What the Teacher Believed: A Theological Genealogy of the Kantian Settlement

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

The two essays preceding this one made the case in general terms. The first traced a personal departure from Kant. The second showed that the construal theology took from Kant — totalizing antirealism about the supersensible, the prohibition on ontological assertion, the relocation of theological content into symbol, grammar, or practice — is not the construal contemporary Kant scholarship defends. This essay takes up a different question: how did that construal become, within theology itself, something closer to settled doctrine than contested argument? 

The answer has two parts. The first is textual: the architects of the precritical/critical/postcritical scheme largely received the Kantian restriction rather than re-deriving it, and their own writing shows this. The second is personal: I watched a late stage of that reception happen at close range, in graduate training, and what I watched illustrates a mechanism the texts alone leave abstract. The textual case comes first, because it has to stand on its own.

What the Architects Actually Wrote

The triadic scheme — precritical thought naive and unexamined, critical philosophy exposing the conditions of knowledge, postcritical theology retrieving older content only after it has passed through the critical tribunal — is not Kant's own vocabulary. Kant distinguished dogmatic from critical philosophy. He did not bequeath a three-stage philosophy of history in which theology's task became permanent border-crossing, translating its inherited claims into terms a critical sentinel would allow through. That scheme is a later theological construction, and its architects can be read closely enough to see the construal happening rather than merely asserted.

Ritschl's distinction between value-judgments and theoretical judgments, worked out across his Justification and Reconciliation, does not argue from Kant's actual text to the conclusion that theology must abandon ontological claims about God. It assumes the conclusion as a starting condition and then builds a theology that can survive within it: faith concerns Christ's worth for us, not speculative claims about his metaphysical constitution, because — and this premise is stated rather than defended — metaphysical claims of that kind have already been ruled illegitimate by the critical philosophy. 

Wilhelm Herrmann, Ritschl's student, makes the same move more explicit by making it more extreme: in his Communion of the Christian with God, the certainty of faith is relocated entirely into the believer's inner moral experience precisely because, he holds, no other kind of certainty about divine reality remains available after Kant. The "after Kant" is doing the load-bearing work in that sentence, and it is not argued for; it is the premise from which the chapter proceeds.

Bultmann's demythologizing program supplies the clearest case, because Bultmann states his own premise plainly rather than leaving it to be inferred. The opening pages of "New Testament and Mythology" assert that the mythological worldview of the New Testament is simply unavailable to modern persons who use electric lights and modern medicine — an empirical claim about what moderns can and cannot believe, offered as though self-evident, standing in for the philosophical argument that would actually need to show why the categories of myth cannot refer. The Kantian inheritance operates here at one remove, mediated through a positivist confidence about what "modern scientific consciousness" simply is, but the function is identical: a restriction on what kind of claims theology may make, treated as a finding rather than argued as a thesis.

Tillich is more sophisticated and correspondingly harder to pin down, but the move is structurally the same. Identifying God with being-itself rather than with a being among beings is presented in the Systematic Theology as the only way to avoid both atheism and idolatry — but the argument that no other route is available, that any assertion of God as an existent entity automatically collapses into idolatrous finitude, borrows its force from the same post-Kantian conviction that theoretical assertions about a transcendent object are illegitimate. Tillich's ontology is original and considerable. The restriction it operates within is not original to him; it is received.

The clearest case of all, because it states its debts in its own preface rather than leaving them to be inferred, is John Macquarrie's Principles of Christian Theology — the text used as the actual classroom basis for the course in which I was taught this material. Macquarrie opens by dividing reason into a speculative employment, which builds metaphysical systems and includes things like Anselm's ontological argument, and a critical employment, which examines reason's own competence before it builds anything. He cites Kant directly and approvingly on the danger to religion of declaring outright war on reason, and he states without disguise that the philosophical categories structuring his entire theology are borrowed from Heidegger. This is, of all the cases surveyed here, the most honest about its own procedure: Macquarrie does not pretend his existential-ontological starting point was forced on him by an argument he conducted; he tells the reader plainly that he is building on Kant's critical restriction as a given and then importing a Heideggerian apparatus to do the constructive work that restriction leaves available. The textbook used to teach me this material was, on its own first pages, a demonstration of exactly the inheritance this essay is describing.

None of this means Ritschl, Herrmann, Bultmann, Tillich, or Macquarrie were unserious thinkers, or that their positions were never argued for at all within their own systems. It means something more specific: at the precise point where each system meets the question of whether theology may assert that God actually exists and acts, the argument that such assertion is unavailable is not conducted there. It has already been assumed, imported from a reading of Kant none of these theologians re-examined against Kant's own text, let alone against the contemporary scholarship that the second essay in this series showed has substantially revised that reading. The prohibition was received and then built upon. That is a textual claim, verifiable in each case from the books themselves, and it does not depend on anyone's graduate-school experience to be true.

What This Looked Like Transmitted

The architects wrote the books. Someone has to read the books to students, and how that reading is taught determines whether the next generation receives the prohibition as a thesis still open to challenge or as settled ground. I watched a late stage of this transmission directly, at Iowa in the early 1980s, and the texture of it illustrates — does not establish, illustrates — how completely a received premise can harden into something indistinguishable from doctrine by the time it reaches a third or fourth academic generation.

David Klemm, my doctoral advisor, had studied under Robert Scharlemann, and Scharlemann's positions functioned for Klemm as settled ground rather than live hypotheses — if Bob said it, David believed it, very nearly as a methodological principle. Scharlemann himself deserves more credit than that sentence allows him; I learned a great deal from his work, and his Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich remains, I think, his finest book. What I could never follow him into was the speculative architecture he built on top of his diagnoses — the elaborate ontology of "the Being of God" as something other than God's being God. I asked him about it once, directly, at a party: what did he take the Being of God to be when God was actually being God? He wrinkled his nose, as though the question itself were a category error, and said only that he was not sure what to make of the comment. It was not a counterargument. It was a register violation, treated as one — and the lesson it taught, more efficiently than any argument could have, was that the question was not one the system existed to answer, and that I should feel faintly embarrassed for having asked it twice.

The same mechanism showed up at a smaller scale with Bill Schweiker, who sat on my examination and dissertation committees. When I mentioned an interest in Carnap, his reaction was not engagement but mild incomprehension — he did not seem to register that Heidegger himself had read and answered Carnap, which would have been the well-informed reason to take an interest rather than dismiss one. The boundary there was drawn at the level of a reading list, before any actual disagreement had occurred. At my dissertation defense, he remarked that the work "almost felt like confessional theology at points" — not, I think, intended as cruelty, but functioning, within the framework he had inherited, as a diagnostic label for a regression the postcritical settlement existed to prevent.

What sharpened all of this for me was the contrast with an entirely different department at the same university. In close contact with Iowa's philosophers — Panayot Butchvarov, Moltke Gram, Richard Fumerton, Evan Fales, Laird Addis — I found a categorically different method. Pressing a question about realism or predication got an argument: premises, an inference, an invitation to find the weak point. Positions were held because they had survived scrutiny and stayed open to losing the next round. In the School of Religion, the deepest commitments were often held because a particular teacher had held them, and questioning them registered, at the margins, as something closer to disloyalty than to the ordinary business of the discipline. I do not think this contrast was unique to Iowa. Philosophy retains a working assumption that any position, however venerable, exists to be tested again. The theology I was trained in had, in important respects, stopped testing what it inherited from Ritschl, Herrmann, Bultmann, Tillich, and Macquarrie by way of Scharlemann, and had begun instead to transmit it.

Two further details from that period are worth setting down briefly, because they show what full commitment to, and full resistance to, the inherited construal actually looked like in a single cohort. Klemm wanted me to write my dissertation on Georg Picht, whose theology ran directly through this same inheritance; by 1984 I could not do it, though I want to be honest that what I had then was an intuition rather than the argument this series has since supplied. And Richard Grigg, my closest interlocutor from 1981 until roughly 2005, took Scharlemann's apparatus further than I ever could, spending the better part of a decade working out its implications in his own writing, building a real and respected career within American Tillich scholarship in the process. He should be taken seriously, and largely was. What his path also shows is what the inherited construal costs and yields when a serious mind commits to it fully rather than testing it at the door. He died in 2022. I still miss the arguments.

