ABSTRACT
The idea that theology is the study of religion, or – perhaps better – religious belief and practice, is relatively recent; it can be traced to Kant’s lectures in the winter semester of 1783-84, later published as Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre (1817). This was the first time that Kant consecrated an entire course of lectures to natural theology, and for the most part he appeared to remain within the traditional fold of theologia rationalis, assessing proofs for the existence of God, and examining the different styles of natural theology: ontotheology, cosmotheology, and physicotheology. If he kept Alexander Baumgarten’s Metaphysica (1739) dutifully before him, along with supplementary texts by Johann Eberhard and Christoph Meiners, his stance was nonetheless that of his own revolutionary Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781). “We are merely throwing out the false presumptions of human reason when it tries from itself to demonstrate the existence of God with apodictic certainty”, he said, before adding, “from moral principle, however, we will accept a faith in God as a principle of every religion” [my emphasis].1 Here the Christian God quietly gives way to religion as the proper object of theology (philosophically considered), although Christianity will be accorded the status of the sole moral religion, even though all religions must be moral if they are to be pleasing to God.2 As Kant says later in the lectures, “morality and religion stand in the closest combination, and are distinguished from each other only by the fact that the former moral duties are carried out from the principles of every rational being, which is to act as a member of a universal system of ends; whereas here [in religion] these duties are regarded as commandments of a supremely holy will” (430). The word “religion” appears only twice in the lectures, in the passages I have quoted, but the shift from theologia rationalis to Religionslehre is accomplished nonetheless, and almost entirely from within the province of natural religion. Only
the end of the very last lecture is devoted to revealed religion, and then Kant is intent on showing that exterior revelation depends on interior revelation.
