The wording is more careful than its reputation. It denies that the relationship between throne and people rests on a false conception, specifying that conception as the emperor being a manifest deity and the Japanese being a race destined to rule others. It does not address the traditional claim of descent from Amaterasu, and it does not use the ordinary word for god in the crucial sentence, employing instead the archaic term for a deity manifest in the world.
Scholars accordingly disagree about the scope. Some read it as a comprehensive renunciation of imperial divinity. Others hold that it denies a specific ideological construction of the 1930s and 1940s while leaving the older mythological claim untouched, and note that the passage sits in a document mostly about reconstruction rather than standing alone.
The emperor added his own complication. Speaking many years later, he said that the rescript's main purpose had been the Charter Oath quoted at its head, showing that democratic principles were not a foreign import, and that the denial of divinity had been a secondary matter to which he had given little weight, his chief concern being to repudiate the idea of Japanese racial superiority.
The atlas records the text, the popular name, the occupation context and the disagreement, and does not decide, because what the document renounced is genuinely a question about which informed people differ.