What the Genealogy Establishes

The textual case stands on its own: Ritschl, Herrmann, Bultmann, Tillich, and Macquarrie each build a system on a restriction they import from a reading of Kant rather than re-derive from Kant's text, a restriction the second essay in this series has already shown to be a contestable construal rather than Kant's settled verdict. The personal material does not add evidence to that claim. It shows what happens after the claim is received — how a premise that was never re-argued at its origin can still travel four academic generations intact, sustained less by continuous re-argument than by discipleship, by a reading list functioning as a boundary, by a wrinkled nose doing the work an argument should have done.

Once that mechanism is visible, the settlement loses some of the inevitability it is usually granted. It was not philosophy's verdict, transmitted faithfully through theology. It was a premise theology adopted early, argued for rarely even at the point of adoption, and passed down mostly by example — which means it can, in principle, be examined the same way it was first received: by going back to the books where it was assumed rather than argued, and asking, this time, whether an argument was actually owed.

The Kant Theology Kept

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

In the essay that preceded this one, I described a personal departure from Kant — not a rejection of the critical questions he raised, but a refusal to let the conditions of finite cognition legislate what may be said to exist. That essay was autobiographical because the path it traced was mine. This one is not autobiographical. It is a claim about where theology stands relative to a field it has, for the most part, stopped reading.

The claim is this: the Kant that contemporary theology continues to presuppose — the Kant invoked, often without citation, whenever a theologian declines to say that God actually exists and acts, and instead offers symbol, grammar, practice, or regulative ideal in its place — is not the Kant that Kant scholarship now defends. Philosophy has not abandoned Kant. Kant studies are, by any reasonable measure, thriving. What philosophy has substantially abandoned is a particular construal of Kant: the reading on which the supersensible is not merely unknowable but ontologically idle, on which the thing-in-itself functions as a placeholder rather than a reality, on which transcendental idealism collapses, for practical purposes, into a sophisticated phenomenalism. That construal is the one theology inherited. It is not the construal philosophy currently holds.

This is worth saying plainly, because the alternative — assuming that theology's antirealist Kant simply is Kant, full stop — forecloses a question that ought to remain open: whether the path beyond the Kantian prohibition on theological realism requires rejecting Kant at all, or only requires reading him as several of his ablest contemporary interpreters already do.

The Construal Theology Inherited

It is worth being exact about what was actually borrowed, because the borrowing was selective and the selection mattered.

Theology did not inherit the whole architecture of the first Critique. It inherited, chiefly, three commitments, often detached from the arguments that were supposed to support them. First, that the categories structure experience in such a way that no theoretical knowledge of objects beyond possible experience is available — and that God, not being a possible object of experience, falls under this restriction without remainder. Second, that the thing-in-itself, whatever else it is, cannot be known to have any determinate character, and that this unknowability is total rather than partial — not a limit on the depth of our access but an erasure of access altogether. Third, that whatever survives this restriction must be relocated: into practical reason, into the moral law, into the regulative employment of ideas, into — in the hands of later inheritors — symbol, existential possibility, narrative identity, or communal grammar.

Each of these three commitments is contestable on Kantian grounds, and each has in fact been contested, vigorously, by philosophers working from inside the discipline that takes Kant most seriously. Theology, by and large, did not wait for the outcome of that contest. It built on the construal as received, and it built quickly, because the construal was useful. It supplied a respectable, modern-sounding reason for theology to retreat from metaphysical claims it had in any case grown embarrassed to defend.

What Philosophy Did With the Thing-in-Itself

The most consequential revision in recent Kant scholarship concerns precisely the point theology relied on most heavily: the status of the thing-in-itself and the nature of our ignorance of it.

Rae Langton's Kantian Humility, published in 1998, remains the sharpest statement of the alternative. Langton argues that Kant is a realist about things-in-themselves — they exist, and they possess intrinsic, non-relational properties — and that what Kant calls our ignorance of them is epistemic humility, not ontological agnosticism. We do not know the intrinsic natures of things because our cognition is receptive rather than purely active, because we know objects only through the relations in which they stand to our forms of sensibility, and because relational properties do not entail or reveal intrinsic ones. But the things whose intrinsic natures we cannot know are not thereby rendered unreal, indeterminate, or merely posited. The humility is ours. The reality is not in question.

This is a different Kant from the one theology borrowed, and the difference is not cosmetic. On Langton's reading, the move from "we cannot know X completely" to "X has no determinate status apart from our cognitive activity" is not licensed by the first Critique — it is precisely the inference Kant's humility thesis was designed to block. That is, more or less exactly, the distinction I drew in the preceding essay between epistemic limitation and ontological restriction, arrived at independently, from inside technical Kant scholarship, by a philosopher with no theological stake in the outcome.

Langton is not isolated. Henry Allison's own treatment of transcendental idealism shifted across successive editions of his standard work, moving away from a reading on which appearances and things-in-themselves are simply different sets of objects (a "two-world" view inviting straightforward antirealism about the latter) toward a "two-aspect" reading, on which appearances and things-in-themselves are the same objects considered under different aspects — as they are related to our cognitive faculties, and as they are in themselves. Karl Ameriks has, across several decades of work, pressed a "moderate" interpretation explicitly aimed at resisting what he regards as overreadings of Kant's idealism into something closer to Berkeleyan or post-structuralist antirealism than Kant himself intended or argued for. None of these scholars agrees on every detail. What they agree on, against the construal theology inherited, is that totalizing antirealism about the supersensible is not obviously Kant's considered position, and may be closer to a misreading that later idealists and positivists found convenient than to anything Kant's own arguments secure.

Two Revivals, Not One

A second point requires care, because it is easy to elide and the elision would falsify the historical picture.

Contemporary philosophy's confidence about metaphysics — about modality, grounding, causation, properties, universals, possible worlds, truthmakers, the entire apparatus that now structures analytic metaphysics — did not arise primarily from a re-reading of Kant. It arose from the collapse of the logical positivist and ordinary-language hegemony that had, for much of the twentieth century, treated metaphysical questions as confused or meaningless. David Lewis's modal realism, David Armstrong's realism about universals and states of affairs, Alvin Plantinga's revival of modal metaphysics in service of both general ontology and natural theology, and more recently the grounding and truthmaker literatures associated with Jonathan Schaffer and Kit Fine — none of this work proceeds by reinterpreting the first Critique. It proceeds, largely, by ignoring the Kant-descended prohibition altogether and asking metaphysical questions directly, with the technical resources of modal logic and possible-worlds semantics rather than transcendental argument.

This matters for the thesis of this essay because it means two distinct developments are easily, and wrongly, run together. One development is internal to Kant scholarship: a revision, on broadly Kantian grounds, of how restrictive Kant's own position actually was. The other is external to Kant scholarship: a revival of metaphysics that simply bypassed the neo-Kantian and positivist settlement from a different direction entirely, often without much interest in Kant exegesis at all. Both developments point the same way — toward greater philosophical confidence that reality outruns what is given in experience and may still be a legitimate object of inquiry and assertion — but they are not the same argument, and conflating them would overstate how much of contemporary metaphysics actually depends on a revised Kant rather than on having moved past the question of Kant's correctness altogether.

What can be said accurately is this: theology now operates in an intellectual environment in which both the narrowest reading of Kant's own restrictions and the broader twentieth-century antimetaphysical mood that reading helped sustain have lost their grip on the discipline that once enforced them. Philosophy did not need theology's permission to notice this. Theology has been slower to notice it for itself.

Kantian Ethics Is a Different Story

A further distinction deserves mention, because it cuts against a simplification this essay might otherwise invite.

It is not true that Kant's influence has generally waned. In moral and political philosophy, the opposite has occurred: Christine Korsgaard's constructivism and Onora O'Neill's work on practical reason and obligation have made broadly Kantian approaches to ethics among the most vigorous live options in normative theory, arguably more dominant now than at any point since Kant's own lifetime. This is a genuine revival, not a relic of theology's borrowed construal, and it should not be folded into the claim this essay is making.

