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HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
The earliest and most perfect non-theological exponent of this religion of the
heart and feeling was the poet and moral philosopher Christian Fiirchtegott
Gellert (1715-1769). The son of a minister and himself a former student of
theology, Gellert was by far the most German author of the second half of the
eighteenth century. His treatise, Betrachtungen über die Religion aspired to this
internalization of religious truth. He believed that the purifying and liberating
force of Christianity as the “teaching which makes us wise, virtuous and happy”
could only be developed with reference to depths of feeling and sensibility.’
Sensibility was the dominant force in Gellert’s personal religious beliefs; as
far as he was concerned, anything that did not translate into religious feelings
remained merely cold thought.
Beginning in the late 1780s, the term religiosity emerged; at the time, it was
equated with piety. Religiosity meant a religious spirit that was based in sub¬
jective feeling: “religiosity”, an anonymous article stated in 1798, is “subjective
religion that counterbalances our sensuousness.”1*4
Equating Christianity with the religion of the heart implied a connection
between religion and morality, piety and an ethical view of the self in the me¬
dium of a feeling for what is good and true. This was to emerge more clearly
later.As religious confession was subjectivized, the moral motif emerged ever
more strongly. With time, the ethicized view of humanity necessarily and in¬
creasingly spread to religion. Even many leading theologians accepted the view
according to which Christian truth was moral in character. The moralism typi¬
cal of all eighteenth-century theology was repeatedly expressed by Lessing.
And in his Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens, Wilhelm Abraham Teller (1734—
1804), the Helmstedt theologian, reflected on the ideas of moral perfection and
inner happiness.'” Following Spalding, religion was to be seen as “virtue for
Gods sake", which defined what was to be taught and learned in theology.’
It was only logical that Semler restored the biblical canon to the histori¬
cal tradition and thus limited its potential authority to “moral teaching” and
“instructions for inner improvement”.’®*’ He retained the notion of revelation,
153 Cf. GELLERT, Christian Fürchtegott, Betrachtungen über die Religion, in: Id. GELLERT, Sämt¬
liche Schriften, Part 5: Reden und Abhandlungen, Leipzig, 1769, 96-123.
154 Cf. for the transformation of the religious language in the eighteenth century especially
HÖLSCHER, Religion im Wandel (note 52).
155 TELLER, Wilhelm Abraham, Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens, Helmstedt — Halle, Hemmerde,
1764. “Vorrede” (no page numbers); Cf. NÜSSELER, Angela, Dogmatik fürs Volk. Wilhelm Abra¬
ham Teller als populärer Aufklärungstheologe, München, Herbert Utz, 1994.
156 SpALDING, Johann Joachim, Über die Nutzbarkeit des Predigtamtes und deren Beförderung, Ber¬
lin, Voß, 1772, 55.
157 SEMLER, Johann Salomo, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons, Part 1, Halle,
e 118"