Feuerbach

Feuerbach and Marx – Young or Left Hegelians

The young or left Hegelians of the early 1800's accept the dialectical method of Hegel, but take it in a quite different direction. Hegel valued the emergence of the modern political state, the emergence of a civil society separate from government, and the advances of freedom. Consequently, he valued the role religion played in the development of European culture. The left Hegelians focused upon religion as a primary tool by the Prussian state to keep the poor oppressed. They viewed their culture primarily from the perspective of alienation from political and capitalist powers that oppressed the poor. Religion was an important part of this oppression. Their vision was to remove belief in God and the institutional church from European culture. I want to discuss two of the leading left Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach, who will be the focus, and Karl Marx. Feuerbach will also have an influence on Durkheim in his The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1915, in which he says that the idea of society is the soul of religion. The unity of society expresses itself in the objectivations of religion.[1]

When it comes to a philosopher of religion in the west, I like to see if I can find some way that their reflections touch the Bible in some way. With Ludwig Feuerbach, I think of this passage:

Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?" Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go? (John 6:66-68a)

Reading Feuerbach can be frustrating for one who has sought to live a human life in reference to Jesus Christ and with the church. The frustration is that he seems to explain Christian teachings very well. I do not know his biography. He reads like someone who is not only acquainted with Christianity, but quite likely believed it. He has walked away. In the passage from John, many people disciples, that is, people who had been learning from Jesus, decided to turn away due to the difficult teaching. Jesus asks the Twelve if they will leave as well. Simon Peter asks to whom could they go? In contrast, Feuerbach decided that he had another place to go, namely, the rejection of European state churches. He concluded that the great philosophical lights of his period, such as Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, and Descartes, were living in atheistic modern culture, but unwilling to admit that it was such. He wants to free the reader from the alienating effects of Christianity by showing both the positive that it teaches about humanity as well as the ways in which Christianity alienates humanity from its highest ideas.

Here is an image that Feuerbach presents to me. If we were to travel to another solar system and if were able to figure out that they believed in some notion of the divine, what would our inference be? Well, our inference would be that they had created a religion based upon their experiences and capacity for reasoning. In other words, we would not assume that the basis of their religion was divine revelation, for that would mean we would have been without such revelation for these thousands of years. Further, rather than thinking we will learn something about God, our assumption is that the more we learn of what they teach about God, the more we will know them as thinking beings. In fact, the basic thing we will learn is that they are thinking beings, simply from the fact that they can create a theology or religion.[2]

What I will do is wrestle with Feuerbach a bit. I think far too many theologians have tried to run past him, some pretending that that they can easily dismiss his arguments. My suggestion, however, is that he has hit upon the basic object of modern philosophy to religion and theology. Other atheists will re-work his basic arguments. I have come to see him as offering a critique of Schleiermacher and Hegel before him, and Karl Barth, who came after him. Time spent with Feuerbach will be time well spent.

Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1841), offers a materialist view of one religion. In the preface to the second edition, written in 1843, he describes himself as an idealist only in the sense that he has faith in the final triumph of truth and virtue. Otherwise, he rejects Hegel in favor of realism and materialism. The idealist notion that all that is mine I carry with me is not one he can accept. Rather, he has many things outside himself that he cannot carry in his pocket or head, but which nevertheless belong to him. He views himself as a natural philosopher in the domain of mind. In his view, thought arises from its opposite, from matter, existence, and the senses. Thought has relation to its object first through the senses before defining it in thought. The speculative philosophy of Hegel turns religion into something other than what religion would recognize, while Feuerbach wants to listen to what religion truly says. He admits that his analysis is largely negative, irreligious, and atheistic, although he thinks atheism is the secret of all religion. In Part One he discloses that theology is nothing more than anthropology. In Part Two he shows that if one continues the distinction between theology and anthropology, one involves oneself in contradiction that one can resolve only by removing it in favor of anthropology. He does not view his work as saying purely negative things, making religion an absurdity. True, religion is the dream of the human mind. Yet, even dreams are not empty. Dreams occur on earth rather than in heaven. He wants to change the object of religion from God to humanity; he wants to turn its gaze from the divine to the human. He grants that one who makes this change from illusion to reality experiences it as a nullification of religion. He admits that he has no respect for the appearance of religion as it presents itself in its doctrines and rituals, but only in its truth as a reflection upon human nature.

In Chapter 1, “Introduction,” he discusses the essential nature of humanity in the first section and the essence of religion in the second section. The essential nature of humanity consists in the nature of human consciousness and its distinction from other animals. Human consciousness allows conversation with oneself, at once I and thou. The individual can, through imagination, put oneself in place of another. Homo sapiens have an essential nature because they have this imaginary capacity, and are thus not themselves only in their individuality. Humanity becomes an object of human thought in a way that other species cannot do. Religion is identical with self-consciousness. Religion is consciousness of the infinite capacity of human activity. For example, the caterpillar is conscious only of its limited domain, a limit we call instinct. Human consciousness is consciousness of the infinite. The essential nature of humanity consists in reason (thought, intellect), will (energy, freedom) and heart (affection, love). A complete person has power of thought, will, and will. The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, and the power of heart is love. Humanity exists to think, feel, and love. Individual human beings consist of the unity of this trinity. Humanity is nothing without the objects that express the essential nature of humanity. In whatever object human beings contemplate, human beings acquaint themselves with themselves. Consciousness of the objective is the self-consciousness of human beings. The power that any object holds over the individual is actually the power of the essential nature of the individual as feeling, will, and reason exerting itself. Every limit to reason, feeling, or will rests on a delusion. Of course, individuals have their limits. They are finite. Yet, each individual perceives the infinite capacity of human nature, or we could also say, of the human species. In religion, humanity becomes conscious of the infinity of its own being. Individuals perceive the infinitude of thought feeling, and will. Any metaphysical and transcendental speculation is nothing other than the subjective reality of the essential nature of humanity finding expression. For example, let us suppose that religion arises from feeling. The nature of God is nothing other than the nature of feeling. The divine nature discerned by feeling is nothing other than feeling enraptured, in ecstasy, the intoxicating experience of joy and bliss. If feeling is the means toward determining the infinite, if this subjective feeling defines religion, then one can safely say that the external data of religion lose objective value. I want to stress this. Here is his critique of Schleiermacher. The true religion of the believer is about God, not about the subjective feeling one has toward the Infinite. When one makes this shift, in the view of Feuerbach, one has emptied the believer of the objective power in which the believer trusted. In particular, the doctrines of Christianity have lost their importance. What makes a feeling religious is not the object of feeling, but the nature of feeling. God is pure, unlimited, and free feeling. Feeling is actually atheist in that it denies an external quality to God. Yet, the religious thinker will recoil at such a suggestion. Again, he likely thinks of Schleiermacher here. He imagines such a thinker, focused on the religious nature of this feeling for the Infinite, as having “the religious atheism of your heart,” but not willing to admit it. Such a person prefers to live with the delusion of an object of this feeling. He puts it well.

This act of self-delusion throws you back to the old questions and doubts: Is there a God or not? The questions and doubts vanish — they are, indeed, impossible — when feeling is defined as the essence of religion. Feeling is your innermost power, and yet it is a power that is separate from and independent of you; existing inside you, it is above you; it is your very own being, yet it seizes hold of you as another being. In short, it is your God. How can it therefore be possible for you to distinguish from this being in you another objective being? How can you get beyond your feeling?

