8. The Rise of Subjectivism: Kant and the Turn Inward
The Rise of Subjectivism: Kant and the Turn Inward A lthough the various religious and philosophical movements of modern times differ in many ways, they share a common trait: they shift the focus of salvation away from God's objective work—Christ, the church, the Word, the sacraments—and place the emphasis on the individual. Whether they elevate the intellect (like rationalism), the will (as in Methodism), or the emotions (as in Pietism), they make the inner life of the person the center of religious experience.
This inward turn began with thinkers like Descartes, who believed that the starting point of all knowledge was one's own self-awareness—"I think, therefore I am." He taught that the only truth we can trust is what we perceive clearly and distinctly in our minds. External reality, including the senses, was viewed as unreliable. Truth, therefore, came from within.
Spinoza built on this idea. He claimed that the emotions (what he called "affects") control the natural person. People call something "good" or "evil" simply based on how it makes them feel or whether it enhances their lives. In Spinoza's view, good and evil don't exist in any objective sense—
they are just mental labels. True freedom, he argued, is achieved when we gain a higher, intuitive knowledge that sees everything as necessary, as flowing from God. This higher perspective brings peace, teaches us to see all things under the lens of eternity, and helps us transcend negative emotions like fear, sadness, guilt, or even repentance. Salvation, then, is not forgiveness through Christ, but the calming insight that comes from seeing things as they truly are.
This way of thinking deeply influenced the Enlightenment. Reason was king. Revelation and grace were accepted only if they could be rationally defended. Religion was reduced to moral improvement. Grace, if mentioned at all, was granted only to those who did their best. And in full-blown rationalism, divine grace was discarded entirely. People were told to follow their own reason, to trust their own will, and to live without dependence on any external authority. Human effort—not divine grace—was the supposed road to happiness and salvation.
Then came Immanuel Kant. He challenged this overly confident rationalism, especially its claim to know everything through the senses and reason. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant limited human knowledge to what we can observe in the physical world. We cannot, he said, know ultimate things—God, the soul, or eternity—through reason alone.
But Kant didn't stop there. In his Critique of Practical Reason, he introduced the idea of moral reason—the sense of inner duty and obligation we all feel. He argued that, even though we can't know God through reason, we are morally bound to act as though He exists. For Kant, freedom—the ability to choose the good out of a sense of duty—is the foundation of both morality and religion. This freedom is not proven; it is
simply assumed whenever we obey the moral law. And in that obedience lies the path to redemption.
According to Kant, human beings are not neutral between good and evil.
Deep down, all people have a bent toward evil. He acknowledged what Scripture and experience teach: that no one is naturally good. All are sinners. In fact, he described human nature as "radically evil." So evil is not just something we do—it's something in us, a core corruption of the will. What we need, Kant admitted, is nothing less than a new creation, a kind of rebirth.
Yet here, Kant could not accept the Christian doctrine of grace. Though he acknowledged the depth of human sin, he refused to embrace salvation as a gift of God through Christ. Instead, he returned to the autonomy of the will. If the moral law says we must do good, then—Kant insisted—we must be able to do it. Like the ancient Pelagians, he reasoned from "you must" to "you can."
Kant allowed that there is still within every person a predisposition toward the good—a moral seed that can, by one's own free will, grow and bring about self-renewal. Just as one freely became a sinner, so too can one freely become good again. For Kant, this rebirth is not a gradual process but an instant moral revolution—a decisive inner change, the laying aside of the old self and putting on the new.
To be fair, Kant did not deny the possibility of divine help. He even encouraged people to hope for "cooperation from above." But in the end, he refused to ground salvation in grace. For if grace were the decisive cause, then the good would no longer be our own doing. That, to Kant, would violate the principle of moral autonomy.
Can We Save Ourselves? Modern Thinkers on Redemption
In Kant's system, salvation depends not on divine grace but on human freedom. He believed people could and must redeem themselves by their own will. The person of Christ served not as a Savior who atones for sin, but as an ideal model—a picture of moral perfection. Christ, in this view, shows us how to overcome sin and temptation through discipline and selfcontrol.
According to Kant, once a person experiences this moral "rebirth" through a free act of will, they begin the slow journey of sanctification.
