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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
accepted the presence of God only where there is congruence between human
and divine categories.
What is more, Enlightened theologians increasingly came to see belief in
God as potestas absoluta not only as a worship of arbitrariness, but also as a
denial of any possibility of human self-assertion. Ihe aims of the theological
Enlightenment were to remove fear and to gain an interest in and openness
toward the world. “Can God”, asked Johann August Eberhard (1739-1809),
pastor and professor of philosophy in Halle, “demand mindless obedience and
can He base His sovereignty over us on anything but reason and justice? ...
The idea of never-ending torment is in friendly league with it; one supports the
other ... the horror of religious darkness ruled by a blood thirsty despot. That
is why this disfigured religion contains nothing that revives, nothing that gives
succor, nothing that could open the heart in a beam of divine love, nothing
that would allow the heart to find comfort in the thought of God and in His
image a model for imitation. Nothing but doubts and fears tearing apart the
tormented soul, for it sees no fitting punishments, but only suffering without
end.”°? This vehement attack on the contents of the old faith cannot conceal
however, that neither Eberhard nor most of the German supporters of the
Enlightenment were prepared to dispense with religious guidance altogether.
The aim of these theological elaborations was not liberation from all anxieties,
but a “mild, inspired awe”.
August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack’s (1703-1786) thoughts about God “not
only contained nothing dreadful and disheartening, but in fact something ...
peaceful and joyous.” “I never”, he continued, “felt like a human being with
more seemliness and pleasure than when I opened my understanding to the
omnipresent evidence of His power, wisdom and goodness, and my heart to
the feelings of devotion and love which flowed from them.” For Enlightened
theologians, God’s wisdom and goodness had become a demonstrable truth.
Consequently, for Sack and his contemporaries, they were part of “a providence,
which my understanding and my heart require for me to be fully reassured
and comforted.”® For Enlightened theologians, God was a known quantity
Religion, Vol. 1, Braunschweig, Waisenhaus, 1772, 335f.
5° EBERHARD, Neue Apologie des Sokrates (note 56), 346f.
60 Ibid., 344.
61 Sack, August Friedrich Wilhelm, Vertheidigter Glaube der Christen, parts 1-7, Berlin, Haude
und Spener, 1748-1751, part 4, 33.
%2 Ibid., part 1, 82.
63 Ibid.
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