Philosophia Christi

Vol. 9, No. 1 © 2007

What Can Christian Theologians

Learn from Kant?

Chris L. Firestone
Department of Philosophy
Trinity College, Trinity International University
Deerfield, Illinois

This symposium collection of essays was originally presented as a panel

of papers sponsored by the Evangelical Philosophical Society at a session of
the 2005 American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Philadelphia. I
want to thank William Lane Craig for his hospitality and facility throughout
the process of putting that session together. The purpose of the panel was to
introduce a new book, titled Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, and
to provide a forum for some of the contributors to that book to address the
question What can Christian theologians learn from Kant? The contributors
to this symposium are all interpreters of Kant with an abiding concern for
the interests and welfare of Christian theology. Because of the excellence
and relevance of the panel, the essays by John Hare, Stephen R. Palmquist,
Nathan Jacobs, and myself are here being offered in slightly modified and
enhanced forms. An additional essay, titled “Kant on the Christian Religion”
(coauthored by Firestone and Jacobs), has been added to this collection.
Response essays from Christophe Chalamet and Keith Yandell follow the
five essays. Chalamet was the original panel respondent in Philadelphia, and
Yandell was invited to respond specifically for this special symposium edi-
tion. I also want to thank Paul Copan and Craig Hazen for their interest in
this collection and help preparing this volume for publication.
In this essay, I will provide a brief introduction to KNPR and present
a series of motifs that emerge out of recent trends toward theological af-
firmation in the field of Kant studies. The other essays will cover Kant on
human depravity, moral redemption, Christian apologetics, and the Christian
religion, respectively. Stephen Palmquist’s essay briefly introduces KNPR as
well, but is placed third in this collection for thematic reasons (the issue of
grace and works coming thematically after human depravity). While we hope
. Chris L. Firestone and Stephen R. Palmquist, eds., Kant and the New Philosophy of Reli-
gion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006); henceforth, referred to as KNPR.
 Philosophia Christi

that the insights and positions presented here will be helpful for the theo-
logically minded who find themselves ready to rethink Kant’s philosophy
of religion, KNPR has a somewhat different emphasis. It is not, for instance,
written to advance or otherwise address Evangelical concerns. If you do get
the opportunity to read Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, you will
find that the contributors come from a variety of different denominational
categories, including Anglican, Catholic, Reformed, and others. What united
this multipartisan group in the making of the book were not denominational
considerations, but a realization that the Kant establishment has for too long
been unreasonably resistant to the largely persuasive arguments of theologi-
cally affirmative Kant interpreters. This, we believe, has blunted the positive
religious impact of Kant’s philosophy on mainstream secular scholarship
and likewise left Kant lurking in the shadows of recent Christian scholarship.
KNPR addresses these issues with a view to moving the discussion of Kant’s
philosophy of religion forward along decidedly more positive grounds.
The main resistance from the field of Kant studies has not been primar-
ily through the process of open and rational argumentation. Instead, there
has been a systematic (sometimes implicit, but often times explicit) margin-
alization of theologically affirmative insights and interpretations of Kant.
For years, Christian scholars have seemed to stand by while a sweeping
secularization of historical figures in philosophy has taken place. John Hare
awakened the Christian community to this situation in 1996 in his book, The
Moral Gap. He writes,
I have been constantly struck by how often the Christian content of
these [primary] sources [of philosophy] has been ignored by the stan-
dard interpretations in the secondary literature. This is notably true of
Kant. . . . His system does not work unless he is seen as genuinely try-
ing to make “room for faith.” Failure to see this has led to heroic mea-
sures, either excising portions of the text as not properly “critical,”
or attributing his views to a desire to appease the pious sentiments of
his faithful manservant. What is true of Kant is also true of Descartes,
Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and even Hume.

