Kant and Love
The Firestone Files: Letters to My Grandchildren — Dr. Chris L. Firestone
January 27, 2026 · Episode 24 · 46:24
https://drchrisfirestone.com/episode/kant-and-love/

Transcript is auto-generated from YouTube captions and lightly formatted; it may contain errors.

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today on the files, I have for you a paper on the philosophy of Emanuel Kant and uh his relationship to the topic of love. That's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the file. So good to be back in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and able to sort of sit back in my original studio here and uh come, you know, with some new material for you. Well, I am planning to do a deep dive on the philosophy of Emanuel Kant sometime later this year. Don't know exactly when that will be, but uh look forward to that.

But this is kind of a prelude to that where I gave a paper at the I guess it's a series of conferences that converge every year right before Thanksgiving. It's the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, the Evangelical Theological Society, and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. All of those every year have conferences kind of right next to each other in various places throughout the country. This past uh right before um Thanksgiving, this in in in 2025, the paper uh was in the papers were in Boston. The conference was in Boston and I was there to give a paper and the paper's title is rational religious love concian foundations for Christian theology and so it's an extension of my own research program.

I'm going to backtrack and talk a lot about Kant's philosophy and why I think it's of real interest to you know thoughtful people philosophers in general but also to uh Christians who want to understand the interface of faith and reason uh through a kind of contean lens. So that's out there in the future. This time we're just going to listen to that paper. I've asked my producer, uh, Matt, to perhaps, uh, give you access to the paper itself. So, if you want to read along while I'm reading, that'd be fine, too. Um, also, I've got a little preliminary video of me walking uh from my Airbnb to the train on my way to the conference.

I talk a little bit about um, you know, what I'm doing there and uh, kind of set it up. So, we're going to bring a little bit of that to you. and then of course the paper itself. So I hope you enjoy this installment on Emanuel Kant and the topic of love. Enjoy. All right, I'm walking through Boston trying to get to a train. Got my buddies back here. make a lot of sense for me. Uh thankful that Turning Point let me come to this conference, the Evangelical Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Religion. Um on the last day of the conference, it's been a great one. Uh a chance to catch up with people.

Saw my buddy Charles Hall who did his PhD at St. Andrews. Parker sets who's runs the podcast, Parker's Pon, and uh lots of other people today. What do I got? I'm going to go to the book room, check out some books, uh with halfp price appetizers at the art house, hang out with some friends one last time, and then we're getting up at 4:00 in the morning. get to the train. Anyway, that's it for now. Can't wait to uh get back home for Thanksgiving. Thank you so much. What an August crowd here. Um super excited to be here. As soon as I found out I was right before dinner, I was worried.

And then the third paper was cancelled. And then I thought, okay, well, I'm sure Kant and love will be a a strong topic by itself here at the Evangelical Philosophical Society. So glad you're here and um happy to present this paper.

It's kind of culmination or not culmination but a sort of ongoing research program that I've had for many many years and it emanates out of Kant scholarship and its interface with Christian theology and I've been in that field for a very long time now um trying to show the implications of Kant's philosophy for Christian theology in an affir in an affirming manner not in the way that has traditionally been supposed um that's been quite a journey for me and uh super excited to be able to talk about the concept of love in that context because it's not immediately obvious to anybody who knows even a little bit about Kant how love can be said it's almost an oxymoron uh rational religious love and so uh I don't think so what I'd like to show here reading this brief paper I think I've only got about 20 to 23 minutes worth of paper here is why that is not an oxymoron why it might actually matter to the Christian community to reconsider Kant.

Now, just a word about Kant scholarship in recent days. Um, interpreters of Kant have been for the most part uh collegial and so forth for most of my career until the last 5 years or so where they've been less than collegial. There's been um I don't know how to how to exactly put it.

there had been um um you know dis disrespecting senior scholars ambushing people in public and just kind of a weird set of things going on in the world of con studies and I that's another reason why I picked this topic rational religious love to try to you know bring some calming influences to the field and so um I hope to do that here with this brief essay something of an olive olive branch to con studies and to uh Christians who are interested in understanding the interface of Kant and Christian thought on this issue of love.

