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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Immanuel Kant and God's Grace


Immanuel Kant writes: “God’s justice is usually divided into justitiam remunerativam et punitivam, according as God punishes evil and rewards good.  But the rewards God bestows on us proceed not from his justice but from his benevolence.  For if they came to us from justice then there would be no premia gratuita, but rather we would have to possess some right to demand them, and God would have to be bound to give them to us.  Justice gives nothing gratuitously; it gives to each only the merited reward.  But even if we unceasingly observe all moral laws, we can never do more than is our duty; hence we can never expect rewards from God’s justice.”  [Immanuel Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, 28: 1085, quoted from Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 417].
Immanuel Kant has been accused of holding that we merit God’s grace by our actions because we choose to adhere to the moral law and hence by choosing to adhere to the moral law we thereby make ourselves worthy of happiness.  In this point of view, that happiness would be a gift from God, and he gives it when we merit it from having chosen the moral law as the incentive for our actions.  But this would reverse the very idea of God’s grace being freely given from his sovereignty, since this kind of position would mean that God is constrained to reward us for our good choices and hence, that is merited happiness, not unmerited grace.  Kant would be in direct conflict with the Christian concept of grace if this were his position.  However as the quote above shows, this is not Kant’s position.  Kant has a position that is consistent with the doctrine of unmerited grace that St. Paul and the Gospels articulate.
In this quote above Kant distinguishes between remunerative justice and punitive justice.  Remunerative justice regards positive rewards for just actions whereas punitive justice has to do with punishments for unjust actions.  Kant is saying that God definitely punishes unjust actions and we merit punishment by our unjust actions, but that God does not reward just actions.  God’s justice is not the source of reward but of punishment.  The source of God’s reward is in his benevolence.  There is a great difference between God’s justice and his benevolence.  God’s benevolence is freely given to all and is not based on merit.  As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:44-45).  God gives his benevolence universally to all people.  He gives rain to both the just and the unjust.  He doesn’t just give rain to the just, but also to the unjust.  So merit has nothing to do with God’s benevolence.  His benevolence extends to all people.  He gives good things even when we don’t deserve it. 

As Kant would put it – God wills the happiness of human beings universally, and does not favor some people over other people by virtue of having merited it.  It is the universality of God’s will that characterizes his benevolence.  And it is also unmerited benevolence since it is given whether one deserves it or not.  God universally wills that all people be saved and that all people be happy.  We do not deserve this by our moral decision-making according to Kant because our morality is motivated by duty.  We are to choose the moral law as the incentive for our actions not because we are trying to please God but because it is our duty to do so.  We are under the moral law and it requires of us that we conform our maxims to the universality of the moral law.  To expect a reward for this is precisely to be moral out of self-love, which is an evil motive.  Hence we are to be moral for the sake of being moral and by virtue of that pure motive we become worthy of happiness.  But being worthy of happiness does not mean that we thereby acquire a right to be happy.  Happiness is not a reward but a free gift of grace.

Hence, we can conclude that Kant does not hold that we make a demand on God by our moral action and then grace is no longer grace.  Rather, in our decision to make our maxims conform to the universality of the moral law we become worthy of happiness which is a gift of God and always was a gift of God’s benevolence and good will toward human beings.


2 comments:

  1. The sacrifice one makes for the grace of God is the sacrifice of their pride in human will and human wisdom; human wisdom dictates that a supernatural view of Jesus is unreasonable, and the human will compels us to believe that each individual bears the responsibility to conform to a human universal law which dwells within us. So when the bible teaches that grace comes through faith the Jesus Christ is the son of God, the temptation is to reinterpret the New Testament, cheapening Jesus into a moral teacher and an archetype. How then should we view the historical crucifixion? With disgust: he was crucified for claiming to be God. If there was a deranged lunatic hanging on the cross who drew crowds with his astounding parables and aphorisms and somehow as a deranged madman "wrought miraculous feats” (Josephus), then a deluded lunatic was seized, tried for "practicing sorcery and enticing Israel into apostasy"(Sanhedrin 43a, Babylonian Talmud), then hung on the cross for six hours, being mocked and scoffed at for his inability to save himself. This picture gave Kant an aesthetic sensation of "delight."

