Immanuel Kant and his influence on the Enlightenment
The Germans were latecomers to the Enlightenment movement due to the devastating 30-year War of Religion. When they finally did come to this new way of thinking that was sweeping across Europe. It had been widely agreed that no one was more influential to the Enlightenment than Immanuel Kant. Kant was influenced by two strains of thought rationalist philosophy and pietism
Immanuel Kant's innovation lay in his new revolutionary view of knowledge. He thought the mind is active and not passive in the production of knowledge. Kant claimed that we cannot know things in themselves but only as they present themselves to us which means objective knowledge of things is not possible. As Byrne says “ Kant thus constructed a dualism between the subject and the object based on a pessimistic epistemological phenomenalism “ (Byrne, 1996, p. 210).
This view is problematic if you are a Christian as it rules out special revelation and that God revealed himself in Scripture through the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the challenge as Kant rejected the theological prolegomena as the visibility of revelation as he insists that we cannot know of things by themselves but what is present in our mind. Due to this type of thinking a new type of theology known as Liberal Theology was created, it rejected the traditional reformed view of biblical revelation and inspiration.
Kant also believed that humanity from birth the soul was innocent and free from evil. He was also of the view that to call people evil they would have to be conscience of their evil actions. This thinking is very Platonic as Psalm 51:5 is very clear that we were sinful from birth and that includes our whole being including the soul so this idea that the soul which is a Greek concept is not evil it is not a biblical concept.
Kant was influential in the area of ethics as his prolegomena for ethics was the assumption that humans are autonomous in matters of ethics. Kant dismisses the Christian idea of ethics, that it is the conformity of my will to the will of God. As this looks like someone imposing someone else’s law on themselves.
According to Kant, every human possesses a certain degree of consciousness when it comes to moral law and this is linked to their freedom of what they believe is moral or immoral. The problem with this line of thinking is that everyone will have a different view on what they consider moral or immoral. As a result each individual will have their own standard of morality, in turn a uniform standard will fail to exist.
Influence of the Enlightenment on Modern Christianity and the world
Since Kant rejected the theological prolegomena as the visibility of revelation. We see today, especially amongst liberal theology, which reject the miracles in the bible as they cannot be explained scientifically. It also rejects special revelation and the inerrancy of Scripture are which showcases the influence of Kant.
The concept that man’s soul is not evil Kant gives rise to some theological circles that believe that God won't punish us for our sins, send us to hell as the soul is not sinful and evil. Since he elevated the individual mind and person he was influential in the creation of the individual rights that are enshrined in the USA Bill of Rights.
In today's culture where lust is not considered a sin, it goes back to Kant. He believed that when a man or woman (heterosexual) has the desire to have sex with a person of the opposite sex that desire is not sinful as the lust is the object and not the person.
How he came to that conclusion is rather interesting. I do not think it is possible to have a sexual desire without sexually objectifying the person one wants to have sex with. I therefore do not agree with this notion that the person and the desire can be separated I think it is impossible.
Bibliography
Byrne, J., 1996. Religious Thought in the Enlightenment. London: SCM Press Ltd.