So it's something of a table setting exploration into the issue of rational religious love and what that might look like. There's no doubt that Kant's scholarship has flipped the field from being the bastion of atheism, agnosticism, and non-realism to more theologically friendly philosophical paradigms of interpretation. Over the last 50 years, Kant's critical philosophy as delineated in his post 1781 writings, that's the critique of pure reason onward, have become fertile ground for theological reflection. In this paper, I explore how and to what extent rational religious faith as the culmination of Kant's transcendental examination of reason necessitates a proactive form of um sorry of neighbor love that approximates Christian understandings of agape. Drawing upon the perspectival nature of Kant's system, we shall see that the consummation of the highest good demands not merely individual striving for virtue, but also for communal banding, wherein God's condescension through the prototype in rational religious faith inspires us to love our neighbor as he has transcendentally first loved us.

This insight while venturing into the treacherous waters of religion within the boundaries of mere reason I'll use the word religion as a short for that throughout the paper remains attuned to the boundaries of reason fostering a dialogue between philosophy and theology that further advances the positive appropriation of Kant's legacy for contemporary Christian thought as I have argued in Kant and theology at the boundaries of reason Kant's philosophy is neither atheistic nor necessarily theistic but establishes what I call pure cognition as the substrate for rational religious faith and pure cognition is a technical term in Khan studies. It roughly means transcendental thinking about the meaningfulness of life.

This faith addresses the antitomies of moral hope and human depravity culminating in the ethical commonwealth where respect of neighbor becomes the practical expression of divine grace. By integrating Kant's critiques with his religious writings, we continue to uncover resources for theology that chasen speculative excesses while hastening reason toward its moral telos. In what follows, I shall review the progression of Kant scholarship, trace Kant's philosophy from moral philosophy to rational religious faith, and demonstrate how transcendental philosophy provides rational momentum beyond mere respect and toward a form of neighbor love grounded in God's condescension in the prototype of perfect humanity and the real and ongoing need for communal banding.

I'll culminate with a couple of objections and their rejoiners. A brief review of the scholarship. This I don't know how familiar you guys are with the last 50 years of Khan scholarship, but this is a brief very brief overview of um let me just say that the landscape of Khan scholarship over the past half century has witnessed a pivotal shift from traditional interpretations that reduce K's philosophy of religion to moral rigorism. and thinly veiled theism toward readings that affirm its transcendental resources for theology.

Traditional views exemplified by Alan Woods Kant's moral religion which was a kind of a groundbreaking book in 1970 portray Kant as delimiting religion to the postulates of practical reason wherein God serves merely as a guaranteer of the highest good without substantive theological content or at least theological content that is that is at intentional removed from Christian orthodoxy. Similarly, Gordon Michaelelsson's fallen freedom that was in 1990 and some 20 years later kind of books bookends this traditional period suggests that count immortality has no use for the body potentially linking embodiment to humanity's universal turn toward evil.

These readings, while rigorous, often downplay or ignore the full scope of Kant's relentless turn toward pure cognition and the full transcendental examination of reason that Kant develops in his post 1790 writings, especially the critique of judgment in 1790 and the religion text in 1793, opting instead for what they perceive to be the straightforwardly deistic Kant. In contrast, the new wave of affirmative scholarship, this is a term that Keith Andelle first termed or coined in 2007's Philosophia Christi, rehabilitates Kant as a positive resource for rational religious faith. This is done by carefully executing the connection between Kant's writings of the 1790s with those of the 1780s.

That's one easy way to determine whether or not you're dealing with a traditional reader of Kant if they dismiss the later writings or marginalized them for the 1780 writings alone. But if you take the whole corpus of Kant, you oftentimes get a more affirmative religious or theological outlook with Kant. Early movers in this regard were Ronald Green in his 1978 book, Religious Reason, and John Hair in his 1996 book, The Moral Gap. They elucidate the the moral grounds for rational religious belief in God as legislator while also exploring how the synthesis of grace and worth addresses redemption and amid moral depravity. These contributions said shed much neededed light on the standard portrayals of Kant as metaphysical all destroyer but in my estimation were more suggest suggestive and provocative than interpretively and substantively complete.

