The "Coincidence of the Christian and the Reasonable": Barth's Reading of Kant's Religious Thought

REFERRING TO KARL BARTH, venerable Kant scholar and translator Heinz Cassirer once remarked: "Why is it that this Swiss theologian understands Kant far better than any philosopher I have come across?"¹ The great irony conveyed by Cassirer's question of course arises from the fact that Barth and Kant are traditionally viewed as standing at opposite ends of what we might call the spectrum of theological mediation. This spectrum tracks the broadly liberal element in modern Protestant thought, involving the degree to which a Protestant thinker understands Christian faith to be something that can be apprehended, recognized, or otherwise mediated through an underlying feature of human nature or self-awareness. The mature Barth's position is normally depicted at the revelation-centered end of this spectrum, a position deeply suspicious of mediation as invariably a slippery slope to an anthropological captivity of theology. Indeed, in an effort years ago to save Barth from unfair caricature in his introduction of Barth to an American audience, Robert McAfee Brown still conceded that it "is true that Barth feels that the path from human knowledge to knowledge of God is a cul de sac."²

By contrast, Kant's position on the spectrum can be viewed as the very model of mediation, both for himself and, subsequently, for a long line of post-Kantian successors seeking a modern framework for the Christian message. In Kant's own case mediation between the human and the divine is of course driven by the cardinal features of human reason, with particular emphasis on universality and necessity. His explicitly religious thought emerges, after all, from reflection on the rational character of morality. Kant unfolds his account of the moral life in a way that necessarily leads to the disclosure that awareness of God's reality as the moral governor of the world is embedded in the apodictic awareness I have of myself as a rational being living under moral obligation. The note of "necessity" here reflects the genuinely rational character of the argument. Indeed, upon examination, moral awareness as what Kant tellingly calls a "fact of reason"³ turns out to be inseparable from awareness of God's reality. "Agreement with the mere idea of a moral lawgiver for all human beings is indeed identical with the moral concept of duty in general," Kant tells us.⁴

Accordingly, awareness of God as moral governor commingles with awareness of myself as a moral agent, thereby giving me the rational "hope" that my moral strivings are both reasonable and ultimately meaningful and not simply futile. Kant will proceed to render many of the chief themes associated with Christian faith—such as Christology⁵—in terms of this antecedent mediating point of contact associated with a secure and rationally grounded sense of moral obligation. Rationally interpreted, Christianity thus turns out to be compatible in principle with "moral faith."⁶

We know in retrospect that much liberal-minded Protestant thought after Kant carried forward this mediating framework while frequently distancing itself from Kant's specifically ethical interest. We know, in other words, that the Kantian mediating framework had tremendous staying power even when Kant's characteristically ethical content was superseded by an alternative point of contact; the moral emphasis does not exhaust the possible points of mediation.

Maybe moral seriousness, maybe a distinctive experience of "depth" in human life—usually some appeal to a basic incompleteness, basic need, a primordial relation to divine transcendence, or some combination of these—is made in order to persuade us that in our hearts we knew all along what we weren't willing to admit, namely, that we cannot get along without divine succor.⁷

In other words, the key element provided to theology by Kant's Copernican Revolution was not so much the moral element as the reflexive or self-involving one, made inevitable by the very idea of a "critique." Consequently, the capacity of the Kantian framework to adapt itself to theological interests of multiple sorts "reflected a Socratic turn to the role of the subject...