Challenge to Christian Views of Faith and Works


Συγγραφέας: Stephen R. Palmquist


Stephen R. Palmquist: Challenge to Christian Views of Faith and Works (html, 59K)
The contributors to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion are united in the conviction that Christian readers have too often rejected Kant prematurely because they believe his philosophy has negative implications for their religious or theological commitments. While we disagree on some of the finer points of interpreting Kant and of how best to apply his philosophical insights to the religious life, affirmative interpreters all agree that such rejection of Kant is premature and that Christians (or indeed, religious persons of any faith) would be better off considering more deeply the religious goals Kant himself was aiming to achieve. The most common complaints against Kant center around various challenges he poses to the way many people practice their religion or conceive of their theological commitments. Thinking Kant is out to destroy their most cherished beliefs, many readers remain unaware that he poses these challenges in the hope of leading us to a religiously healthy way of meeting these very challenges. Here I will briefly mention three of Kant’s most important challenges and how he thought religious persons ought to respond; I shall then devote more attention to explaining a fourth challenge in more detail. Christian philosophers tend to see the chief problem with Kant as his denial of the possibility that we may have theoretical knowledge of God. Anyone who regards the traditional proofs for God’s existence as a crucial building block of religious faith, will surely regard Kant’s call for a revolution in the way we view the relationship between knowledge and faith as philosophical (if not Christian) heresy. However, Kant himself saw it simply as a call to a more humble, more authentically religious epistemological outlook. In short, the alleged authority of the theoretical proofs must be challenged because reliance on them will eclipse the authentically religious need to ground our religious commitments in our moral disposition, not in our logical reasoning abilities...