His point is quite simple. He thinks it impossible for humanity to get beyond the true horizon of the essential nature and being of humanity. Religion abstracts from humanity its powers, qualities, and essential determinations and deifies them.

In the second section of the introduction, Feuerbach offers a general consideration of the essence of religion. In religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. The religious object is within humanity. Augustine said that God is nearer, more related to us, and therefore we know more easily, than physical things. The object of any subject is nothing other than the nature of the subject taken objectively. The thoughts and dispositions of individuals are their god. Whatever worth individuals ascribe to themselves, so much is their god. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge. Knowledge that one has of the god in which an individual believes will also give knowledge of the individual. Knowledge of the individual gives knowledge of the god in whom the individual believes. Religion is the solemn unveiling of the hidden treasures of humanity, the revelation of the intimate thoughts of humanity, and the open confession of the love secrets of humanity. Ignorance of the truth of what Feuerbach has just written is essential for the continuing of religious belief. Religion is the earliest form of human self-knowledge. Religion is the childlike condition of humanity, seeing the essential nature of humanity as if outside of oneself, as divine, before one sees it inside of human beings. In religion, humanity adores the essential nature of humanity. Religion gives objectivity to humanity. Every advance in religion is a deeper form of self-knowledge. Particular religions pronounce other religions as idolatrous while exempting itself from such a judgment. They do so because of the special quality they have invested in the object of their belief. Yet, the essence of religion remains hidden from the religious person, but is evident to the thinker, who has an objectivity that the believer cannot have. Religion everywhere precedes philosophy. As such, religion is the first, but indirect, self-consciousness of humanity. Humanity transposes its essential being outside itself before it finds its essential being within itself. Its own being becomes the object of thought first as another being. Humanity has objectified itself in religious beliefs, but has not recognized in religion that it contemplates itself. Every progress in religion is deepening of human self-knowledge. Such self-knowledge is important to him in every way. One who writes a bad poem and knows it to be bad is not as limited in self-knowledge as the one who has written a bad poem and thinks it good. When human beings claim that God is unknowable or indefinable, they have entered a time when the intellect no longer has any interest in God. Such a view justifies forgetfulness of God and absorption in the world. Such a person can deny God by his or her conduct. Denying qualities to the divine nature is a denial of religion. It becomes atheism in disguise. That which is to humanity the self-existent, the highest being, to which one can conceive nothing higher, is the divine being. How can one enquire into the qualities of divine being? Well, if a bird imagined a god, it could imagine nothing higher than winged flight. Humanity can imagine nothing greater than putting a human face on the divine. The recognition of anthropomorphism in relation to the human description of God does not go far enough, for it must accept the reality the object of religious belief is itself a projection of human thought. To know God is to know oneself. If one believes in love as a divine attribute, one does so because one loves. If one believes God is wise and benevolent, one cannot imagine any better life for oneself than to exhibit such qualities. If God acts as a subject that thinks, wills, and feels, one acknowledges oneself as a subject who does so as well. If God has mysterious qualities, it shows that humanity remains a mystery. In religion, in relation to God, human beings are in relation to their own essential nature. Yet, the believer makes a strong distinction between humanity and God. The believer does this because the present experience of the human condition does not actualize the ideal. Yet, the abstraction is an illusion. However, the down side to religion is that to enrich God, humanity must become poor. To make God all things, humanity must be nothing. What humanity takes from itself it finds preserved in God. If humanity finds itself in God, then it does not need to posit itself again. Thus, what humanity renounces in itself, it can enjoy at higher levels in God. Whatever humanity denies to itself, it finds again in God. The denial of human rationality in religion becomes the thoughtfulness of the divine. The denial of human power finds a re-discovery in divine power. The denial of goodness in humanity finds goodness rediscovered in God. Yet, he puzzles about this. If I am wicked and unholy, how can holiness and goodness be in my thoughts? How could I perceive the good? How could I perceive the beautiful if my nature is ugly? These are good questions, of course. Many theologians would argue that human sin does not erase the image of God with which humanity finds it origin in creation. He is quite right in observing that if we can observe these qualities, then we must possess them to some degree. They are part of human nature and being human. In any case, he views his task as showing that the antithesis of the divine and human is an illusion. The object and content of the Christian religion is altogether human. In and through God, the aim of humanity is religion is humanity. In fact, the aim of God, in religion, is humanity and its salvation. Such divine activity toward humanity is not foreign to us. Humanity, in religion, has placed its hopes and dreams in the divine, and then receives that divine action toward humanity. As he sees it, humanity is the measure of all things. Whatever impresses humanity the religious person places onto the divine. Yet, for the religious person, such placement of human qualities onto the divine are not anthropomorphism. They are the being of the divine. God is real Father, Love and Mercy, for the religious person takes them to be real living, and personal attributes.

We have here the atheistic reconstruction of the origin of religion for which Feuerbach is justly famous. He is arguing for the elimination of the God-term if one could give it no positive content of its own. For Feuerbach, to put it a little differently, God is nothing more than the moments beneath God, God becoming the most abstract of a progression, and is thus the most fictional notion of all. If theistic language has fictitious status, then the projection of theistic predicates into the heavens must fulfill some human wishes. Once we recognize its basis in projection, we can uncover the qualities of the human species that humanity illicitly read onto the nonexistent God.[3] In fact, some theologians open themselves to the criticism that their language is really about human relationships rather than about a divine agent. For example, Sally McFague and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza have argued that people choose models for God exclusively for their helpfulness in forwarding a particular social or political agenda.[4]

Feuerbach needed the infinity of the species in order to view the formation of the idea of an infinite God as a process of projection that presents an aspect of human nature in the form of a being that is different from us, namely, which gives our own species the form of a different and suprahuman species. True, Barth will criticize Feuerbach at this point by saying that this notion of the infinite nature of the human species is fictional. He would also say that Feuerbach did not truly know evil or mortality. For Feuerbach, the derivation of the thought of God from a human self-misunderstanding is the basis of his critique of religion. He has proposed a projection theory of ideas of God that forms the basis in the present era of saying that the idea of God is simply a reflection of the prevailing social relationships.[5] The problem with Feuerbach is deeper than any of this analysis shows, however. Pannenberg points out that we can think of humanity as referred to the Infinite, but never already infinite. Behind the religious and psychological arguments we have already seen, Feuerbach has a view of humanity as absolutely self-empowered being, which suggests the atheism of human freedom. Further, modern thought now can think of an “empty transcendence,” a notion of the Infinite and Eternal that is without deity.[6] Feuerbach developed the idea of the rise of ideas of God can appeal to theology, especially that of Schleiermacher, which had understood anthropologically the cosmological basis of the ascribing of divine attributes. They deduced the divine qualities from the human experience of dependence that points beyond as well as embraces worldly objects. The critical description of this procedure as projection gained force once scholars saw the resultant concept of God as contradictory, since the qualities ascribed to God still bear traces of finitude along with anthropomorphic features. All such thinkers needed was psychological motivation for the human imagination to project ideas of God that would ascribe to the divine essence qualities analogous to those of human and finite things. Feuerbach, a pupil of Hegel, saw that the essence is real only in its attributes, without which it is an empty idea. If there are no qualities, there is no divine essence to bear them. If the cloak falls, the duke falls with it.[7] Further, as Pannenberg sees it, Feuerbach regarded religion as the very epitome of alienation, since in the idea of God human beings separate themselves from their own being, the infinity of the human species and the powers resident in the species, as though it were foreign to them and then worship it.[8] He stresses that if talk about God no longer contributes to our understanding of the experienced reality of the world and of human beings, then talk about God and even the presence of the religious consciousness itself are still in the grip of alienation, and is the extent to which Feuerbach truthfully describes the alienated consciousness.[9]

