Lessing's Conception of Revelation as Education

Lessing's Conception of RevelationutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM as EducationMLKJIHGFEDCBA H E N R Y E . A L L IS O N I The Education of the Human Race is generally regard ed as the final and most authoritative expression of Lessing’s religious-philosophical position. Its central theme is the analogy between revelation and education. This analogy is used as a vehicle for presenting a progressive or developmental conception of religious truth and thereby for ostensibly answering the objections which were raised against the notion of revelation in general, and the Jewish and Christian revelations in particular, by Hermann Samuel Reimarus.1 Neither the analogy itself, nor the purpose for which it is apparently used, were original with Lessing. Probably the first thinker to make use of it was Clement of Alexandria, in his response to Gnostic criticisms of the Old Testa­ ment. The Gnostics, in striking anticipation of deists such as Reimarus, chal­ lenged the revealed character of the Old Testament on the grounds that it presented an overly anthropomorphic conception of God and failed to in­ clude a doctrine of immortality. Clement responded to this criticism by pre­ senting the Old Testament as a preparatory revelation, accomodated to the primitive level of development of the Hebrew people.2 A similar conception, together with a doctrine of stages of revelation, was developed by Origen, and is also to be found in Tertullian and Irenaeus.3 In more recent times, we find Locke using a similar analogy in order to counter the deistic objection that a God who makes salvation dependent upon the acceptance of an historical 183 184 / vutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA HENRY E. ALLISONutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA revelation, which must of necessity remain either inaccessib le or implausib le to the vast majority of mankind, is an arbitrary and immoral tyrant. Locke responds to this by admitting that, since the truths which it contains are all accessible to reason, divine revelation is not absolutely necessary to salvation. He also claims, however, that revelation has an important pedagogical func­ tion, as without its assistance most men would never be able clearly to appre­ hend these truths.4 These thinkers all seem to have taken the analogy between revelation and education with full seriousness, viewing revelation in theistic fashion as the communication from God to man of a body of propositions and moral prin­ ciples. This naturally gives rise to the question whether Lessing likewise con­ strued the analogy in this sense, that is to say, whether he really accepted a theistic conception of revelation. The vast bulk of the Lessing literature of the present century has, of course, answered this question in the negative. Since the work of Frederick Loofs,5 the prevailing opinion has been that Lessing’s conception of revelation is merely an exoteric cloak for a theory of human development. This prevailing interpretation has, however, been acutely challenged by Helmut Thielicke.6 The latter views Lessing’s approach to the concept of revelation in light of the contemporary debate over the demythologization, and attributes to Lessing a view of revelation which is in many ways similar to Bultmann’s.7 Moreover, in reviewing the secondary literature, Thielicke makes the telling point that merely characterizing Less­ ing’s use of “revelation” as an exoteric expression for a conception of human development hardly resolves the problem. For even if this is accepted, the question still remains whether this process of ethical and religious develop­ ment, which for Lessing constitutes the education of the human race, requires an appeal to the idea that a transcendent deity entered into history.8 Thielicke believes that it does, and he endeavors to justify this by an analysis of The Education of the Human Race, together with some of Lessing’s other writings. Now, as I have argued elsewhere, a consideration of Lessing’s overall posi­ tion and strategy in the theological controversies stemming from the publica­ tion of the fragments from Reimarus cannot bear out any such interpre­ tation.9 His whole approach to the question of religious truth is grounded in his adaptation of the Leibnizian perspectivalism, which he held together with a basically Spinozistic conception of God. Accordingly, there is no place in his scheme for the traditional...