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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 subjective 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 medium 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 increasingly spread to religion. Even many leading theologians accepted the view according to which Christian truth was moral in character. The moralism typical 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 historical 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, Sämtliche 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 Abraham Teller als populärer Aufklärungstheologe, München, Herbert Utz, 1994. 156 SpALDING, Johann Joachim, Über die Nutzbarkeit des Predigtamtes und deren Beförderung, Berlin, Voß, 1772, 55. 157 SEMLER, Johann Salomo, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canons, Part 1, Halle, e 118"
