Judaism and the Contingency of Religious Law in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Bibliographic Data

ID14760579
AuthorsJames W Haring (0000-0001-7152-9401, corresponding author), James Haring
Year2020
Volume48
Issue1
Pages74-100
Publication date2020-03-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Religious Ethics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0384-9694 • E-ISSN: 1467-9795
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jore.12301
OpenAlexW3007236852
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited19

For Kant’s moral universalism, contingent religious law is legitimate only when it serves as a means of fulfilling the moral law. Though Kant uses traditional theological resources to account for the possibility of “statutory ecclesiastical law” in historical religions, he denies this possibility to Jewish law. Something like Kant’s logic appears in the work of some of his intellectual successors who continue to define Christianity in terms of its moral superiority to Judaism while attempting to excise remaining “Jewish” elements from it. A more adequate account of the Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and the origins of Christianity exposes deficiencies in Kant’s universalizing logic which seems to deny any intrinsic value to historical religions. A possible alternative may lie in a modified account of the relationship between the moral law and religious law, perhaps nourished by Jewish thought, including the rabbinic tradition of the Noachide commandments

Christianity · Epistemology · Judaism · Political science · Theology · Universalism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · War, Ethics, and Justification · Religious Studies

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