Book Review: The Intolerable God: Kant's Theological Journey

The Intolerable God: Kants Theological Journey. By Christopher J. Insole. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016. x + 176 pp. $30.00 (paper).In this more accessible book, Insole reprises much of what he argued at length from primary sources in his Kant and the Creation of Freedom (2013). A revision of Insoles McDonald Lectures given in 2013, this book has a more conversational approach for an audience who is less familiar with Kant's work and (most likely) less interested in the incessant production of secondary literature on the same.Insole's retrieval narrative is that the young Kants untroubled compatabilist theism gave way to doubts which were the gadfly of the Critical project, transcendental idealism, and the "Kant" whose influence is still felt today. Specifically, Kant was increasingly troubled by the idea of Gods total causal determination and defended the human agents metaphysical independence in order to secure human freedom for moral responsibility. In this book, this narrative is reprised as a journey through pedagogically-minded "conceptual rooms" which chart the changes in Kant's thinking alongside the changes in his thought-environment.Insole is a quick but careful guide through these rooms, covering a remarkable amount of philosophical ground with an eye to highlighting essential figures and concepts without bogging down the general audience in a morass of unfamiliar names and jargon. Insole is both pedagogically astute in his choice of analogies and an adept writer with surprising humor for a book on Kant. His analogy of "the best possible rummage box" for the possibilities in the divine understanding stands out as an example of both (p. 20). Another highlight is his ability to give a sympathetic analysis of the divisions of Kant scholarship on the tricky concept of noumena and what we can think about them, while demonstrating his own commitment and its basis in a concise and admirably clear ten pages (pp. 95-105).It is tempting to call this a "popular" theo-biography of Kant, but it is not nearly broad enough in its discussion of Kant's life or work to be a satisfying account of Kant's theological life. Human freedom and divine action are not merely at the center; they eclipse other ideas of theological importance or interest in Kant's work. The title of the book comes from the Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion (LPR), where Kant says that the concept of God can neither be resisted nor tolerated (p. 7). While Insole shows how intolerability surmounts irresistibility late in Kant's life, his positive characterization of Kant's belief in God during the Critical period seems implausibly thin. Insole interprets the practical postulates clearly, but they do not reveal the character of Kant's beliefs so much as how he warrants those beliefs. They show how vital Kant thought belief in God was to the stability of a moral life, but fail to otherwise distinguish Kant's "living God" from the blind workings of the deists eternal nature. There is substantial room between the audacious Swedenborg and the metaphysical skepticism of Hume. Insole's failure to draw out more of the appeal of the implicit and explicit doctrine of God from the LPR weakens the book. …