In Kant in the new philosophy of religion in 2006, Steven Palmquist and I curate a watershed set of essays that decisively counter reductive narratives affirming Kant's ongoing conflict between philosophy and theology. Remember, for Kant, conflict is not a war, but it's actually an intellectual engagement. And I think that that's a healthier way to understand the importance of the conflict of the faculties. That book is in 1798, one of his last writings, which I really think sets the stage for this affirmative reading. Um, let's see here. Uh, let's see. Con's ongoing conflict between philosophy and theology is a provocative tension tension prompting theologians to demonstrate Christian doctrines's practical and judicial imported Kant's moral as his rational religious faith.

and thus ground transcendental theology. My own contributions sometimes in my own contributions I should say sometimes in collaboration with Nathan Jacobs have sought to unpack and advance this affirmative trajectory in defense of K's religion in 2008 employs a courtroom metaphor to resolve seven conundrums in religion that were first mentioned by Gordon Michaelelsson such as the innate but freely chosen nature of radical evil and the hermeneutic circularity of historical faith.

We argue that const two experiments applying philosophy to religion and vice versa establish a coherent argument through the advance of pure moral and judicial cognition that leads to religious faith with distinct content. Book one of K religion famously establishes the cornerstone of such faith namely the human species is evil by nature but not by necessity. a doctrine he dubs radical evil. Jacob's chapter on con prototypical theology in that earlier book content the new philosophy of religion ex examining book two of religion posits the prototype as transcendental incarnation a rational foundation for god talk that enables personal conversion through adoption and redemption.

My chapter in the same book extends the prototypical theology to the ethical commonwealth arguing that the community is the only poss is only possible when moral converts freely choose to join together and support one another in collective moral striving. These three doctrines in religion provide the grounds or baseline for K's rational theology that can be further developed through a critical examination of reason. So, one of the things that I've been doing over the years since those writings is developing those rational grounds through various rationally required or transcendentally required religious doctrines.

To this end, Kant and theology at the boundaries of reason. I delineate and defend these three perspectives for further advancement of theology. what I call moral, poetic, and ontological perspectives. Evaluating their adoption by Christian thinkers such as Rudolph Otto and Paul Tillig. I advanced the thesis that Kant's notion of rational religious faith requires belief in a trinitarian doctrine of God as the necessary condition for the possibility of ethical community. We need not only the prototype of perfect humanity for for uh for the hope of individual moral redemption but also an eminent trinity for the hope of contextual and communal moral formation. More recently in Kant in the question of theology we assemble essays clarifying Kant's natural philosophical and revealed theology. My chapter entitled rational religious faith in a bodily resurrection extends Aaron Bunch's 2010 argument in philosophia Christi positing resurrection as necessary to avoid practical absurdity trying uh tying embodiment to the prototype and to the human person's hope of being found well pleasing to God.

Kant's argument for moral hope seems to rest on moral striving of the kind that requires bodily resurrection for human beings and the prototype. In other words, we're never going to be found well pleasing to God in this world. So, in con estimation, there must be an embodiment in the world to come in order for that moral striving to continue. This progression of scholarship underscores Kant's philosophy as not terminating in moral and uh autonomy but transforming it via the development of rational religious faith where persistent philosophical questions and the resources of reason's transcendental boundaries make ample room for theological appropriation.

As an aside, I'm currently working on a book, and for those unfamiliar with Kant, you might find this a little more appealing than all the Kantian jargon. Um, I compare reason to a processing plant for human experience. It receives raw sensory data and organizes it into coherent reality. But its full output requires all faculties, empirical, moral, poetic, and religious, working in harmony for its ongoing flourishing and productivity.

I'm currently working on a this companion volume, and uh it fleshes this metaphor out in much more detail. Uh I have to speak to a publisher about its great delay over the last two years. So, well, uh that's just the nature of the of the of the game, I guess. Uh I also use another metaphor for explanatory purposes namely a theater which stages a play with with the sets which is like the space-time continuum along with the props and actors within the play.

