The Essence of Christianity Translated from the second German edition

In the contradiction between Faith and Love which has just been exhibited, we see the practical, palpable ground of necessity that we should raise ourselves above Christianity,...

Religion has its basis in the essential difference between man and the brute--the brutes have no religion. It is true that the old uncritical writers on natural history attribut...

The Sacraments are a sensible presentation of that contradiction of idealism and materialism, of subjectivism and objectivism, which belongs to the inmost nature of religion. Bu...

The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural,...

all things, both in time and rank, who has life in himself (though an imparted life) like as the Father has life in himself,--what, if we follow out the consequences, can such a...

God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral....

The grand principle, the central point of Christian sophistry, is the idea of God. God is the human being, and yet he must be regarded as another, a superhuman being. God is uni...

The essential standpoint of religion is the practical or subjective. The end of religion is the welfare, the salvation, the ultimate felicity of man; the relation of man to God...

Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is--man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the...

Creation is the spoken word of God; the creative, cosmogonic fiat is the tacit word, identical with the thought. To speak is an act of the will; thus, creation is a product of t...

The subjective elements of religion are on the one hand Faith and Love; on the other hand, so far as it presents itself externally in a cultus, the sacraments of Baptism and the...

Christ is the omnipotence of subjectivity, the heart released from all the bonds and laws of Nature, the soul excluding the world, and concentrated only on itself, the reality o...

The fundamental dogmas of Christianity are realised wishes of the heart;--the essence of Christianity is the essence of human feeling. It is pleasanter to be passive than to act...

It is the consciousness of love by which man reconciles himself with God, or rather with his own nature as represented in the moral law. The consciousness of the divine love, or...

If a God without feeling, without a capability of suffering, will not suffice to man as a feeling, suffering being, neither will a God with feeling only, a God without intellige...

The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have a new con...

Faith in the power of prayer--and only where a power, an objective power, is ascribed to it, is prayer still a religious truth--is identical with faith in miraculous power; and...

With the idea of the existence of God is connected the idea of revelation. God's attestation of his existence, the authentic testimony that God exists, is revelation. Proofs dra...

The doctrine of the Creation sprang out of Judaism; indeed, it is the characteristic, the fundamental doctrine of the Jewish religion. The principle which lies at its foundation...

I say chiefly, for it was impossible to exclude theology from the first part, or religion from the second. A mere glance will show that my investigation includes speculative the...

Religion is the relation of man to his own nature,--therein lies its truth and its power of moral amelioration;--but to his nature not recognised as his own, but regarded as ano...

The second Person, as God revealing, manifesting, declaring himself (Deus se dicit), is the world-creating principle in God. But this means nothing else than that the second Per...

The essential significance of the Trinity is, however, concentrated in the idea of the second Person. The warm interest of Christians in the Trinity has been, in the main, only...

An essential condition of the incarnate, or, what is the same thing, the human God, namely, Christ, is the Passion. Love attests itself by suffering. All thoughts and feelings w...

Israel is the historical definition of the specific nature of the religious consciousness, save only that here this consciousness was circumscribed by the limits of a particular...

The personality of God is thus the means by which man converts the qualities of his own nature into the qualities of another being,--of a being external to himself. The personal...

God as God--the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding, has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for a special...

The quality of being agreeable to subjective inclination belongs not only to practical miracles, in which it is conspicuous, as they have immediate reference to the interest or...

following v. 18: "He that believeth in him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of...

Religion gives reality or objectivity not only to the human or divine nature in general as a personal being; it further gives reality to the fundamental determinations or fundam...

XIX. The Essential Standpoint of Religion 185 XX. The Contradiction in the Existence of God 197 XXI. The Contradiction in the Revelation of God 204 XXII. The Contradiction in th...

II. God as a Being of the Understanding 33 III. God as a Moral Being or Law 44 IV. The Mystery of the Incarnation; or, God as Love, as a Being of the Heart 50 V. The Mystery of...