The inhumanity of God

- Yg. 1921, No. 11 -

Who am I that I may talk to you? said a pious man
and prayed no more from the hour.

Hans Natonek

In the Tübingen evangelical-theological seminar, the "Stift", the theology students were once asked to answer a semester examination (I think spring 1907): "How far is anthropomorfism justified in the conception of God?" Of God in human form). At that time I wrote in my work that the idea of ​​God in human form or as a being with human characteristics was justified insofar as it was naive, that is, as long as it had not come to consciousness as such, as humanization. As soon as this occurs, "anthropomorfism" is perceived by religious people as offensive and therefore rejected, no matter how refined, ennobled or blurred.

This answer was apparently not the way it should have turned out on the basis of diligent attendance at the lectures and prescribed exercises (which, I must admit, I missed something at the time). Roughly speaking, the gentlemen superiors wanted to have the answer that anthropomorfism was reprehensible in the non-Christian religions, but allowed in the Christian, because it is something completely different and “higher”. My solution sounded more like revolutionary disrespect than a good rendering of what I had learned, and I got a bad report card.

Later I told Christoph Schrempf about it, and he consoled me with the answer that my answer was the only correct one.

I would not pronounce it any other way today and I could never understand how Christian theologians could reject and ridicule the "superseded" conceptions of God of earlier forms of religion with such superiority, without them even having to grab their own noses.

The type of conception of God does not play a decisive role in religious life itself. There is not the slightest difference between the piety of a fetish worshiper, an ancestor worshiper, a polytheist (who believes in many gods), a monotheist (who worships one god), and a pantheist (to whom all is God) if it is sincere. All religions are in a certain sense equally “true”, or: there is no “true” religion to which the others would be “false”. Every religion is true as long as its God does not contradict the thinking of its confessor or withstand it. What can prevent a person from imagining his god in the form of a tiger, as long as this seems divine (profanely expressed: superior), as long as nothing has grown from our arrogance, which looks down on the animal as an inferior being? Can one doubt that the ancient Greeks or Teutons were shaken by showers of the most genuine religion when they prayed to their gods, who were nothing but people in gigantic proportions? Divinity existed in this greatness of its own, and for a long time it never occurred to the naive believer to be offended by their often all too human way of life. It is very interesting to observe how the image of the deity gradually takes on moral traits only late in the history of Western religions, until the just God of the Jews, the loving father God of Christians as the preliminary end result of the "anthropomorphic" (removing human peculiarities) Cleaning process comes out. Piece by piece, God is stripped of human clothing, human colors are erased, human characteristics are peeled off - namely whenever they are recognized as weaknesses, as "humanities". To be sure: the further the purification goes, the paler and blurred, the more inanimate this god becomes; and the popular imagination pleases itself with the greatest tenacity in countless relapses, which appear all the more charming and poetic the more grotesque they are (just think of Christian legends and stories of saints!).

The dehumanization of God, however, continues, with the truly divine inexorability of the laws of nature, which is also suitable for human thought: until the end, even until this being, whose bloodlessness already foreshadows the final dissolution, is completely completely decomposed like the metal in aqua regia. Even the Christian God is nothing but an ideal man. Also, the righteousness and the grace, the wisdom and the goodness of God are human qualities, are anthropomorphic, are not worthy of God and not really in him. Who today does not think only superficially and half, but thoroughly and thoroughly, whose verdict is unbiased and not clouded by his own desires, will thereby walk the path to the end and strike out of the old God's ultimate human quality, the personality. Now, when the God created according to the human image has been completely evacuated, within the modern man the space becomes free for the new infinitely greater God, who embraces everything and with whom he can not measure himself and compare himself in his minuteness he no longer pretends to be coarse again, and drives him crazy. If you want to talk about him (best you talk as little as possible of him), then this can actually happen only in negatives or negation pairs. He's not all that's been said about him so far. He is not human - inhumane ...

1921, 11