But it is a revival of practical Kant, not theoretical Kant — and it bears, at most, indirectly on the question of theoretical realism about the supersensible that concerns this essay. A philosopher can be a committed Korsgaardian about the structure of moral obligation while holding any number of views about the status of things-in-themselves; the two questions are not coupled in the way that theology's inherited construal sometimes assumed when it treated "Kantian" as a single undifferentiated stance covering ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics indiscriminately. The revival of Kantian ethics is real. It is not the same fact as the revision of Kantian metaphysics, and citing the former to support claims about the latter would be a category error theology can ill afford to keep making.

The Familiar Shape of Late Appropriation

There is a recurring pattern in theology's relationship to philosophy that this case illustrates with unusual clarity: theological appropriation of a philosopher's thought tends to arrive only after that thought's own field has begun revising it.

Neo-Kantianism shaped Ritschlian theology and, through it, much of nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal Protestant thought, at precisely the period when Kant scholarship within philosophy itself was being reorganized by figures like Cohen and Natorp into readings increasingly distant from Kant's own texts — readings that later Kant scholarship would substantially set aside. Bultmann's existentialist appropriation of the critical restriction on metaphysics drew heavily on a post-Kantian, Heideggerian inheritance at a moment when phenomenology was already moving past the neo-Kantian settlement that made such a restriction seem self-evident. The cultural-linguistic turn associated with Lindbeck arrived in the 1980s indebted to a picture of meaning as use, derived in substantial part from a reading of Wittgenstein that Wittgenstein scholarship itself has subsequently complicated and, in places, abandoned.

The pattern is not a coincidence of timing. Philosophy under construction is contested, technical, and slow to filter into adjacent disciplines; philosophy in its settled, textbook form is what gets taught to students who will go on to become theologians. By the time a philosophical position becomes stable enough to be confidently summarized in a theology seminar, the philosophers who produced it have frequently already begun dismantling it. Theology inherits the photograph, not the motion.

This need not be treated as an embarrassment unique to theology — most disciplines borrow from their neighbors with some lag, and lag is not the same as error. But it does mean that any theological claim resting on "what Kant established" or "what the critical turn requires" needs to specify which Kant, established by whom, defended on what grounds, and whether that reading currently commands assent among the people whose job it is to adjudicate it. The construal theology borrowed was never the only available reading, and it is decreasingly the reading specialists in the field regard as the best one.

What This Clears for the Argument Ahead

None of this amounts to a proof that theological realism is correct, and nothing here should be mistaken for an argument from authority — the fact that Langton or Allison or Ameriks reads Kant a certain way does not settle what God is or whether theological sentences are true. What it does is remove a borrowed obstacle. The claim that "Kant showed" theology must abandon ontological assertion, that the critical turn simply forecloses realist speech about the supersensible, that any return to such speech is ipso facto precritical — this claim was never as secure as several generations of theologians assumed, and it is markedly less secure now than when it was first borrowed.

The path beyond the Kantian prohibition, in other words, does not require theology to win an argument against the best contemporary Kant scholarship. In significant respects, that argument has already been substantially won, by philosophers with no theological interest in the outcome, on Kant's own terrain. What remains is the constructive task: to say, with appropriate formal and conceptual care, what it would mean to assert that the Logos grounds the intelligibility of theological discourse — not as a regulative convenience reason adopts to make experience coherent, but as the actual ground that experience and reason alike presuppose. That is the task the essays following this one will take up.

When Kant’s Supersensible Became Harder to Believe Than the Supersensible

This essay forms part of an ongoing series in philosophical theology produced through the Department of Philosophical Theology at Christ School of Theology. The series explores questions of intelligibility, reality, theological language, and the philosophical conditions for Christian belief.

There was a time when Immanuel Kant meant almost everything to me intellectually.

I first encountered the Critique of Pure Reason in a library. I cannot now reconstruct exactly how much of it I understood on that first attempt. Certainly, I did not understand all of it. Very few people do, and almost no one does on a first reading. But I understood enough to be captivated.

Kant seemed to be doing something larger than offering another philosophical system. He appeared to be explaining how philosophy itself had to be transformed. There was thought before criticism, and there was thought after criticism. Once Kant had asked how knowledge was possible, no responsible thinker could simply return to speaking about reality as though the conditions under which reality becomes intelligible to us were philosophically irrelevant.

That struck me as unquestionably right.

The mind was not merely a passive surface upon which the world wrote its message. Human knowing had form. Experience possessed conditions. Judgment was governed by structures that could themselves become the subject of philosophical reflection. Kant did not merely ask what we know. He asked what must already be the case for knowing to occur at all.

I loved this immediately.

The Allure of Autonomy

What most attracted me was the autonomy Kant granted to human beings. The word autonomy must be handled carefully, because it can easily be reduced to the contemporary notion that individuals should be free to do whatever they please. That was not Kant’s meaning. Kantian autonomy was not caprice. It was the capacity of rational beings to legislate laws for themselves as rational beings.

The autonomy of reason meant that the human subject did not merely receive its epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic norms from an external authority. Reason was not simply obedient to rules imposed upon it from without. It discovered within itself the lawful conditions under which knowledge, obligation, and judgment were possible.

This appeared to me both intellectually liberating and morally serious. Human beings were not creatures driven only by inclination, custom, appetite, or inherited authority. They could act according to laws they recognized as rationally binding. In morality, they could legislate the law under which they stood. In knowledge, they supplied the forms by which experience became experience of an ordered world. In aesthetic judgment, they exercised a freedom that was neither reducible to conceptual determination nor abandoned to private preference.

Kant thus seemed to preserve both freedom and order. He resisted the reduction of human beings to natural mechanisms without allowing freedom to dissolve into arbitrariness. He preserved objectivity without returning to what he regarded as dogmatic metaphysics. He protected religion from crude rationalism while also protecting reason from ecclesiastical domination.

For a young philosopher and theologian, the attraction was considerable.

Kant also offered a powerful historical narrative. Philosophy before Kant was “precritical.” It had attempted to speak directly about God, the soul, substance, causation, freedom, and the world without first examining the competence of reason to make such claims. Kant awakened philosophy from this supposed dogmatic slumber. After him, one could perhaps retrieve metaphysics, religion, or ontology, but only postcritically. One could never innocently return to the intellectual world that existed before the critical turn.

For many years, I accepted this narrative almost without reservation.

The Weariness of the Critical Story

By the middle of the 1980s, however, Kant’s allure had begun to fade.

The change was gradual. I did not suddenly discover a devastating objection that caused the critical philosophy to collapse before me. Rather, I grew weary of the intellectual history constructed around it.

Again and again, the same story was told. There had once been naïve, precritical thought. Kant then introduced criticism. Later thinkers either radicalized his insights or attempted some form of postcritical retrieval. The history of theology was narrated in much the same way. Earlier theologians had spoken metaphysically and ontologically. Modernity had taught us that such speech could no longer proceed without attention to subjectivity, history, language, culture, and the limits of reason. Theology could perhaps recover older doctrines, but only after translating them through the critical conditions of modern consciousness.

The structure of this story eventually became tiresome because its outcome was decided in advance. Precritical thinkers could be admired, but they could not be allowed to speak on their own terms. Their claims had first to be passed through the critical tribunal. They could be retrieved only after they had been rendered safe for modernity.

The very term postcritical retrieval often concealed the problem. What was supposedly being retrieved was rarely permitted to return unchanged. It could reappear as symbol, grammar, narrative, existential possibility, communal practice, regulative ideal, or horizon of meaning. What it could not easily reappear as was a true claim about what actually exists and what God has actually done.

The critical turn had ceased to function as a salutary examination of reason’s limits. It had become an intellectual customs office through which every metaphysical and theological claim had to pass. The officials at the border were willing to admit almost anything, provided it surrendered its claim to describe reality independently of the conditions imposed upon it by the knowing subject.

Yet I still did not fully understand what troubled me. That changed when I read the Critique of Judgment more seriously.

The Oddity of the Critique of Judgment

The Kritik der Urteilskraft changed everything for me.

