Abstract
Kant’s turn to the subject has changed the epistemological conditions for theology. Four intellectual backgrounds of objections are examined: an Aristotelian and Thomistic teleological order of nature (1); Augustinianism based on original sin in which human agency is completely attributed to God’s grace (2); a Hegelian critique of the deontological conception of an “unconditional ought” which also puts Kant’s postulate of the existence of God into question (3); the combination in Radical Orthodoxy of a postmodern critique of the subject, an Augustinian view of human nature, and a monistic understanding of the Trinity (4). Their different diagnoses why Kant’s work constitutes a cul-de-sac are contrasted with theological positions that welcome it as a watershed: its move from ontology to human subjectivity; from a biologically transmitted inescapable sin to a freedom for good and evil; from a strict reciprocity to an unlimited scope of ethics that is faced with the question of meaning; and from condemning the secular as “heretical” to defining it as the genuine space of the free human counterparts created by God, according to Duns Scotus’s late medieval theology which anticipates Kant’s concept of autonomy. The standard by which theologies are judged is how they do justice to the New Testament’s message of salvation by Jesus Christ. The Conclusion argues that Kant’s turn to freedom in its unconditionality and finitude has opened up a thought form in which the truth of the Gospel finds more adequate categories of understanding than in those of earlier eras.
Highlights
В своем вкладе в культурные изменения и в реакциях на них религиозные традиции представляют собой тестовые образцы для изучения новых формулировок основного содержания, заключенного в соответствующих основаниях этих традиций
The first background is the framework of Aristotelian and subsequent Thomistic thought, themselves examples of major innovation in their own eras; the second, the turn that Augustine gave to patristic theology
These two models illustrate the enormity of the shift required in Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies to understand the new ground being proposed by Kant: from a substance ontological view of humans in nature to the new starting point of human freedom (1), and from an analysis of the human creature in its inescapable inherited original sin to a different conception of agency and a non-competitive appreciation of divine grace (2)
Summary
В своем вкладе в культурные изменения и в реакциях на них религиозные традиции представляют собой тестовые образцы для изучения новых формулировок основного содержания, заключенного в соответствующих основаниях этих традиций. The first background is the framework of Aristotelian and subsequent Thomistic thought, themselves examples of major innovation in their own eras; the second, the turn that Augustine gave to patristic theology These two models illustrate the enormity of the shift required in Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies to understand the new ground being proposed by Kant: from a substance ontological view of humans in nature to the new starting point of human freedom (1), and from an analysis of the human creature in its inescapable inherited original sin to a different conception of agency and a non-competitive appreciation of divine grace (2). The theological ethicists who defend the Aristotelian understanding of practical reason as phronesis, with its basis in a community-oriented anthropology and its specification of contextually formed virtues, argue for taking historical change in defining “nature”, social and gender roles seriously (1.1) Those who hold the new foundations established by the three Critiques to be unrelinquishable, define its validity against this reflected approach of a hermeneutical ethics (1.2)
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