The interim between Calvin’s Geneva and Karl Barth’s cutting indictment of human striving in Epistle to the Romans should be noted. The road to Barth’s salvo runs through the ENLIGHTENMENT, and in particular the practical morality of IMMANUEL KANT. With Kant’s defense of morality in the Critique of Practical Reason, the matter of morality and soteriology is entirely transformed. For Augustine, Luther, Sattler, and Calvin, ethics is a variously complicated dialectic of practice and praise, of discipleship and doxology. In Kant’s wake, the “sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating but requirest submission” is not God, but “Duty!” God, as it turns out, is a “postulate of pure practical reason”—the divine becomes a morally necessary assumption. Arguably due in part to the tragically bloody wars following the Reformation, many learned Europeans eagerly accepted a fundamental shift away from the dangerously contested realm of explicit Christianity and toward a moral order within the bounds of universal human reason. Given the flammable alliance of nation-state, warfare, and religious disagreement about the holy kingdom, it is not surprising that Western philosophy took up Kant’s summons to a merely human “kingdom of ends.”
The results reverberate throughout Protestant thought.
James M.Gustafson, a leading Reformed ethicisit of the twentieth century, is able to ask the question “Can Ethics Be Christian,” the title of his 1975 book, in large part due to the severing of soteriology and morality. This process spans continents and centuries, and Protestants who sought to retrieve original texts were themselves influenced by the growing separation. For example, a century after the Enlightenment, German theologian ALBRECHT RITSCHL read Luther’s de-emphasis of metaphysics through Kant’s emphasis on practical reason to depict the Jesus of scripture as a moral figure summoning humanity to a new level of “reciprocal moral action.” Ritschl’s hope for a civil state that would realize the lived gospel of Jesus found a ready adherent across the Atlantic, as WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH sought to propel a relatively new nation state toward the justice of Jesus. While neither theologian sought explicitly to banish soteriology from the field of ethics, the question had already become framed in such a way that morality was itself an end humanly pursued. As Western Europe and the UNITED STATES became increasingly secularized, questions of faith, DOCTRINE, and doxology became significantly less important than the separate task of civil, moral discourse. Thus, can ethics be Christian?
Intertwined with this trajectory are thinkers who sought anew to problematize ethics for the sake of soteriology. For Danish philosopher SØREN KIERKEGAARD, Protestant ethics is precisely the irresolvable intersection of faith, fear, and obedience. Both DIETRICH BONHOEFFER and Karl Barth sought to amplify Kierkegaard’s crisis in order to summon a new generation to mind the growing gap between Protestant faith and Protestant ethics. While their response is itself ineluctably influenced by the Enlightenment, it may be a promisingly Protestant way to proceed.
See also Capital Punishment; Election; Vocation; War; Schleitheim Confession
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