The Enlightenment’s idea of human rights and especially freedom of conscience (so freedom of religion) had not been explicitly accepted by most Christians in Europe since they were still living under state religions. Dissenters were often punished with exile or worse. One would have thought that if religion had really been understood as “natural” or “common,” people would neither have persecuted for specific doctrinal or moral infractions and no person would even have thought of antagonizing authorities over such a simplistic idea of that which was common knowledge. It wasn’t worth dying for, in any case. So as far as experiencing a division of humanity drawn by religion, the line may have been challenged as splinter groups tried to move it, but the assumption that it was valid was not challenged by many. Autonomy was important, but its realization as one of the principles of the Enlightenment was quite slow, especially when it came to religion. Competing forms of heteronomous exclusiveness persisted.
While critical approaches to the Christian scriptures continued to blossom from establishing the most likely words of the text, to questioning theological beliefs when they were not found in the text, while Protestant churches and the Catholic church were at odds with one another, and various people even within given Protestant churches fought each other over single words in doctrines, and even in the prayer books, exclusion was key to the day. The division in religion had not been healed by some idea of “natural theology,” even within the most closely related communions of essentially the same religion of Christianity.
That brings us to Kant (1724–1804), whom we already mentioned. His basic work came after most of the Deist leaders, and the comparative study of religion had begun. He was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by David Hume’s empirical approach to knowledge, especially his work on causality, a discussion that had been vital since Hobbes’ Leviathan. Yet in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone,19 Kant used only the Christian religion’s primary teachings to reinterpret religion in ethical terms, which is obvious on every page. But “religion” involved many more specific specimens across the globe than just Christianity. So while he may have shown certain aspects of Christian doctrine that could be understood in ethical categories, there was much Christian dogma that could not, and never could be a reference to any other religion. That did not confirm any “natural” or “universal” religious understanding, and even the ethical explanations at points became very objectionable to many Christians, for example, when he explained the redeeming sacrifice of Christ on the cross as merely the “new” person (i.e., one who was in the process of turning his moral maxims upright, so they could be accepted by all people as universal principles) was the one suffering vicariously for the “old” person (which was himself prior to such rethinking or reversal of his moral principles).20 His position of denying inclination as one of the best tests one could use in trying to ascertain whether one’s will is ethically good, also appeared to kill any natural desires of any human. And even the most moral person could never be assured that in one lifetime, he or she would be able to show enough moral growth as to satisfy the idea of morality sufficiently to satisfy one’s conscience. These were all offensive to traditional Christian beliefs.
But perhaps the greatest blow to “natural” theology was the fact that Kant never considered any primary ideas of other religions in this sketch, so it is not clear how some other religion’s basic tenets would have a moral point, for example, Buddhism’s ideas of impermanence, co-dependent originality, or “emptiness”? Where was the moral reinterpretation of the monism found in the Upanishads? What of the Hindu doctrine of karma, which though apparently a tenet for justifying various castes in the society, as a law for individuals, was finally seen to be inseparable from a group aspect of karma?
“Natural religion” or natural theology was finally touched on by Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834), and dealt a death blow. In Schleiermacher’s earliest work, his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers,21 he addressed the idea of “natural theology” immediately. His view was that one could neither substantiate one’s religiousness nor the origin of any religion merely from one’s inner experience of knowledge, morality, logic, and so on, nor from one’s empirical observation of actual religions in the world. Moral specifics and specific knowledge is not what religion is, either in its origin or in one’s realization of it. Instead, one simply ends up with “a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs” (31).
The typical assertion of those in favor of “natural religion” or “natural theology” consisted primarily of a “fear of an eternal being, or, broadly, respect for his influence on the occurrences of this life called by you providence, on expectation of a future life after this one, called by you immortality” (13). Instead, religion is prior to all knowledge and all moral activity, prior to all subject–object thinking. It is properly “piety” or “feeling,” not as emotion, but an immediate awareness of Absolute dependence upon the Whole, of an intuition or even “sense and taste” of the Infinite within everything finite. This awareness is even not an identifiable moment in one’s time, but the indispensable connection between knowledge and action.
In his famous dogmatic system, The Christian Faith of 1832,22 Schleiermacher distinguished this “feeling” (Gefühl) or “immediate awareness” of not being self-caused as the only human mode of human relating that is totally passive. There was already the general recognition that moral being involves a movement “beyond self” or something self-initiated, and Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” showed that knowledge also involved self-relation or a “movement” “beyond-self” in that the human mind dictates the categories or limits of judgment, which objects must meet for the relation to be able to produce “understanding.” “Feeling” is therefore the only passive function, that is, one that is influenced universally, but without any input or initiation from oneself. He elaborates this in detail and calls it the “immediate self-consciousness” (not consciousness of self) and distinguishes that from the “objective self-consciousness,” which is the subject–object structure of all reflection. The latter makes science possible; the former is the realm of religion.
In the Speeches, he insisted every religion as a historical phenomenon, which comes about from this “feeling,” but it is always in a particular time and place from which it immediately derives a specific content. But the cognitive content and the prior feeling are not the same. This means the religion had a “positive” and “individual” origin, some unique person or event, and is neither “natural” nor simply an inevitable historical evolution. No religion is merely the forerunner or harbinger of another. They come from unique situations.
“Natural religion” is not simply revealed by comparing the specific contents of each religion to the others. But if one realizes that the “feeling” was the common element, a contentless stimulus, which enables one to see that all religions could together even form a whole (Speeches, Fifth Speech), provided none exalted its time-bound content to the diminution or exclusion of others. That seems to suggest that religions should not be exclusive or draw the line between the saved and lost or the believers and infidels. At the same time, by the reduction of their unique contents, the final picture might be lacking in content, simply exalting the intuition of the Infinite in the finite. This is the same problem of a religion claiming universality for its specific. The concrete cannot be universal.
Unfortunately, in his dogmatic system, Schleiermacher classified religions as either monotheistic or polytheistic and either teleological or aesthetic. He concluded that only Christianity is both monotheistic