It is not my purpose in this essay to chastise the Christian community for

complicity in this process, but only to point out that history matters, and,
equally, that what happens in specific fields of study, like the philosophical
subculture of Kant studies, also matters to how Christian theologians get
their philosophical moorings.
The reasons why this situation has emerged are complex, but, I think,
can be boiled down to two. Firstly, the traditional interpretation of Kant, of
course, is no friend to theology. Interpretations under this rubric reduce Kant’s
account of religion to mere morality embellished by a few metaphysical pos-

. John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 2.
Chris L. Firestone 

tulates (namely, God, freedom, immortality, the soul, and so on). Traditional
interpreters designate Kant as the “all-destroyer of metaphysics” and father
of contemporary atheism, agnosticism, deism, or nonrealism (depending on
the branch of the tradition one is referring to or who is telling the story). We
Christians would do well to support the banishing of Kant to the secular his-
tory books if this were the only lesson his philosophy teaches or is meant to
teach. Secondly, even though theologically affirmative approaches represent
the growing majority of Kant interpretations, these interpretations are not
always friendly to one another and, by extension, not necessarily compatible
with Evangelical theology. What I want to focus on for the moment is the
internal conflict of perspectives between affirmative interpretations of Kant
since the point about compatibility will be addressed in more detail by the
essays to follow. It is this conflict of interpretations that, at this point in time,
seems to be the principal impasse in the way of a more welcoming reception
of Kant in Christian circles.
Scanning through the literature over the last one hundred years, it would
appear that there are as many interpretations of Kant’s significance for re-
ligion and theology as there are affirmative interpreters of Kant. This has
created a conflict of interpretations in the literature that has splintered the
dissemination of Kant’s work and made it difficult to discern the shape of the
whole of his philosophy. The theologically pessimistic view of Kant gains
currency from the fact that, though always under attack from what seem to
be overwhelming forces, the conceptual territory it occupies is never overrun
and inhabited because there has never been a unified, theologically affirma-
tive force capable of replacing the power and influence of the traditional
regime. The story goes something like this: one interpreter makes convincing
arguments against the traditional approach to Kant, forwards a new inter-
pretation of Kant meant to supplant the worn out standard, and opponents
to that interpretation surface from within the traditional camp. Rather than
a vigorous debate ensuing between theological and atheological interpret-
ers, other theologically affirmative interpreters join forces with atheological
interpreters to demonstrate the weaknesses of the proposed interpretation.
What ends up happening is that vigorous debate ensues and new interpre-
tations proliferate. However, these interpretations never provide a unified
alternative to the traditional standard. The traditional interpretation stands
not because of its exegetical or explanatory merit, but because it is unified
and undaunted, and cannot easily be synthesized with the many theologically
constructive accounts of Kant’s thought in the literature. This, of course,
has had an adverse consequence on the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy
of religion and the theological reception of Kant’s philosophy based on it.
Internal disagreements of the past have made it appear as though there is no
single, identifiable version of Kant’s philosophy of religion ready-made to
overcome the traditional one and few prospects of there ever being one.
10 Philosophia Christi

I am delighted to report that this situation is now showing signs of finally

being reversed. While disagreements and family squabbles still persist, what
has become increasingly clear is that motifs are beginning to emerge within
the affirmative camp of Kant interpreters that provide guidelines for under-
standing Kant on which virtually all within this camp can agree. My essay
will outline four motifs within the emerging consensus of affirmative Kant
interpretation that are significant for understanding the interface of Kant’s
philosophy and Christian theology, and do so as an introduction to the other
essays being presented here. It should be noted that these motifs are matters
of Kant interpretation rather than maxims for Christian theology. As you
will see, however, there is overlap between the two fields, and it is by way
of this overlap that a genuinely Kantian and Christian philosophy of religion
may yet be forged. To the extent that the motifs are found to be unacceptable
on theological grounds, the prospects of founding a Christian philosophy
of religion on Kantian terms may be found equally unacceptable. Be this as
it may, I would encourage those of you who are as yet undecided about the
prospects of revisiting Kant to resist the temptation of dismissing too quickly
the veracity and utility of some or all of these motifs. At minimum, I hope to
show that there is much to be gained by engaging Kant’s work, even if at the
end of the day we find his strictures, for whatever reason, to be unpalatable.
As a final measure meant to strengthen our resolve in giving Kant a second
chance, I will conclude this paper by suggesting a fifth motif that, if accurate,
both defuses any concern that Kant’s philosophy is fundamentally antitheti-
cal to Christian theology and points the way forward to a healthy relationship
between the two of them.