The 12 categories all put into motion by a script in the on in the guiding hand of its direction which in the analogy is the significance of rational religious faith and its transcendental transition beyond the empirical to moral and eventually to the theological considerations. Section three moving from moral philosophy to rational religious faith. Kant's philosophy, when interpreted through the lens of its transcendental dimensions, reveals a clear progression from the stricters of moral philosophy towards specific amendments and advancements in rational religious faith. As Jacobs and I argued in in defense of Kant's religion, Kant's critical project begins with the delimitation of empirical cognition in juxtaposition with pure cognition in the critique of pure reason exposing the antitomies of spaceime causation and freedom. thereby making room and indeed need for faith by positing numinal ideas as thought horizons beyond phenomenal that are expressions of and and must be believed in for moral hope.

The theoretical foundation rooted in an enzalisimum conception of God makes a transition to practical reason in the groundwork of the metaphysics of morals and the critique of practical reason where the moral law emerges as the categorical imperative act according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that become a universal law. Here morality is autonomous grounded in pure reason rather than empirical incentives. establishing responsibility and virtue as the pursuit of a good disposition. I call this first move in Kant's philosophy in the practical philosophy his numinal point of orientation. If you're familiar with Kant, he wrote a a well-known essay called what is orientation in thinking?

And he uses it for the empirical where he begins in a dark room. And if you have a firm foundation of empirical truth, you can then set out to the uh to to uh map out metaphysics from that location even though it's a dark room. Similarly, I would argue that freedom is the point of orientation in the numinal realm itself because Kant says we can know freedom. we can know uh something through its reciprocal relationship with the moral law. And it's from that point of view of morality or the moral law and freedom that reciprocal relationship that the rest of his transcendental theology unfolds.

Yet, as hair notes, this rigorism encounters a moral gap. Human depravity renders the highest good virtue united with happiness unattainable with without divine considerations. Kant thus posits God as legislator freedom as numinal choice and immortality as the hope of virtue's progress from a moral point of view countering the propensity to evil. And this is the bridge that John here talks about in his well-known book, The Moral Gap. The progression culminates in religion where Kant's moral and judicial philosophy extend to rational religious faith addressing depravity as radical evil in book one namely a universal innate yet freely chosen inversion of incentives corrupting maxims at their ground.

As Michaelelsson explains, evil is not empirical induction, but a practical and rational assessment of human nature, requiring a quote revolution of disposition, as it says in religion. This revolution finds its transcendental warrant in the prototype of perfect humanity. An eternal uncreated ideal in God's intellect condescending to humanity as the quote only begotten son also found in the religion text. Jacobs and I have defended this as transcendental incarnation, a rational foundation for God talk that enables redemption via vicarious atonement and imputation of righteousness.

Rational religious faith then manifests communally in the ethical commonwealth, a god-headed society of moral converts banding together to propagate virtue under divine providence. Kant's rational religious faith, according to our reading, encompasses moral depravity, belief in the prototype of perfect humanity, and the banding together of moral converts into communities or churches, addressing the antitomies of human hope amid human frailty. in content theology at the boundaries of reason. I evaluate this progression as moral grounds for theology chasened by judicial purposiveness from the third critique and ontological ideals that lay its ground in his lectures on metaphysics and to a certain extent in the critique of pure reason fostering faith without dogmatism.

I think that's Kant's trying to walk a line between what he calls dogmatism and and really skepticism. And he's trying to say there is something that he calls rational religious faith, critical religion, you might say, running right through the middle. But finding it requires this ongoing engagement of philosophy and theology in reciprocal sort of dialogical engagement, which seems to be happening everywhere at this conference, thank goodness. Um, so he'd be he'd be happy with that, I'm sure.

This trajectory, let's see here. Uh well like a processing plant transforming raw inputs into coherent output or a theater putting on a play. Reason's whole noetic structure unfolding through rational perspectives and human commitment requires this communal banding to stabilize moral striving against nature's indifference and ongoing human moral depravity. This trajectory from moral autonomy to religious faith reveals Kant's philosophy as meaningfully incomplete without the ongoing refinement of transcendental theology where depravity yields to moral to the to prototype enabled redemption and communal banding provides us with an important but mere beginning. In other words, if Kant's philosophy is not moving outward, it's going retrograde inward into moral nealism.

