An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
None since Kant, except extreme confessionalists, and those in
diminishing degree, have held that the great effect of the work of
Christ was upon the mind and attitude of God. Less and less have men
thought of justification as forensic and judicial, a declaring sinners
righteous in the eye of the divine law, the attribution of Christ's
righteousness to men, so far at least as to relieve these last of
penalty. This was the Anselmic scheme. Indeed, it had been Tertullian's.
Less and less have men thought of reconciliation as that of an angry God
to men, more and more as of alienated men with God. The phrases of the
orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, Lutheran as well as Calvinistic,
survive. More and more new meaning, not always consistent, is injected
into them. No one would deny that the loftiest moral enthusiasm, the
noblest sense of duty, animated the hearts of many who thought in the
terms of Calvinism. The delineation of God as unreconciled, of the work
and sufferings of Christ as a substitution, of salvation as a
conferment, caused gratitude, tender devotion, heroic allegiance in
some. It worked revulsion in others. It was protested against most
radically by Kant, as indeed it had been condemned by many before him.
For Kant the renovation of character was the essential salvation. Yet
the development of his doctrine was deficient through the
individualistic form which it took. Salvation was essentially a change
in the individual mind, brought about through the practical reason, and
having its ideal in Jesus. Yet for Kant our salvation had no closer
relation to the historic revelation in Jesus. Furthermore, so much was
this change an individual issue that we may say that the actualisation
of redemption would be the same for a given man, were he the only man in
the universe. To hold fast to the ethical idealism of Kant, and to
overcome its subjectivity and individualism, was the problem.