This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the ... more This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the Kantian letter with an Orthodox spirit. In §§17-18 of his DC, Storr positions Immanuel Kant’s physico-theological and moral arguments for rational belief in God within an argument for the divine authority of Scripture—on which he suggests the reliability of the book’s dogmatic statements rest. By foregrounding some versions of Kant’s arguments (while hiding others) and by illegitimately drawing biblical-theological conclusions from transcendental and limited-speculative premises, the scholarly story goes, Storr made it seem as if Lutheran Orthodoxy follows from Kant’s arguments for rational belief in God. I argue rather that Storr put Kant’s arguments in the mouth of reason—construed as a figure in a traditional Lutheran story of transformation. In this story—told from a post-transformation perspective—reason’s awareness of God is both transformed by an encounter with Word and it is a placeholder that makes a comparison between ‘pre’ and ‘post’ transformation visible. In this encounter with Word, reason comes to trust that the God who is able to help is also willing to help, and to trust that the God who reveals his willingness to help is also the divine Author of Scripture. Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s rational belief in a God who is able to see the secrets of our hearts and are cognitive symbolic, Storr is able (while keeping within the bounds of the Lutheran dogmatics genre) to (re)present them as symbolic summaries of Scripture (i.e., as dogmatic statements) that harmonize neatly with reason’s self-understanding. Storr does not cherry-pick the Kantian words that support his cause, but exploits the compatibility of Kant’s heuristic language with the Lutheran heuristic. And he does not cast methodological rigor aside so much as he incorporates Kant’s arguments into a Lutheran rule for hierarchically combining human- relative modes of argumentation and measures of reliability with divine or Scripture- relative modes and measures. While he owes much to sixteenth-century thinking, Storr answers a pressing question of the late eighteenth-century: how to reliably bring together multiple modes of argumentation and measures of reliability.
This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the ... more This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the Kantian letter with an Orthodox spirit. In §§17-18 of his DC, Storr positions Immanuel Kant’s physico-theological and moral arguments for rational belief in God within an argument for the divine authority of Scripture—on which he suggests the reliability of the book’s dogmatic statements rest. By foregrounding some versions of Kant’s arguments (while hiding others) and by illegitimately drawing biblical-theological conclusions from transcendental and limited-speculative premises, the scholarly story goes, Storr made it seem as if Lutheran Orthodoxy follows from Kant’s arguments for rational belief in God. I argue rather that Storr put Kant’s arguments in the mouth of reason—construed as a figure in a traditional Lutheran story of transformation. In this story—told from a post-transformation perspective—reason’s awareness of God is both transformed by an encounter with Word and it is a placeholder that makes a comparison between ‘pre’ and ‘post’ transformation visible. In this encounter with Word, reason comes to trust that the God who is able to help is also willing to help, and to trust that the God who reveals his willingness to help is also the divine Author of Scripture. Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s rational belief in a God who is able to see the secrets of our hearts and are cognitive symbolic, Storr is able (while keeping within the bounds of the Lutheran dogmatics genre) to (re)present them as symbolic summaries of Scripture (i.e., as dogmatic statements) that harmonize neatly with reason’s self-understanding. Storr does not cherry-pick the Kantian words that support his cause, but exploits the compatibility of Kant’s heuristic language with the Lutheran heuristic. And he does not cast methodological rigor aside so much as he incorporates Kant’s arguments into a Lutheran rule for hierarchically combining human- relative modes of argumentation and measures of reliability with divine or Scripture- relative modes and measures. While he owes much to sixteenth-century thinking, Storr answers a pressing question of the late eighteenth-century: how to reliably bring together multiple modes of argumentation and measures of reliability.
Uploads
Papers by Stiles Alexander