pilgrim people

Who was Jesus for Kant? Well, in the first place, Kant saw no essential need of a redemptive-historical event in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Contrary to the Protestant Reformation’s doctrine of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, because of the finished work of Christ alone (Sola Gratia; Sola Fide; Solus Christus), Kant finds the notion of vicarious atonement and imputed merit unreasonable. There is nothing accomplished for people in the person and work of Christ other than perhaps a great moral example for our pure universal religion.

Yet even reduced to a universal example, Christ is not necessary, for we already possess whatever is needed to exercise pure religion. “We need, therefore, no empirical example to make the idea of a person morally well-pleasing to God our archetype; this idea as an archetype is already present in our reason.” (Pure Religion, 56) Fully understanding the distinction between archetypal theology (theologia archetypa) and ectypal theology (theologia ectypa), Kant nevertheless believes that archetypes are present in the moral consciousness. There is simply no need for the noumenal to become the phenomenal and satisfy the requirements of the Lawgiver; we only need to do what we already know is right.     

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Francis Beckwith, the former president of the Evangelical Theological Society who recently reverted to Rome, told Christianity Today that he has "no doubt that the New Perspective and Federal Vision have had an effect on the Protestant-Catholic debate," and that the movements have helped Protestants make the journey to Rome. "I have met several former evangelical Protestants who have told me that Wright's work in particular helped them to better appreciate the Catholic view of grace."

Taylor Marshall, a Westminster Philly grad and Protestant-turned-Romanist goes so far to say, "If you buy into Wright's approach to covenantal theology, then you've already taken three steps toward the Catholic Church. Keep following the trail and you'll be Catholic." Marshall, now a PhD student at University of Dallas, attributes Wright's work to helping him conclude that the Reformed doctrine of justification sola fide was a departure from Scripture. You can read it here in the CT article.

Note carefully what Marshall says regarding buying into Wright's covenant theology. Essentially what he is referring to is a collapse of the Abrahamic d Mosaic covenants into one and a flattening of the contours of redemptive history from old covenant to the new. Whenever such flattening out or monocovenantalism occurs, the distinction between law and gospel is inevitably blurred and the necessity of Christ's active obedience imputed to the believer denied, at lease to some degree.  

So there you have it: straight from the horse's mouth. Now, will those within confessional bodies who are sympathetic to the FV and NPP please shew the horse away or get on it and mosey on out of town? That horse has no place hitched to the post of confessional Reformed churches.

A popular notion in our day is that organized religion must be pitted against spirituality. The former is disparaged as passé at best and hatefully intolerant at worst, while the latter is readily embraced as chic and healthy. Organized religion is particular and manifests itself in narrow doctrines, liturgical customs and exclusive tradition. Spirituality, on the other hand, is universal and can express itself in a wide variety of personal faiths and individual practices that generally seek one common goal, namely, self-improvement.

Roughly corresponding to this contrast of religion v. spirituality is the contrast of “ecclesiastical faith” and “pure religion” by the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Displaying creative interaction between the pietism in which he was raised and the rationalism in which he was influenced, Kant sought to structure a universal theology that would emphasize the moral or practical side of the religious life, while remaining free from the archaic and ignorant particulars of an ecclesiastical tradition that superstitiously get handed down over the course of history. For Kant, particular “ecclesiastical faith” is unnecessary and encumbering to universal “pure religion” because the latter is better practiced without the former.

 The Universal: “Pure Religion”

In order to understand Kant’s position on “pure religion,” one must first have a basic idea of his epistemology (theory of knowledge), which was revolutionary to the eighteenth century philosophical world. First a Cartesian rationalist, Kant said he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by reading the Scottish philosopher David Hume. He found Hume’s radical skepticism challenging. But unlike Hume, Kant believed that this limitation did not demand a skeptical rejection of all metaphysical concepts. Wanting to rescue religion out of the hands of the rationalism of his day and offer a new balance between transcendence and imminence, Kant attempted to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by categorizing all of existence into two realms, viz., the noumenal and the phenomenal. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that the noumenal realm is the metaphysical, which contains objects as they exist apart from any relation to a knowing subject (i.e. the “thing-in-itself”) or objects for which we simply lack the needed equipment to perceive. Kant placed God, the self and substances in the noumenal realm and, therefore, inaccessible to our knowledge.

The phenomenal realm, on the other hand,

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The good Doctor RSC responds on the Heidelblog.

John Frame, the J.D. Trimble Chair of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary and a former professor at Westminster Seminary California, has recently published a rather scathing review of his succesor Dr. Michael Horton's Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church. You can read it here in full length. In short, Frame says that, while he agrees with the book "about many things" and commends Horton for his "passion for the purity of the church and for the gospel," he must render a negative verdict upon it due to Horton's "defective theology" with which he measures the state of the American church. According to Frame, the state of American Christianity is not as bad as Horton makes it out to be. Moreover, Horton is not a good representative of Protestant or Reformed theology since his perspective is "narrow, factional, and sectarian" (no, I'm not making this stuff up).

White Horse Media has offered a response, which you can read here.