An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

The turn of this last phrase is an absolutely characteristic one, and brings out another quality of Kant’s mind in dealing with the Christian doctrines.  They are to him but symbols, forms into which a variety of meanings may be run.  He had no great appreciation of the historical element in doctrine.  He had no deep sense of the social element and of that for which Christian institutions stand.  We may illustrate with that which he says concerning Christ’s vicarious sacrifice.  Substitution cannot take place in the moral world.  Ethical salvation could not be conferred through such a substitution, even if this could take place.  Still, the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ may be taken as a symbolical expression of the idea that in the pain of self-discipline, of obedience and patience, the new man in us suffers, as it were vicariously, for the old.  The atonement is a continual ethical process in the heart of the religious man.  It is a grave defect of Kant’s religious philosophy, that it was so absolutely individualistic.  Had he realised more deeply than he did the social character of religion and the meaning of these doctrines, not alone as between man and God, but as between man and man, he surely would have drawn nearer to that interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement which has come more and more to prevail.  This is the solution which finds in the atonement of Christ the last and most glorious example of a universal law of human life and history.  That law is that no redemptive good for men is ever secured without the suffering and sacrifice of those who seek to confer that good upon their fellows.  Kant was disposed to regard the traditional forms of Christian doctrine, not as the old rationalism had done, as impositions of a priesthood or inherently absurd.  He sought to divest them indeed of that which was speculatively untrue, though he saw in them only symbols of the great moral truths which lie at the heart of religion.  The historical spirit of the next fifty years was to teach men a very different way of dealing with these same doctrines.

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Kant had said that the primary condition, fundamental not merely to knowledge, but to all connected experience, is the knowing, experiencing, thinking, acting self.  It is that which says ‘I,’ the ego, the permanent subject.  But that is not enough.  The knowing self demands in turn a knowable world.  It must have something outside of itself to which it yet stands related, the object of knowledge.  Knowledge is somehow the combination of those two, the result of their co-operation.  How have we to think of this co-operation?  Both Hume and Berkeley had ended in scepticism as to the reality of knowledge.  Hume was in doubt as to the reality of the subject, Berkeley as to that of the object.  Kant dissented from both.  He vindicated the undoubted reality of the impression which we have concerning a thing.  Yet how far that impression is the reproduction of

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An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.