    Or Jesus was a genius, a deceiver, who tricked people somehow with sorcery or sleight of hand, deceiving everyone with his extraordinary lies, then dying on the cross for not denouncing his lie, saying that you will be blessed with the Holy spirit and have eternal life if you have faith his lies are true, and keep passing on his lies – those who die for preaching his lies are especially blessed, and by either the placebo effect or through a continuation of the lie, all his disciples had some Holy Spirit giving them the strength to do just that, so that now hundreds of millions of people are deceived by a lie and report the effects of the holy spirit, while countless Christian missionary martyrs have been executed for no crime other than being pests by converting people away from other Gods. All of these Jesus said would happen, so he is essentially the antichrist, far worse than Hitler.

    Then was it this that gave Kant a feeling of "delight"?

    Still Kant would have to believe that the embarrassment and certain danger the disciples faced in transmitting Christ's message (the same ones who had as a matter of history denied being followers of Christ) was not enough to dissuade them from dying for Christ's message. For the greater good? In the gospels, Jesus says, "those who are willing to give their lives for me and the gospels, will have eternal life in me", and "they will seize you and persecute you. On account of My name, they will deliver you to the synagogues and prisons, and they will bring you before kings and governors.13This will be your opportunity to serve as witnesses. 14So make up your mind not to worry beforehand how to defend yourselves. 15For I will give you speech and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict". How does it achieve anything good to willingly march millions of Christians to their death for nothing other than testifying to Jesus as Lord and Savior? Rather, if the gospels are doctored in any way, which is unlikely given the early dates of first manuscripts, then Christianity is a completely nihilistic travesty and Jesus should be viewed with disgust.

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  2. Luckily, it is far more absurd to deny the truth of Jesus than to accept it. Yet, it is this very stumbling block of faith which leads people like Kant to interpolate a works-based salvation into the New Testament. Kant thinks that he must overcome evil with his human will -- that which he gives sovereignty over his actions. Yet, in his faith in willpower, he did not see that the most difficult task for the will, is the will to overcome itself -- the will to denounce its power, and cede all power to the will of God (not an impersonal force, a personal creator God). Even Jesus found it difficult to face his own death, but he was strengthened when he prayed to God, "if it is your will, let it be done." That is what it means to offer your body as a living sacrifice to God, your 'rational duty: to not conform to the patterns of the world, instead being transformed by the renewal of your mind. Then you can test [logically deduce] and prove through allowing his will to work through you, that his will is prefect, just, and complete.' - Romans 12:!.

    I am sure that Kant would agree with 2 Timothy 3:16, which states all scripture "is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness" but when he would read the other half, "all scripture is God-breathed, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work" he would do some mental gymnastics by reassigning the word God to mean "universal goodness". Were the early epistles simply written in the naive superstition that God exists, or was God a secret code to be cracked by Gnostic mystics (with whom Kant shares a great deal of his conceptual Jesus)? Bishop Clement 70 AD: ""Take up the Epistle of the blessed Paul the Apostle, what did he write to you in the beginning [that is, in the first days of the preaching] of the gospel? In truth, divinely inspired divinitus inspiratus], he wrote to you Corinthians about himself, and Cephas, and Apollos, because just then factions existed among you."

    I sometimes think about how much I thought I knew about Christianity until I actually begun reading the bible myself in the quest to expound its contradictions and absurdities. Athenagoras studied scripture in the second Century AD with a similar view of refuting Christianity, only to be converted by the very writings he was endeavoring to bring into disrepute: "The prophets, while entranced . . . by the influence of the Divine Spirit, they gave utterance to what was wrought In them--the Spirit using them as instruments as a flute-player might blow a flute."

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