The Essence Of Religion

[Ernest Babin]

Religionat least the Christian religion, is the expression of how man relates to himself, or more correctly, to his essential being; but he relates to his essential being as to another being. The Divine Being is nothing other than the being of man himself, or rather, the being of man abstracted from the limits of the individual man or the real, corporeal man, and objectified, i.e., contemplated and worshiped as another being, as a being distinguished from his own. All determinations of the Divine Being are, therefore, determinations of the being of man. [9]

How could the divine activity work on me as its object, indeed, work in me, if it were essentially foreign to me? How could it have a human aim, the aim to make man better and happy, if it were not itself human? Does not the, aim determine the act? When man makes it his goal to morally improve himself, his resolutions and projects are divine; but, equally, when God has in view the salvation of man, both his aims and his corresponding activity are human. Thus, in God man confronts his own activity as an object. But because he regards his own activity as existing objectively and as distinct from himself, he necessarily receives the impulse, the urge, to act not from himself, but from this object. He looks upon his being as existing outside himself, and he looks upon it as the good; hence it is self-evident, a tautology, that he receives the impulse to good from where he deposits it.

11. For religious belief there is no other difference between the present and the future God than that the former is an object of belief, conception, and fantasy, whereas the latter is an object of the immediate; i.e., of personal and sensuous conception. He is the same God both here and in the world hereafter, but here he is opaque, whereas in the other world he is transparent.

12. However great may the similarity between the creator and the creature be conceived, the dissimilarity between both must be conceived even greater. (Later. Cone. Can. 2. Summa Omn. Cone. Carranza. Antw. 1559, p. 326.) The last distinction between man and God, between the finite and the infinite being in general, to which the religio-speculative imagination soars is the distinction between something and nothing, between ens and nonens; for only in nothingness is all community with other beings annulled.

The book is often considered a classic of humanism and the author's magnum opus. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were strongly influenced by the book, although they criticised Feuerbach for his inconsistent espousal of materialism. Feuerbach's theory of alienation would later be used by Marx in his theory of alienation. Max Stirner directed his The Ego and Its Own against it. Rather than simply a polemic, Stirner's work uses Feuerbach's idea of God as a human abstraction as the basis of his critique of Feuerbach.

Feuerbach's theme was a derivation of Hegel's speculative theology in which the Creation remains a part of the Creator, while the Creator remains greater than the Creation. When the student Feuerbach presented his own theory to professor Hegel, Hegel refused to reply positively to it.[citation needed]

In Part I of his book, Feuerbach developed what he calls the "true or anthropological essence of religion", treating of God in his various aspects "as a being of the understanding," "as a moral being or law," "as love" and so on.[1] Feuerbach talks of how man is equally a conscious being, more so than God because man has placed upon God the ability of understanding. Man contemplates many things and in doing so he becomes acquainted with himself. Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. "If man is to find contentment in God", he writes, "he must find himself in God."[1]

Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man's inward nature.[1] This projection is dubbed as a chimera by Feuerbach, that God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence. Feuerbach states that "a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God," and he then says that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God divine, indicating that man is capable of understanding and applying meanings of divinity to religion and not that religion makes a man divine.

The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout man in all forms. God, "is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions, consequently [man's] own good principle and nature." It appeals to man to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach contends, when man removes all qualities from God, "God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being." Additionally, because man is imaginative, God is given traits and there holds the appeal. God is a part of man through the invention of a God. Equally though, man is repulsed by God, because "God alone is the being who acts of himself."

In part 2 he discusses the "false or theological essence of religion," i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. Hence arise various mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in revelation which he believes not only injures the moral sense, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man, the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, which is to him a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are superstition and immorality."[1]

A caustic criticism of Feuerbach was delivered in 1844 by Max Stirner. In his book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own) he attacked Feuerbach as inconsistent in his atheism. (See External links)[citation needed]

The question can be answered, Olson says in the first post, in three ways. The essence of Christianity may be a matter of 1) right belief or doctrine (orthodoxy), 2) right experience or spirituality (orthopathy), or 3) right practice or ethics (orthopraxy). In each case the definition must be determined with reference not only to the Bible but also to the early church fathers. Global Christianity today is simply too chaotic, too disparate, and too heterodox to tell us anything about what proper Christianity ought to be.

The sermon on the mount is not a summary of a general Christian ethic that might meaningfully be implemented today. Jesus is teaching the vulnerable community of his Jewish disciples how to deal with the peculiar pressures that they would face in the period leading up to the storm and flood that would destroy the house of Israel. To be sure, we can pick out the bits that we like, but the thing as a whole is stitched tightly into the tapestry of the unfolding story. Why vandalise it?

But I really struggle in understanding how reconcile the transition from the Jesus movement within Judaism to Christianity as THE religion of the empire. It does seem like in some important way God rejected his people and that what became the people of God became bitter enemies of the Jews not only abandoning the Jewish foundations of their faith but actively persecuting them and creating a Platonistic religion in its place.

But I also keep coming back to the fact that Christianity today, when it is not a cover for various ideologies of left or right, is fundamentally doctrinally driven and focused on individual souls (some to save them from hell and some to save them in this life). That is when it is not a thin patina over moralistic therapeutic deism.

Biblical eschatology, probably through to Jesus, held to the paradigm of a restored Jewish centre to which the nations would come to bring tribute and to pay their respects to the living God of Israel.

Why not indeed? But if we are not expecting Christianity to be state sanctioned again, that is already a very different eschatological vision to that either of the New Testament or of the church fathers.

You point towards serving the Creator God as the purpose for the church beyond Christendom. This sounds somewhat like pointing the church to beyond Christ, for all practical purposes. Or should we be looking in a fresh way at what it means for Christ to be ruler of the nations, now and in the future?

This approach does not sit well with an all-embracing narrative historical reading, which, in my view, tends to flatten out a variety of narratives just as much as the so-called theological approach, and does tend to lock up OT and NT in the history of long ago.

The OT provided the foundation, and a historical world into which Jesus came culturally, geographically and biologically (up to a point). But a narrative, if ever there really was one narrative, now switches in ways spelt out in the NT letters, which quite frankly no-one could have predicted by studying the OT. The focus now switches to him, rather than simply to a narrative, and to him as the centre of a broadly brush-stroked new narrative which has very little connection with any kind of discernible OT narrative. Consider how Paul, in reflecting on Jesus, proposes a narrative of the primal origins of sin and its universal effects, which are nowhere in sight anywhere in the OT without a very creative and up to that point non-existent interpretation of Genesis.

In my view the narrative historical interpretation of the bible flattens out the contribution of even more important wisdom interpretation. Any fair reading of Paul shows that the historical grammatical hermeneutical method, on which the narrative historical depends, was not one which he paid much attention to in his interpretation of the Old Testament as the basis for the belief in the light of Christ.

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