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HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
that one could count on; according to Spalding, God was "substantiated moral
perfection”.‘*
Kant, too, constantly reflected upon “the religious notions and theological
doctrines that on the one hand interpreted the will of God as arbitrary and
something absolutely alien to men, and, on the other, saw the will of the ethical
and religious human being ... as derived from the will of this arbitrary God.”®
In his view a free and critical subject could only justifiably accept a religion and
morality which had overcome the “empty” or “anthropomorphic” notion® “of
an egotistical and despotic divine will”.” Kant rejected a heteronymous deriva¬
tion of the human will from the will of an arbitrary God in order to make “free
belief” possible, and not in order to justify the autonomy of practical reason. He
could not imagine Enlightened subjectivity allowing itself to be bound by mo¬
rality if it was not based on the idea that God was holy and just. For him, man
as a rational, free and ethical being ought not to be thought of as a means used
by God or a higher intellect for perfecting the universe. “God cannot sacrifice
a »rational« creature in the universe; but he can permit it to sacrifice itself.
(Here it is assumed that God uses the rational creature merely as a means for
perfecting the whole. But there is no moral value in a world in which rational
beings are used merely as means to an end).”® For Kant, any such idea of God
was fundamentally incompatible with the possibility of humans as beings who
could act in moral freedom.
In Kant’s view, Christianity had to be stripped of false notions, especially
that of an arbitrary God. This distancing from the orthodox, official Lutheran
view of God was accompanied by a change in religious consciousness, as well as
by the emergence of a view of the self which regarded the human being as au¬
tonomous, a development which was only made possible by this emancipation.
The transformation of the orthodox idea of God coincided with the emergence
of the modern idea of freedom. For Goethe, for instance, the projection of the
master-servant relationship onto the relationship between God and man was
totally alien. In his view, it had nothing to do with religious feeling under the
conditions created by the Enlightenment. He described the contemporary state
of religious awareness using the model of relations between human beings and
4 SPALDING, Johann Joachim, Die Bestimmung des Menschen nebst einigen Zugaben, Leipzig, Weid¬
mann,1794, 97.
6% OELMULLER, Unbefriedigte Aufklärung (note 14), 134.
66 KANT, Immanuel, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, in E. Cassirer (ed),
Werke, 11 vols., Berlin, Cassirer, 1912-1922, hereafter cited as KANT, Werke.
§7 Kant, Schriften AA, vol. 18, 474.
6 Ibid., vol. 17, 202.
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