I had expected Kant’s third Critique to complete the critical system by showing how nature and freedom, theoretical reason and practical reason, might be related. In one sense, that is precisely what it does. But the more I read it, the stranger Kant’s position appeared.

Reflecting judgment must proceed where no determinate universal is already available under which a particular can simply be subsumed. It seeks order. It searches for unity. It approaches nature as though nature were purposively arranged for our cognitive powers. Without this presupposition, inquiry itself would become impossible. We could not confidently seek systematic relations among empirical laws unless we proceeded as though nature were intelligibly ordered.

This was a profound insight. Indeed, I have come to believe that reflecting judgment is one of Kant’s most important discoveries.

But Kant’s treatment of the supersensible began to seem increasingly unstable to me. The unity sought by judgment seemed to require a supersensible ground. Nature and freedom, sensibility and reason, mechanism and purposiveness could not be brought into relation wholly within the field of empirically determined objects. Something beyond the sensible had to be thought.

Yet it could not be known theoretically as an actually existing reality possessing determinate characteristics. The supersensible was required by the architecture of reason, but its objective actuality could not be established as theoretical cognition. It had to be thought, while reason was simultaneously warned not to mistake the necessity of thinking it for knowledge of what actually obtains.

I remember thinking: what an odd position this is.

I must think the supersensible, but I must continually remind myself that I have not thereby established that the supersensible actually exists as I am thinking it. I must employ it to make sense of the unity of experience, nature, freedom, and purposiveness, but I must not permit it to become an object of legitimate metaphysical knowledge.

The supersensible was indispensable, yet officially unavailable.

Kant had not eliminated metaphysics. He had placed metaphysics under a peculiar form of quarantine.

The Greater Intellectual Burden

At some point, the Kantian restriction began to require more intellectual effort from me than the realism it was intended to replace.

I found it simpler to think that an actually existing supersensible reality might be imperfectly and finitely apprehended than to think that the supersensible must necessarily be invoked while its actuality remained theoretically suspended.

The realist position did not require the claim that finite minds comprehend the supersensible exhaustively. It required only the more modest claim that reality exceeds the empirical and that finite reason may possess limited, analogical, mediated, or revealed access to that reality.

This seemed to me less extravagant than the critical alternative.

Suppose one grants that human cognition is finite, conditioned, perspectival, and incapable of exhaustive knowledge. It does not follow that what exceeds those conditions is unreal, unknowable in every respect, or merely regulative. Limited access is still access. Mediated knowledge is still knowledge. Incomprehensibility does not entail non-reference. The failure to determine something completely does not mean that one cannot speak truly about it.

Kant had persuaded generations of thinkers that intellectual responsibility required us to distinguish carefully between what must be thought and what may be said to exist. But the distinction increasingly seemed to conceal a questionable inference. From the fact that the supersensible cannot be presented as an empirical object, it does not follow that it cannot actually obtain. From the fact that it cannot be mastered conceptually, it does not follow that it cannot disclose itself. From the fact that human reason cannot generate knowledge of it from its own resources, it does not follow that reality cannot determine the conditions under which it becomes known.

It was at this point that the critical project began to reverse itself in my thinking. Kant had wished to discipline reason by restricting its claims. But perhaps the deeper dogmatism lay in assuming that the conditions of finite human cognition determine in advance the forms under which reality may disclose itself.

The subject that had once appeared liberated by Kant now appeared burdened with policing the boundaries of being.

From Epistemic Limitation to Ontological Restriction

This distinction became increasingly important to me: epistemic limitation is not the same thing as ontological restriction.

Human beings do not know everything. They do not know anything exhaustively. They encounter reality under conditions they did not create and through conceptual, linguistic, historical, and embodied forms they cannot simply escape. Any serious philosophy must acknowledge this.

But it is one thing to say that our access to reality is conditioned. It is another to say that reality is available only as constituted by those conditions. The first is an acknowledgment of finitude. The second is an ontological conclusion drawn from an epistemological premise.

Theology has repeatedly failed to preserve this distinction.

Because God is not an empirical object, theologians have concluded that God cannot be spoken of objectively. Because divine action cannot be derived from the structures of theoretical reason, it has been relocated into moral consciousness, existential transformation, symbolic expression, communal grammar, historical interpretation, or religious experience. Because revelation cannot be secured by a universally available epistemology, its truth has often been redescribed as the self-understanding of a community.

These maneuvers differ sharply in genealogy — several arose precisely as protests against the Kantian settlement, against Schleiermacher, against a liberalism judged too accommodating to the critical turn — yet they converge, against their own intentions, on the prohibition they meant to escape: God may be meaningful, transformative, regulative, symbolically powerful, narratively indispensable, or grammatically necessary, but God may not, on any of these accounts, simply be the actual referent and satisfier of theological utterance.

Theology has too often accepted the proposition that it may speak meaningfully only by abandoning or severely qualifying its claim to speak truthfully about what obtains.

That is the mischief of the Kantian paradigm.

What Kant Still Taught Me

My departure from Kant was not a return to the kind of thought Kant called precritical. Nor do I believe that one can simply ignore the critical questions he raised.

Kant permanently taught me to ask about the conditions under which knowledge, judgment, and intelligibility are possible. He taught me that the human knower is not a transparent spectator of reality. He taught me that determining judgment does not exhaust the work of reason. Above all, the Critique of Judgment taught me that inquiry requires an orientation toward intelligibility that no determinate rule can completely supply.

What I eventually rejected was the placement of those conditions primarily within transcendental subjectivity and the corresponding suspension of the supersensible as an object of theoretical knowledge.

The conditions of intelligibility are not constituted by the subject. Subjects encounter intelligibility; they do not create it. Language participates in meaning; it does not generate the reality to which it refers. Formal systems display relations of derivability, but they do not secure their own interpretation, applicability, or truth. Communities authorize forms of speech, but they do not constitute the reality that satisfies those utterances.

The supersensible need not be treated as an intellectual fiction that reason must employ while continually resisting the temptation to regard it as real. It may be the real ground of the intelligibility that makes thought possible in the first place.

Kant’s reflecting judgment did not finally close the door upon metaphysics. It revealed why the door could never remain closed.

The Articles to Come

The essays that follow will examine the theological consequences of the Kantian paradigm.

They will consider how the restriction of theoretical reason gradually transformed doctrines into symbols, ontological claims into existential possibilities, divine action into human self-understanding, revelation into communal grammar, and truth into warranted utterance within a tradition.

They will also ask why contemporary philosophers have increasingly returned to metaphysics while many theologians remain embarrassed by ontological claims concerning God. Philosophy now speaks readily of modality, grounding, causation, properties, universals, possible worlds, and truthmakers. Theology, meanwhile, often hesitates to affirm that God is the actual referent and satisfier of its most fundamental assertions.

This is where the path away from Kant has brought me: not to a rejection of finitude, but to a refusal to let finitude legislate being. Reflecting judgment was right that the mind seeks a unity it does not manufacture. It was wrong only in supposing that the ground of that unity must remain forever unavailable to the very judgment that requires it. The supersensible Kant placed under permanent epistemic arrest is, I have come to think, the Logos under another description — indispensable because actual, not actual because indispensable.

The purpose of these articles will not be to dismiss Kant. I owe him far too much for that. The purpose will be to understand why a philosophy that once appeared to liberate theology eventually confined it, and why the path beyond Kant may require neither a naïve return to precritical thought nor another postcritical retrieval.

It may require something simpler and more difficult: the acknowledgment that reality is intelligible before we legislate the conditions under which we shall permit it to be known.

The next essay in this series will take up that asymmetry directly, asking how the Kant theology appropriated diverges from the Kant philosophy has since reconsidered — a divergence with a familiar shape: theological appropriation of a philosopher's thought tends to arrive only after that thought's own field has begun revising it.

Theological Education for a Church Moving South and a North Atlantic World in Transition

The following address was delivered at the Commencement Exercises of Christ School of Theology and Christ College on June 11, 2026. Although addressed to graduates, it reflects broader concerns regarding theological education, world Christianity, the Global South, and the future of Christian intellectual formation in the twenty-first century.