Barth discusses the possibility of God being drawn into the dialectic of the antithesis of the world, leaving open the way for the question of Feuerbach as to whether God might not be in human beings, rather than human beings in God.[10] He also points to the edifying reflection that God has planted the divine in the heart of human beings. Yet, he says, Feuerbach is right in his objection to theology, that the essence of such thought and language consist in humanity creating God for human beings and after a human image piety becomes a profound meditation by a human being on the self.[11] He stresses that Feuerbach has room only for natural religion as the illusory expression of the natural longings and wishes of the human heart.[12] Barth can refer to anthropology disguising itself as cosmology and theology, asking the question “Who am I, who am now undertaking to give an account of what God and the world mean to me?” He thinks that when theology is uncertain of its foundation in revelation and the Word, then it will lead to the uncertainty that its theological reflections are nothing but concealed anthropology.[13] Barth will use Feuerbach to criticize the idealist and liberal Protestant version of theology. In referring to Essence of Religion lecture 3, Feuerbach said that theology is anthropology. In lecture 20, he says that humanity created God after its image. Barth wonders how such pointing to the longing of the human heart, the infinite value of human personality, the import of the history of religion, the meaning of personality in spiritual and world history, with their open projection of human self-consciousness into the transcendent, could expose themselves to this criticism by Feuerbach.[14] However, Barth does not face honestly the notion challenging of the truth claims of Christian talk about God. As Pannenberg points out, the thought by Barth that the critique of religion by Feuerbach applies to religion in general, but not for Christian proclamation and theology, is too simplistic. Further, the critique by Barth that liberal Protestant theology is in line with the position of Feuerbach by dissolving religious ideas in their anthropological basis is even less satisfactory. Barth at least admits that they wanted to be theologians and not anthropologists in the sense of Feuerbach. Yet, Barth wants to say that the drift of such Protestant theology is toward Feuerbach and the notion of religion as a human product. Instead, Barth should have known that between Schleiermacher and Feuerbach there stands like a watershed the question whether we are religious by nature and therefore willy-nilly absolutely dependent upon another that, that other to which the religious consciousness relates, or whether the religious consciousness of God is a self-misunderstanding that one can overcome. The point is not good or bad intentions. The point is a matter of the truth about humanity.[15]

What Feuerbach has done is refer to the vanity and self-seeking of individuals who ascribe their own finitude to the human species and regard the infinity of the species as an alien entity. The inner improbability of this construction led his successors to other descriptions of the mechanism that gives rise to religious ideas.[16] Yet, his criticism also led many theologians to avoid discussion of God as personal. Pannenberg points out that such a description is objectionable only if God becomes a person, rather than of the genus of the personal.[17] Schleiermacher provided an opening for the radical critique of religion by separating the concept of God from a necessary part of religion. This separation opens the door for Feuerbach to appeal to the notion that God is not a necessary construct to explain human existence.

Feuerbach wants to show that religion is superfluous. Such a radical criticism of religion stands or falls with the claim that religion is not a constitutive part of human nature, in spite of its persistent influence on humanity and its history. We must view religion as an aberration or at best as an immature form of the human understanding of reality, that the secular culture of the modern west has overcome in principle or by a new society that is still in process of creation, so that it will finally wither away. If, however, religion is constitutive, then there can be no fully rounded and complete human life without it. Impressing this fact on the public consciousness of the world of secular culture will thus be a potential danger to the continued existence of that culture.[18]

In Part One, Feuerbach wants to discuss the anthropological essence of religion. He will do so by focusing upon the anthropological significance of Christian teaching. Barth will comment that Feuerbach offers “pregnant deductions” concerning a Christianity in which he no longer believed.[19] In Chapter 2, God is a being of human understanding. Religion separates human beings from themselves. By believing in God, the individual sets up antithesis within himself or herself. Yet, as he has already pointed out, in religion humanity contemplates its own latent nature. In Chapter 3, God is the morally perfect being, the fulfilled moral nature of imperfect humanity. If one finds contentment in God, then God cannot be an essentially different being from humanity. I cannot find peace in God if God is essentially alien to me. I can partake of the divine nature only because I share that nature. One overcomes the separation from God through love. The law affirms me as an abstraction, but love makes humanity free. Love is the bond and reconciliation of the human with the divine. Love strengthens the weak and weakens the strong it abases the high and raises the lowly. Love unifies the human and divine as well as nature and spirit. In Chapter 4, the Incarnation reveals the heart of God, the humiliation of the divine to the human, and thus a realization of the love human beings need to show to each other. The Incarnation was a tear of the divine compassion. The Incarnation shows the worth of humanity to God, and thus the worth of human beings to each other. The love of God makes me a loving person. We love, because God first loved us. For him, then, God has not saved us, but love, which transcends the difference between the divine and the human. God has renounced divinity out of love in the Incarnation. For him, then, out of love, humanity should renounce God, for we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, largely due to religious fanaticism. Even prayer discloses the secret of the Incarnation. We involve God in human distress. God participates in our sorrows and wants. God is not deaf. God has compassion on this distress. Our sufferings affect God. The elevating influence of the Incarnation is that we have value in the sight of God. God becomes a human being, thus making the worth of humanity obvious. “The Christian religion is so little superhuman that it even sanctions human weakness.” “The Christian religion is the religion of suffering.” He then considers that human beings must place before themselves an aim or purpose, which is God. The aim is the conscious, voluntary, essential impulse of life, the glance of genius, the focus of self-knowledge. Such an aim or purpose guides individual behavior and thought. One who has no aim has no home, no sanctuary. As he sees it, such aimlessness is the greatest unhappiness. An aim sets limits, but such limits are the mentors of virtue. One who has an aim has religion in the sense of reason and the universal, the only true love.

