The Kant Theology Kept

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

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.