KANT ON GRACE: A REPLY TO HIS CRITICS
Authors: MARIÑA JACQUELINE 
Published: July 2002

It has become almost a commonplace in theological circles that
despite the
Augustinian echoes sounded by his doctrine of radical evil and his discussion

of the need for divine forgiveness in his Religion Within the Bounds
of Reason
Alone, Kant's understanding of salvation remains through
and through Pelagian. Such was the verdict of Karl Barth;
more recently, Gordon E. Michalson has made the charge that, ‘Kant's

conception of grace and divine aid
reintroduces an obviously Pelagian element based on human effort and
merit’. Michalson has noted further that ‘if the implicit
point of a Kantian
view of morality and religion is to equate salvation with the individual

achievement of virtue, then there seems to be little role left for a
heteronomous grace or divine act to play’.
And in a similar vein, Nicholas Wolterstorff
has argued that on Kant's scheme God is morally required to forgive
the
person who has altered her fundamental maxim for the good; salvation is

thus understood in terms of a system of rights – that is, it is something
that
the moral individual can expect as that which is her due. It is something
that
she merits. Wolterstorff reads Kant's project as ‘probing the

implications of our human rights and obligations’, and argues that

If we have a moral claim on someone's doing something, then for

that person to do
that is not for the person to act graciously, but for the person
to grant what is due
to us, it is to act justly, not graciously. … Thus Kant cannot have

it both ways: he
cannot hold that we can expect God's forgiveness, since
God's failure to forgive
would violate the moral order of rights and obligations, and also
hold that God's
granting forgiveness is an act of grace on God's part. … God

must be understood on
the Kantian scheme as required to forgive. Of course this means that a
gap begins
to open between Christianity, on the one hand, and Kant's rational

religion, on the other.

Against those who would dismiss Kant's project on the grounds that
it is
Pelagian, I hope to show that an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's

views on divine justice and grace shows them not to conflict with an
authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. To the contrary,

Kant's
analysis of them helps us to understand the implications of the Christian

understanding of grace. An unfolding of these implications will also uncover

the intrinsic relations that must hold between God's justice and his
grace.

In the course of my argument I will show that Kant works with at least

three different concepts of grace, all of them operating on distinct levels.

Getting clear on what these concepts are and how they operate is of decisive

significance if we are to understand correctly Kant's stand on divine
aid.
Accordingly, the paper will be organized into three parts. In my first
section
I deal with Kant's general conception of grace. An in-depth analysis
of this
most general notion should reveal why Kant is not Pelagian. In the second

part of the paper I identify two more particular concepts of grace. While
the
general description still applies to both of them, they are distinguishable
from
one another in important ways. Not taking account of the differences
between the two will make it very difficult to understand Kant's project
in
the Religion coherently. In fact, it is because the
differences between the two
concepts have been ignored that commentators such as Gordon Michalson
have principally viewed the Religion as a failed attempt to weave
together
two world views, that of Bible and that of the Enlightenment. While I
distinguish between these two concepts in my second section, there I focus

on the one which I identify as practically useful. The
third section is devoted
to an investigation of Kant's understanding of the last of these concepts.