introduction to a series of essays
you’ve probably heard that during the enlightenment, science attempted to displace religion. this story is a bit like the one about pilgrims and indians at a large picnic table: there’s something kinda right about it… and it brings primary schoolers into the american story… but it turns out that pilgrim/indian relations were a bit more complicated and that thanksgiving as we know it is as much about economic stimulus as american mythology. the story about science attempting to conquer religion is pretty useful for getting people into (not out of) debates. but the notion of science that is incompatible with religion wasn’t invented until after the enlightenment.
enlightenment thinkers may not have been attempting to conquer religion or prevent the spread of science, but many of them were interested in questions about the meaning of the bible —particularly its divinity and historical truth. for example, galileo wrote about methods for reading scripture that didn’t undermine the possibility of heliocentrism; newton wrote more biblical commentary than treatises on mathematics or the natural world.
in our science vs. religion stories, the divinity of the bible & the historical truth of the bible are big issues. for example, some think that darwinian evolution is incompatible with the bible because the bible tells the historical truth — that life as we know it appeared over the course of 8 days — and darwinian evolution, which suggests that life as we know it appeared over many years, does not measure up. another example: some say that genesis 1 is an ancient near eastern effort to say that a particular god was from the beginning and is the creator of all things — not a record of what once happened.
because we associate questions about the divinity & historicity & truth of the bible with a war between science and religion, it can be easy to forget that (for some earlier thinkers) there was no war. when we tell the story of galileo’s trial, for example, we tend to talk about it as if it were a battle in that war. galileo’s trial is probably the most familiar example, but lots of other modern thinkers — both natural philosophers and biblical interpreters — get caught in our science vs. religion myth, too.
about Kant and Storr
this series of essays is about a conversation between two late 18th-century thinkers — a biblical interpreter called Gottlob Christian Storr and a philosopher called Immanuel Kant… a conversation that has arguably been caught in the net of that myth for some time.
one version of the story about their conversation goes like this: Kant argued that human reason couldn’t know God or anything about God, but that it was rational to have faith in practical matters—to trust that if we do our best to become moral, our efforts might eventually issue in a world where doing good and happiness always appear alongside each other.
Kant’s arguments perhaps seemed to suggest that the teachings of Lutheran Orthodoxy might be less than trustworthy. If we cannot know that God exists but can only trust that God can make this world where morality and happiness go together, what room is there for sola scriptura or justification by faith alone or the immediacy of the Word or the doctrine of the false pretensions of reason? If God is merely something we have to postulate because we need to (must) act (morally), what room is there for grace?
Storr saw in Kant’s arguments, the story goes, a loophole. Kant suggested that if reason needs to postulate or trust something in order to act rationally (to act with the expectation that good deeds will be rewarded and bad will be punished), it may postulate or trust it—provided that that something isn’t unthinkable. Storr applied Kant’s suggestion to Orthodox dogma. He claimed that if reason postulates all the Orthodox teachings, it is even better able (and even encouraged) to become more moral than if it merely postulates God and immortality.
the tale gets caught up in the science vs. religion net when its tellers claim that Storr’s application of Kant’s suggestion is illegitimate because when Kant says that we cannot know anything about God, he means that things like Orthodox dogma are not reliable knowledge. And when Kant says we may postulate God, he does not mean that we have a blank check for faith in speculative metaphysics. Kant is against religion and for respect for the limits of human knowledge (by experience). Storr, the tellers say, is for religion and against Kantian ‘science’ because he treats Scripture as trustworthy evidence for the divine authority of his claims and because he treats Scripture’s reports about miracles as legitimate. when Storr takes advantage of Kant’s loophole, he makes it seem as if Kant, who is against religion and for strict standards for knowledge, is pro-religion and contra strict standards.
Kant’s philosophy has had the wider, longer-lasting influence, and it has been understood to be more compatible with science. So it has been easy for scholars to dismiss Storr’s work as a last-ditch, even desperate effort to defend religion against a Kantian-scientific worldview. Indeed, Storr’s conversations with Kantian thinking might not have garnered much attention if he had not been the teacher of Hegel and Hölderlin and Schelling at the Tübigen Stift.
for this trio, Storr’s conversations with Kant’s work were supremely important. Like many contemporary thinkers, they thought that Storr made it seem as if the tenets of Lutheran orthodoxy followed from the Kantian philosophy… but where some contemporary thinkers are quick to dismiss Storr’s response to Kant as an example of science vs. religion, the trio thought it absolutely critical that they save Kant from Storr’s interpretation… even if it meant rewriting Kant. like contemporary scholars who use the religion vs science myth, the threesome imagined Kant’s work and Storr’s genuinely opposed.
what to expect in this series of essays
in this series of essays, I’ll point out how Storr made it seem like Orthodox conclusions followed from Kantian premises. as I show how Storr “put an orthodox spirit under the Kantian letter,” I’ll suggest that the two thinkers may not have been so genuinely at odds as they perhaps seemed to the threesome or mayhaps seem to contemporary thinkers who read their conversations through the science vs. religion story.
instead I’ll argue that even though Storr talked endlessly about the divine truth of Scripture and the Creeds and with miracles, his biggest questions were, like Kant’s, arguably about reliability, communicability, and ways of seeing or reading. Storr’s biggest questions were, like Kant’s, arguably about the possibility of reliably ordering multiple ways of seeing or multiple ways of discerning what is reliable.
in the course of the series, i’ll sketch what happens if we take the conversations of Storr and Kant outside the science vs. religion myth and drop them into a story about how late 18th-century scholars hoped to combine several different reading methods into a reliable meta-method.
if that promise doesn’t turn you on, these might. much of the series will be an exploration of Storr’s creative ways of integrating Lutheran theology and Kantian philosophy with historical, philological methods on scholarly terms & with scholarly tools. from Storr’s creative integrations we stand to learn much about the influence of Lutheran forms of thinking in modern and contemporary life (particularly in how we frame conflict, stability, us-ness, and otherness) and scholarship; and we stand to learn about the trans/formative and integrative powers of citations and annotations.
in short, you can expect juicy political/religious heuristics, histories of humanism, bibles, versification, scholarly methods, book layout/design/illustration…
and pictures. lots of pictures.