Morality requires the highest good. It requires teiology. It requires us unpacking what we need to believe for moral hope. He calls this rational religious faith. Okay. Well, let me get to the punchline. I guess the consummation of rational religious faith as proactive neighbor love. K's transcendental philosophy when fully explicated suggests that the consummation of rational reli religious faith must be a proactive form of duty towards one's neighbor that converges with Christian understandings of love. Put simply, if the community is not moving forward through conversion and formation, it is moving backwards, thereby threatening its members with a type of communal moral retrograde.

If cons system has hope of achieving the highest good, it must be because God has condescended to us, rendered us capable of loving our neighbor just as he has loved us in the prototypical theology and in this way propagating community of moral converts. This insight emerges from the boundaries of pure reason where empirical cognition of mere self-awareness yields to moral teology positing neighbor virtue care as the practical expression of divine grace as delineated in religion in book three. The ethical community or the ethical commonwealth requires moral converts to band together countering radical evil's propensity through collective virtue. This banding is not arbitrary. As he says in religion, the duty to promote the highest good obliges us to join such a community.

Proactive virtue care thus becomes the mechanism for realizing this ideal, extending the categorical imperative to active communal responsibility. in a in a small book that I wrote and I have a co-author who just walked in, Alex Pierce and I apply this notion to relationships, viewing friendship as a community of friends, fostering virtue amid difference, approximating a commonwealth where love of neighbor emulates God's condescension.

Yet a gap or wobble persists between theory, facts, and values, and practice, moral striving, where nature seems blind to virtue. As in the third critique, beauty helps here. It bridges this divide. Experiencing a sunset's disinterested delight harmonizes the soul, evoking purposiveness without a purpose. This is all in the third critique. It's kind of a progometer to religion, you might say. this feeling of beauty, something like a theater metaphor where sets and actors align under a director's unseen hand.

There's some kind of purposiveness going on there that just beauty alone and scientific study of te theology can't quite get to that requires or prompts rational religious faith thinks Kant under my reading transcendentally this love as virtue care is grounded in the prototypes required fiat God's eternal idea of perfect humanity condescends atoning for depravity and imputing righteousness as bunch argues and I extend in my essay rational religious faith and a bodily resurrection. This condescension must be embodied for coherence enabling hope in resurrection as the consummation of virtue.

Maybe in the Q&A I can unpack why that's the case. Um there's a there's a a lot to be said there. God's love thus empowers us to love of our neighbor proactively just as he has loved us bridging the moral gap individually and communally. This approximates Christian agape love your neighbor as yourself interpreted rationally as obedience to the moral law as divine command. Even natural te theology in Kant's philos philosophical economy reinforces this organic life like a seed growing into an oak testifies to inherent purpose urging us beyond facts to communal ethics where neighbor care cultivates shared growth and esqueological fulfillment.

Thus, Kant's philosophy suggests proactive neighbor love as faith's consummation grounded in divine love. Skipped over a little bit there, but I think I've gotten to the point where I want to raise a couple of objections. You may have more actually. These are two that have come to my mind that uh one of which I think I can address straightforwardly. The other is a little more difficult. Let me share those with you. One objection to this notion that love is required for rational religious faith to reach this ultimate end point is that um is is the following question. Is this critical analysis of reason or a biblical abstraction?

One might in other words argue that this is all too convenient. K's rational religious faith is far too Christian not to be a pure abstraction from Christianity. In other words, just borrowing Christian ideas and putting them into rational concepts sounds like we have a winner there. How can it be that K's philosophy of religion so clearly culminates in a decidedly Christian moral teology? The answer to this question is basically an extension of one already provided in one of my earlier books, the indefense of Kant's religion. Cotton never denies the role of theology as prompter and hastener towards rational truths of transcendental theology. That's part of the whole purpose of the ongoing conflict is that theology should be prompting the philosopher in the transcendental examination of reason for deeper truths about the nature of said reason and its answers to the questions that human beings naturally ask themselves.

