How Political Is the Kantian Church?

• Authors: Palmquist Stephen

Abstracts

EN

Commentators who lament that Kant offers no concrete guidelines for how to set up an ethical community typically neglect Kant’s claim in Religion that the ethical state of nature can transform into an ethical community only by becoming a people of God—i.e., a religious community, or “church.” Kant’s argument culminates by positing four categorial precepts for church organization. The book’s next four sections can be read as elaborating further on each precept, respectively. Kant repeatedly warns against using religious norms to control people. Accordingly, he explicitly forbids the true church from adopting any standard form of political governance; it must aim to be radically non-political. Nevertheless, churches organized according to Kant’s non-coercive theocratic model contribute something essential to the ultimate political goal of achieving perpetual peace and an end to war: by approaching the ultimate ethical goal (the highest good), the true church offers an antidote to normative fragmentation.

Keywords

EN

Immanuel Kant; politics and religion; ethical community; religious freedom; perpetual peace; church and state

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii - Uniwersytet Jagielloński
• Journal: Diametros
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 65
• Pages: 95-113

Dates

published

2020-09

Contributors

author

Palmquist Stephen

• Hong Kong Baptist University

References

• Bergen W.W. (2019), Moralizing the Civilized: A Kantian Approach to the Problem of Normative Fragmentation, M.Phil. thesis in philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
• Chignell A. (2010), “The Devil, the Virgin, and the Envoy: Symbols of Moral Struggle in Religion II.2,” [in:] Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, O. Höffe (ed.), Akademie Verlag, Berlin: 111–130.
• Fauchald O.K., Nollkaemper A. (eds.) (2012), The Practice of International and National Courts and the (De-)Fragmentation of International Law, Hart Publishing, Oxford.
• Kant I. (1793/2009), Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. W.S. Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis (revised translation in Palmquist (2016)).
• McGaughey D. (2013), “Historical and Pure Religion: A Response to Stephen Palmquist,” The Journal of Religion 93 (2): 151–176.
• Molloy S. (2013), “An ‘All–Unifying Church Triumphant’. A Neglected Dimension of Kant’s Theory of International Relations,” The International History Review 35 (2): 317–336.
• Molloy S. (2017), Kant’s International Relations: The Political Theology of Perpetual Peace, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
• Palmquist S. (1992), “Does Kant Reduce Religion to Morality?,” Kant-Studien 83 (2): 129–148.
• Palmquist S. (1993), Biblical Theocracy: A Vision of the Biblical Foundations for a Christian Political Philosophy, Philopsychy Press, Hong Kong.
• Palmquist S. (1994), “‘The Kingdom of God Is at Hand!’ (Did Kant Really Say That?),” History of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (4): 421–437.
• Palmquist S. (2000), Kant’s Critical Religion: Volume Two of Kant’s System of Perspectives, Ashgate, Aldershot; republished (2019), Routledge, New York.
• Palmquist S. (2009), “Kant’s Religious Argument for the Existence of God—The Ultimate Dependence of Human Destiny on Divine Assistance,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (1): 3–22.
• Palmquist S. (2010a), “Philip J. Rossi’s The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil and the Destiny of Humankind,” Kant-Studien 101 (1): 127–131.
• Palmquist S. (2010b), “Kant’s Ethics of Grace: Perspectival Solutions to the Moral Difficulties with Divine Assistance,” The Journal of Religion 90 (4): 530–553.
• Palmquist S. (2012), “Could Kant’s Jesus Be God?,” International Philosophical Quarterly 52 (4): 421–437.
• Palmquist S. (2016), Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
• Palmquist S. (2017), “Kant’s Model for Building the True Church: Transcending ‘Might Makes Right’ and ‘Should Makes Good’ through the Idea of a Non-Coercive Theocracy,” Diametros 54: 76–94.
• Palmquist S. (2019), Kant and Mysticism: Critique as the Experience of Baring All in Reason’s Light, Lexington Books, Lanham.
• Palmquist S. (2020), “Humanity’s Moral Trajectory: Rossi on Kantian Critique,” Philosophia (forthcoming).
• Rossi P.J. (2005), The Social Authority of Reason: Kant’s Critique, Radical Evil, and the Destiny of Humankind, SUNY Press, New York.
• Rossi P.J. (2019), The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peace-Making as the Moral Vocation of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Taylor C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
• Taylor R.S. (2010), “Kant’s Political Religion: The Transparency of Perpetual Peace and the Highest Good,” The Review of Politics 72 (1): 1–24.
• Williams H. (1983), Kant’s Political Philosophy, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
• Williams H. (1996), International Relations and the Limits of Political Theory, St. Martin’s Press, New York.
• Williams H. (2018), “Sean Molloy Kant’s International Relations,” Kantian Review 23 (4): 689–693.
• Wong S. (2018), The Roles of the Moral and the Political in the Philosophies of Kant and Rawls, PhD dissertation in Philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Identifiers

DOI

10.33392/diam.1639

ISSN

1733-5566