Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers Ltd., 2009

From "Chapter One":

"In what follows, I will attempt the road less travelled by going through Kant to seek out and make plain the promising grounds for theology in his philosophy. This work is not, therefore, written for Kant exegetes eager to see a text systematizing Kant’s writings on philosophy of religion. In Defense of Kant’s Religion is my effort, in cooperation with Nathan Jacobs, to undertake that difficult task. Instead, this work is written for those interested in understanding the grounds for Christian theology in Kant’s philosophy and estimating their promise for theology today. It is written for those persons who believe Kant’s influence is not going away, and, as a result, recognize the importance of assessing the grounds for theology in Kant’s philosophy.

Even though this book is not devoted to Kant exegetes, we cannot avoid ‘getting our hands dirty’ by ignoring Kant’s texts or key Kant interpreters. Knowledge of Kant’s corpus and longstanding disputes in the field of Kant-studies serve as invaluable guides or signposts for understanding how Kant’s philosophy can be supportive of theology. For example, one important dispute, though certainly not the only one, centres around Kant’s philosophy of religion as exemplified in the classic text Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. While contemporary interpreters agree on the basic contours of Kant’s Religion, below the surface all is not well. Over the past 30 years, detailed analysis has exposed numerous interpretive difficulties with this classic text, and these findings have snowballed into full-fledged assaults on its philosophical viability. The difficulties surrounding this text provide a significant reason for the continued persistence of traditional interpretations of Kant despite mounting pressure in the field against them and in favour of theological affirmation.

In Defense of Kant’s Religion offers a detailed synopsis of this troubled interpretative history. Capitalizing on new resources, Jacobs and I offer a fresh interpretation of Kant’s Religion that is both consonant with the critical philosophy and internally coherent. A number of the key insights from that book are echoed and expanded on here. These include Kant’s notion of pure cognition (Chapter 2), rational faith (Chapter 3) and depravity and redemption (Chapter 7). Without this groundwork, this book would not have been possible. In this sense, these works, as mentioned in the Preface, are complementary volumes - one written for exegetes of Kant focusing specifically on Religion and the other for theologians wanting to go through Kant’s philosophy rather than over or around it. What makes this book distinctive is that, while going through Kant’s philosophy as a whole, I examine it with particular reference to the theological significance of its transcendental boundaries and their positive utility for Christian theology.

This examination takes place in three stages. The first stage, in Chapters 2 and 3, examines the theoretical philosophy with an exegetical eye in order to establish what Kant means by ‘pure cognition’ of God and ‘rational faith’ in God. The second stage comes in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. This second stage is not primarily an exercise of Kantian exegesis or exposition, although I consistently draw on Kant in order to orient the reader and assess the strength and weaknesses of the philosophical grounds and theological superstructure of the positions under review. Rather, throughout these chapters, I examine the various resources in Kant that influential ‘Kantian’ theologians utilize to establish grounds for theology in Kant’s philosophy. By no means do I intend to commend these disparate ‘Kantian’ theologies as definitive or even desirable, but by using these theologically inclined readers of Kant as guides for discovering the most theologically positive and useful aspects of Kant’s corpus, I will mine those resources buried in the critical philosophy and discover precisely how these Kantian resources can be positively utilized in a theological context. The third stage is found in Chapters 7 and 8, where I summarize my findings with specific reference to the positive utility of Kant for contemporary theology, and make concluding comments."