Theology After Kant

Theology is literally "God-talk." In Literature and Dogma, Matthew Arnold--one of the most incisive of Victorian religious thinkers--noted that the word "'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness, a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs" [see Nathan A. Scott's remarkably insightful (if ultimately flawed) essay on Arnold in The Poetics of Belief (1985), 47].

Theologians, on the other hand, are people who pretend to have mastered a science and claim exact knowledge. With very few exceptions, they exhibit an unparalleled fluency in what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "language on holiday."

After Kant, any assertion that unmediated contact with the Real or the Thing-in-Itself is possible (or that it is possible to unequivocally express such contact in language) must be held suspect. After Kant, we must learn to content ourselves with humanitas.