An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant — Kant — John Shaqi
An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
Nor can we overlook the fact that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries witnessed a great philosophical revival. Here again it is the
rationalist principle which is everywhere at work. The observations upon
nature, the new feeling concerning man, the vast complex of facts and
impulses which we have been able in these few words to suggest, demanded
a new philosophical treatment. The philosophy which now took its rise
was no longer the servant of theology. It was, at most, the friend, and
even possibly the enemy, of theology. Before the end of the rationalist
period it was the master of theology, though often wholly indifferent to
theology, exactly because of its sense of mastery. The great
philosophers of the eighteenth century, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, belong
with a part only of their work and tendency to the rationalist movement.
Still their work rested upon that which had already been done by Spinoza
and Malebranche, by Hobbes and Leibnitz, by Descartes and Bayle, by
Locke and Wolff, by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. With all of the
contrasts among these men there are common elements. There is an ever
increasing antipathy to the thought of original sin and of supernatural
revelation, there is the confidence of human reason, the trust in the
will of man, the enthusiasm for the simple, the natural, the
intelligible and practical, the hatred of what was scholastic and, above
all, the repudiation of authority.
All these elements led, toward the end of the period, to the effort at
the construction of a really rational theology. Leibnitz and Lessing
both worked at that problem. However, not until after the labours of
Kant was it possible to utilise the results of the rationalist movement
for the reconstruction of theology. If evidence for this statement were
wanting, it could be abundantly given from the work of Herder. He was
younger than Kant, yet the latter seems to have exerted but slight
influence upon him. He earnestly desired to reinterpret Christianity in
the new light of his time, yet perhaps no part of his work is so futile.
Pietism