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3. Overcoming Deism: Hope Incarnate in Kant's Rational Religion
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79 three Overcoming Deism Hope Incarnate in Kant’s Rational Religion Christopher McCammon The shape of Immanuel Kant’s religious vision—if indeed it has a shape at all—is notoriously difficult to delineate. Many scholars have been content that beneath the serial number on Kant’s dog tag we would find the inscription Deist. Allen Wood certainly believes this was the case. In his straightforwardly titled paper ‘‘Kant’s Deism,’’ he does a good job of substantiating just this sort of claim. He posits that the kind of deism described by John Dryden as ‘‘the opinion of those that acknowledge one God, without the reception of any revealed religion,’’ fits Kant very well.1 He was, says Wood, concerned with the validity of a natural religion of unaided reason, not with any supernatural religion. While Kant concedes that ‘‘revealed traditions’’ may be temporarily necessary, Wood argues that this concession can be explained by (1) Kant’s desire to appease the religious establishment and (2) Kant’s belief that humankind had not yet emerged from the immaturity described in What Is Enlightenment ? Nicholas Wolterstorff expresses similar sentiments in his ‘‘Conundrums in Kant’s Rational Religion’’: ‘‘The ritualistic side of Christianity should be seen, [Kant] thought, as having merely historical worth: rituals are neces- Philosophical Foundations for Kantian Theology 80 sary, for a time, if humanity is to progress to the point where it can discard a faith of divine worship and make do with a purely rational religion.’’2 Explanation (1) appears over and again in Wood’s paper, yet it is prima facie unattractive. It seems a backhanded condemnation of a man who took his integrity very seriously. Kant confessed in a letter to Moses Mendelssohn: ‘‘Although I am absolutely convinced of many things that I shall never have the courage to say, I shall never say anything I do not believe’’ (C 10:69). Why not reverse Wood’s accusation and maintain that the traces of deism in the Kantian corpus are attempts to pacify (uncritically) ‘‘enlightened’’ academia? Though Kant explicitly rejected deism as a live religious alternative (PFM 356), scholars have persistently approached his position as a variation on the deistic theme. Be this as it may, the discussion of (2) will receive the lion’s share of my attention in the following paragraphs—that is, that Kant makes allowances for revealed traditions because he believed humankind had not yet emerged from philosophical immaturity. I believe Kant’s use of symbols and representations drawn from revealed religion makes this second contention extremely problematic . Giving special attention to Kant’s doctrine of the Christic archetype from Book Two of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, I hope to draw together important themes from Kant’s broader critical project in order to outline the nature of rational hope in Kantian religion. In the end I believe we will see, among other things, that Kant does not foresee for humankind, in any possible ‘‘maturity,’’ the obsolescence of revealed religion. Christianity— revealed religion par excellence according to Kant—provides symbols and representations that make hope beyond the limits of knowledge accessible for rational belief. This done, I will briefly set my contentions over against Wolterstorff ’s treatment of the themes of hope and rational belief in ‘‘Conundrums in Kant’s Rational Religion.’’ Wolterstorff contends that, whatever its deistic or Christian analogs, Kant’s conception of the relationship of rational religion to the Christian concepts of atonement and forgiveness is terminally incoherent. If my analysis is correct, Kant is incoherent only to the extent that his pursuit of reasonable hope is mistaken for the pursuit of moral and religious knowledge. Before I can proceed, however, I must bring the relevant portion of Wood’s argument into brief focus. While he acknowledges that Kant’s ‘‘religion of reason has need of revealed traditions, owing to ‘a special weakness in human nature,’ ’’3 Wood qualifies this by asserting that this ‘‘special weakness’’ may one day be overcome as humankind advances toward maturity. He sees this advanced humanity in Kant’s anticipation of a day when ‘‘the form of a church itself is dissolved, the viceroy on earth steps into the same class as the human being raised to a citizen of heaven, and so God will be all in all.’’ Clearly, Wood equates this dissolution of the church’s outward form with the coming of a religion more like deism. It is interesting to compare the statement cited by Wood...