Religious Faith Is Required for Rational

Stability, Not Instability

Within Kant’s philosophical system, a deep divide exists between facts

and values, one that threatens to undermine the consistency of Kant’s entire

. A critical mass of interpreters is beginning to gather in various research groups throughout

the English-speaking academy developing research programs and projects (including seminars
and conferences) based on these affirmative motifs. Fueling this development is an emerging
consensus that, in the context of these motifs, Kant’s philosophy of religion can provide an
affirmative backdrop on which to articulate a decidedly Christian philosophy of religion. This
essay and, in many ways, each of the others in this volume are an attempt to unpack some of the
most important motifs within this emerging consensus.
. Originally, this essay collection included five essays—my introductory essay and then an
additional essay corresponding to each of these motifs. Christopher McCammon’s paper, titled
“Foundations of a Kantian Religious Epistemology,” is not published here, but was presented
along with the others at the American Academy of Religion annual conference in Philadelphia
(2005). The essay “Kant and the Christian Religion,” coauthored by Chris L. Firestone and
Nathan Jacobs, replaced the McCammon paper for this symposium.
Chris L. Firestone 11

philosophical program. The Critique of Pure Reason provides Kant’s tran-

scendental account of knowledge about nature and the conditions within rea-
son that make this knowledge possible, and the Critique of Practical Reason
does the same with regard to freedom and the moral law as necessary condi-
tions for the possibility of right action. Both Kant and his interpreters have
long noted the instability of this account of rationality given the fact-value
divide that emerges when these two great spheres are considered together
as driving features of a single philosophical worldview. At the outset of the
Critique of Judgment, for example, Kant writes,
There must, therefore, be a ground of the unity of the supersensible
that lies at the basis of nature, with what the concept of freedom con-
tains in a practical way, and although the concept of this ground nei-
ther theoretically nor practically attains to knowledge of it, and so has
no peculiar realm of its own, still renders possible the transition from
the mode of thought according to the principles of the one to that ac-
cording to the principles of the other. (5:176)

In the third Critique and the writings on religion that follow it, Kant is acute-
ly aware of the difficulties posed by the fact-value divide and outlines a plan
for their resolution.
Michel Despland, in the foreword to Kant and the New Philosophy of
Religion, refers to this tension and the efforts by Kant to ameliorate it with
religious faith:
The first and properly foundational tension [in Kant’s philosophy]
is that found in the joint impact of the Critique of Pure Reason and
Critique of Practical Reason. Firm limits are set for knowledge. Nou-
mena are distinct from phenomena. Room is made for faith of a moral
kind. Warnings are issued against the tendency of the human mind
to ‘press . . . monstrosities on reason,’ religious imagination being
identified as a major source of these pathological speculations. These
arguments are momentous and have understandably given rise to ca-
nonical views of the Kantian philosophy: they provide a solid and
indispensable framework for all readers.

In the next paragraph, Despland continues, “Kant however moved beyond

this framework, or, rather, pressed vigorously against the limits it estab-
lished. It is at this point that the articles published [in KNPR] have a call on
the attention of all Kantian scholars.” He goes on to point out recent work in

. Initial references to Kant’s writings contain the full title of the relevant work. Subsequent
references adopt standard abbreviated forms. For example, the Critique of Pure Reason is re-
ferred to as the first Critique, the Critique of Judgment is referred to as the third Critique, and
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is referred to as Religion. Specific citations
come from the multivolume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge
University Press, 1992–), except for the third Critique, which is cited below from the Critique
of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952).
. Michel Despland, foreword to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, xii.
12 Philosophia Christi