Those who are truly "born again," he believed, would never fall back into their former state. And though perfection is not reached quickly, moral progress assures us that it will be reached—if not in this life, then in the next. Feelings of guilt and fear of punishment eventually fade. A person pays for past sins not by receiving divine pardon, but by enduring the consequences and learning from them. In time, suffering becomes not punishment, but discipline—a way to become worthy of forgiveness. God,
Kant claimed, sees the sincere intention to do good and counts it as righteousness.
In this framework, grace becomes unnecessary. The gospel is replaced by the moral law. Redemption is not received but earned—slowly, through personal growth.
Schopenhauer: The Despair of the Will Like Kant, the philosopher Schopenhauer believed that human nature is profoundly corrupt. He agreed that mere education or enlightenment couldn't fix us. What we do flows from what we are, and what we are is twisted. He rejected the shallow optimism of his age, but unlike Kant,
Schopenhauer had no hope for salvation.
Instead, he believed the only escape from life's misery was to extinguish the desire to live. True deliverance, he said, comes not through redemption but through resignation—a renouncing of all desire, even consciousness itself. In this view, salvation is found not in renewal but in extinction, much like the Buddhist idea of nirvana. Art and philosophy might ease our pain, but they cannot save. The ultimate goal is to be rid of the self entirely.
Von Hartmann: Salvation as Self-Improvement through Suffering Eduard von Hartmann offered a more complex and mystical take. He too started with the brokenness of humanity—our self-centeredness, which he attributed to both evolution and history. Like his predecessors, he saw people as deeply flawed. But he believed this very brokenness was intended by God—not as a final purpose, but as a necessary means. God allows evil so that people will long for goodness and salvation.
In Hartmann's view, every person has a hidden moral potential, a faint echo of the divine will. This capacity for good—what he calls "grace"—is not a gift that comes from outside, but something built into us. It's passed down through history and nurtured by environment. Every person has a share in it. No one is entirely lost; no one is entirely chosen. All have been given some measure of grace, and all must develop it through effort.
Salvation, then, is part divine and part human. God gives grace, but we must make use of it. From our side, grace looks like faith—and faith is just our effort to cooperate with the divine moral order.
Hartmann's Gospel Without Christ Hartmann's view of salvation is a long, gradual journey. It begins with moral awareness, grows into repentance, and then matures into a faithful pursuit of holiness. This leads to reconciliation with God and a lifelong process of sanctification.
Yet all of this is ultimately just a step toward something greater: not the salvation of individual souls, but the redemption of humanity as a whole.
This "redemption" is not found in the kingdom of God or the return of Christ, but in the final triumph of a moral idea. It ends not in glory, but in collapse—the destruction of the universe and the return of all things into a formless, impersonal "being." According to Hartmann, even God is redeemed through this process, as He draws back from reality into potentiality.
Fichte and the Reimagining of Human Destiny For the German philosopher Fichte, the purpose of human life once centered on moral action and freedom. But as his thinking evolved, he came to believe that faith—not reason or intellect—is the foundation of all certainty, including our knowledge of the moral world and the physical world. According to Fichte, all truth begins in the heart, in the conscience, in a posture of faith. As he put it, "We are all born in faith."
Through this lens, Fichte concluded that the God we often discover last in our reasoning is, in fact, first of all. God is both the source and the goal of all things. Humanity and God are eternally one in essence. But this unity is disrupted by self-consciousness—our awareness of ourselves as distinct from others and from God. This separation is not accidental; it's necessary.
It creates the longing to return to what was once whole.
So, the story of human life becomes a journey: from union with God, into separation, and then—through struggle and self-denial—back into communion. The ultimate purpose of human life, then, is not action, not personal freedom or moral effort, but resting in God, delighting in His presence. As Spinoza once described it, it is an "intellectual love" of God— the highest, most blessed form of life.
Fichte believed this idea wasn't opposed to Christianity, but rather its deepest truth—especially as revealed in the Gospel of John. For him, the eternal unity between God and humanity was fully expressed in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ, Fichte argued, wasn't just a historical figure but the visible expression of what is eternally true: the union of the divine and the human.
Jesus shows us what we are called to become—not by nature, but by freedom and rebirth. He was by nature the Son of God. We are to become children of God by dying to ourselves and following His example. This inner transformation—the death of selfishness and the birth of a new self— is the only true path to salvation.
