Allen Wood’s powerful new work, Kant and Religion, is informed by more than fifty years of engagement with the Kantian corpus. In tone, it is often polemical, challenging a multitude of recent works on Kant’s philosophy of religion, as well as critical of what Wood calls the ‘toxic delusions’ (p. xvii) and ‘political exploitation of Christianity’ (p. xix), in both Kant’s time and our own. Wood’s own leanings, as he admits, are secular, and thus we find in his approach to Kant’s philosophy of religion one that promotes atheism or agnosticism, and rejects ‘literal’ explorations of a Kantian philosophical theology in favour of a reading that treats Christian doctrines, as James DiCenso so pithily put it in his 2012 commentary on the Religion, as symbols for our moral ideals in an ‘imaginatively enhanced or pictorial form’ (DiCenso Reference DiCenso2012: 28). As such, Wood similarly rejects the view that Kant sought to engage with Christianity in such a way that some of its doctrines would be found to accord with the principles of rational religion, while others would not; instead, the Religion offers no ‘appraisal whatever of Christianity’ (p. 22).

Wood thus dismisses as ‘a mere distraction’ scholarship on the Religion which explores ‘whether Kant “accepts” or “rejects” this or that part of “Christianity”’ (p. 25). Instead, he asserts that Kant would want us to see such doctrines as original sin, vicarious atonement, sanctification, justification and the incarnation as free symbols, open to whatever interpretation (so long as it is non-literal) that meets the reader’s personal needs. Hence, for Wood, Kant is merely telling us ‘what his reason tells him’ (p. 25) rather than evaluating whether or not specific doctrines have ‘unity’ or ‘compatibility’ with the Pure Rational System of Religion (AA, 6: 13).

One of the most telling illustrations of Wood’s approach to the Religion can be seen in his treatment of divine forgiveness. According to the Augustinian tradition, original sin burdens humanity with an infinite debt to God, a debt that is then repaid (or at least lifted) through the vicarious atonement of the crucifixion. Kant engages with these themes in part two of the Religion, explicitly discussing the problem of how an infinite debt could be repaid (AA, 6: 72–6), rejecting the doctrine of vicarious atonement (AA, 6: 72), and resolving this ‘difficulty’, albeit cryptically, by suggesting that ‘[i]t is always therefore only a decree of grace when we are relieved (entschlagen) of all responsibility’ (AA, 6: 76). Wood, however, sidesteps the challenges which arise from the classic problem of the ‘infinite’ magnitude of our debt, the tensions between divine justice and mercy and the host of other soteriological issues which have fuelled centuries of theological debate, despite the fact that they are explicitly discussed by Kant throughout the Religion and elsewhere (e.g. part one of the Conflict of the Faculties). Wood likewise dismisses the interpretations offered by others as not merely incorrect, but ‘repugnant’ (p. 147).

Relying upon his contention that Kant never engages with Christian theology but instead just seeks to use its doctrines as symbols for what are essentially secular-psychological problematics, Wood not only perfunctorily dismisses opposing views, but, across pages rife with the kind of bullying and belittling language more suited to the tweets of political demagoguery than a reputable press, he attacks these views as ‘deplorable’ (pp. 91, 98), ‘worse than gratuitous’ (p. 116), and as making ‘nonsense’ of the Religion’s project (p. 163). In place of their ‘perverse’ (p. 128, n. 8) and ‘repugnant’ (p. 147) approaches to Kant, Wood contends that ‘the whole point of the religious symbolism’ (p. 147) of sin and salvation, debt and grace, atonement and so forth is just ‘a meaningful and emotionally enriched way of relating to our own past’ (p. 145) whereby we each become our own ‘redeemer’ (p. 134). Kant’s discussions of the infinite debt of sin and so forth are thus not seen by Wood in the context of philosophical theology, but rather as ‘emotionally enriched’ or ‘imaginatively enhanced’ code for psychoanalytics.

Wood thus contends that Kant’s examination of the Christian story, which centres on a ‘second-person relationship between myself and God’ (p. 137) is just metaphor for a first-person ‘self-relation’ (pp. 137, 143). That is, all the complexities of Kant’s analysis of Christian soteriology boil down to metaphor for ‘our self-relation: whether we can find ourselves acceptable’ (p. 137). To contend otherwise is to adopt a ‘repugnant’ standpoint. No appraisal of Christianity, indeed.

So, why does Wood read Kant’s Religion in a manner so similar to DiCenso’s (i.e. as a sort of non-cognitivist semiology)? One answer is that Wood needs to make Kant fit with his own secular leanings, and thus despite casting Kant and Religion as exegesis, it is, in fact, more a sort of eisegesis. But if that is how we are to read his work, it is unfortunate that Wood (unlike the more self-aware and explicit hermeneutic used by Steve Palmquist (Palmquist Reference Palmquist2019) in his recent Kant and Mysticism) has proffered Kant and Religion as exegesis. I presume that Wood genuinely believes that his interpretation is accurate to Kant’s intentions, i.e. that it is exegesis rather than eisegesis. For early on in Kant and Religion, Wood claims that a semiological reading of the Religion is the only one that is viable. This is because, Wood asserts, Kant’s ‘most fundamental doctrines of thought and cognition’ demand that ‘our cognition of God is merely symbolic’ (p. 5); and, further, ‘if we think about God in a way that is not symbolic, then we cannot think in a way that is genuinely religious’ (p. 6). In other words, the only ‘genuinely’ religious way to approach religious concepts is to treat them as symbols for what are essentially secular concepts, such as I noted above in his rendering of Kant’s discussions of Christian soteriology as ultimately just about our own ‘self-relation’.