Distinguished faculty, honored guests, families who have prayed and waited and sacrificed, and, above all, the graduates of Christ School of Theology and Christ College: grace and peace to you.

I want to put a question to you today—not a question you will answer in this room or at this hour, but one you will spend the rest of your lives answering by the way you live, teach, preach, and serve. The question is this: What does it mean that you were here?

Not merely that you completed a curriculum, satisfied requirements, passed examinations, and earned the right to a new title. Those things matter. They are not nothing. But I mean something far larger. What does it mean, in the long arc of the church’s history and in the groaning and hoping of a world that does not yet know what it is waiting for, that you, in this decade and in this place, received the kind of theological formation you have received?

I want to spend these minutes trying to answer that question. To do so, I am going to ask you to think across two centuries.

I. The World You Are Entering

We are not given the luxury of imagining that history stands still. The world into which you graduate has been reshaped by what historian Philip Jenkins described as a seismic shift: a movement in the center of gravity of world Christianity without precedent in five hundred years.

The church of Jesus Christ, for five centuries dominated by its Northern and Western expressions, has moved south and east—to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, roughly two-thirds of the world's Christians live in what we now call the Global South.

As the Kenyan theologian John Mbiti observed decades ago, the centers of Christian vitality are no longer found primarily in Geneva, Paris, London, or New York. Increasingly, they are found in places such as Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Manila, and Lagos.

What once sounded like a prediction has become a description.

At the same time, here in our own North Atlantic world, the long age of cultural Christianity is ending. Churches are aging. Inherited loyalties are thinning. The institutional forms that carried theological education through much of the twentieth century will not, by themselves, carry it through the twenty-first.

I know what that can feel like. It can feel like loss, retreat, and decline. But despair is precisely the wrong response—not because the losses are unreal, but because those losses have opened something.

Karl Barth repeatedly reminded the church that it neither masters nor judges the Word of God. The church stands beneath that Word as its servant. When cultural scaffolding comes down, what remains is the Word. And the Word, as Scripture says, “is not bound” (2 Tim. 2:9).

The reduction of cultural Christianity in the North is not the defeat of the gospel. It may, in the strange economy of God, be one of the conditions under which the gospel once again becomes legible—not as cultural background noise, but as the startling, specific, demanding, and beautiful claim that God became flesh, died, and rose again, and that this changes everything.

Into that opening, the church needs people who can speak credibly and rigorously, with their whole minds and their whole hearts: people who have not merely inherited the faith but wrestled with it; who know why they believe what they believe; who can give an account of the hope that is in them; who have read the tradition deeply enough to stand in it and speak from it, not merely about it. That is what you have been formed to do.

II. The Treasure You Carry

I want you to understand what a rare and precious thing you hold. Theological education—genuine theological education, education that takes Scripture with full seriousness and brings to it the full discipline of the human mind—is in short supply in the world.

Andrew Walls, the great historian of world Christianity, devoted much of his life to sounding an alarm about this reality. The southward movement of Christianity creates an urgent need for theological leadership, Christian scholarship, and institutions capable of forming pastors, teachers, and thinkers for the rapidly growing churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The church is growing faster than it can train leaders. The result, in too many places, is faith that is wide but not deep—enthusiastic but undiscerning, vulnerable to exploitation, distortion, and the thousand substitutes that offer spiritual experience without theological substance.

You have been given substance. You have been given the languages of the tradition—its Scripture, its confessions, its centuries of reflection, argument, and prayer. You have been taught to read carefully, think precisely, and speak clearly. You have been formed not merely in information but in a habit of mind, a theological imagination, that can be brought to bear on any question, in any culture, and in any century.

Beneath all of it—beneath the languages, disciplines, and centuries of argument—your formation here rested on a single conviction: that theological language can speak truthfully about reality. When the church says, “Christ is risen,” it is not merely expressing a feeling, preserving a tradition, or marking an identity. It is making a claim about what is.

This institution was founded on that conviction. It exists because of it. Theology, as you have learned it here, is not the management of religious meaning or the adaptation of inherited symbols to contemporary taste. It is disciplined speech about God—under Scripture, within the tradition, accountable to truth.

Your task, therefore, is not, in the first instance, to make the gospel credible. It is to ask under what conditions the gospel is true, and then to speak faithfully within a reality you do not control.

This is not a small thing. It is, in fact, an almost embarrassingly large thing to have been given. And with it comes a responsibility proportionally large.

III. The Two Directions

I want to speak to you about two directions in which your formation will be needed, two horizons toward which you must face simultaneously, like a watchman guarding both the city's gate and its walls.

In the North Atlantic world, the church will likely be smaller in the coming decades. It need not be weaker. A church no longer upheld by cultural assumption must be upheld by genuine conviction, and that is, in many ways, a more honest and more theologically serious church.

But it will need pastors who can think and teachers who can explain, without defensiveness or embarrassment, why the faith of the Creed is not a relic but a reality; why the Incarnation is not mythology but metaphysics; why the Resurrection is not comfort but claim.

Charles Taylor has mapped with remarkable precision how the secular age arrived at a condition in which belief in God appears to many as merely one option among many—one choice in a supermarket of meaning.

Into that condition, the church is not helped by becoming louder or more entertaining. It is helped by becoming more serious. It is helped by recovering the question Dietrich Bonhoeffer posed from prison: What does Christian faith look like when it can no longer depend upon inherited cultural supports? It stands on what it actually is—the gospel of the Crucified and Risen One.

For that church, you are indispensable.

The growing church of the Global South is doing what the North has nearly forgotten how to do: it is proclaiming the gospel, and people are responding. Yet it faces the same challenge faced by the early church as it spread across the Mediterranean world: how to go deep; how to move from first proclamation to mature formation; how to develop theology that is genuinely African, genuinely Asian, genuinely Latin American—not a carbon copy of Northern categories, but a living encounter between the gospel and particular cultures, carried out with rigor, love, and fidelity to the apostolic witness.

This is where institutions of the North—with their libraries, disciplines, and centuries of accumulated learning—can become genuine partners: not overlords, not exporters of cultural imperialism dressed in theological clothing, but partners and learners.

The church of the Global South has much to teach the church of the North about vitality, proclamation, and the lived expectation that God actually acts in history. The traffic must run both ways.

You are equipped to travel in both directions.

IV. The Long View

Now I want you to think across two centuries—not just back, but forward.

Two hundred years from now, someone will write the history of theological education in the early twenty-first century. They will describe a moment of crisis and transition: the waning of old institutional forms in the North; the urgent, unmet needs of the burgeoning church in the South; the rise of digital education that made formation across vast distances suddenly possible; and the theological questions generated by technological change at a speed and depth not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

And they will ask: Who rose to that moment?

Who understood that the moment called not for retreat but for rigor—not for the lowering of standards in the hope of survival, but for the deepening of formation in the conviction that the church deserves the very best of what its teachers can give?

Who understood that accessibility and seriousness are not enemies but allies, and that the gospel can be proclaimed clearly without being proclaimed shallowly?

Who understood that the Word of God is not the property of any single culture or century, but belongs to every tribe and language and people and nation, and that theological education is one of the chief instruments by which that Word is received, understood, and faithfully handed on?

I believe—I am convinced—that some of those who rose to that moment were formed here: in institutions like this one; by faculty who cared enough to teach with everything they had; by students who cared enough to learn with everything they had; by a community that believed, against the evidence of institutional decline all around it, that theology matters.

Theology is not a museum of antique ideas but a living, truth-bearing enterprise concerned with the reality of God, the proclamation of the gospel, and the formation of faithful servants for Christ's church.

You are those students.

This is that institution.

And the moment you were formed for is the one you are now entering.

V. A Word About the Cost

I would be less than honest with you if I spoke only of the privilege and not of the cost.

Many of you have paid a great price to be here. You have given years of your lives, financial resources you could not easily afford, and midnight hours that others spent in leisure. Some of you have uprooted families, strained relationships, and carried doubt and weariness alongside your conviction. Some of you have wondered, in the darkest hours, whether any of it would amount to anything.

I want to speak to that doubt directly.

