Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
2024 marks the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth. To commemorate this anniversary, the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit is organizing a session exploring Immanuel Kant's legacy and influence on modern theology in the long nineteenth century. Kant was a ground-breaking figure whose critique of rationalist metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics and the quest for a new foundation of "science" (Wissenschaft) bridged the gap between the 18th and 19th centuries. His reflections were enthusiastically adopted but also fiercely rejected by nineteenth-century theologians. The work of Kant still inspires debates worldwide to this day, for example, in relation to recent research on the intersection of philosophy and theology and its role in the emergence of modern theology in the early 19th century. The session takes the research of nineteenth-century academic theology to the next level by exploring the intersection between Kant's work and post-Kantian idealism and the theologies it influenced.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
The paper reconstructs the reception of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in the theologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann, taking into account the modernization process in the 19th century. They used Kant’s philosophy to modernize the self-image of Protestant theology as a ‘science’. Around 1800, theologies emerged which took up the differentiation of religion in culture as an independent form. This transforms Kant’s religion of reason into the concept of the independence of religion in consciousness and determines theology as a ‘science’ that operates on the basis of the philosophy of religion. Against the backdrop of advancing cultural modernization, the special nature of the Christian religion became the focus of theology from the 1870s onwards. In these conceptions, religion is increasingly detached from the self-relationship of consciousness, and theology is understood as an autonomous Wissenschaft. This shows that in the history of the development of Protestant theology in the 19th century, it was not only the understanding of religion and theology that changed, but also the image of Kant’s philosophy that was referred to.