable judgement. In fact, Leibniz bitterly refuted this view.°* He
believed that the basic outlines of God’s action were susceptible to reason, even
if particular acts were not. Leibniz presupposed that faith and reason were in
harmony with each other, and this paved the way for therationality of creation
to be recognized. His notion of God was nothing more than a philosophical
version of the Christian idea of God, but it differed quite crucially from the
orthodox God. In simplified terms, we could say that Leibniz transformed Lu¬
ther’s unknown God into a revealed God of love, and that the revelation in the
gospels was no longer the sole source of knowledge of God’s will.
The theological Enlightenment enthusiastically espoused Leibniz’s notion of
God. The theologian and philologist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768)
provides a good illustration of the growing disenchantment with the orthodox
53 For the topic “theological absolutism” see BLUMENBERG, Hans, Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit, rev.
version, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp, 1988., esp. second part:Theologischer Absolutismus und hu¬
mane Selbstbehauptung.
54 Cf. KIRCHMANN, J. H. von (trans.), LEIBNIZ, Gottfried Wilhelm, Théodicée. Préface, id. Theodizee,
Leipzig, Dürr, 1879, II $6, §79 passim., cf. especially SCcHMIDT-BIGGEMANN, Wilhelm, Die Ratio¬
nalität der Theodizee, in H. Poser - C. Asmuth et al. (eds.), Nihil sine ratione. Nachtragsband, VII.
Internationaler Leibniz-Kongreß, Hannover, Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Gesellschaft, 2002,
350-357.
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