In Chapter 5, the passion of Christ becomes an example of love attesting itself through suffering. To suffer for others is divine. God as one who suffers says that God has a heart, and that therefore, humanity needs such a heart as well. What would humanity be without such feeling? God is the mirror for humanity, reflecting back to humanity what humanity wants to become. In Chapter 6, the Trinity and the Mother of God show the unity of human consciousness in feeling, thinking, and willing. Divine Trinity suggests the participatory life of friendship and love, the Spirit being the love that binds Father and Son together. The Son is the heart of the Father. Human beings, denied such a fellowship among themselves, have this wish expressed in the fellowship in the Trinity. Here we can see that belief in God springs from the feeling of want, that for which humanity has a need. The feeling of loneliness in the world leads to belief in the fellowship of the Trinity. Yet, Feuerbach will say that love is not itself a substance or essence. In the background lurks a subject that might exist without it. For him, the subject is the omnipotent God as an infinite spiritual essence that is as such a person. He aimed his criticism at the notion of giving the essence of love a subject instead of viewing it as itself essence or substance. His criticism is in line with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, which does not make the unity of the divine essence a fourth hypostasis alongside the persons of the Trinity.[20] He criticized the equation of God and love. The structure of the limits of human personality with which he charged the Christian view of God remains there being only an imperfect realization of personal ec-stasis. The point Pannenberg will make is that the differences in being a human person is not so exclusively constituted by the relation to one or two other persons as it is in the Trinitarian life of God. The human I is always distinct from its relation to any specific human person. In the mutual relations of the Trinitarian persons, however, these specific mutual relations fill their existence as persons, so that they are nothing apart from them. Their existence as persons is coincident with the divine love, which is simply the concrete life of the divine Spirit.[21] In Chapter 7, the divine logos is a divine speaking, even as language is the root of culture. Where one cultivates language, one cultivates culture. He goes on to discuss creation, mysticism, providence and creation out of nothing, the supreme miracle, focused on divine will and omnipotence, prayer (conversing with oneself in feeling), resurrection (the wish not to die), heathens, celibacy, and heaven. He will say, in reference to providence, that he things the only provides is the powers of the human race, but seems to lament that this means he is an irreligious person to the believer. As he sees it, providence is faith in one’s own worth and in humanity. Humanity separates itself from its own powers in this teaching of the Christian faith. In Chapter 11, he laments that for Judaism, providence and miracle happen for Israel, at the command of Yahweh, who pays attention to no one else but Israel. As he sees it, Yahweh is nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelite people, to the exclusion of other nations. As he sees it:

Humanity first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in its own image, and after this God consciously and voluntarily creates humanity in the divine image.

He again points out that “revelation” is nothing other else than the revelation, the self-unfolding, of the human nature.

In Chapter 12, he speaks rather eloquently of prayer.

God is love: that is, feeling is the God of man, nay, God absolutely, the Absolute Being. God is the nature of human feeling, unlimited, pure feeling, made objective. God is the optative of the human heart transformed into the tempus finitum, the certain, blissful “IS” — the unrestricted omnipotence of feeling, prayer hearing itself, feeling perceiving, itself, the echo of our cry of anguish. Pain must give itself utterance; involuntarily the artist seizes the lute that he may breathe out his sufferings in its tones. Re soothes his sorrow by making it audible to himself, by making it objective he lightens the burden which weighs upon his heart by communicating. it to the air, by making his sorrow a general existence. But nature. listens not to the plaints of man, it is callous to his sorrows. Hence man turns away from Nature, from all visible objects. He turns within, that here, sheltered and hidden from the inexorable powers, he may find audience for his griefs. Here he utters his oppressive secrets; here he gives vent to his stifled sighs. This open-air of the heart, this outspoken secret, this uttered sorrow of the soul, is God. God is a tear of love, shed in the deepest concealment over human misery. “God is an unutterable sigh, lying in the depths of the Heart;” this saying is the most remarkable, the profoundest, truest expression of Christian mysticism. The ultimate essence of religion is revealed by the simplest act of religion — prayer;

but the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture. In prayer, man addresses God with the word of intimate affection — Thou; he thus declares articulately that God is his alter ego; he confesses to God, as the being nearest to him, his most secret thoughts, his deepest wishes, which otherwise he shrinks from uttering. But he expresses these wishes in the confidence, in the certainty that they will be fulfilled. How could he apply to a being that had no ear for his complaints? Thus what is prayer but the wish of the heart expressed with confidence in its fulfilment? what else is the being that fulfils these wishes but human affection, the human soul, giving ear to itself, approving itself, unhesitatingly affirming itself?

In Chapter 13, he writes of the mystery of faith. Faith is the power of prayer and identical to miraculous power. Faith in miracles is the essence of faith. The object of faith is miracle and belief in miracle. Miracle satisfies the wishes of humanity for it suggests that one can attain something without effort. He then launches into his lament of the effect of Christianity on culture.

The Apostles were men of the people; the people live only in themselves, in their feelings; therefore Christianity took possession of the people. Fox populi vox Dei. Did Christianity conquer a single philosopher, historian, or poet of the classical period The philosophers who went over to Christianity were feeble, contemptible philosophers. All who had yet the classic spirit in them were hostile, or at least indifferent to Christianity. The decline of culture was identical with the victory of Christianity. The classic spirit, the spirit of culture, limits itself by laws, — not indeed by arbitrary, finite laws, but by inherently true and valid ones; it is determined by the necessity, the truth of the nature of things; in a word, it is the objective spirit. In place of this, there entered with Christianity the principle of unlimited, extravagant, fanatical, supra-naturalistic subjectivity; a principle intrinsically opposed to that of science, of culture.

In Chapter 15, he reflects on the notion of the personal God. In the process, he reflects on dreams.

Dreaming is a double refraction of the rays of light; hence its indescribable charm. It is the same ego, the same being in dreaming as in waking; the only distinction is, that in waking the ego acts on itself; whereas in dreaming it is acted on by itself as by another being I think myself — is a passionless, rationalistic position; I am thought by God, and think myself only as thought by God — is a position pregnant with feeling religious. Feeling is a dream with the eyes open; religion the dream of waking consciousness: dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion.

In this context, Christ is the fulfillment of the human wish to see God, is always remote from humanity. In the passion of Christ, one finds God sympathizing with the human condition. He stresses that his life has the limit of time, but the human species does not. The history of humanity is the continuous and progressive conquest of limits. God is nothing other than the essence of the human species.

In Chapter 16, he sees Christianity as separating humanity from its connection with nature and immanence in the world. Christianity severed its connection with the world by its belief in God. The world will pass away, but the Christian continues in heaven. He points to the further significance of Christ.

Christ, i.e., the Christian, religious Christ, is therefore not the central, but the terminal point of history. The Christians expected the end of the world, the close of history. In the Bible, Christ himself, in spite of all the falsities and sophisms of our exegetists, clearly prophesies the speedy end of the world. History rests only on the distinction of the individual from the race. Where this distinction ceases ' history ceases; the very soul of history is extinct. Nothing remains to man but the contemplation and appropriation of this realized Ideal, and the spirit of proselytism, which seeks to extend the prevalence of a fixed belief, — the preaching that God has appeared, and that the end of the world is at hand.

He again reflects on the significance of the species, this time connecting love, friendship, and forgiveness.

Without species, love is inconceivable. Love is nothing else than the self-consciousness of the species as evolved within the difference of sex. In love, the reality of the species, which otherwise is only a thing of reason, an object of mere thought, becomes a matter of feeling a truth of feeling; for in love, man declares himself unsatisfied in his individuality taken by itself, he postulates the existence of another as a need of the heart; he reckons another as part of his own being; he declares the life which he has through love to be the truly human life, corresponding to the idea of man, i.e., of the species. The individual is defective, imperfect, weak, needy; but love is strong, perfect, contented, free from wants, self-sufficing, infinite; because in it the self-consciousness of the individuality is the mysterious self-consciousness of the perfection of the race. But this result of love is produced by friendship also, at least where it is intense, where it is a religion as it was with the ancients. Friends compensate for each other; friendship is a mean,. of virtue, and more: it is itself virtue, dependent however on participation. Friendship can only exist between the virtuous, as the ancients said. But it cannot be based on perfect similarity; on the contrary, it requires diversity, for friendship rests on a desire for self-completion. One friend obtains through the other what he does not himself possess. The virtues of the one atone for the failings of the other. Friend justifies friend before God. However faulty a man may be, it is a proof that there is a germ of good in him if he has worthy men for his friends. If I cannot be myself perfect, I yet at least love virtue, perfection in others. If therefore I am called to account for any sins, weaknesses, and faults, I interpose as advocates, as mediators, the virtues of my friend. How barbarous, how unreasonable would it be to condemn me for sins which I doubtless have committed, but which I have myself condemned in loving my friends. who are free from these sins!

