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 preceding essay distinguished the two principal schools of German neo-Kantianism. The Marburg school, represented most prominently by Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and later Ernst Cassirer, understood philosophy chiefly as a transcendental reflection upon the procedures through which the sciences constitute their objects. The Southwest or Baden school, associated with Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, resisted the Marburg tendency to regard reality as wholly homogeneous with the logical activity through which it is known, turning instead toward value, validity, historical individuality, and the peculiar conditions under which cultural knowledge becomes possible. The contrast between the schools was genuine, particularly with respect to whether anything irreducible to conceptual constitution remains as a constraint upon thought.
It would nevertheless be misleading to conclude that modern Protestant theology simply chose one school and rejected the other. The history is both more complicated and more consequential than that. Theology did not receive Marburg and Baden as two completed systems, compare their respective merits, and then declare itself for Cohen against Rickert. It appropriated elements from both, sometimes directly and sometimes through broader currents of nineteenth-century thought, and fashioned from them a theological synthesis more durable than either philosophical school in isolation.
From Marburg theology received the conviction that no object is simply available apart from the forms and procedures through which it becomes an intelligible object. From Baden it received an account of value, historical individuality, and validity that allowed religious claims to retain seriousness even when they could no longer be defended as theoretical judgments concerning a supersensible reality. The result was a theology in which God could remain religiously and normatively decisive while becoming increasingly difficult to affirm as the independently existing referent of theological propositions.
Theology came, in effect, to inhabit a Baden world while speaking of a Marburg God.
By this I do not mean that the theologians involved read Cohen and Rickert with equal care, or that the history can be reconstructed as a straightforward line of influence from the two philosophical schools into a settled theological position. Albrecht Ritschl’s principal theological work, for example, was already substantially formed before either neo-Kantian school achieved its mature institutional identity. Ritschl cannot responsibly be described as having chosen between Marburg and Baden. His sources were more various, including Kant, Schleiermacher, Lotze, historical criticism, and a sustained opposition to speculative theology. Yet Ritschl established the theological problematic to which the two neo-Kantianisms would supply increasingly refined philosophical expression. His distinction between theoretical judgments and value-judgments made it possible for theology to withdraw from metaphysical speculation concerning the being of God while retaining strong judgments about God’s significance for reconciliation, moral freedom, and the coming kingdom.
Ritschl did not intend this as a surrender to private subjectivity. He believed that Christian value-judgments possessed objectivity within the historical and practical relations in which faith arose. Nevertheless, the movement of thought was decisive. God was no longer approached primarily through assertions concerning what God is independently of God’s significance for us. God was approached through the value God possesses within the nexus of Christian reconciliation and moral existence. The qualification “for us,” however necessary to Christian proclamation, began to carry a philosophical burden it had not borne in earlier theology. It no longer clarified the soteriological relation between God and the believer alone; it increasingly determined the conditions under which God could become a theological object at all.
Here the later synthesis of Marburg and Baden becomes intelligible. Marburg could explain why no object is available outside the conceptual and methodological procedures through which it is constituted for knowledge. Baden could explain why the objects of religion and history need not be constituted according to the law-seeking procedures of mathematical natural science. Together they allowed theology to claim that God is objectively significant without being theoretically knowable as a supersensible reality existing independently of the religious relation.
This was not a crude compromise. It was one of the most sophisticated intellectual achievements of modern theology, and its durability should not be underestimated. It preserved the dignity of theology in an academy increasingly governed by the natural sciences and historical criticism. It allowed theologians to acknowledge the critical restriction upon speculative metaphysics without reducing religion to arbitrary feeling. It granted religious judgments a kind of objectivity grounded in value, history, and communal significance rather than in the direct cognition of a metaphysical object. Theology could thus retain God-language while redefining what theological objectivity was understood to mean.
The difficulty is that objective significance and objective truth are not the same thing.
Constitution and the Marburg Object
The Marburg school began not with the isolated knowing subject but with what Cohen called the fact of science. The sciences had achieved genuine knowledge, and the philosophical question was therefore not whether knowledge was possible in the abstract, but what principles must be presupposed in the successful construction of scientific objectivity. Philosophy was not to speculate beyond the sciences about an independently existing world whose structure might or might not correspond to thought. Its task was to reconstruct the logical conditions through which the sciences constitute objects as objects of knowledge.