Fichte rejected the idea that historical facts or dogmatic propositions could save. He insisted that salvation must be metaphysical—concerned with eternal realities, not merely events in time. Yet he still affirmed that the story of Christ holds eternal significance. In this view, the Holy Spirit doesn't just help us understand doctrine, but leads us into ever-deepening union with God, building a kingdom that is both divine and rational.
Schelling: From Nature to Revelation Schelling, another major German thinker, took a similar path. Early in life, he paid little attention to religion. But through his study of nature, he developed a philosophy centered on the idea of unity—between God and the world, spirit and nature, the eternal and the finite. He called this the philosophy of identity.
For Schelling, the highest truths—whether in religion, morality, or art— cannot be discovered through logic or argument. They must be grasped through an inner vision, a kind of spiritual perception. True knowledge, in his view, comes from the heart, not the head. This leads to a kind of
mysticism in which philosophy and religion converge, both revealing the same reality: the unity of the finite with the eternal.
In paganism, Schelling said, the eternal is pulled down into the finite. But in Christianity, the finite is lifted up into the eternal. That's why history, not nature, is the heart of Christian faith—and at the center of that history stands Jesus Christ.
These themes, which emerged in Schelling's early work, became even more prominent in his later philosophy of revelation. There, he explored how the eternal God reveals Himself in time, especially through Christ—the one in whom heaven and earth, time and eternity, fully meet.
Christ and the Redemption of All Things According to some modern philosophies, the story of humanity is not simply about individual sin and salvation, but a cosmic drama—a journey of the finite returning to the infinite. These systems taught that sin began, not with a specific act of rebellion, but with the creation itself, where the finite (created things) gained an apparent independence from the infinite
(God). Sin deepened as human beings used their created nature to serve themselves instead of God.
But this estrangement, they said, was met by God's response in history— in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ, who existed eternally, humbled
Himself, becoming the Son of Man. This act of humility did not begin at His incarnation, but from the moment of humanity's fall. Even before being born into the world, Christ was at work, even mysteriously through the movements of paganism and myth. This long period—until His resurrection
—was seen as His suffering and humiliation.
With His resurrection, however, everything changed. The old world came to an end. The powers of paganism and darkness were broken. Humanity, in
a real sense, was justified—declared right before God (cf. Romans 4:25).
This justification, according to these thinkers, had to come before any true good works. Only when people know they are accepted by God can they be free to live joyfully and courageously in His service. Otherwise, they live in fear, trying to earn what God has already given.
Christ's resurrection, then, becomes the foundation of human reconciliation with God. It means that Christ didn't just come and go—He remains human forever, and by His ongoing life, we are declared righteous
(Romans 5:17). That righteousness isn't based on our works, since our entire being stands guilty before God. Only Christ—who made our whole existence right—can justify us. And because of Him, we can now live in peace with God, far from a gloomy, self-condemning religion that ignores the grace Christ accomplished.
This emphasis highlights a central truth: the person of Christ is the heart of Christianity, and Christianity is a thoroughly historical faith. But Christ's work didn't end at the resurrection. After ascending into heaven,
He continues His mission. First, He restored human nature to favor with God. Then, He sent the Holy Spirit, who brings the fullness of God's life into us.
In this way, a new kind of spiritual life began—a life marked by freedom, fellowship with Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Some thinkers imagined this as a process unfolding through the institutional church— moving from the hierarchical Roman church (Petrine), to the gospelcentered Reformation (Pauline), and ultimately to a future spiritual maturity
(Johannine). In that vision, all things are being reconciled to God through Christ. History itself becomes the story of God restoring what is broken.
Hegel and the Cosmic Story of Redemption
Among these post-Enlightenment philosophers, Hegel also sought to make room for Christianity within his worldview. But his version was radically different from biblical teaching. For Hegel, God was not a fixed, eternal being but a process—a self-developing spirit, unfolding throughout history. He believed that the divine "emptied" itself into creation, and through the course of time, sought to return to unity with itself. This movement—from unity to separation and back again—was how he explained sin and redemption.