In fact, this is the special role of the conflict of faculties. If one reads Kant or extends the reading of Kant as if it were a biblical abstraction of the Christian narrative, then the principal experiment of religion, which would be this abstraction, is full of conundrums and is an abject philosophical failure. That's really one of the turning points of in defense of Kant's religion. That book that uh Jacobs and I wrote in 2007 was the realization that everybody in the field seemed to think that Kant was abstracting Christianity into rational terms and it had all these conundrums for that reason. But when we flipped the narrative and said he's not abstracting at all.

He's actually just using that as a foil to show how this theology grows out of Platonic and Aristotilian insights rooted in the very nature of reason. All of these conundrums began to fall away and it became a kind of revolution in the field because we had answered all the major conundrums by simply saying that Kant is not abstracting Christianity at all. He is just engaging it in finding it to be fruitful in prompting the inherent things built within reason that it needs for moral stability and ongoing human uh virtue striving.

So if however one understands Kant to be developing the enzalisimum conception of God through the work of Plato and Aristotle towards rational religious faith in the prototype of perfect humanity and the notions of primary and secondary substance in rational anthropology and the ant and the anatomy of redemption. Then the experiment continues successfully until the full excavation of reason is complete. In other words, it continues to refine itself as we continue to ask questions that human beings meaningfully ask themselves so that we know what we must believe for moral hope. One of the key things to realize about Kant is that his entire philosophy is best understood as a critical examination of reason unemployed.

In other words, he is not looking at empirical truths. He is just using empirical truths to prompt this rational analysis of the inherent nature of reason unemployed. So the entire um rational religious faith is an excavation of reason unemployed. We still have to go out there thinks Kant and this is what he does in book four of religion to see whether or not any religion matches up to what we find are the needs of reason. And if you find such a religion you have every reason to believe in it.

And so he rather famously says that in the teacher of the gospel, he never mentions the word Jesus, but in book four of the religion text, he says the teacher of the gospel is the first person to ever realize the nature of the prototype. And the only question that remains is whether or not it has come from humanity below or from above. And on that, the philosopher must remain silent. And so context us right to the church door, if you will. but he doesn't want to make empirical proclamations because he doesn't think that's the job of the philosopher. And so this is how I believe he overcomes the first objection.

All right, the second objection. This one's a little thornier and the more I think about it, I still have to do more thinking about it. Uh but let me just lay it out for you. I feel like El Planagan when he when he came up with the uh the great pumpkin objection to found found the Achilles heel of reform of reformed epistemology. Anyway, um I'll let you decide if that's true. Second question, can Kant's notion of love account for agape love in its fullness, including love of enemies?

I take this to be a thornier problem than the problem of abstraction. It is not immediately clear why converting to the good principle and joining an ethical community enables or even promotes such unconditional love. Admittedly, the issues get more complex. As explained earlier, rational religious faith in its fullness requires belief in the proactive banding together of moral converts, the ideal of the trinity as exemplar of this moral community, and the kind of immortality found in the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. The moral momentum of hope in Khan's rational faith is one of continued expansion. human action rooted in divine grace and an inexhaustible commitment to God's love as the baseline of a meaningful universe.

In other words, the giving of the very concepts of the prototype of the community of the trinity and the other things is a kind of grace coming from we know not where the recesses of reason built into what you might call a rational anthropology or a natural theology even rooted in the human condition. The condescension of the prototype is proof of his divine love. While we were enemies of God, the God man died for us. As our moral exemplar, we are to become like this prototype by laying down our life for our friends and loving our enemies as he first loved us. Only with this kind of love can the ethical commonwealth and its varied individuals become like God or continue continue to become like God.

You see people die and they don't get there and other communities invade your community and some people say they're part of the ethical commonwealth but they're not a part of the ethical commonwealth. There's all sorts of things that could go wrong. And it seems to me that only the presupposition of something as dramatic as an enemy's love is sufficient to overcome all of the various uh potholes and landmines one might encounter in trying to establish an ethical commonwealth. as well as the ongoing growth of said commonwealth in light of the fact that it's constantly on the verge of going retrograde. I guess anybody who's had a long church church life knows this to be the case.