This position must not be confused with psychological idealism. Cohen and Natorp were not suggesting that individual minds invent worlds according to their private inclinations. The activity of constitution belonged to objective thought, expressed in the lawful and indefinitely progressive development of scientific cognition. The scientific object was not created by personal imagination. It emerged through the increasing determination of relations within a systematic order of knowledge.
Yet this very account altered the meaning of objectivity. The object was no longer first given as an independently structured reality to which thought must conform. It became the terminus, always provisional, of the process through which thought determined its object according to law. Natorp sharpened the point by denying that cognition begins with some conceptually unformed material standing over against thought as an external constraint. There is no fully determinate object in itself waiting behind the process of cognition to be discovered as it already is. The thing-in-itself functions instead as the limit of the endless process of determination, the never wholly completed task toward which knowledge advances.
The theological attraction of this position is not difficult to understand. If the object of knowledge is inseparable from the process of its constitution, then the object of theology need not be sought as a supersensible entity standing behind Christian faith and independently available for metaphysical inspection. God may be understood as the object constituted within the religious, moral, historical, or symbolic activity by which Christian faith becomes intelligible to itself.
This does not require theology to say that God is invented. No responsible theologian within this tradition would have accepted so simple a characterization. The religious object is constituted through structures larger than an individual believer: through moral consciousness, historical revelation, ecclesial tradition, communal language, or the symbolic forms of culture. God is not the product of an isolated imagination. Nevertheless, God becomes available as an object only within these structures, and the question of what God might be apart from them becomes correspondingly difficult to state.
The traditional realist question asks whether theological discourse refers to a reality that exists and acts independently of the discourse through which it is apprehended. Within the Marburg framework, however, this question appears to request an object outside the conditions under which anything can count as an object. It asks what God is apart from the theological, historical, and religious relations through which God becomes intelligible. The question is then judged not merely difficult but confused. There is no legitimate standpoint from which the object could be compared with its constitution, because the object is nothing other than what is progressively determined within the process of knowing.
Theology could therefore retain a robust language of objectivity while suspending the question of independent actuality. God remained the objective correlate of religious consciousness or Christian faith, but objectivity had come to mean validity within a lawful structure of constitution rather than correspondence to a reality that precedes and exceeds that structure.
The language remained realist in appearance, while the conditions of realism had quietly changed.
Value, Validity, and the Baden Alternative
The Baden school resisted Marburg’s attempt to understand all objectivity through the homogeneous activity of thought. Windelband and Rickert were particularly concerned with the status of history and culture, domains in which the individuality and significance of an object cannot be captured by subsuming it under universal natural laws. The difference between the natural sciences and the historical sciences was not simply a difference in subject matter. It concerned two distinct ways in which reality becomes intelligible.
Natural science seeks what is general and repeatable. Historical inquiry seeks what is individual and significant. A physicist may consider an event as an instance of a universal causal relation, while a historian considers that same event in the singular configuration of circumstances that makes it historically meaningful. Historical knowledge therefore requires selection. Not every occurrence becomes historically significant merely because it happened. The historian identifies and organizes events through their relation to values that render them worthy of attention.
The appeal to value did not mean that historical judgment was merely subjective. Rickert was determined to distinguish validity from the psychological occurrence of judgment. A proposition does not become valid because someone happens to believe it. Its claim upon thought exceeds the empirical act in which it is affirmed. The distinction between being and validity, inherited in significant measure from Lotze, allowed the Baden school to speak of a normative order irreducible both to physical existence and to psychological preference.
This provided theology with intellectual resources that Marburg alone could not supply. Christianity is irreducibly historical. Its central claims concern particular persons, events, texts, and communities. Jesus of Nazareth cannot be reduced to an instance of a general law. The exodus, the incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection are not repeatable natural regularities. Their theological significance lies precisely in their particularity.
If the methods of the natural sciences supplied the only legitimate form of objectivity, Christian theology would be forced either to become an inadequate natural science or to retreat into private religious sentiment. Baden offered a third possibility. Historical and religious judgments could claim objective validity because they apprehended individual realities in relation to values whose normative significance was not reducible to empirical fact.
