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.
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