But morally, also, there is a qualitative, critical distinction between the I and thou. My fellow-man is my objective conscience; he makes my failings a reproach to me; even when he does not expressly mention them, he is my personified feeling of shame. The consciousness of the moral law, of right, of propriety, of truth itself, is indissolubly united with my consciousness of another than myself. That is true in which another agrees with me, — agreement is the first criterion of truth; but only because the species is the ultimate measure of truth. That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another; it can be conceived otherwise; it is an accidental,. merely subjective view. But that which I think according to the standard of the species, I think as man in general only can think, and consequently as every individual must think if he thinks normally, in accordance with law, and therefore truly. That is true which agrees with the nature of the species, that is false which contradicts it. There is no other rule of truth. But my fellow-man is to me the representative of the species, the substitute of the rest, nay, his judgment may be of more authority with me than the judgment of the innumerable multitude.

He will then stress that God is nothing other than the idea of the species, free of limits.

In Chapter 17, he explains the attraction of celibacy and the monastery by saying that separation from the world is possible because in God one finds fulfillment of one’s aim or goal in life. One does not need others. He expresses his loathing of modern Christianity.

But I turn away with loathing and contempt from modern Christianity, in which the bride of Christ readily acquiesces in polygamy, at least in successive polygamy, and this in the eyes of the true Christian does not essentially differ from contemporaneous polygamy; but yet at the same time — oh! shameful hypocrisy! — swears by the eternal, universally binding irrefragable sacred truth of God's Word. I turn back with reverence to the misconceived truth of the chaste monastic cell, where the soul betrothed to heaven did not allow itself to be wooed into faithlessness by a strange earthly body!

In contrast, one living in the consciousness of the species regards existence for others and relation to society as of great utility and embodying immortal existence. One then lives with the whole soul and heart for humanity. He does not see how one can reserve a special existence for oneself or separate oneself from humanity.

To expand on his notion of the wish not to die, he is criticizing the hope of life after death. He took issue with the egoism of the Christian hope of life after death, which he knew largely in the truncated form of belief in immortality. Individual immortality simply expresses the intransience of individuals bent only on self-seeking and unable to let go and merge into the universality of reason, even in face of death. Christianity teaches individuals not to accept their finitude and not experience satisfaction with this earthly life.[22] Pannenberg suggests that he had some justification for this analysis, given the divorce in his time that Christian teaching made between individual immortality and universal eschatology. His point is that divorced from a Christian notion of the destiny of humanity, the teaching of life after death is vulnerable to the criticism of Feuerbach.[23]

Feuerbach concludes Part One with these words.

Our most essential task is now fulfilled. We have reduced the supermundane, supernatural, and superhuman nature of God to the elements of human nature as its fundamental elements. Our process of analysis has brought us again to the position with which we set out. The beginning, middle and end of religion is MAN.

In Part Two, Feuerbach discusses the false or theological essence of religion. He begins by saying, in Chapter 19, that the essential standpoint of religion is the practical or subjective. The end of religion is the salvation of humanity. In reality, the relation of the human being to God is nothing other than a relation to its own spiritual good. However, such salvation affirms that earthly good draws people away from God, while adversity and suffering lead one back to God. As soon as one introduces secondary causes, one begins destroying the foundation of the experience of the believer at prayer. One day, the earthly will melt away and there will be only God and the pious soul. He criticizes the notion of deists and the mechanical notion of creation. In this idea, once made, the world turns its back on the Creator and rejoices in its godless self-subsistence. God becomes the alter ego, the lost half of humanity.

In Chapter 20, he says that the truth and moral power of religion is that it reflects the nature of humanity. The noxious source of religion is that in positing the existence of God, humanity places onto the divine nature the essence of human nature, but in such a way, that humanity cannot recognize itself in the divine. In his judgment, for example, Yahweh in the Old Testament differs from individuals only in endurance. In all other ways, Yahweh had the same passions and properties as did human beings. He puzzles that people think atheism is the negation of all moral principle, foundation, and bonds. Some think that if God is not, then distinction between good and bad, virtue and vice, is abolished.

Feuerbach now enters into an area that appears to be a critique of an important future theologian, Karl Barth. Chapter 21 deals with the contradiction in the revelation of God. The existence of God connects naturally with the idea of revelation. The attestation of divine existence in authentic testimony is revelation. Proofs from reason are subjective. The only objective proof of the existence of God is revelation. God speaks to humanity. Revelation is the word of God. The revelation thrills the soul and gives joyful certainty. In revelation, the subjective conviction of the existence of God becomes an indubitable, external, and historical fact. God existing without revealing is abstract, imaginary, and subjective. God who gives one knowledge of who God is through a divine act is a God who truly exists and is therefore objective. Reliance upon revelation assumes that human beings do not have within their feeling, reason, and willing the resources to live their lives. However, in criticism of this notion, Feuerbach says that the gods of Olympus were also self-attesting beings. Balaam’s ass spoke, at least, people believed it as strongly then as scholars today believe in the Incarnation. Revelation is simply the individual determining himself or herself. The premise of revelation is that humanity can know nothing of God. Only God knows God. We can know nothing of God beyond what God reveals to us. Revelation is the word of God, God declaring who God is. Revelation opposes itself to human knowledge and opinion. His basic point is that human nature determines divine revelation. God uses human speech and conceptions. God must reveal within the power of human comprehension. However, Feuerbach wants to be clear that what the religious mind believes comes from God is actually coming from humanity to God. Humanity goes out of itself in reason and wants. In revelation, humanity goes out of itself in order, by a circuitous path, to return to itself. He returns to the point that revelation confirms that theology is nothing else than anthropology. The knowledge of God is simply reveals knowledge of humanity. Every revelation is the nature of humanity. In revelation, the latent nature of humanity is disclosed to the one who received the revelation. One receives from the hands of God what his or her own unrecognized nature entails upon the one receiving the revelation. Belief in revelation is a childlike belief. Revelation actually hinders the moral sense, for it places responsibility upon the divine rather than focusing upon human capacity. His greatest concern is that dulls a human sense for the truth.

The revelation of God is a determinate revelation, given at a particular epoch: God revealed himself once for all in the year so and so, and that, not to the universal man, to the man of all times and places, to the reason, to the species, but to certain limited individuals. A revelation in a given time and place must be fixed in writing, that its blessings may be transmitted uninjured. Hence the belief in revelation is, at least for those of a subsequent age, belief in a written revelation; but the necessary consequence of a faith in which an historical book, necessarily subject to all the conditions of a temporal, finite production, is regarded as an eternal, absolute, universally authoritative word, is — superstition and sophistry.

