In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

124 six Kant’s Prototypical Theology Transcendental Incarnation as a Rational Foundation for God-Talk Nathan Jacobs Kant on God: Incantation or Incarnation? Three main questions face theology in and around Kant’s philosophy: (1) Does Kant’s philosophy leave room for meaningful theological discourse? (2) If so, where is this room and what is the nature of the theology that fills it? (3) Given the relationship between such theology and Kant’s philosophy, is it desirable to be both a theologian and a Kantian? The bulk of this essay will be devoted to the first and second questions. The first I answer affirmatively: Kant’s philosophy does leave room for meaningful theological discourse. The second I answer by reference to the transcendental theology Kant develops in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The third question is briefly addressed in my concluding comments by highlighting the questions we are left with if this account of Kantian theology is accurate. Recent articles on Kant by Nicholas Wolterstorff and Jeffrey Privette will frame my inquiries throughout and will be the focus of this introductory section. Beginning with Wolterstorff, we find a basic distrust in the prospect of meaningful Kantian theology, common among traditional readers of Kant’s philosophy. His pessimism is rooted in the problems this traditional read creates for God-talk and God-thought. In ‘‘Is It Possible and Desirable for Theolo- Kant’s Prototypical Theology 125 gians to Recover from Kant?’’ Wolterstorff examines the predicament contemporary theology faces, given its post-Kantian context.1 He avers the primary difficulty facing theology is one of anxiety: How can we speak (or even think) of God in a way that actually refers to God? According to Wolterstorff, the strictures on human knowledge and experience set forth in Kant’s first Critique appear to make theological discourse that is actually about God impossible. One of the chief advocates of the severity of these strictures and the limitations they place on transcendent metaphysics is P. F. Strawson, who defines them in relation to what he calls Kant’s principle of significance: ‘‘This is the principle that there can be no legitimate, or even meaningful, employment of ideas or concepts which does not relate them to empirical or experiential conditions of their application.’’2 If a concept, theological or otherwise, is such that its ‘‘experience-situation’’ cannot be specified, then according to Strawson’s Kant we are not using that concept legitimately. Wolterstorff explains the Kantian strictures on knowledge by employing ‘‘the metaphor of a boundary.’’ Since, as Wolterstorff puts it, ‘‘knowledge of objects is limited to what we could in principle experience,’’ we cannot have knowledge of what we cannot experience.3 The metaphor of a boundary identi fies the line between what we can know and what is beyond our ability to know. This sets up a bifurcated worldview made of things-as-they-appear and things-as-they-are-in-themselves. The forms of intuition (viz., space and time) and the forms of conception (viz., the twelve categories) are the structural features that constitute knowable objects and separate the knowable from the unknowable. God, freedom, immortality, the soul, and things-in-themselves are beyond our ability to know in any meaningful way. Therefore, while Kant may have ‘‘[denied] knowledge in order to make room for faith’’ (CPR Bxxx), the only examples of faith that seem to fit his philosophical paradigm are those that shade off into agnosticism, nonrealism, or perhaps radical fideism. The theological difficulty this paradigm creates becomes clear as we consider that religious adherents typically hold that their beliefs, many rooted in experience, are reasonable and true of God’s actual nature (even if incomplete ). The Judeo-Christian patriarchs, prophets, and apostles are prime examples : ‘‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched —this we proclaim’’ (1 Jn 1:1). The vexing question in the light of Kant’s paradigm (traditionally conceived) is how such claims about and experiences of God can be thought meaningful in a realist sense. As Wolterstorff notes, ‘‘God, in the Kantian scheme, cannot be an object of experience.’’4 To speak or think of God is to predicate something of God, and to predicate something of God is to express a concept that interprets intuitions. Since, however, no intuition is adequate to the deity, no predication is possible...

Share