French emphasizing the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s third installment in the

critical trilogy, as providing crucial and as yet underdeveloped resources for
overcoming the stifling effects of Kant’s fact-value divide.
In the 1920s, Clement Webb was among the first in the English-speak-
ing Kant studies to argue that this gap in Kant’s system requires a religious
solution. It was his position that Kant had made a concerted effort to bridge
this gap in his philosophy of religion. Unity in Kant’s philosophy, accord-
ing to Webb, “was essentially unattainable by the method of Science,” and
pure practical reason was little help as well. Webb asserted that the essen-
tial bridge in Kant’s philosophy “was apprehensible by faith, or, in other
words, belonged to the sphere of Religion.” Rather than develop third Cri-
tique resources to bridge this gap, Webb turned to Kant’s Religion within
the Boundaries of Mere Reason in conjunction with his moral philosophy.
More recently, Ronald Green has taken up and developed this strategy. He
draws a close connection between the unity of Kant’s philosophy and reli-
gious faith by characterizing the logic that supports the fact-value divide as
the chief source of conflict in Kant’s philosophy. Like Webb, he describes it
as a principally moral problem, characterizing it as a conflict between pru-
dential reasoning (or moral reasoning in an employed theoretical context)
and impartial reasoning (or moral reasoning in a formal practical context).
Elsewhere I have noted the exegetical weaknesses of this position, which I
will not rehearse here. The bottom line is that the fact-value divide drives
Kant beyond merely practical concerns towards considerations of meaning
and feeling, and ultimately to rational religious belief itself.
When morality is understood formally, it is self-sufficient—that is, rea-
son tells us what we ought to do and the will is capable of doing what reason
requires of it. But when moral reasoning is employed in the theoretical con-
text of actual experience, a radical dispositional depravity becomes apparent
in human beings. From this perspective, the question of hope becomes the
central concern of Kant’s philosophical program. Hare puts his finger on the
basic issue: “[Kant] raises the problem of the moral gap vividly, because he
places the moral demand on us very high and recognizes that we are born
with a natural propensity not to follow it.” He goes on to argue, “[Kant’s]
solution is to appeal to the possibility of assistance by God.”10 Hare under-
stands the essential core of Kant’s account of religious faith to have a three-
part structure: high moral demand, human depravity, and the need for divine
assistance. He will be focusing on the second part of this three-part structure
in his essay in this volume. For my purposes, it is important merely to note
that, for Kant, religious faith plays a crucial role in the quest to excavate
. Clement C. J. Webb, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 2–3.
. See Chris L. Firestone, “Kant and Religion: Conflict or Compromise?” Religious Studies
35 (1999): 151–171.
. Hare, The Moral Gap, 7.
10. Ibid., 38.
Chris L. Firestone 13

reason completely. In Hare’s contribution to KNPR, entitled “Kant on the

Rational Instability of Atheism,” he argues,
if a person does have reverence for the moral law, then without God
she is in what I call “the moral gap.”. . . [M]y view is that if she cannot
produce a working alternative to theism in bridging this gap, her posi-
tion will be unstable in just the same way Kant said Spinoza’s was.
She will not be able to make consistent her beliefs about what she can
do and what she should do.11

In terms of motif, it is clear that, for Kant, religious faith is necessary for
rational stability. Considering reason as a whole, human depravity becomes
a radically destabilizing feature; it yields moral guilt, removes moral hope,
and leads reason down the retrograde path of moral nihilism, along with the
eventual loss of human dignity.