He stresses that faith in a written revelation is real and respectable only when one believes that all of it is significant, true, holy, and divine. However, when one makes a distinction between the human and divine within the sacred writing, or the relatively true and the absolutely true, the historical and the permanent, then the interpreter is deciding which is the case. The sacred writing becomes like any other writing in that sense. If the book imposes upon me, the reader, to separate divine from human, the book is no longer divine, certain, or infallible in any sense. One degrades it to the status of every other book, for any book can contain something of the divine. Everything in the book needs to be eternal, true, and good. If it must wait for me to read, and then for me have an insight in which I say that now the Holy Spirit speaks for all time and people. He thinks religion is more honest when it affirms the inspiration of the letters of scripture. Belief in revelation arises from superstition sophistry. Only self-deception will and sophistry arises from faith in the Bible as a divine revelation. Any honest reading of the Bible suggests the lack of morality of many of its people and its God.

Sadly, Feuerbach succumbs to the temptation of every atheist, claiming that the religious person is superstitious, elevating himself into the elite group that is willing to live truthfully. I can understand it, in the sense that some definitions of superstition involve notions of supernatural agency. Superstition involves magical beliefs, fear of the unknown, and luck, such as throwing spilt salt over the shoulder or not walking under a ladder, black cat superstitions, or Friday the 13^th. To place the great religions of the world in the same category is a profound error, whether some dictionary definitions make the error or whether one like Feuerbach makes it. What I find sad is that most of this book treats religion respectfully, recognizing that religion is an expression of a positive dimension of the human being thinking of itself, its own wishes, hopes, and ideals.

Feuerbach has argued against a certain form of revelation. However, suppose with me for a moment that revelation is not sufficient. It is not sufficient because it occurs within a time, a culture, a set of beliefs, and a language. It must therefore submit itself to the same tests of every other type of belief, religious or not. Only the light of rationality and experience will disclose the truthfulness of the revelation. Divine revelation does not occur in its own silo of human experience, but rather, occurs in the context of human life and history. It occurs within a tradition. As such, we as receives of revelation must take up the responsibility of testing its veracity.

Chapter 22 deals with the contradiction in the nature of God in general. He thinks that the religious person feels no need of culture. After all, the Hebrews had no art or science, while the Greeks did. The Hebrews did not because they felt no need of it. The Lord supplied everything they needed. Chapter 23 discusses the contradiction in the speculative doctrine of God. He stresses that the being of humanity is alone the real being of God. Humanity is the real God. His question is why one should want to alienate human consciousness from itself in positing the divine. He concludes that we must abandon a philosophy of religion, or a theology, which is distinct from psychology and anthropology, and recognize anthropology as itself theology. Only then do we attain a true, self-satisfying identity of the divine and human being, the identity of the human being with itself. Chapter 24 deals with the contradictions of the Trinity. Chapter 25 deals with the contradiction in the sacraments. He thinks that appealing to experience is a way to renounce faith where experience is a datum, there religious faith and feeling vanish. When religion contradicts reason, it places itself in contradiction with the moral sense.

Chapter 26, he particularly focuses upon the contradiction involved in faith and love. Faith separates God from humanity, and thus human beings from each other. By faith, religion places itself in contradiction to morality. By faith, religion isolates God into a distinct being. By faith, religion brings disunity within individuals. By faith, religion turns its belief in God into a law. Love is the opposite of all of these negative influences of faith. Faith comes to its knowledge of God in a peculiar revelation of God, rather than by the reason open to all people. Faith gives the believer a sense of his or her own personal dignity, while denying it to others. Faith is arrogant, clothing its pride in the humility of the believer. Faith is a spirit of partisanship, dividing people into friends and enemies. Faith is intolerant, for its cause is the cause of God. In fact, to practice tolerance toward others would require of faith to be intolerant toward God. Faith postulates a future in which its opposite no longer exists, or at least its opposition is in Hell, which sweetens the joy of believers. While one can reconcile love with reason, one cannot reconcile faith and reason. Faith will pass into hatred and then into persecution. Faith will sacrifice love for humanity in the name of honoring God. Faith destitute of love contradicts reason and morality. While Christian love led to many charitable acts, Christian faith led to Inquisitions and Crusades. Christianity is a religion of faith and love, but faith has led to the darkest of actions. The history of Christianity is full of this contradiction. In fact, the contradiction between faith and love should help us to see, in the concluding application contained in Chapter 27, which modern humanity needs to move beyond Christianity and the particular standpoint of all religion. He says religion sucks away the best forces of morality. It renders to humanity only the things that belong to humanity, and to God the things that are God’s. However, to God belongs true living emotion, that is, the heart. Morality and all substantial relations have their basis in themselves. To place anything in God is only to withdraw it from the test of reason, to institute it as indubitable, unassailable, and sacred, without rendering an account as to why. The turning point in history now needed is the open confession that the consciousness of God is nothing other than the consciousness of humanity as a species. Humanity needs nothing other than the thought, imagination, feeling, belief in, wish for, and love for, the essence of human nature.

Feuerbach raises the question of both God and the consciousness of God in Hegel. If we start with God, what we find is that the nature of God is to reveal who God is. God loses nothing when God communicates who God is. If we start from human beings, we arrive at the knowledge of God precisely because we are thinking beings. When we consider the consciousness of God, we are at the point of considering religion. We find it before us in certain forms, partly psychological in nature. In fact, as Martin J. De Nys[24] points out, Hegel will argue that acknowledging finitude is not sufficient for setting the stage for the religious consciousness. He will argue instead that the experience of finitude is at the same an experience of self-transcending relations to something that presents itself to us in contrast to finite life. Such self-transcendence in human consciousness is the basis for the specific place that religion in the development of humanity in the nobility of its project. Hegel will refer to self-transcendence as the consciousness of Spirit/Mind/Absolute. In this sense, Hegel has offered his answer to Feuerbach,[25] that religion is nothing but human projection. Rather, for Hegel, to take such a view is to isolate the individual within self-consciousness as finite, which for him is an abstraction. In a way that would be admittedly uncomfortable to Hegel, he is quite close here to the view of Schleiermacher in his Fifth of the speeches on Religion.

The way Paul Ricoeur analyzes Feuerbach at this point is helpful. The experience of the finitude of humanity occurs within a horizon of the alpha and omega. He points to Kant, who regarded the experience of such transcendence as leading to a necessary illusion in the structure of thought. The transcendental appearance is a necessary illusion that becomes the origin of every “false consciousness.” In his view, Feuerbach is already operating with secondary and derived forms of illusion, which is why his analysis can only be partial. The movement he identifies as humanity emptying itself into transcendence is secondary as compared to the movement by which humanity grasps hold of the Wholly Other in order to objectify it and make use of it. Humanity projects itself onto this Wholly Other in order to grasp hold of it. Such objectifying is the origin metaphysics and religion. His point is that religion treats the sacred as a new sphere of objects, institutions, and powers within the world of immanence, or that of what Hegel calls objective spirit, and alongside other economic, political, and cultural spheres. Religion sees sacred objects in addition to the world of culture. He describes this transformation as diabolic, making religion the reification and alienation of faith. By entering the sphere of illusion, religion becomes vulnerable to the blows of reductive hermeneutics such as those offered by Feuerbach. As he sees it, human beings constantly reduce the horizon-function to an object-function, and thus, are in the process of producing idols. An idol is the reification of the horizon into a thing.[26]

