Oldal 104 [104]
OCR
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 concept 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 allowed 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 theologians 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 & Ruprecht, 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 constitution 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 +