Religious Faith Is Properly Augustinian, Not Pelagian

One of the most common objections to Kant’s philosophy of religion is

that it promotes a religion of works rather than grace. Such an interpretation
is part and parcel of what many Evangelicals, I assume, take to be Kant’s
own. On this reading, Kant’s Religion is thought to be best read from the
vantage point of Kant’s moral philosophy. This strategy for reading Kant
is also common parlance in the halls of power in the field of Kant studies.
It presupposes that Kant’s philosophy of religion is, in other words, funda-
mentally Pelagian. What this means is that interpreters understand Kant’s
philosophy of religion to be centered on the autonomous individual and the
intrinsic power of his or her personal moral resources. Kant, on this reading,
celebrates the stoic quest to live a good life—a life that at the end of the day
has but the naïve hope of being found well pleasing to God. Kant’s philoso-
phy of religion is taken to defend this moral fecundity of human persons, so
much so that individual human beings are even encouraged to become the
stoic heroes of their own stories.
Numerous articles have emerged in recent years presenting an impres-
sive catalogue of evidence and argumentation pointing out the weaknesses
of this position and the real importance of divine grace and belief in divine
action to the entire thrust of Kant’s philosophy of religion. In KNPR, Philip
Rossi points to the work of Jacqueline Mariña as a good recent example.
According to Rossi’s analysis of Mariña, the Augustinian character of Kant’s
account of grace contains a key element—namely, “an acknowledgement of
the function of grace for the general orientation of the human will prior to

11. John E. Hare, “Kant on the Rational Instability of Atheism,” in Kant and the New Phi-
losophy of Religion, 76.
14 Philosophia Christi

making any specific choice.”12 Later, he writes, “Mariña’s argument against

considering Kant to be a Pelagian draws attention to the universal function
of grace in constituting the unconditioned moral worth of humans whereby
God establishes a relation with us ‘before any act on our part.’”13 Rossi takes
Mariña’s account of grace to be what he terms “a relational” way forward
beyond those interpretations that would see Kant’s philosophy of religion to
be either Pelagian or somehow based upon arbitrary reward.
Mariña’s account of grace is but one of many finding their way into
the literature. We might also cite a recent issue of Kant-Studien as an ex-
ample. There we find David Sussman’s essay titled “Kantian Forgiveness.”
He writes, “Grace does not supplement our strivings to become morally bet-
ter people, but rather makes it possible for us to coherently undertake such a
project at all.”14 Sussman’s work is but one of growing number of examples
of scholarship beginning to emerge documenting what I am calling the Au-
gustinian character of Kant’s philosophy of religion. Frederick Beiser’s es-
say in the Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy is another
excellent example. One excerpt from that essay is worth quoting at length
here:
In making his case for Christianity, Kant affirms three of Augustine’s
central contentions about the pagans: that the highest good cannot be
attained in this life; that we cannot attain it through our own efforts
alone; and that justice prevails only in the heavenly city. Pivotal to
Kant’s argument is a conception fundamental to Augustine but alien
to Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the entire Enlightenment tradition: the
concept of sin. In going back to Augustine in all these respects, Kant
proves to be deeply loyal to the Reformation, whose founding fathers,
Luther and Calvin, found their inspiration in the same Augustinian
doctrines.15

Beiser, throughout his essay, points out the many ways in which Kant affirms
these Augustinian doctrines and develops them into the moral teleology that
drives his philosophy of religion. Accordingly, the highest good, for Kant,
means, “the divine will come down to earth, which will be completely trans-
formed. Once we realize this simple point, we have no reason to think Kant

12. Philip J. Rossi, “Reading Kant through Theological Spectacles,” in Kant and the New
Philosophy of Religion, 114.
13. Ibid., 117.
14. David Sussman, “Kantian Forgiveness,” Kant-Studien 96 (2005): 102. Recently, Suss-
man followed up this essay at the Society of Christian Philosophers’ eastern regional meeting
with another extending its implications, titled “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Reflections on
the Basis of Rational Faith.”
15. Frederick C. Beiser, “Moral Faith and the Highest Good,” in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 594.
Chris L. Firestone 15

is inconsistent, or that he changed his views in the 1790s. Kant’s views were
consistent and persistent. They were those of the Augustinian tradition.”16
Nathan Jacobs and I have for the past few years been working on an
interpretation of Religion that takes Kant to be moving decisively away from
the moral individualism of his practical philosophy to a kind of transcen-
dental synthesis of Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s realism based on logi-
cal developments in his transcendental theology between the first Critique
and his later writings on religion.17 Space limitations prohibit me from de-
veloping those arguments here; suffice it to say, we understand Kant’s turn
to anthropology in his writings on religion to reflect a noticeable and quite
positive theological development in his thinking. For the purposes of this
symposium, Stephen Palmquist will address Kant’s position on the relation-
ship of divine grace and human moral striving. According to Palmquist, it is
important to note the various perspectives at work in Kant’s philosophy and
then to apply them directly to Kant’s statements on religion. He distinguishes
between the theoretical and practical perspectives in Kant’s work and argues
that “In the former grace precedes . . . good works, whereas in the later good
works precede and lead to the hope of salvation.”18