The gain was considerable. Theology could take history seriously without surrendering all claims to normativity. It could affirm that an event possesses unique religious significance even though that significance cannot be derived from natural law. It could speak of Jesus Christ as the bearer of unsurpassable value without pretending that historical criticism, operating by its own procedures, could establish a metaphysical doctrine of incarnation.
Yet the distinction between being and validity also created a profound ambiguity. A claim might be valid without the character of its validity being grounded in a corresponding state of affairs. Value could supply normative significance without deciding the ontological question. The theological judgment could be binding for faith while the question of whether its object exists independently of that judgment remained suspended.
Theology learned from Baden that the truth of religion need not be measured by the procedures of natural science. That lesson was necessary. It also learned, however, to speak as though validity could bear a theological weight that only reality could finally sustain.
The Construction of the Hybrid
The Marburg and Baden contributions could now be joined. From Marburg came the thesis that the object is inseparable from the process through which it is constituted for knowledge. From Baden came the thesis that the objects of religion, history, and culture are constituted through relations of value and significance rather than through the universal laws sought by natural science.
The theological object consequently became that which is constituted as religiously valid within a historical and cultural field of meaning.
This formulation permitted theology to avoid both metaphysical realism and private subjectivism. God was not treated as an entity available to speculative cognition, but neither was God reduced to a passing feeling within the individual believer. The objectivity of God was secured through structures that transcended the individual: the history of Israel, the person of Jesus, the moral community, the church’s proclamation, the religious consciousness, or the inherited symbolic world of Christian faith.
The synthesis was sufficiently flexible to assume many forms. In one theologian, the decisive structure might be moral experience; in another, historical revelation; in another, existential self-understanding; in another, ecclesial language or cultural symbol. What these forms shared was not a common doctrine of God but a common restriction upon how theological objectivity could be understood. God could be objectively significant insofar as God was constituted within a valid structure of religious meaning. Whether God also existed and acted independently of that structure was no longer the question theology was prepared to answer directly.
The resulting ambiguity can be seen in the questions the synthesis permitted theologians to postpone. Is God the independently existing source of the validity encountered in faith, or is “God” the name faith gives to the experience of ultimate validity? Does an event become revelation because God acts within it, or does it become revelation when it is apprehended as bearing unsurpassable religious significance? Is Jesus Christ of unique value because he is the incarnate Son of God, or is the confession that he is the incarnate Son of God the symbolic articulation of the unique value encountered in him?
These alternatives were seldom stated so sharply, because the purpose of the theological synthesis was precisely to prevent them from becoming unavoidable. Traditional language could be retained while its ontological force was transferred into another register. The confession remained, but its truth was interpreted through value, validity, historical significance, or the transformation it effected in the believer.
The theological sentences had not disappeared. Their satisfaction conditions had become elusive.
Herrmann and the Certainty of Faith
Wilhelm Herrmann is particularly important because his work stands near the institutional and intellectual intersection of these developments. Herrmann taught theology at Marburg while Cohen and Natorp were elaborating the philosophical program associated with the university. It would be too simple to treat him as the theological representative of the Marburg school, and the directions of influence were more complex than any such designation would suggest. Nevertheless, Herrmann participated in the same intellectual environment and shared its determination to secure objectivity without returning to speculative metaphysics.
Herrmann sought a certainty of faith that could not be destroyed by historical skepticism, yet he did not believe such certainty could be established through metaphysical demonstration or historical proof. Historical criticism might provide information concerning Jesus, but historical probability could never produce the unconditional certainty proper to faith. Faith arose when the believer encountered the inner life of Jesus as morally compelling and personally decisive.
Herrmann did not regard this encounter as arbitrary. The believer did not freely invent the religious object. Jesus confronted the believer through the historically mediated testimony of the Christian community, and the moral power of his life became inwardly present. Yet the object of faith was constituted as the object of faith only within this encounter. The theological identity of Jesus could not be detached from the act in which the believer apprehended his significance.
