Kantian Concepts, Liberal Theology, and Post-Kantian Idealism

This essay is part of a larger project that explores the role of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in founding modern theology. More specifically, it investigates the impact of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism in creating what came to be called "liberal" theology in Germany and "modernist" theology in Great Britain. My descriptive argument is implied in this description, which folds together with my normative argument: Modern religious thought originated with idealistic convictions about the spiritual ground and unifying reality of freedom, and there is no vital progressive theology that does not speak with idealistic conviction, notwithstanding the ironies and problems of doing so.

Liberal theology was born in largely illiberal contexts in eighteenth-century Germany and England, a fact that helps to explain why much of it was far from liberal. Most of the great thinkers in this story were Germans, the key founding thinkers were Germans, and there was a vital intellectual movement of liberal theology in Germany for a century before a similar movement existed in Britain. Thus, the German story dominates my argument. British theology comes into the picture mostly as it engages German idealism, as do other non-German thinkers, principally Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, although the British story begins with a figure that preceded Kant by a century, John Locke. For better and for worse, German thinkers dominated modern theology right up to the point that liberal theology in Germany crashed and burned, after which the field was still dominated by the intellectual legacies of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the Ritschlian School.

The idea of a distinctly modern approach to Christian theology built upon early Enlightenment attempts in Britain and Germany to blend Enlightenment reason with a Christian worldview. I will argue, however, that early Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism did not privilege the questions of subjectivity, historical relativity, and freedom, and thus did not develop a liberal approach to theology. It took Kant's three critiques of reason and his writings on religion and ethics to launch a fully modern departure in religious thought, through which Kant became the quintessential modern philosopher and inspired rival streams of theology and idealism.

I will argue that Kant's influence in modern religious thought is unsurpassed by any thinker, that his use of metaphysical reason is usually misconstrued, that he was a subjective idealist who mediated between extreme subjective idealism and objective idealism, that his recognition of universal forms of experience paved the way to post-Kantian objective idealism, that his moral faith mattered more to him than anything except his idea of freedom to which it was linked, and that the key to his system—terrible ironies notwithstanding—was the emancipating and unifying reality of freedom. I will argue that Kant's transcendental idealism laid the groundwork for all post-Kantian versions and that the post-Kantian idealisms of Hegel, Schleiermacher, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, and, very differently, Kierkegaard, surpassed Kant in creatively construing religious experience and the divine. I will argue that the dominant forms of liberal theology flowed out of German idealism and tried to calibrate the right kind of idealism to distinct positions about the way that any religion is true. And I will argue that even the important critiques of religious idealism proffered by Kierkegaard, William James, G. E. Moore, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth demonstrated its adaptability and continued importance.

Philosophers loom large in this story. Kant defined himself against René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy; G. W. Leibniz and Christian Wolff, the leaders of the German Enlightenment; and John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, the luminaries of British empiricism. By the late 1780s, everyone had to deal with Kant and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge plays a major role in my larger project for doing so, as Coleridge brought post-Kantian idealism to England. Kierkegaard plays a similar role in the book's scheme by prefiguring the twentieth-century reaction against religious idealism from a standpoint that assumed it. Alfred North Whitehead plays a key role in this book's account of the...