Religious Faith Is Properly Grounded

on Values, Not Facts

Kant’s fundamental conviction is that facts, considered on their own,

are always nondescript. What I mean by this is that facts do not tell stories,
they do not tell us what they mean. Facts, for Kant, are something like state-
ments about the world formulated when sense datum and rational concepts
are synthetically brought together in the judgment of reason. When reason
then employs these facts discursively, they can be used in the attempt to ei-
ther prove or disprove a variety of metaphysical propositions. Theologians,
Kant thinks, are often faced with the temptation to prove their convictions
about metaphysical matters by using facts as a foundation for argumentation.
16. Ibid., 599.
17. The exact nature of this movement is expressed in various places in Kant’s writings
from the first Critique right through to Religion, but is particularly evident in his Lectures on
Metaphysics. There, Kant appears to be presenting the case that faith is properly associated with
what he calls “pure cognition.” Pure cognition is the ability of reason to get something in mind
or simply to have an idea at all. Once we have the idea of God in mind, we have the possibility
of developing a faith in God that is both consonant with what we already know about reason
and the world, and open to what God might have to say about himself. For more on this aspect
of Kant’s philosophy of religion, see the essays in this volume by Nathan Jacobs and the one
following it by Jacobs and Firestone. As this symposium of essays is being sent to press, Jacobs
and Firestone have just finished cowriting a book titled In Defense of Kant’s Religion. The essay
coauthored by Jacobs and Firestone in this volume is a modest by-product of that book.
18. Stephen R. Palmquist, Kant’s Critical Religion (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2000),
469.
16 Philosophia Christi

Such a strategy serves as a bulwark against those who would oppose faith.
The problem with these proofs, however, is that similar proofs can almost
always be articulated so as to yield conclusions in direct opposition to the
theologian’s claims. Kant identifies several pairs of arguments in such oppo-
sition and dubs them “Antinomies of Reason.” We can, argues Kant, prove
that the world had a beginning in time and had no beginning in time, that
every composite substance in the world consists of simple parts and does not
consist of simple parts, that freedom is both a part and not a part of the causal
nexus of nature, and that there is and is not an absolutely necessary being that
belongs to nature (A426–460/B454–488).
Something is going wrong with reason when it presses itself into these
kinds of contradictions. Rather than continuing to marshal evidence on one
side or the other of these debates, or seeking some grand synthesis of these
positions, Kant would have us turn toward an analysis of the apparatus be-
ing employed in the arguments—what he calls “bare reason.” Bare reason
is reason unemployed. It is the object of the transcendental question: “What
are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience?” As Kant turns
toward an analysis of bare reason, he finds that dogmatic theologians are
usually the first to object to his findings, and, interestingly enough, they of-
ten do so by illegitimately reasoning from empirical facts to metaphysical
truths. The arguments for God’s existence are Kant’s prime example. The
problem, according to Kant, is that these proofs are an attempt—pardon the
football metaphor—to run a kind of theological “end around” reason. They
posit an image of God supposedly rooted in indubitable reasoning about the
world without first attempting to understand what trace of the image of God
is manifest in human reason alone.
Kant’s so-called demolition of the traditional arguments for God’s exis-
tence in the first Critique is among the most documented aspects of Kant’s
thought in the Evangelical world. What is not nearly as well documented is
the argumentative context in which this demolition takes place. Kant uses
his analysis of the arguments for God’s existence not as a means to dismiss
theology, but to point out the shortsightedness of reason and to map out a
plan for establishing theology on a more secure foundation.19 For Kant, faith
is a matter of the will or heart, and it is for this reason that values, and not

