The Enlightenment’s Criticism of Religion: Theology

Abstract

The motivation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion developed in reaction to the religious situation that he found himself in at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This chapter and the next sketch the main issues stemming from the Enlightenment to which Hegel was reacting. This chapter focuses on the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion specifically in the fields of theology and biblical studies. Through much of the Middle Ages, the dogmas of the Christian religion were regarded collectively as a field of scholarly study alongside the sciences. However, with the rapid development of the empirical sciences, religion suddenly appeared to be based on a dubious foundation. The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted merely to hold firm to what they regarded as rational, while purging religion of what they took to be superstitious, childish views without foundation. After rejecting Christianity, the philosophes ended up with Deism, that is, a simple, very general belief in a Supreme Being. Hegel takes one of the main negative aspects of the Enlightenment to be its dismissal of the traditional Christian dogmas. The result is an empty abstraction that is meaningless from a religious point of view. An account is given of Voltaire’s Deism in his work God and Human Beings. A brief overview is provided of the scepticism about the veracity of the sacred texts in the field of biblical studies. This is exemplified by a reading of Hermann Samuel Reimarus so-called ‘Wolfenbüttel Fragments’ that were published by Lessing.