Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Moral Theology of Mordecai Kaplan and Hermann Cohen

Abstract

In this essay, I seek to highlight the continuities between Mordecai Kaplan’s and Hermann Cohen’s theological projects in order to better facilitate the incorporation of Kaplan’s theology—and that of his successors—into the broader field of modern Jewish thought, as well as to better position Jewish thought to respond to currents in academic theology beyond Jewish Studies. I begin by examining Kaplan’s reading of Cohen’s Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums in his The Purpose and Meaning of Jewish Existence. Claiming that Cohen’s posthumous work anticipates Kaplan’s own functionalist rationalism, Kaplan recasts Cohen’s project in immanent theological terms. Next, I argue that despite Kaplan’s attention to Cohen’s posthumous opus, the affinities between his thought and Cohen’s are more readily apparent with regard to Cohen’s Ethik des reinen Willens, where God functions to secure the compatibility of morality and nature. I then turn to Kaplan’s The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion in order draw attention to significant affinities between Kaplan’s and Cohen’s respective theologies. Both Kaplan and Cohen turn to a notion of God to secure the integrity of morality in the face of the ascendance of naturalism. However, where Cohen fears that configuring God in immanent terms threatens the integrity of morality by subsuming it into nature, Kaplan hopes that it will provide the basis for a more expansive sense of naturalism, one capacious enough to accommodate morality and spirituality.