Here the Marburg–Baden synthesis appears with particular clarity. Jesus is historically individual and irreducible to general natural law, as the Baden emphasis upon historical singularity requires. His religious significance possesses a claim upon the believer that is not reducible to psychological preference. Yet the theological object emerges within the structure through which the believer encounters Jesus as the decisive revelation of God. Certainty is not grounded in the publicly demonstrable truth of a metaphysical proposition. It is grounded in the event through which Jesus becomes religiously certain for the subject.
The advantage of this position is considerable. Herrmann does not make faith dependent upon speculative proofs unavailable to most believers. He does not reduce Christianity to the acceptance of historical propositions whose probability could never produce religious certainty. He seeks to preserve the immediacy and seriousness of faith.
The difficulty is equally considerable. If theological certainty arises only within the constituting event of faith, it becomes uncertain how theology can distinguish between the truth of its object and the power of the believer’s relation to that object. The fact that Jesus becomes inwardly certain does not yet tell us whether the theological assertions made about Jesus are satisfied by what Jesus actually is. The transformation of the believer is not identical with the truth of the claims through which that transformation is interpreted.
Herrmann safeguards the certainty of faith by relocating it. What he cannot fully secure is the independent actuality of what faith confesses.
Troeltsch and the Historical World
Ernst Troeltsch developed the problem from another direction. He accepted the radical consequences of historical consciousness more fully than many of his contemporaries. Christianity belonged to history and could not exempt itself from historical comparison. Its doctrines, institutions, texts, and practices arose under contingent conditions, and the historian could not suspend ordinary historical methods when approaching Christian claims.
Yet historicism threatened to dissolve every normative judgment into the cultural conditions of its origin. If each religion expressed only its historical situation, Christianity could claim no more than local significance. The Baden philosophy of history supplied Troeltsch with a way to resist this conclusion. Historical knowledge was never a mere inventory of causally related facts. It depended upon selection according to value, and historical individuality became intelligible through relations of significance not reducible to natural explanation.
Troeltsch could therefore acknowledge the relativity of Christianity as a historical phenomenon while continuing to assess its comparative religious value. Christianity might be judged the most adequate or comprehensive realization of religious truth available within the history of religions, even though its emergence remained historically conditioned.
Once again the intellectual achievement should not be minimized. Troeltsch refused to protect Christian theology by isolating it from historical inquiry. He accepted the universality of historical method and nevertheless attempted to preserve theological normativity. His project represented a form of intellectual honesty often absent from more defensive theologies.
But the same ambiguity persisted. The truth of Christianity was increasingly expressed through its comparative adequacy as a realization of religious value. The question of whether its central propositions referred to acts of God that occurred independently of their historical and cultural reception receded from view. Christianity could be regarded as the highest synthesis of religious value without the theologian having to establish that God had acted as Christian proclamation said God had acted.
History became the arena in which religious meaning appeared, but divine agency became increasingly difficult to distinguish from the significance history acquired under religious interpretation.
The Survival of the Neo-Kantian Structure
Neo-Kantianism ceased to dominate German academic philosophy after the First World War. Phenomenology, existential philosophy, logical empiricism, and renewed ontological inquiry displaced the schools that had governed philosophy during the preceding decades. Crowell’s observation that neo-Kantianism entered the lore of Continental philosophy as the father who had to be slain captures the retrospective narrative well. Phenomenology and existential ontology were presented as liberations from a sterile philosophy of consciousness, method, and epistemological mediation.
Yet the theological structure fashioned from Marburg and Baden survived the apparent death of its philosophical parents.
It survived because the structure could migrate into conceptual vocabularies that seemed to reject neo-Kantianism. Phenomenology could replace the language of constitution with the language of intentionality, manifestation, or disclosure. Existential theology could replace value-consciousness with authentic self-understanding and decision. Hermeneutics could replace the transcendental subject with historically effected consciousness. Symbolic theology could replace categories with symbols. Postliberal theology could replace individual consciousness with the grammar and practices of the ecclesial community.
These changes were real. One should not collapse Heidegger, Bultmann, Tillich, Gadamer, and Lindbeck into a single undifferentiated neo-Kantian position. Each rejected important elements of the earlier settlement, and each opened questions the neo-Kantians had not adequately considered.