The Apostle Paul, writing from prison, said, "I have learned to be content with whatever I have." Learned—not always possessed, not simply received without struggle, but learned through suffering, failure, and the long disciplines of trust.

Formation is always costly. It is always slow. It often feels, in the middle of it, as though nothing is happening—as though you are simply enduring. And then one day you discover that the person on the other side of all that endurance is not who you were when you began.

You are not who you were when you began.

The tradition you have received is not simply academic content stored in your memory. It has shaped the way you see. It has given you eyes to look at the human situation—at suffering and joy, sin and grace, death and resurrection—and see it whole.

That is irreversible.

No one can take it from you.

You carry it into every room you enter, every conversation you have, every sermon you preach, and every life you touch.

Verbum Domini manet in aeternum.

The Word of the Lord endures forever.

And so, because it has been entrusted to you, you now bear the responsibility of carrying it faithfully into the places where God calls you.

VI. The Charge

And so I charge you.

Go and teach the church to think.

Go and help the church in the North to become the smaller, more serious, more genuinely evangelical community it is being called to become in this hour.

Go and stand beside the rising church of the Global South—not above it, not as experts condescending to pupils, but as partners and servants in the one holy catholic and apostolic mission.

Go and write the theology that this century needs: theology that does not evade the hard questions of artificial intelligence, ecological crisis, political fragmentation, and the slow hemorrhage of meaning in secular culture, but faces them with the full resources of the Christian tradition and the full confidence of the gospel.

Go and refuse the quiet bargain this age will offer you: to retain the vocabulary of the faith while relinquishing its claim. Where that bargain is accepted, theology does not immediately disappear. It continues—as institution, discourse, and activity—but it loses its object. Do not lose the object.

Go and remember that behind every theological question is a human being: a person made in the image of God, groping for light, hungry for truth, in need of the one thing that neither philosophy nor politics nor technology can provide—the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us.

Go and be ruthlessly faithful—not successful, faithful.

Faithfulness looks like failure more often than we admit, and it bears fruit more often than we see.

Athanasius was exiled five times. Luther was excommunicated. Bonhoeffer was hanged. The arc of the faithful life is not a smooth ascent. It bends, sometimes violently, and it is often in that bending that God does some of his deepest work.

Go and know that you do not go alone. You go as members of the body of Christ, which has been proclaiming this gospel for two thousand years and has not yet run out of breath.

You go carrying the prayers of the faculty who taught you, the love of the families who sustained you, and the witness of the saints who have gone before you.

You go, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1): Augustine, Luther, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Mbiti, Walls, and ten thousand others whose names we do not know, but whose faithfulness made our faithfulness possible.

And you go carrying the promise that "the one who calls you is faithful" (1 Thess. 5:24) and that "the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion" (Phil. 1:6).

Conclusion: The Word Is Not Bound

I want to close with a word about why institutions such as Christ School of Theology and Christ College matter in the history I have been describing.

History is not made only by the large and famous. More often, it is shaped by the faithful and the obscure: by the teacher in a small seminary who trains the bishop who later guides the church through a crisis; by the scholar in a modest institution whose ideas travel farther than she ever imagined; by the graduate who returns to a village, congregation, or city and builds a community of faith that, two generations later, sends its own graduates into the world to do the same.

We will not know, in our lifetimes, what God will do with the formation that has taken place here.

We do not need to know.

We need only to trust that the Word is not bound and that, when it is faithfully taught and faithfully received, it accomplishes what the Lord promises:

"So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isa. 55:11)

That is not a sentimental hope. It is a theological claim.

The gospel does not become true because it is believed. Rather, it is believed because it is true, and the reality to which it bears witness does not depend upon our recognition of it.

And you, standing here today, are evidence that someone believed that truth deeply enough to stake an institution upon it—and that you believed it deeply enough to stake a portion of your lives upon it as well.

For that faith, and for what you will do with it, I am profoundly grateful. The church is grateful. And I believe—indeed, I dare to say—that the Lord of the church, before whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, is not indifferent to what has happened here.

Go, then.

The task before you is larger than you can presently see. The church needs what you have been given. The world needs the truth entrusted to your care. The hour is urgent, the opportunities are immense, and the future remains open before the providence of God.

The Word is not bound.

Therefore, neither should your courage be.

Soli Deo Gloria.

The Theology of the Cross as Right Naming

Most discussions of Luther's theology of the cross begin with suffering. They tell us that God works through weakness rather than strength, through suffering rather than triumph, through hiddenness rather than glory. While all of this is true, it may not be the most fundamental point Luther is making.

My contention is that the heart of Luther's theology of the cross is not suffering. It is truthful judgment. 

The decisive text comes from the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, where Luther writes:

"The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is."

The contrast is striking because Luther does not say that the theologian of glory suffers too little or that the theologian of the cross suffers more. He says that one names reality falsely while the other names it truthfully. Simply put, the primary issue for the theologian of the cross is judging rightly. 

The theologian of glory lives within a distorted account of reality. He judges according to power, success, achievement, influence, and visible accomplishment. Strength appears self-evidently good. Weakness appears self-evidently bad. Success seems to indicate blessing. Failure seems to indicate judgment.

The problem is not that such judgments are irrational; it is that they are made according to a false model of the real, and it is the cross that reveals this.

At Calvary, divine power appears as weakness. Divine wisdom appears as foolishness. Divine victory appears as defeat. If one judges merely by appearances, then Good Friday can only be understood as catastrophe. Yet faith recognizes that precisely there, under the form of weakness and shame, God is accomplishing reconciliation with the world.

The theologian of the cross therefore learns a difficult discipline. Like Plato, she learns to say what is real apart from appearances to the contrary.  Accordingly, she claims:

• Sin is sin.
• Death is death.
• Judgment is judgment.
• The creature is creature.
• God is God.

The point sounds almost trivial until one recognizes how much energy human beings expend avoiding such naming. What do we humans do? 

• We rename sin as woundedness.
• We rename guilt as dysfunction.
• We rename death as transition.
• We rename rebellion as authenticity.                                                   
• We rename judgment as intolerance.

Our age is remarkably skilled at redescribing reality until the thing itself disappears beneath its preferred vocabulary.

This tendency is hardly limited to secular culture. The church is often tempted by the same impulse. We preserve theological grammar while quietly evacuating theological reference. We continue speaking of grace, resurrection, repentance, and Christ while becoming increasingly uncertain whether these words refer to realities outside our own religious practices.

The result is a culture of managed descriptions. Everything is interpreted, but nothing is named. The theology of the cross stands against this entire enterprise.

It insists that reality possesses a determinate contour independent of our descriptions of it. More importantly, it insists that this reality is disclosed most clearly in the crucified Christ. The cross becomes the criterion by which false naming is exposed and truthful naming becomes possible.

This is why the theology of the cross is not anti-rational. It is neither a celebration of paradox for its own sake, nor is it an invitation into theological obscurity. It is instead a discipline of intellectual honesty.

The theologian of the cross does not refuse to think, but refuses to allow thinking to be governed by false appearances. The theologian of the Cross refuses

• To call success faithfulness.
• To call power wisdom.
• To call self-justification righteousness.
• To call evil good and good evil.

Instead the theologian of the cross says what the thing is.

This is not merely an academic exercise, but the precondition for hearing the gospel. Accordingly, 

• Forgiveness can only be proclaimed where sin has been named.
• Resurrection can only be proclaimed where death has been acknowledged.
• Grace can only be proclaimed where judgment has been spoken.

The cross names in order to promise; it kills in order to make alive; it unmasks in order to redeem.

Luther's theology of the cross therefore remains profoundly relevant to our contemporary horizon. We inhabit an age of therapeutic management, technological control, institutional ambiguity, and semantic evasion. Everywhere we find pressure to rename reality into forms that are easier to bear. It is against all of this that the theologian of the cross stands. 

While such a theologian is not specialist in suffering, not a lover of paradox, and certainly not an enemy of reason, she is one who has been judged by the crucified and risen Christ and thereby set free to call a thing what it is.

Why Most Theological Education No Longer Knows What Theology Is

This essay arises from the work of the Christ School of Theology. For a broader account of its mission and theological rationale, see the Christ School of Theology.