This, however, mangles Kant’s own approach to religious language. Although Wood tries to buttress his views by appealing to Kant’s characterization of religious language as analogical, his depiction of Kant’s conception of analogy is quite distorted: Kant does not use analogy for the purposes of turning a religious sign into a secular signified, but, rather, to show how we can conceptualize God in a manner consistent with the strictures of transcendental idealism.

One helpful place where Kant’s intentions in this regard can be seen is in the Prolegomena, as he contrasts his views on the philosophy of religion with those of Hume. There Kant illustrates his use of analogy as follows: ‘the promotion of the happiness of the children = a is to the love of the parents = b as the welfare of humankind = c is to the unknown in God = x, which we call love’ (AA, 4: 357n.). Likewise, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant frames this x as an unknown ‘[s]omething’ in God ‘of which we have no concept of what it is in itself’ (A679/B707), and explains in the Critique of Judgement that his treatment of analogy allows us to gain cognitive purchase on religious language without determining anything about God’s ‘internal constitution’ (AA, 5: 457).

Despite his insistence that Kant makes no appraisal of Christianity, it strikes me that Wood is quite inconsistent on the issue. One illustration of this can be seen in how Wood disparages those who do not reduce Christianity to symbols for secular matters. But there is also a second important manifestation. Although Wood repeatedly attacks interpreters (such as myself) who claim that Kant ‘rejects’ one or another Christian doctrine, Wood himself – despite his avowals otherwise – does exactly the same.

One such instance occurs on one of the pages where his language is the most belligerent. Just before he accuses me of proposing a Kantian inquisition to root out the heretics to rational religion, he (accurately) lists those doctrines that I argue are incompatible with one or another aspect of Kantian ethics, including ‘Original Sin as biologically inherited, the Incarnation, Vicarious Atonement, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac’ (p. 14, n. 15). But here is the irony. On this very page, where he attacks me for asserting that Kant ‘rejects’ the aforementioned doctrines, Wood himself writes that ‘rational and revealed religion must reject certain doctrines, or the apparent teachings of certain scriptures’ (p. 14, top) – and as his example, he uses one of the examples I too offer, namely, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.

Moreover, later in Kant and Religion, Wood discusses another of the doctrines on my list, writing that Kant ‘rejects’ the ‘claim that sin is literally inherited by human beings from their ancestors’ (p. 62). Perhaps catching this slip, Wood follows up by stating that ‘Kant does not reject the revealed account’, for it ‘still belongs to the outer circle of revealed religion’ (p. 62), i.e. Kant does not ‘reject’ that there is a historical record which indicates that some Christians believe that our moral condition is biologically inherited.

Before moving on to the conclusion of this review, let us consider the implications of Wood’s denial (notwithstanding the aforementioned inconsistencies) that Kant rejects any Christian doctrine whatsoever. In particular, what would then become of Kant’s well-known imagery of the two spheres found in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Religion?

As many interpreters read the Religion, its overall aim is to explore which Christian doctrines have ‘unity’ or ‘compatibility’ with rational religion and which do not. Those doctrines that are found to have ‘unity’ or ‘compatibility’ with rational religion overlap thereby with the inner sphere, while those that do not fall thereby within the annulus of the outer. Each part of the Religion is thus devoted to specific clusters (original sin, redemption, the function of the church, ecclesiastical practices), with the doctrines of each cluster evaluated so as to identify which comport with rational religion and which do not. Following this interpretation, to ‘reject’ a doctrine is to find it incompatible with the ‘moral concepts’ (AA, 6: 12) that set the conditions for rational religion (e.g. how can we be held morally responsible for our moral condition if it is inherited or if it is improved through the ‘vicarious’ sacrifice of another?).

By contrast, imagine reading the Religion according to the thesis that Kant does not reject any Christian doctrine whatsoever (i.e. Kant never concludes that one doctrine or another lacks ‘unity’ or ‘compatibility’ with rational religion). Were that so, then there would be no doctrine that falls outside the smaller sphere of rational religion, no annulus to distinguish between the smaller and wider spheres. The two spheres become homotropic and the project of the Religion once again becomes just a study of Christian symbols, something that anyone could have composed, with minimal ties to the critical project, no Pure Rational System of Religion, but rather a vapid reduction of religion into ‘a meaningful and emotionally enriched way of relating to our own past’ (p. 145).

Space does not allow me to discuss more of my concerns with Kant and Religion. I expect most readers would agree that Kant and Religion displays a facility with the Kantian corpus that one would expect from such a senior scholar as is Wood. But, as an interpretation of Kant’s Religion, it is sorely lacking. It dismisses, ignores or mocks the scholarly advances of recent decades, turning the Religion back into the sort of meandering, disorganized, ahistoric text it was rendered as by many Anglophone Kantians of the last century. Lastly, we as a community should not turn a blind eye to its abusive language. Such language, especially when used by those with the greatest influence in our field, has a negative impact on the free exchange of ideas, especially the willingness of young scholars to pursue potentially valuable new lines of inquiry.