Nevertheless, a deeper continuity remained. Theological reality was still approached through the conditions under which it became intelligible to consciousness, history, language, or community. The site of constitution changed, but the correlation between the object and the conditions of its disclosure endured. What Marburg had treated as constitution and Baden as validity reappeared as event, symbol, horizon, grammar, or form of life.
Neo-Kantianism could therefore disappear as an acknowledged philosophical allegiance while continuing to govern the range of questions theology considered legitimate. The theologian might repudiate the philosophy of consciousness and still assume that there is no theological object apart from the event of disclosure. The theologian might reject liberal individualism and still assume that truth is inseparable from the grammar of the believing community. The old subject could be displaced without restoring a reality capable of determining the conditions of its own appearance.
The father had been slain, but the structure of his household remained.
Significance and Satisfaction
The deepest problem in the neo-Kantian theological synthesis is not its attention to consciousness, history, value, or culture. Theology must attend to all of them. Christian claims are made by finite subjects, within historical communities, through inherited languages, under conditions that shape both their formulation and reception. No adequate theology can simply step outside mediation.
The problem arises when the conditions under which a claim becomes meaningful are treated as sufficient conditions for its truth.
A theological utterance may possess profound significance without being true. It may transform the believer, orient a community, disclose a moral possibility, or organize a culture without being satisfied by the reality it asserts. The power of a sentence does not establish its reference. The validity of a practice does not donate the object toward which the practice is directed. The historical importance of a confession does not make the confession true.
The sentence “God raised Jesus from the dead” does more than express the hope of the Christian community. It identifies an agent and attributes an action. Its meaning is not exhausted by the existential possibilities it opens, the liturgical practices it authorizes, or the communal identity it sustains. It is true only if God raised Jesus from the dead.
Similarly, the confession that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is not true because it expresses the unsurpassable value encountered in Jesus. It is true if Jesus Christ is the Son of God. The value encountered may be evidence, consequence, or mode of apprehension, but it cannot substitute for the reality that satisfies the confession.
The neo-Kantian synthesis could explain with great subtlety how theological language acquires meaning and validity. What it could not explain from within its own resources was how theological language is made true by a reality not constituted through the language, consciousness, or history in which it appears.
This is the distinction theology must recover: the distinction between the conditions under which a claim becomes intelligible and the reality by virtue of which it is true.
Beyond Marburg and Baden
The path beyond this synthesis does not require theology to discard everything it learned from either school. Marburg was right to reject the notion that knowledge is merely the passive copying of an already articulated world. Concepts, judgments, theories, and models actively organize what becomes intelligible to us. Theological knowledge is mediated, and theology must examine the forms of that mediation.
Baden was right to insist that historical and cultural realities cannot be reduced to instances of universal natural law. Historical individuality, value, and significance are irreducible features of human understanding. Theology cannot speak responsibly of Jesus Christ, Israel, the church, or revelation without attending to singularity and history.
But neither insight warrants the conclusion that the conditions of intelligibility constitute the being that becomes intelligible. Mediation does not create its referent. Value does not generate existence. Validity does not replace truth.
A realist theology can acknowledge that God is known only under conditions without claiming that those conditions constitute God. It can acknowledge that revelation is historically mediated without reducing divine action to historical meaning. It can acknowledge that doctrine possesses a grammar without treating grammatical coherence as sufficient for truth. It can acknowledge that faith receives its object without claiming that faith produces the object it receives.
The direction of dependence must therefore be reversed. God is not real because God is religiously valid. God is religiously valid because God is real. Jesus Christ is not the Son of God because the church’s language constitutes him as its unsurpassable religious object. The church confesses him because he is the Son of God. The resurrection is not true because it generates Christian hope and authentic existence. Christian hope is possible because God raised Jesus from the dead.
This reversal does not return theology to an uncritical metaphysics. It does not deny the finitude of human knowledge or the historical conditions of theological language. It refuses only to allow those conditions to legislate what may exist and act. It affirms that reality may precede its apprehension, determine the conditions of its disclosure, and satisfy claims that no human subject or community could make true by its own constituting activity.
The next essay will consider how this neo-Kantian structure survived its supposed overthrow by migrating into existential theology. The conceptual vocabulary changed dramatically as value gave way to existence, consciousness to disclosure, and judgment to decision. The restriction upon theological reference, however, remained substantially intact.
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