The Crisis Beneath the Crisis

The deepest crisis in contemporary theological education is not financial, demographic, institutional, or ecclesiastical. It is theological. Beneath the visible anxieties of declining enrollment, budgetary strain, denominational fragmentation, and cultural marginalization lies a more fundamental disorder. Many theological institutions no longer know, with clarity and conviction, what theology itself is.

That judgment may sound severe, but it names a reality that presses upon anyone willing to look steadily at the present situation. The problem does not usually announce itself as confusion. Institutions speak readily and often eloquently of mission, ministry, leadership formation, spiritual growth, justice, service, and ecclesial renewal. They describe what they do, whom they serve, and why their work matters. Yet beneath this confident speech there remains a prior question that is too seldom asked and even more seldom answered: What kind of discourse is theology? Does theology make claims about reality? Does it say what is the case? Are its judgments true or false in any serious sense? And if they are, what would have to obtain for them to be true?

Where those questions are not faced, theology begins quietly to lose its object. It may continue to function institutionally. It may continue to produce courses, degrees, conferences, and graduates. It may continue to serve the church in a variety of recognizable ways. Yet the inner center has begun to give way. A school may remain busy, earnest, and religiously useful while no longer being fully certain what it means to educate theologically. Once that occurs, every other institutional uncertainty is intensified, because the school no longer possesses settled clarity concerning the very thing it claims to teach.

The Modern Reduction of Theology

This situation did not arise by accident. It is the result of a long and cumulative modern redescription of theological discourse. Over the course of generations, theology has been pressed to speak more modestly, more cautiously, and finally more evasively about its own object.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the language of value. On this view, theological claims do not describe what is the case, but rather articulate what has significance for human life. To confess that Christ is Lord is not chiefly to state something about reality, but to declare the incomparable value of Christ for the community of faith. Theology thus becomes the ordering of religious significance rather than the disciplined articulation of truth.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the analysis of experience. It becomes the reflective description of dependence, commitment, transformation, or communal consciousness. Theological language then functions as a way of rendering intelligible what persons or communities undergo in relation to the divine, or what they take themselves to undergo.

Sometimes theology has been reduced to the grammar of an ecclesial practice. In this construal, theological statements do not refer to objective reality so much as they operate within the rule governed speech of a believing community. Their validity lies less in truth than in coherence, less in reference than in authorized use, less in ontological seriousness than in communal intelligibility.

These approaches differ in important respects, but they share a common direction. Each weakens the bond between theology and reality. Each loosens the relation between theological language and what theology purports to name. Each moves theology away from truth bearing discourse and toward a more sheltered and less demanding mode of speech.

What is lost in this movement is not merely a theory of meaning. What is lost is theology itself.

What Happens to Schools When Theology Loses Its Object

Once theology no longer understands itself as discourse ordered toward reality, theological education is transformed from the inside out. The school may still teach doctrine, Scripture, history, and ministry. It may still cultivate piety, discipline, and pastoral skill. Yet the purpose of these activities has subtly shifted. Students are no longer being formed principally to speak truthfully about God, creation, sin, redemption, and the world. They are being formed to use a religious language competently, to inhabit a tradition intelligibly, and to function within a community of practice.

This work is not worthless. The church indeed requires formation, discipline, inheritance, and faithful practice. But when these become detached from theology’s primary obligation to truth, something decisive has been surrendered. Theological language becomes increasingly expressive, therapeutic, adaptive, and intraecclesial. It continues to function, but at a lower register. It can sustain discourse within a believing community while becoming progressively unable to say what is the case.

That inability is disastrous. The world beyond the church does not finally ask whether theology is moving, edifying, or coherent within its own circle. It asks what theology is about. It asks whether theological language refers, whether it makes claims, and whether it can account for itself as more than disciplined religious self description. When theology can no longer answer such questions, it loses public intelligibility. It may continue speaking, but it no longer knows the precise character of its own utterance.

The consequences return upon the church itself. A theological discourse that cannot in principle withstand the question of truth cannot indefinitely preserve its force even among believers. The church too lives within a world in which truth claims are tested, challenged, and compared. If theology cannot say what sort of claim it is making, it cannot long sustain confidence in those whom it teaches.

The First Question

For this reason, the first question confronting theological education is not practical but conceptual. Before strategy, before enrollment, before budgets, before institutional design, there stands a more fundamental inquiry: What kind of language is theology? When theology speaks, what kind of claim does it make? And what would have to be true of God, world, and language for theological speech to bear truth?

These questions must come first because everything else depends upon them. If they are not answered explicitly, they will be answered implicitly, and usually badly. Institutions will continue to speak as though theology were one thing while structuring their teaching as though it were another. They will retain the vocabulary of truth while quietly educating for something less than truth. They will invoke doctrine while hollowing out its ontological seriousness. In that way theology is not denied outright. It is thinned, displaced, and rendered increasingly weightless.

Renewal therefore cannot begin merely with better programs, more efficient administration, stronger branding, or more energetic recruitment. Theology cannot be rescued by management. It cannot be restored by institutional optimism alone. It must first recover its object. It must once again understand itself as discourse concerning God, God’s acts, and the relation of creation to its Creator. It must dare again to make claims that are not reducible to private spirituality, communal performance, or moral aspiration. It must recover the nerve to speak of reality.

That recovery will not remove difficulty. It will intensify it. The moment theology again claims to be truth bearing speech, it must face anew the hard questions of meaning, causation, reference, revelation, and interpretation. But those are precisely the questions theology ought never to have ceased asking. Better the difficulty of truth than the comfort of conceptual surrender.

Two Different Callings for a School

At this point every theological institution faces a decision. Is it chiefly teaching students to use theological language well within the life of the church? Or is it teaching them to make truthful judgments about reality through theological discourse? The difference is not small. It is determinative.

If the former is the true task, then the school will properly concentrate on formation, fluency, tradition, and ecclesial competence. It will teach students how to speak fittingly and faithfully within an inherited community of belief. It will cultivate the practices and habits that render such speech possible. There is dignity in this work. But it is not yet the full work of theology.

If the latter is the true task, then a more rigorous and demanding vocation emerges. Students must be taught not only what Christians have said, but what sort of reality Christian claims intend. They must learn to ask what it means for theological language to refer, what kind of causation divine action implies, what truth in theology can mean, and under what conditions theological assertions may be judged more than expressive, useful, or socially authorized. In this case the school is not merely training religious speakers. It is forming theologians.

Only the latter preserves theology as theology in the strong sense.

The Public Responsibility of Theology

This issue has become acute because theology no longer inhabits a culture willing to grant it authority in advance. It cannot presume its own seriousness. It must show that its claims are intelligible, that they are about something, and that they cannot be reduced to the religious interiority of the speaker or the cultural habits of a community.

To say this is not to deny the interpretive character of theology. Theology certainly interprets. It receives an inheritance, reflects upon it, and speaks it anew within changing historical and intellectual horizons. But interpretation must not become a solvent. Theology interprets only on the condition that what it interprets is not dissolved into the act of interpretation itself. Christian confession cannot be reduced to its use, its effect, or its communal resonance without ceasing to be confession in the strong sense.

Theology therefore has a public responsibility. It must be able to say, with conceptual seriousness, what sort of claim it makes when it speaks of God. It must not hide behind pious language when pressed on the question of truth. It must not substitute fluency for reference, sincerity for ontology, or usefulness for reality. If it does, then it may continue to function religiously, but it will no longer know itself theologically.

The Decision Before Us

We therefore stand before a stark and unavoidable choice. Shall theology become primarily a language of identity, practice, and communal self understanding? Or shall it recover itself as disciplined discourse concerning God, revelation, world, and truth? Shall it rest content with being meaningful inside a protected circle, or shall it once again risk speaking about what is the case?

No school can evade this decision indefinitely. If it does not know what theology is, it cannot know what kind of students it is forming, what kind of faculty it requires, what sort of curriculum it ought to build, or what future it should seek. The question is not peripheral. It is architectonic. Everything else depends upon it.