Another way to think of this issue is in the context of a theology from below, which suggests that the notion of God answers a human need. The danger is that God will become merely the name for an aspect of human experience, rather than a divine agent in its own right. For example, people take what they most value (perfection, endurance, etc.) and project it onto the universe itself. One often sees it alleged that merely to consider the possibility that language about might involve a projection of human predicates opens the door to a reduction of all theistic language to its “real” sources in human experience, as Feuerbach has done. Philip Clayton thinks one must avoid two mistakes here. One must remember that taking the possibility of projection seriously does not mean that one knows that one should reduce all theistic language to the human level. Of course, the critics of theism quickly make this leap. The other mistake, from the conservative and neo-orthodox side, would be to avoid all discussion of all theology from below. In this case, God-language is sui generis and needs no justification from outside. Such language is for some reason accepted as directly revealed, authoritatively established, or immune to criticism.[27] The dilemma Feuerbach has presented deserves critique. Thus, could such a universal attempt to explain the origin of religion itself be a projection? The point here is that the important notion of the infinite is one that mathematicians can conceive without fear of the charge of projection. It might be that humanity simply lives in the presence of the Infinite and Eternal, and will not serve itself well if it avoids this reality.

Feuerbach bases his argument on what we might refer to as the anthropological interpretation of the proofs of God, or the concept of God in general, which we find in Schleiermacher with the feeling of absolute dependence, Descartes in his Third Meditation, and the moral proof in Kant. Of course, no anthropological argument can prove the existence of God. The proponents do not make such a claim. All that they maintain is that we are referred to an unfathomable reality that transcends us and the world, so that the God of religious tradition is given a secure place in the reality of human self-experience. Such an interpretation suggests that human openness to the world becomes openness to God. God becomes the origin of human freedom. Of course, the entire tradition of such “proofs” cannot change the debatable quality of the existence of God. What they can do is properly describe the reality of humanity and world in a way that makes talk of God intelligible. What Feuerbach shows is that anthropological arguments for the existence of God might become the basis of an atheistic argument. Such an argument presents the thought of God as the expression of purely subjective needs or the product of the projection of earthly human ideas into thought of the infinite. His psychological theory of religion took this path. Once the concept of God was no longer a rational ideal that is from error, one could no longer regard it as an expression of the nature of human reason itself. It had to be seen as the product of a defective application of its rules and therefore as an illusion that we may at root overcome.[28]

Barth may well be right. We might well ask why Feuerbach found it necessary to keep hammering away at what he declared to be so bankrupt a thing as Christianity, especially in a century when it no longer cut a very imposing figure outwardly. The battle against it had long since ceased to be a heroic war of liberation.[29] Barth may also be right to at least ask the question of whether Feuerbach had some basis for quoting Martin Luther so much, especially as Luther wrote of the identity of divine with human essence, and therefore of God becoming a human being, which is really the manifestation of humanity becoming God. Of course, Luther did not intend this. Yet, his doctrine of the humanity of the Mediator prepared the way for such a speculative anthropology.[30] In his discussion of Christ as the light of life, Barth ponders the challenge of Feuerbach to what he is himself expounding. Has he simply ascribed to Christ his own thoughts? Has he ascribed to Christ his own value-judgments? Is what he has described as revelation no more than his own creative insight? Is the logos as Barth described it nothing more than his own life-action? Is his exposition of the prophecy he finds in Jesus no more than an examination that leads to confirmation to his own teaching? The point Barth wants to make is that he has no standpoint from which he can judge whether Jesus Christ is the light of life. The only valid question is whether have shown in our lives that Christ is revealer, prophet, and mediator, that Christ is what is orients our thinking, willing, speaking, and acting.[31]

Pannenberg points out that in order for atheism to succeed, it must offer a genetic explanation of the religious that contradicts the assertions of the religious, affirming that it uncovers the real origin of religious ideas. Such is the importance of an effort of Feuerbach and others of his philosophical bent. Such an explanation must show that religious phenomena products of humanity. His significance is that until his argument, atheism appeared as nothing more than assertion. Through his genetic theory of religion, he handed to atheism the proof it sought. Even if science can explain the universe without recourse to God, atheism will not persuade until it can explain religion without recourse to God. Feuerbach does this by using Hegelian language. Religion disunites the human being from itself, projecting onto God humanity free of its limits. Humanity can then respect in God that which it cannot achieve. Pannenberg thinks that that theology must learn that after Feuerbach it can no longer mouth the word “God” without offering any explanation. It can no longer speak of the meaning “God” as if it were self-evident. It cannot pursue theology from above, as Barth says, if it does not want to fall into the hopeless and self-inflicted isolation of a higher form of tongues, leading the church into this blind alley. Pannenberg does not think that theology can offer this response to Feuerbach without working on a philosophical anthropology within the framework of a general ontology. Only then can the theologian respond to the philosophical challenge posed from Feuerbach.[32]

Karl Marx in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) continues the critique of religion by the young or leftist Hegelians. He begins with the thesis that humanity makes religion. Pannenberg points out that he takes Feuerbach’s view of humanity as a species and replaces it by the social alienation supposedly reflected in religious alienation.[33] Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of humanity. However, religion also represents the loss of humanity. Further, since the world of humanity is the state and society, the state and society produce religion. Religion becomes “an inverted consciousness of the world.” It becomes the consolation and justification of the state or society. Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence. Therefore, the struggle against religion is the struggle against the world. He then famously says that religious suffering is the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion becomes the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. Religion is the opium of the people in the sense that it relieves their pain. Pannenberg notes that Marx will view religion as the expression of compensation for the real misery of social alienation. It can also serve as a protest against the misery. However, he does not examine how this supposed compensation relates specifically to ideas of God.[34] Thus, Marx calls for the abolition of religion because it has become the illusory happiness of the people in order to demand the real happiness of the people of the world. He calls upon people to give up the illusion created by religion. The criticism of religion is the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism of religion means throwing off the chains of bondage created by religion in order to pluck the living flower. Casting off the chains religion means living a human life without illusion, so that humanity may think, act, and fashion reality like a human being with no illusions and regained senses. Criticism becomes radical when it becomes ad hominem in the sense that it reveals that the root of the matter is humanity itself. Radicalism reveals itself in the abolition of religion. Humanity is the highest essence of humanity. It becomes imperative to overthrow all relations that debase, enslave, and abandon humanity.

Marx criticizes Luther. He overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it with bondage out of conviction. Luther shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. Luther turned priests into laypersons because he turned laypersons into priests. Luther freed humanity from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner person. He freed the body from chains because he chained the heart. The value of the Protestant Reformation, however, is that individuals must now struggle against the priest within. Secularization will not stop with the confiscation of church estates. It will end with the philosophical transformation of the people. However, theory must fulfill the needs of the people.

Although the left Hegelians believed religion in Europe was a tool of oppression, and thus deserved removal, they also express sympathy for those who do believe. They could see that many of the poor they wanted to liberate received comfort from their religious belief. When Marx refers to religion as an opiate, it could refer to the delusional qualities of the drug. However, the medical uses of opium to relieve pain and suffering were also well known. When Marx says that religion is both the expression of real suffering and a protest against, I imagine through offering the illusory hope of heaven, he expresses an opinion concerning the appeal that religion has.

