An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
The orthodox had immemorially asserted that revelation imparted
information not otherwise attainable, or not then attainable. The
rationalists here allege the same. Kant is held fast in this view.
Assuredly what revelation imparts is not information of any sort
whatsoever, not even information concerning God. What revelation imparts
is God himself, through the will and the affection, the practical
reason. Revelation is experience, not instruction. The revealers are
those who have experienced God, Jesus the foremost among them. They have
experienced God, whom then they have manifested as best they could, but
far more significantly in what they were than in what they said. There
is surely the gravest exaggeration of what is statutory and external in
that which Kant says of the relation of ethics and religion. How can we
know that to be a command of God, which does not commend itself in our
own heart and conscience? The traditionalist would have said, by
documents miraculously confirmed. It was not in consonance with his
noblest ideas for Kant to say that. On the other hand, that which I
perceive to be my duty I, as religious man, feel to be a command of God,
whether or not a mandate of God to that effect can be adduced. Whether
an alleged revelation from God inculcates such a truth or duty may be
incidental. In a sense it is accidental. The content of all historic
revelation is conditioned in the circumstances of the man to whom the
revelation is addressed. It is clear that the whole matter of revelation
is thus apprehended by Kant with more externality than we should have
believed. His thought is still essentially archaic and dualistic. He is,
therefore, now and then upon the point of denying that such a thing as
revelation is possible. The very idea of revelation, in this form, does
violence to his fundamental principle of the autonomy of the human
reason and will. At many points in his reflection it is transparently
clear that nothing can ever come to a man, or be given forth by him,
which is not creatively shaped by himself. As regards revelation,
however, Kant never frankly took that step. The implications of his own
system would have led him to that step. They led to an idea of
revelation which was psychologically in harmony with the assumptions of
his system, and historically could be conceived as taking place without
the interjection of the miraculous in the ordinary sense. If the divine
revelation is to be thought as taking place within the human spirit, and
in consonance with the laws of all other experience, then the human
spirit must itself be conceived as standing in such relation to the
divine that the eternal reason may express and reveal itself in the
regular course of the mind's own activity. Then the manifold moral and
religious ideals of mankind in all history must take their place as
integral factors also in the progress of the divine revelation.