19. Admittedly, this plan is somewhat convoluted and underdeveloped within the first Cri-
tique, and, for this reason, is often overshadowed by Kant’s chastening of theology. Never-
theless, Kant is insistent that theologians do themselves no favors by attempting to prove the
existence of God. For those who favor employing the arguments for God’s existence as a pri-
mary means of support for faith, the strength and security of their faith often depends on the
strength and security of these arguments. Even if an argument could be made to prove God’s
existence, this would not be a good thing in Kant’s estimation. It would have at least two very
negative consequences: (1) we would have to keep the details of this argument in mind lest we
waver at the first of many challenges along life’s way, and (2) faith, as we typically think of it,
would be dead. The “stepping out” of faith would have to be replaced by a type of certainty or
“knowledge.”
Chris L. Firestone 17

facts, are the appropriate foundation for religious faith.20 The entire religious
question will finally turn on this issue in Kant’s worldview. This is why Kant,
in Book 1 of Religion, argues that humans have a radically evil disposition,
and, in Book 2, that the meaningfulness of the world and our place in it is
dependent on faith in the transcendental provision of God’s only begotten
Son. Christopher McCammon, in his contribution to KNPR, calls this aspect
of Kant’s philosophy of religion “Hope Incarnate.”21 Belief in God and God’s
work on our behalf is the only way we can have moral hope, thinks Kant.
No amount of empirical proof is sufficient to engender genuine religious
faith. Only an irrefragable conviction in God’s high moral standards, human
moral insufficiency, and God’s ultimate deliverance stabilizes reason. Na-
than Jacobs’ essay in this volume will explore these themes under the rubric
of apologetics.

Religious Faith Is Fundamentally Christian, Not Generic

Some readers may be surprised to learn that a robust transcendental

Christology resides at the heart of Kant’s philosophy of religion. I know I
was when, after years of reading Kant, I first started putting all the pieces
of Kant’s argument for religion together and reexamining his writings on
religion with more optimistic theological lenses. Kant sews the seeds for
rational religious faith in his moral philosophy, but the growth of these seeds
into an actual philosophy of religion is not fully apparent until Religion. For
theologically affirmative interpreters of Kant, Religion constitutes Kant’s
transcendental examination of the conditions for moral hope and the true
measure of any philosophy of religion that purports to be Kantian. I do not
have the space to develop this point here, but I would draw your attention to
two aspects of Kant’s argument in Religion that should go some way toward
convincing doubters that his position is in a significant sense amenable to
term “Christian.”
First of all, having made the case in Book 1 of Religion that human
beings possess a “propensity” to deviate from the moral law called “radical
evil,” Kant provides his famous solution to this human depravity in Book 2

20. Kant’s dictum that he wants to deny knowledge to make room for faith is a perennial
matter of dispute in the world of Kant studies. What is this faith, and where is the room prepared
for it by the critical philosophy? This is something like the Holy Grail for those interested in
Kant’s philosophy of religion. Some think a statement denying knowledge for the sake of faith
is a contradiction in terms. Peter Byrne, e.g., takes the denial of knowledge to be a simultane-
ous denial of the possibility of faith. See Peter Byrne, “Kant’s Moral Proof for the Existence of
God,” Scottish Journal of Theology 32 (1982): 333–43. Most, however, think Kant’s statement
makes sense, but that a requirement for understanding Kantian faith is moving beyond the first
Critique.
21. Christopher McCammon, “Overcoming Deism: Hope Incarnate in Kant’s Rational Reli-
gion,” in Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, 79–89.
18 Philosophia Christi

