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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 distinct 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 happiness 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 Luther’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 humane 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 Rationalität 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. - 101 +
