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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
image of God even more firmly than before at the heart of its anthropology.”
When Jerusalem or Sack, for example, rejected the idea that man had lost his
Godlikeness because of original sin, they retained the concept of imago dei, but
interpreted it in a completely new way. “I know, Oh God! I am a worm”, wrote
Jerusalem, “a mere nothing compared with You; but I am also your image,
which You have honoured by revealing to it Your nature, which makes You the
supreme being.” ** According to Jerusalem, man carried “the sublime image of
his Creator” in his reason.” Man was limited by comparison only with God,
who was perfection, and with no other living being: “And who are we? By
comparison with Him infinitely small .... infinitely superior to all other crea¬
tures...”°°
On the basis of Creation and the divinity of his own reason, man was able to
recognize God’s intentions and his own destiny. By realizing his destiny, man
could work to perfect the world. Man’s actions, taking his likeness to God as a
point of reference and deriving from God’s love, converted man into a mani¬
festation of divine perfection.”’ Consequently, Jerusalem could say about man:
“He should be a God here on earth... this is his great vocation, and if he fulfills
it, than he carries the image of the Creator worthily.”** Thus, religion indicated
the path to perfection for humanity.
By juxtaposing the Son of God and the ideal human being, Enlightened the¬
ology repeatedly emphasized man’s affinity with God, even the divinity of man
himself. Herder’s view of man’s likeness to God belongs in this context.” He saw
man as “the image of God in all his power, versatility and allure and, at the same
time, a symbol and embodiment of the whole visible and invisible world!”! In
the tradition of the Enlightenment, Herder derived a man’s likeness to God not
from the incarnation of Christ, but from the individual actions of man, from his
personal “imitation of the Highest”.!% This ignored the Pauline assumption that
original sin had broken the imago, which needed to be restored through Christ,
and thus totally devalued Christ’s historical incarnation and act of redemption,
°3 Cf. KRAUSE, Reinhard, Die Predigt der späten deutschen Aufklärung (1770-1805), Arbeiten zur
Theologie, 2nd series, vol. 5, Stuttgart, Calwer, 1965, 67ff.
JERUSALEM, Betrachtungen (note 58), vol. 1, 259f.
Ibid., 283.
Ibid., 330; cf also SACK, Vertheidigter Glaube (note 61), Part 4, 73f.
Ibid., 338.
Ibid., 339, cf. MÜLLER, Jerusalem (note 36), 114 ff.
For Herder’s comments on man’s likeness to God cf. esp. his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit; HERDER, Werke, vol. 13, 163ff.
HERDER, Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, Werke, vol. 6, 21.
HERDER, Lehren zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit; Werke, vol. 13, 163.
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