by bringing together divine grace and a Christic figure he calls “Humanity

. . . in its full moral perfection” or “the prototype of perfect humanity.” In
Nathan Jacobs’ contribution to KNPR, he calls this feature of the text “Kant’s
Prototypical Theology.”22 At the apex of Kant’s philosophy of religion stands
this Christ-like figure in whom we must believe if we are to have moral
hope. Only by believing in the divine-human prototype of humanity can we
hope to overcome the depravity understood to be inherent in our being when
nature and freedom are considered simultaneously. Remember that, for Kant,
this analysis of rational religious belief is prior to experience. It is rooted in
what Kant calls “pure cognition” and the programmatic quest to understand
the nature of the human moral disposition under the rubric of hope. In Book
3, Kant adds to this prototypical theology a corporate vision of hope where
redeemed humans (that is, those adopting the prototype’s disposition as their
own) band together in the form of the church. Kant’s idea is that, from the
point of view of bare reason, hope can only be maintained if human be-
ings embrace the prototype through personal conversion and work in concert
with other converts in order to progress toward an ethical commonwealth or
Kingdom of God.
Besides this prototypical theology and this related ecclesiastical vision,
we find Kant’s philosophy of religion to be amenable to the term “Christian”
in another significant way. In Book 4, Kant employs his previously estab-
lished prototypical theology and understanding of the church as a litmus test
meant to ferret out the positive and negative features of the Christian faith.
According to Kant, the positive features of Christianity, including its doc-
trines of the corrupt disposition, the need for a dispositional revolution, the
prototype, and so forth, ought to be exalted and held in esteem. Kant has
a very high view of Jesus (who he calls “the Teacher of the Gospel”) and
the early Christian church. Together, they comprise the main components
of what he calls “New Testament Christianity.” The doctrines promoted by
these early “Christians” are what make up the essence of Christianity and
mark it historically as the first ever universally valid religion. The doctrines
essential to Christianity, Kant argues, are identical with those of rational re-
ligious faith. They make up the core of true religion and are the measure of
what is peripheral to true religion. They also provide the appropriate foun-
dation for the comparative study of religious faiths. For Kant, rational reli-
gious faith must be essentially “Christian” in orientation by promoting the
doctrines of rational religious faith previously mentioned, for without these
essential components no faith can stabilize reason and provide human beings
with a lasting hope. The forth and final essay, entitled “Kant and the Chris-
tian Religion,” will explore these themes in more detail.

22. Nathan Jacobs, “Kant’s Prototypical Theology,” in Kant and the New Philosophy of
Religion, 124–140.
Chris L. Firestone 19

Religious Faith Is the Appropriate Response

to the Conflict of Human and Divine Perspectives

To my mind, Kant’s maxim of a necessary conflict of perspectives be-

tween philosophy and theology provides an epistemic framework for ap-
proaching his work that empowers Christian thinkers of all makes and mod-
els to utilize Kant’s philosophy for developing a new philosophy of religion.
In my contribution to KNPR, I argue that present in Kant’s philosophy of re-
ligion is a basic understanding of the relative perspectives of philosophy and
theology. When, for instance, Kant writes of theology in The Conflict of the
Faculties, he takes theology to be a field of inquiry where God’s Word and
Spirit are understood to constitute the standpoint of authority (7:24). When
Kant writes of philosophy, he is writing about a field of inquiry where reason
and freedom constitute the standpoint of authority (7:33).23 If this is right,
then Kant’s philosophy of religion is not the end of the discussion over what
a properly Kantian philosophy of religion must look like. It is more like a
statement of where Kant stood in faith given his analysis of reason in a post-
Gospel era. If we Christians believe that Kant, in the first Critique, leaves
home with all his theological possessions and squanders them transcenden-
tally in the noumenal realm of the critical philosophy, then I believe that his
doctrine of conflicting perspectives points out that we need to be open to the
possibility that Kant, in humility, may have returned to his theological home
in his writings on religion. This, I believe, is what Kierkegaard calls “the
honest Kant” and the one that we can receive back with open arms, even if
we are not quite ready to throw him a party.

23. According to Kant in his final publication, The Conflict of the Faculties, “The biblical
theologian proves the existence of God on the grounds that He spoke in the Bible, which also
discusses his nature . . . [and] must . . . count on a supernatural opening of his understanding by
a spirit that guides to all truth” (7:24). In contradistinction, “the philosophical faculty must be
free to examine in public and to evaluate with cold reason the source and content of this alleged
basis of doctrine” (7:33).