Kant and Theology (review)

In Kant and Theology, Pamela Sue Anderson and Jordan Bell provide a brief primer on Kant’s theology, seeking “to make Kant accessible again to new generations of students and to challenge academics to return to Enlightenment rationality” (ix). The introduction offers a brief outline of Kant’s life and theological perspective, highlighting both his reactions against his Pietist upbringing and his formative friendships. Anderson and Bell’s emphasis on Kant’s profound friendship with the eccentric English businessman Joseph Green (1727–1786) may intrigue the reader. Significantly, the reader will find echoes of Green’s rigorous moralism in Kant’s ethics as expounded in later chapters—a connection the authors might have made more pronounced. Unfortunately, as they jump headlong into the task of expounding Kant’s extremely complex philosophy, the authors leave behind the valuable information they provide in the introduction.

Chapter 1, “Themes from Transcendental Idealism,” presents a readable summary of Kant’s well-known philosophical system. Anderson and Bell emphasize that Kant levies his argument that humans are unable to obtain knowledge of things as they are in themselves against the proponents of empiricism. According to Anderson and Bell, Kant’s epistemology is “far more complex than that given by the empiricists” (15). Here the authors run the risk of presenting a caricatured account of empiricism. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology (2001), is worth mentioning here, as it clarifies that even Reid—often dubbed the most “naive” of the “naive” empiricists—offers a complex and profound account of human interaction with the empirical world. Furthermore, Kant’s relationship with empiricism is not simply discontinuous. At the very least, Kant is an empiricist insofar as he holds that humans can only have knowledge of objects that are “spatio-temporally located” (16).

Chapter 2, ‘“Moral Religion’ for Theologians,” outlines Kant’s account of practical reason, which includes morality, aesthetics, and religion. Because Kant insists that matters of practical reason do not admit scientific knowledge, critics have often seen his approach to these matters negatively. However, Anderson and Bell aptly observe that Kant was motivated to protect the human ability to speak meaningfully about morality, aesthetic, and religion. Kant claims that practical reason is superior to theoretical reason because it has access to the noumenal world and is not constrained to phenomenological discourse (22). Human activity can give authentic expression to realities forever opaque to theoretical reason; objects of theoretical knowledge are subject to the determinism of natural causality, but humans, by employing their practical reason, transcend this determinism and act freely as autonomous moral agents (43).

Kant’s powerful critiques of ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological arguments for the existence of God seem to confirm some critics’ impressions of Kant’s approach to theology as negative. However, in chapter 3, “Theoretical and Practical Arguments for Theism,” Anderson and Bell continue to defend Kant’s approach to theology as positive by demonstrating that he rejects these arguments only in order to more rigorously defend God’s existence. Kant argues that God’s existence is a necessary hypothesis for those wishing to avoid practical irrationality as moral agents (55).

Chapter 4, “Immortality, Corruption, ‘Radical Evil’ and Salvation,” summarizes Kant’s Christian theology and serves as a fitting climax to the book. Kant’s articulation of these basic Christian themes—at least, through the lenses of the editors—has a surprisingly traditional—perhaps even Augustinian—flavour. “Immortality” is full rationality (63), “corruption” is our choice to be influenced by natural inclinations that resist the moral law (67), and “salvation” is becoming a person who pleases God (68). Many Christian interpreters dismiss Kant because he posits that human salvation depends on human moral action rather than the outside intervention of God’s grace; nonetheless, the real issue is how well Kant grounds human moral action in Christ (40, 73).

Anderson and Bell conclude Kant and Theology by commending Kant to theologians on the basis of both his endorsement of Enlightenment rationality (82) and his theological...