For that reason, the crisis of theological education is not first a crisis of money, scale, or structure. It is a crisis of self understanding. It is a crisis concerning the very nature of theology. Until that is addressed, every practical reform remains unstable, because the institution has not yet decided what work it exists to do.

Conclusion

Theological education will not be renewed by technique alone. It will not be saved by administrative efficiency, by therapeutic ministerial language, or by institutional ingenuity severed from theological clarity. It can endure only if it knows again what theology is: a disciplined discourse ordered toward truth, speaking of God, God’s works, and the world before God.

Where that conviction is restored, much else may yet be rebuilt. Intellectual confidence may return. Curricula may recover coherence. Faculty and students may again know what kind of labor they share. The school may once more stand before church, academy, and public with a seriousness proportionate to its calling.

Where that conviction is not restored, institutions may continue for a time to speak in theological accents while no longer knowing what theology is.

What Can You Study at the Christ School of Theology?

This essay arises from the work of the Christ School of Theology. For a broader account of the School’s mission and theological rationale, see the earlier posts in this series.

There are theological schools that can describe their purpose in noble and elevated language, yet leave unanswered the most practical of questions: What, precisely, can one study there? A school may speak of formation, tradition, mission, service, and excellence, and still never make sufficiently clear what kind of intellectual and theological labor it actually offers. That clarity matters. If the Christ School of Theology is to be understood rightly, then it must be known not only why it exists, but also what sort of study it makes possible.

The answer is that the Christ School of Theology offers a coherent range of theological and academic pathways ordered to the formation of pastors, scholars, teachers, leaders, and serious lay Christians. Its graduate offerings include the Master of Ministry, Master of Chaplain Ministry, Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, Master of Sacred Theology, Doctor of Ministry, and Doctor of Philosophy. Alongside these stand undergraduate and certificate pathways through Christ College, including the Associate of Arts, Bachelor of Arts, and certificate programs. Taken together, these offerings make clear that CST is not simply a seminary in the narrow sense, nor merely a graduate division detached from broader Christian formation. It is a theological school with multiple levels of entry and multiple forms of vocation in view.

That breadth is not accidental. It reflects a judgment about the needs of the Church and the age. The Church does not require only one kind of laborer. It requires pastors who can preach and teach, scholars who can think deeply and write carefully, chaplains who can carry the Gospel into institutions of suffering and service, teachers who can hand on the tradition, and lay Christians whose intellectual and theological formation equips them for faithfulness in family, society, and congregation. Nor does every vocation begin from the same point. Some students arrive seeking ordination. Some come in search of advanced academic work. Some are second-career students discerning a call. Some begin with undergraduate study. Some seek focused certificates rather than full degrees. A theological school that takes the Church seriously must make room for this variety without surrendering seriousness of purpose.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of these offerings as a mere catalog of options. The deeper unity of the School lies elsewhere. What the Christ School of Theology seeks to do better than most theological schools is to hold together two tasks that are too often torn apart. On the one hand, theology must know the Christian tradition deeply. It must know Scripture, doctrine, history, confession, and proclamation. On the other hand, theology must understand with equal seriousness the intellectual and cultural horizon into which that tradition must now be spoken. Some schools preserve the tradition by retreating from careful study of the present age. Others immerse themselves in the contemporary horizon and thereby lose the depth, grammar, and claims of the tradition itself. The Christ School of Theology refuses both temptations. It proceeds from the conviction that theology is irreducibly hermeneutical: the disciplined effort to interpret the horizon of the Christian tradition into the contemporary horizon without surrendering the integrity of either.

That judgment explains why students here study not only biblical and doctrinal materials, but also philosophy, ethics, church history, pastoral theology, and the cultural and intellectual conditions under which Christian claims must now be heard. Theology cannot be content merely to preserve a body of inherited statements, as though the task were only archival. Nor may it content itself with adapting Christian language to the sensibilities of the age, as though theology were chiefly a matter of cultural translation. Its labor is more demanding. It must understand the classical Christian tradition deeply enough to speak it faithfully, and it must understand the aporias of the present deeply enough to know how that tradition must now be proclaimed, defended, and taught.

This is why the graduate programs have the shape they do. The Master of Divinity, for example, serves those preparing for pastoral ministry, where biblical knowledge, theological judgment, historical awareness, and practical wisdom must be held together. The Master of Arts serves those seeking concentrated theological study that may lead toward teaching, service in the church, or further academic work. The Master of Sacred Theology, Doctor of Ministry, and Doctor of Philosophy each represent more advanced forms of theological labor, whether in scholarly research, ministerial reflection, or the disciplined pursuit of theology at the highest academic levels. These are not interchangeable degrees. Each belongs to a different vocational and intellectual contour, yet all presuppose that theology is something to be studied rigorously, not merely admired from a distance.

The same is true, in a different register, for the undergraduate and certificate offerings. The undergraduate side exists because Christian intellectual formation should not begin only once a student has already reached seminary or graduate work. A classical Christian education at the undergraduate level can prepare students for ministry, for further theological study, or for service to neighbor in a range of settings. The certificates likewise serve students whose callings, circumstances, or immediate aims require serious study in a form more focused than a full degree program. Here again the School’s breadth is not dilution. It is an attempt to serve distinct vocational needs without abandoning theological substance.

How, then, does such study actually occur? The Christ School of Theology teaches through a live, online, synchronous model rather than through a merely self-paced or content-delivery approach. Students and faculty meet in real time. They can question, clarify, respond, and press claims in the presence of one another. The point is not convenience for its own sake, but accountability, encounter, and seriousness. Theology is not learned merely by absorbing information. It is learned where one must answer for what one says, where distinctions are demanded, where confusion is exposed, and where the mind is pushed beyond repetition into judgment. The School’s educational form is therefore ordered toward rigor rather than dilution, and toward presence rather than educational solitude.

This point deserves emphasis because it bears directly on the School’s larger vocation. The Christ School of Theology does not understand itself as existing only for one ecclesial constituency, however important that constituency may be. It stands within the classical Christian tradition from a Lutheran perspective, but it does so with a view toward theology’s three publics: the church, the academy, and the general public. For that reason, study at CST is never merely internal or tribal. Students are not being formed simply to repeat acceptable formulas within a protected ecclesial setting. They are being formed to speak Christian truth as truth—to the Church, certainly, but also in the academy and before the world.

This is why the School’s deeper theological accents matter even in describing what can be studied here. Theological realism, semantic realism, theophysical causation, a theology of nature, and the perspicuity of Scripture are not decorative themes. They are operating convictions that orient the School’s work. They express a refusal to reduce theology to private value, communal self-description, or churchly performance cut off from the common world. A theological language that functions only on religious occasions while spinning idly before the academy and the public cannot finally mediate the external Word of God. The Word addresses human beings in the world they actually inhabit. It comes from without. It is not owned by the Church, but creates the Church. To study theology well, then, is to learn how Christian claims may again be spoken with ontological seriousness, semantic clarity, and evangelical force.

From this perspective, the question What can you study at the Christ School of Theology? has a twofold answer. One may answer first in institutional terms: one may study undergraduate programs, certificates, pastoral ministry, chaplaincy, theological arts, advanced ministerial practice, and doctoral scholarship. That answer is necessary and true. But one may also answer more deeply: one may study here how to think theologically in a time when theology can no longer assume its own intelligibility. One may study Scripture and tradition, but also the conditions under which Scripture and tradition are to be proclaimed now. One may study the Church’s inheritance, but also how that inheritance addresses a world in which transcendence has grown dim, causation has been severed from meaning, and theological language is too often treated as expressive residue rather than truth-bearing speech.

The Christ School of Theology offers this work because the age requires it. It requires more than the preservation of churchly vocabulary. It requires more than managerial training or spiritual uplift. It requires the disciplined formation of men and women who can read carefully, think clearly, judge soundly, and speak faithfully. It requires pastors, scholars, teachers, and lay Christians who understand both the greatness of the Christian tradition and the strangeness of the world into which that tradition must now be spoken.

That is what one may study at the Christ School of Theology.

And anything less would be unworthy both of the tradition it serves and of the age to which it must speak.