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HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
“.. in all countries thinking people, the true believers, will always remain an
invisible church.” He located it in the area of education and taste. Elsewhere
he had stated: “Ihose who really want to live the true Leben Menschen, want
to advance more quickly ... those who are serious must therefore adhere to a
quiet, almost compressed Church, because to set themselves against the broad
tide of the day would be to no avail.”
Members of the largely bourgeois educated classes — lawyers, officials, pro¬
fessors, teachers and clergy — were, in the main, both carriers and targets of
this Enlightened religious feeling.*” With their growing self-confidence, they
voiced a claim to power in all areas of life, reason, critical thinking, Enlight¬
ened humanity, and purified feeling. A fundamental feature of their theological
discourse was a separation between Christians with and without a formal edu¬
cation. In theoretical terms, the differentiation of these two classes went back
to the systematic separation of theology and religion. Religious Enlightenment
referred to the educated classes, the gebildeten Stdnde. Private religion was
thus the religion of the Gebildeten and, above all, of theologians, who gained
insight into their own conduct, both academic and pastoral. A large proportion
of the clergy (but not all) participated in this transformation of religious feeling.
This period, however, also witnessed the beginning of a serious decline in
theology as a discipline and as a profession, a development of great significance
for German cultural history. While it was rare for an established theologian
to leave the profession — except for cases such as those of Joachim Heinrich
Campe and Christian Gotthelf Salzmann, who switched from theology to
teaching, an area in which the boundaries were fluid anyway - it was much
more common for people to change direction, either during their theological
studies or immediately after having completed them. Gottfried August Biirg¬
er (1747-1794), Johann Heinrich Voß (1751-1826), Thomas Abbt (1738-1766),
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Christian Friedrich Schubart (1739-1791), Jakob
Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), Ludwig Timotheus Spittler (1752-1810),
Johannes von Müller (1752-1809), Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel are among those who took this course.
Many of them, and even more others who did not embark upon theologi¬
cal studies at all but who became scholars, officials, or writers, came from the
2% Johann Wolfgang Goethe quoted from the article Kirche in Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (eds.),
Deutsches Wörterbuch, Vol. 5, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1873, 790-796.
207 CF. BÖDEKER, Hans Erich, Die “gebildeten Stände“ im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert:
Zugehörigkeit und Abgrenzungen. Mentalitäten und Handlungspotentiale, in J. Kocka (ed.),
Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Politischer Einfluß und gesellschaftliche Formation. Teil
4, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1989, 21-52.
* 128 +