 Feuerbach’s primary engagement with Luther comes in the second edition of his The Essence of Christianity (1843), and in The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844). Among his motivations was Feuerbach’s desire in the face of Protestant critics to establish that the view of religion proposed in the first edition of The Essence of Christianity applied not only to the Catholic faith (which such critics were happy to concede), but also to Protestantism—and of course there could be no better way for Feuerbach to establish this than to demonstrate that Luther himself could be encompassed within Feuerbach’s analysis, which is what he therefore proposed in these works (see Glasse 1972 and Erdozain 2016: 223–45 for further discussion). Put briefly, Feuerbach’s central thesis was that religious beliefs are nothing more than the expressions of human desires, and God is a being on whom our aspirations for ourselves are projected, so that in worshipping God we are worshipping ourselves. As Feuerbach allows at the outset of The Essence of Faith, this may seem not to apply to Luther’s conception, insofar as Luther insists on the fundamental discontinuity between God and human beings, placing all value in the former and none in the latter. On the surface, therefore, 