Kant and the Bible: Holy Scripture as an Object of Rational-Critical Reflection

The article focuses on the specifics of philosophical consideration and comprehension of books that acquire the status of sacred within a certain sociocultural space. Both in contemporary philosophical discourse and in the discourse of many past eras, there is usually a distancing of professional philosophers from direct engagement with such texts. As a result, the sacred books end up being almost exclusive handled by intellectuals, who either ignore specifically philosophical research methods, or arbitrarily apply them to their opportunistic, pragmatic goals, or limit themselves to the traditional technique of interpreting and commenting on the Holy Scripture. However, for serious thinkers, many sacred books, examined from a specific perspective, turn out, to be very valuable material for testing the strength of their theoretical and methodological tools and the moral and ethical principles they adhere to, despite all possible and even inevitable risks. The article analyzes this problem on the example of Immanuel Kant’s interpretation of the Bible, which played the role of a fundamental culture-forming text in his era.It is shown how the philosopher opposes the rational-critical and doctrinal-theological approaches to reading the Bible, while leaving the reader the right of free choice. The main attention is paid to three small works by Kant, which make up a kind of philosophical trilogy. In the first of them – the “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” – the German thinker, based on the Book of Genesis, gives his own version of the reasons for mankind’s emergence from the state of nature and its transformation into a sovereign subject of historical action. In the second one – “On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies” – Kant, relying on the Book of Job, solves the problem of God’s goodness/non-goodness in the light of the evidence of evil and suffering as an ontological datum. The third work – “The End of All Things” – deals with the Book of Revelation and treats from a philosophical point of view one of the most important religious topics – the apocalyptic destruction of humanity (the Last Judgment, the end of the world, the cessation of historical time). The article demonstrates the heuristic potential of Kant’s rational-critical methodology, which has not lost its significance even today. 

Keywords: Kant, the Bible, rational-critical methodology, the Book of Genesis, the beginning of history, the Book of Job, theodicy, the Book of Revelation, the end of history