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
The ethical ideal of the race is still in process of development. Jesus
has been the greatest factor urging forward that development. We
ourselves stand at a certain point in that development. We have the
ideals which we have because we stand at that point at which we do. The
men who come after us will have a worthier ideal than we do. Again, to
say that Jesus in his words and conduct expressed in its totality the
eternal ethical ideal, would make of his life something different from
the real, human life. Every real, human life is lived within certain
actual antitheses which call out certain qualities and do not call out
others. They demand certain reactions and not others. This is the
concrete element without which nothing historical can be conceived. To
say that Jesus lived in entire conformity to the ethical ideal so far as
we are able to conceive it, and within the circumstances which his own
time and place imposed, is the most that we can say. But in any case,
Kant insists, the real object of our religious faith is not the historic
man, but the ideal of humanity well-pleasing to God. Since this ideal is
not of our own creation, but is given us in our super-sensible nature,
it may be conceived as the Son of God come down from heaven.
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