The Essence of Christianity

As with many philosophers in the post-Enlightenment era, Feuerbach deals explicitly with the question of God and Christianity in relation to his philosophy. In a book explicitly dealing with these questions, as the title suggests—The Essence of Christianity—Feuerbach is naturally going to center the questions of the existence of God, the truth claims of the Christian Church, and the theology that underpins Christian teaching. While Feuerbach has plenty to say about the errors into which theology falls, especially concerning the nature of God and the practice of religion, one of the key points he makes throughout the work—and which will be one of the most influential for thinkers after him—is the idea that theology and religion in general are surreptitiously placing God in the place of human beings.

The very first mention of this idea occurs in the book’s preface. Feuerbach states: “It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this” (6). Theology pretends to study the nature of God, his thoughts and his actions and his words, and yet all the time is simply misunderstanding what it is studying. As he notes in the first chapter, “what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God is God” (24).