Marx is interpreting religion in a noncognitive sense, and thus has cognitive force only when eliminated or translated into an atheistic worldview. In his case, he reduces talk of God to socioeconomic forces.[35]

One of the problems with the dialectical method in general is that it assumes that the writer has a perception and knowledge of other people that is better than they themselves have. In Hegel, it meant that he perceived what Christianity really meant by its main doctrines, and it often meant that Christianity became a symbolic presentation of his own philosophical system. As such, he saw great philosophical significance in the Incarnation, in the Trinity, and in the cross. In contrast, the left Hegelians thought that they saw better than believers and better than Hegel what religion was all about. It was really about offering an illusion to people so that they will remain content with a false happiness. They wanted to remove religion and belief in God so that people can experience genuine happiness. Humanity will find true happiness in political and economic liberation. Once one can remove the belief in God, a belief that separates humanity from their true ideals and places them upon God, one can then invest true ideals in the future of humanity. Religion is worse than a distraction. In one sense, as sympathetic as Feuerbach and Marx are to those who receive comfort from their religion, they want to remove the institutional and philosophical support for belief in God so that people will experience their real political and economic pain, and thus move toward their true happiness in this world.

Some of what these authors suggest is on target as to the legitimizing force of religion in the European culture of their day. However, they did not seem to acknowledge in their day the reforming aspect of religion as well. Thus, while Marx makes positive comments about the Civil War in America and the removal of slavery, he makes no concession that Christian preachers were at the front of the abolitionist movement and that Lincoln intertwined his speeches with biblical references. Further, is it true that if humanity solves its political and economic problems that it will experience genuine happiness? My suspicion is that regardless of the vision of the Garden of Eden we might have for the future, humanity will figure out a way to mess it up. If your vision is political and economic freedom, it will not mean happiness for citizens. If your vision is socialist or communist, it will not mean happiness. At the same time, if we can accept the imperfection of human social organization, that we will not create a new humanity because we are stuck with the humanity we have, then maybe the churches can remain participants in culture and its critic. The point is that churches are at their best when they remain somewhat separate from the levers of power, a reality that America actualized. This freedom from government allows the churches some degree of independence from government, rather than having only a legitimating power.

When human beings talk about their ideals, talk about right and wrong, talk about truth, talk about their vision for political and economic life, talk about God, they are to some degree projecting their wishes and hopes. As Ricoeur points out, the strong mind, the reasonable human being, will always be right against mythology. Yet, beyond every reductive critique, the symbol will always invite thought. Between the naïve historicism of fundamentalism and the bloodless moralism of rationalism, the way of the hermeneutics of symbols opens up.[36] Myth expresses in terms of the world the understanding that humanity has of itself in relation to the foundation and limit of human existence. As he discusses Bultmann, the demythologizing he attempted is to interpret myth by relating the objective representation of the myth to the self-understanding that both shows and conceals in it. We demythologize because the myth aims at something other than what it says. Myth consists in giving worldly form to what is beyond known and tangible reality. It expresses in an objective language the sense that humanity has of its dependence on that which stands at the limit and at the origin of this world. As Ricoeur sees it, such a view sets him in opposition to Feuerbach. For Bultmann, myth dos not express the projection of human power into a fictitious beyond but rather the grasp of humanity on its origin and end, which humanity effects by means of this objectification through a worldly form. Such a view of myth actually brings him close to Kant. In this way, the transcendental illusion is one of inexhaustible philosophical fecundity, grounding a critique that is radically different from that of Feuerbach. Precisely because there is a legitimate thought of the unconditioned that the transcendental illusion is possible. The illusion does not proceed from the projection of the human into the divine, but from the filling-in of the thought of the unconditioned according to the mode of the empirical object.[37] Such discussion reveals who we are. Yet, if science has any validity at all, if realism has any validity at all, then surely part of the experiment that is humanity involves uncovering truth and meaning as much as it involves projecting it. Science assumes that as it discovers more about the operation of atoms and cells, it discovers more about the world. Such knowledge is not just a projection of human thought onto the world. If we take history as the laboratory for studying how human beings can best organize themselves, and if we take psychology as a laboratory for discovering the best means toward individual wholeness, then surely we can accept the approach of realism in philosophy. As human beings, we are slowly discovering how to form a meaningful and whole human life. If it is true that freedom is a worthy ideal for political and economic life, for example, we have discovered it in the course of much history, trial and error, and suffering.

Religion is present at every level of culture and history. Part of the approach of genuine philosophical realism would be to acknowledge the important role that religion has played in the education and training of humanity. Yet, the issue raised here is a basic one. As Feuerbach suggests, could it be that belief in God was for the childhood stage of human development? Could it be that we should look at the modern world of science, democracy, tolerance, pluralism, and freedom as the adult stage of human development? If so, does the adult stage of human development mean that we need to shed childish things like the belief in God? Personally, I accept the temporal quality of human life, and thus I would not rule out such a future for humanity. Belief in God will always require faith or trust in an insight about reality as defined by belief in God and supported in institutions that promote and nurture that belief. The future is still before us. Could it be that belief in God, and therefore religious institutions, will whither away? That seems to be what Freud says. However, before I turn to Freud, I want to consider another influential thinker.

[1] Pannenberg, Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, 479.

[2] Suggested by Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, part I, section 7.

[3] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, William B. Eerdmans Puliishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 25.

[4] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, William B. Eerdmans Puliishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 17, 246.

[5] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1,262.

[6] Basic Questions II, “Types of Atheism and Their Theological Significance,” 191-7.

[7] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 363-4.

[8] Anthropology in a Theological Perspective, Edinburg: T & T Clark, 1985, 276.

[9] Ibid, 280.

[10] Church Dogmatics II.1 [31.1] 467.

[11] Church Dogmatics I.2 [13] 6.

[12] Church Dogmatics I.2 [17] 290.

[13] Church Dogmatics III.2 [43.2] 21.

[14] Church Dogmatics II.1 [28.2] 292-3.

[15] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 104-5.

[16] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1,

[17] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 371.

[18] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 154-5.

[19] Church Dogmatics IV.3 [71.4] 564

[20] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 425.

[21] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 431.

[22] His Erlangen dissertation in 1828 and in 1830 his Thoughts on Death and Immortality.

[23] Systematic Theology Volume 3, 179, 561.

[24] Hegel and Theology, 43.

[25] In agreement with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York: Continuum, 1959, p. 343.

[26] Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, p. 529-30.

[27] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, William B. Eerdmans Puliishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 45, 171, 173, 175.

[28] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 1, 92-95.

[29] Church Dogmatics III.2 [45.2] 241-2.

[30] Church Dogmatics IV.2 [64.2] 83.

[31] Church Dogmatics IV.3 [69.2] 72-85.

[32] Basic Questions II, “Types of Atheism and Their Theological Significance,” 184-200.

[33] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 104.

[34] Systematic Theology Volume 1, 152-3.

[35] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, William B. Eerdmans Puliishing Company: Grand Rapids, MI, 2000, p. 12.

[36] Conflict of Interpretations, Evanston: Northwestern University, 1974, 285.

[37] Conflict in Interpretation, “Preface to Bultmann,” 391, 394, 415..