Catechism Of The Germanic Religion: Part Five

Thesis 10

“To God’s Being belong Will, Understanding and Personality. These are, However, unique in Man. Hence Man is the place of God in the world.”

Comments: What is God’s Place in the World?

God without will, understanding and personality would be no more God. Nature or the “All” is not personality or person, but a cosmic organism. First man is a person. For he has what is otherwise only attributed to God: freedom of will based on understanding reflection. 

“We believe that man is the only being in the world who possesses freedom of will. For only man can do what is attributed to the ‘First Cause’, raise up a causal series out of nothing, based on free, considered act of will. Only man is a person; hence the saying of the German teaching of God; Man is God in his own image, in the image of Man created he Him”

“Master Ekkehart says in this German sermon: ‘I am only Thee God, in Thy highest form’…The German teaching of God is thus no invention of the present, but rests on a 600 year old tradition…The Mystic Silesius once said that man paints with his ray the colorless sea of divinity. For Kant God is an ‘ideal of the pure reason’…Luther tends to regard God as the power of Faith in ourselves. Schiller says: ‘take the divinity from your wills and you remove it from its world-throne’…The world is not yet mind, but the preparation from mind. The really knowing and will-free mind is first Man. Man is God’s habitation in the world.”

Thesis 11

“Man is not God. But he is God’s birthplace. God exists and grows in Man. If God does not come in Man, He never comes. Hence the German religion is the religion of high faith Man.”

Comments: What is the Birth of God?

“It is the great sacred knowledge of the German religion that God is in us men as a becoming and growing Form, in order that we may ennoble and perfect this Form. A God in the beyond is of no use to us. We want Him here in the world and in Man, with us and in us.”

We have found the right way to improve and ennoble Man in our teaching of the realization of God in Man or the God-Man teaching (Anthropotheology).

“The man-like God and God-like man was already the theme of the ancient Nordic-religion…Master Ekkehart carried forward and strengthened this belief, as well as Kant and Fichte. 

This is not to say that Man is God. He is the birthplace of God. If the pure and noble German religious ethics of 1,200 years ago could have been preserved in place of the Asiatic religion of weakness and non-Aryan ethics of decadence, the difficulty of conceiving God and Man in union today would not arise.

“Only if we believe in Man can he be ennobled…With a God of the beyond, Man’s moral perfection can never be reached…Hence the high faith in Man of the German Religion is the beginning of all ethics…the God of the Jewish religion is the beginning of the end of all ethics. The German religion resurrects Man, if it is not too late. But perhaps in the Third Reich in rejuvenated Germany a new epoch of God for man on earth is beginning. Is this great thought not worthy of our faith?”

-excerpted from “The 25 Theses of the German Religion: A Catechism” by Ernst Bergmann (1936)