Only with this kind of love can the ethical commonwealth and its varied individuals become like God. Um, so in conclusion, Khan's transcendental philosophy when interpreted affirmatively offers Christian theology profound insights into rational religious love as proactive neighbor virtue care. From moral depravity to the prototypes condescension and communal banding, this progression fosters hope in the highest good, approximating agape through God's love, enabling ours as theologians venture into these boundaries. Conleacy continues to advance the dialogue between faith and reason, chastening speculation while hastening a moral teology rooted in rational religious faith. In this spirit, my hope is that Khan scholars may learn to better embody the categorical imperative in their actions, treating one another as ends and fostering a community where rational discourse flourishes with mutual respect and dare I say virtue laden love. Thank you guys very much for listening. Really appreciate it.

That sounds great. Any questions about that? I know that was a lot late in the evening and dinner is on its way. Yes, sir. So, this is a this is a little bit of an argument that I actually going to take advantage of the fact that you're a K scholar. This is might might just be Kant adjacent. I'm not sure. Yes. So, this argument would be something like this. In order for love to be fully rational, both love for myself and love for others have to be fully rational. In order for love for myself and love for others to be fully rational, they can never come into conflict.

The only way for that to be the case would be for there to be a God in an eternity. Yes. Um and sort of the only way for for people to know that sort of that they can be their their love can be fully rational is to sort of be assured of their eternity. Yes. Therefore, in order for people to have fully rational love, they need to become a Christian. Yes. But that until that last part, you're right out because Khan wants philosophically to stop at the door and you take a look at the religious alternatives out there. And if there be none, then they need to develop this prototype of perfect humanity, this banding together of the ethical commonwealth and community and so forth.

But he does think that perhaps there was one. He calls it New Testament Christianity. And whether or not theologians would be happy with New Testament Christianity because it he doesn't exactly have a great understanding of Judaism. He doesn't have a great understanding of the connection between the Old and New Testament. But in that case, it does seem like he would probably, you know, wink and say next question saying yes, I think I think that that sort of that sort of logic plays out all the way to the end. you need Kirkugar to go that one step further uh in this. So it's kind of an existential rational religious faith that would be required to go from the rational to the empirical.

One more. Yes sir. Earlier on you mentioned that he also wanted to include the trinity for communal reasons. Yes. So I'm wondering how that works. My understanding was like based on a quote that I was given that he said the doctrine of trinity was absolutely nothing worthwhile for practical life. That's right. That that quote comes from the conflict of the faculties. And so it's not he's only got three doctrines that he has found to be critically required and those are depravity, condescension of the prototype so that we can kill off the old disposition and take on the prototypes disposition and then the banding together of moral converts into a community.

And he believes that he has sort of set this sort of foundation for what every true religion must hold and that includes things like Islam or anything else. They have to develop a prototype of perfect humanity if they don't already have one. Um, my thesis in I think Kant's conflict of the faculty sets up this ongoing dialogue. He's not yet convinced the Trinity has any purpose, but I don't think he sees the need for communities to have prototypical communal activity within the Godhead as a as a as a as a a ground. if you will, or an ideal point to which the community should focus or learn from or something along those lines. So, you're right. He does say in the conflict of the faculties in one of his later writings that I can see no practical import to it. Therefore, we could probably do away with it. He sounds like maybe he's Aryan or maybe he's, you know, be one of the claims.

He's Pelagian. But I think that that's an that's that is a uh I would I would call that a rhetorical device to get the delo the theologian to start speaking up and challenge the philosopher for why it's practically required. I mean Christianity has the same issue by the way in your churches. If you say you're a trinitarian church then you need to have some reason why it matters or or people's like oh well okay maybe it doesn't matter. I think there are good reasons and one of them would be to show how we should love one another just as the father loves the son and you know this paricoritic activity of the trinity.

All right, let's thank Dr. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate you being here and enjoy your evening. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions and remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

It's turn around.