Seeing the true church (i.e. the universal ethical community) as being mired by the historical institution of ecclesiastical faith, Kant looked forward to a golden age that would have no place for office-bearers in the visible church, only a true egalitarianism: 

The humiliating distinction between laity and clergy disappears, and equality arises from true freedom, yet without anarchy, because, though each obeys the (non-statutory) law which he prescribes to himself, he must at the same time regard this law as the will of a World-Ruler revealed to him through reason, a will which by invisible means unites all under one common government into one state – a state previously and inadequately represented and prepared for by the visible church. (Religion, 112) 

Such eschatological hope will not be brought about by a mystical or experiential religion; rather, this “beautiful ideal of the moral world-epoch” will come about in an ordinary manner as people collectively do the right thing: 

[The coming age will be] brought about by the introduction of true universal religion and in faith foreseen even to its culmination – which we cannot conceive as a culmination in experience, but can merely anticipate, i.e., prepare for, in continual progress and approximation toward the highest good possible on earth (and in all of this there is nothing mystical, but everything moves quite naturally in a moral fashion). (Religion, 126)    

For Kant, the church is not a covenantal community formed around the redemptive-historical event of Jesus Christ. Nor is the church united by a common creed or confession. Rather, as Allen Wood points out, “In Kant’s view, what unites people in a true religious community is…a common devotion to the moral improvement of humanity.”   

Some concluding thoughts

While trying to rescue religion from radical sketicism and establish a religious devotion to a transcendent Lawgiver, Kant fashioed a theological method that ultimately remained anthropocentric from beginning to end. His method led inescapably to an emphasis upon the divine voice of reason which is universally heard by autnomous humans, voice from within the self.

Although he presupposed the noumenal realm for his pure religion, Kant’s theology remained caught in the phenomenal, without any possibility of getting across this great chasm. In his effort to protect morality by removing the historical particulars of ecclesiastical faith, Kant seems to miss altogether the covenantal bridge across that chasm in the most important event in all of human history, viz., the life, death and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. 

So how Kantian are you? How has this thinker affected your thoughts about Christ and his church?

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.     

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.

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,

John Frame

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

The crisis of sin is so great that it “could be solved by nothing less than God’s becoming flesh, fulfilling the law and bearing the sentence for its violations in our place, which is the focus of all of Scripture. We may have problems in our marriage, child rearing, stress at work, low self-esteem, and worries about our health or the financial market. However, the ultimate crisis  facing us is summarized in Romans 1:18: ‘For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.’” (39) We need to see this big picture, both in law, revealing the greatness of our sin, and in gospel, which tells us the good news that solves the problem. Only then do we get our living straight.

Who exactly was Jacob Arminius and why is he important? Arminius was born in Holland in 1560 and educated at the Reformed University of Leiden and under Theodore Beza (Calvin’s successor) at Geneva. He was ordained as a minister in the Reformed churches in 1587 and served as a pastor until 1603 when he was to the theological faculty of Leiden. During the 1590s, his preaching through the book of Romans caused many to question his fidelity to Reformed doctrine.