ABSTRACT
At a crucial point in the argument of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793) Kant describes the advent of the ‘Kingdom of God’ in terms of a ‘gradual transition’ from ‘ecclesiastical faith’ to the ‘sovereignty of pure religious faith’.1 The former is doctrinal and partial, ‘having as its end the transformation of ecclesiastical faith for a given people at a given time into a definite and enduring system’ while the latter is authentic and universal, based on the ‘natural predispositions’ of truth and goodness and ‘valid for the whole world’.2 On first reading such distinctions seem justifiably to situate Kant within the tradition of modern liberal theology, the same whose progressive rationalism provoked the violent critiques of first Kierkegaard and then Nietzsche. Yet such an affiliation squares uneasily with the destructive impulse of the critical philosophy which, by showing that human reason was incapable of knowing a being such as God, unleashed a crisis not only in philosophy, but also in the traditions of thought informed by its logos-psychology, cosmology and above all theology.
