Oldal 104 [104]
HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
idea of God. In his book, Vornehmste Wahrheiten der natiirlichen Religion he saw
the God of orthodoxy as fear-inspiring and terrifying. Reimarus went so far
as to interpret dissatisfaction with the old belief as the cause of the spread of
atheism.* Johann August Eberhard (1731-1809) in turn tried to develop a con¬
cept of God which reflected the individualization and increased self-confidence
of the supporters of the Enlightenment: “How can we attribute to God, as an
additional merit, a blind, arbitrary power which, among humans, we detest
under the hated name of tyranny? And yet it is not going too far to accuse the
defenders of God’s unconditional power of presenting God as an involuntary
tyrant. For they base the happiness and misery of rational beings on the will
of God, not merely on a will which we cannot understand, one whose motives
we cannot examine; they also claim explicitly that this will is guided by no
knowledge, is moved by no causes.”’®
As a result of their difficulties with the concept of an all powerful, arbitrary
God, Protestant Enlightened theologians conceived ofa God who granted men
insight into his ideas and decisions, who limited his sovereignty, and who al¬
lowed open access to his motives. In fact, in his reflections, Reimarus, for
instance, drew an explicit comparison with a civil constitution.?
The Protestant theological Enlightenment had lost the Lutheran ethos of
blind belief and unconditional obedience. As time went by, Enlightened theo¬
logians felt increasingly secure in their knowledge and possession of God. In
his Betrachtungen Jerusalem assumed human beings possessed knowledge of
Gods wise intentions, for “their reason is His reason, their feelings are His
immutable will; their good and His good are one; His law and their nature are
one; the law that they feel within themselves is the imprint of His own supreme
perfection.”** Unlike orthodox Lutheran theologians after Luther, Jerusalem
55 Cf REIMARUS, Hermann Samuel, Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen
Religion, Hamburg, Carl Ernst Bohn, 1772, “Vorbericht”. See also Hermann Samuel Reimarus
(1694-1768). Ein “bekannter Unbekannter” der Aufklärung in Hamburg, Veröffentlichungen der
Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Hamburg, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ru¬
precht, 1973, and WALTER, Wolfgang (ed.), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). Beiträge
zur Reimarus-Renaissance in der Gegenwart. Veröffentlichungen der Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft
der Wissenschaften in Hamburg, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1998.
EBERHARD, Johann August, Neue Apologie des Sokrates oder Untersuchung von der Seligkeit der
heiden, Berlin - Stettin, Friedrich Nikolai, 1778, 45.
Cf. REIMARUS, Abhandlungen (note 55), pp. 670f.; “Just as in a civil society no exception can be
made before the law for one or the other individual without this having wider consequences,
and frequent exceptions rob the laws themselves of their force and upset the whole constitu¬
tion of the state .... should God so soon forcibly intervene in nature; obstruct, disturb, alter
... the rule? This would change the essence and the nature of things themselves, and strongly
support evil.”
JERUSALEM, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, Betrachtungen tiber die vornehmsten Wahrheiten der
* 102 +