Humanity, in this view, began in childlike innocence, but as selfawareness grew, people became proud and self-centered. Sin, then, was not merely disobedience but the result of this growing self-consciousness and self-assertion. Yet this also gave rise to the awareness that something was broken—and so began the longing for reconciliation with God.
But Hegel argued that reconciliation couldn't be produced by humanity. It had to exist first in God. And it did—eternally—in the idea of God, where the infinite and the finite are already one. But that truth had to become visible and personal. So in Christ, Hegel claimed, this reconciliation was shown. Christ was not merely a moral teacher or martyr; He was the embodiment of this divine idea—the union of God and man. His death, then, was the turning point: the destruction of sin, the gateway to resurrection, and the start of a new world.
According to Hegel, in Jesus, God entered into human finiteness—even into death itself—to overcome it from within. The cross, then, was the death of death, and the resurrection was the dawn of a new reality.
This, Hegel said, is the foundation of the church. Believers know by faith —not by reasoning or miracles—that God and man are united in Christ. The
Spirit gives this assurance internally. The presence of God in His people means that love must mark their lives, for "God is love."
In this scheme, the church's mission is to help believers grow into this truth. This is symbolized in infant baptism, which assumes the child belongs to the covenant community and will mature into a faith that claims
God's promise. The Lord's Supper, likewise, becomes a visible sign of reconciliation with God and the Spirit's presence within the heart.
A Philosophy of Redemption?
What is striking about these post-Enlightenment philosophies—from Kant to Hegel, from Schelling to Schopenhauer—is that they turned again to Christianity. Rationalism had dismissed the need for grace, teaching that enlightenment and moral effort were enough. But these later thinkers saw the deep brokenness of human nature and acknowledged that redemption had to come from beyond ourselves.
However, they still resisted the gospel of grace. They tried to explain redemption as part of a cosmic process, where evil is not a tragic rebellion but a necessary stage in the world's development. And salvation, in their view, was not the gracious gift of a Savior, but the slow unfolding of divine reason or spirit through history.
The Limits of Post-Kantian Philosophy Although philosophers after Kant made a sincere effort to take the core truths of Christianity seriously again, they ultimately fell short. Their failure lies in this: while they distanced themselves from the rationalism of the Enlightenment in appearance, they didn't fully abandon its underlying assumptions.
Take Hegel, for example. He criticized the arrogance of Enlightenment thinking and wanted to show how reason was present within Christianity.
Yet, at the same time, he put Christianity on trial—not before Scripture, but before his own reason. He claimed that philosophy did not stand above
Christianity's content, only above the way it expressed that content. But even that claim is undermined by his deeper assertion: "Thought is the absolute judge before which all content must prove itself."
In other words, Christianity might offer a rich message of reconciliation, but its true meaning can only be unlocked through philosophy. It is not faith that brings reconciliation with God, but philosophy—which, in Hegel's system, claims to reveal that even nature and opposition itself are divine, and that the human spirit gradually rises into union with the Absolute.
So while Hegel tried to unite reason and religion, what actually happened was a deep split between the truth of the gospel and the speculative ideas of philosophy. The end result? The substance of Christianity—its heart— was lost. In trying to reshape the faith to fit philosophical categories, the message of grace and redemption was drained of power.
Once Hegel's lofty language was stripped away, all that remained was the idea that human beings, caught between conflicting desires and reason, must slowly climb toward a higher spiritual unity. Whether by intellect or by will, the burden of salvation fell squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
Reflection: God's Truth Cannot Be Judged by Human Reason This is the danger of exalting human wisdom above God's Word. Even well-meaning efforts to engage Christianity philosophically can, if not grounded in Scripture, subtly replace the gospel with a human-centered process of self-improvement.
But God's truth does not need to justify itself before human reason.
Rather, human reason must bow before the Word of God. As Paul writes, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … We preach Christ crucified … the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Corinthians 1:20,
23–24).
True reconciliation is not discovered by philosophical speculation, but given by grace through faith in Jesus Christ—crucified, risen, and reigning.
It is not a process we control, but a gift we receive.
The Gospel Is Not a Process but a Person While these philosophies tried to recover the idea of redemption, they missed its heart: the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Evil is not a necessary part of progress—it is sin against a holy God. And salvation is not found in our journey toward the divine, but in God's coming down to us in Christ.
The gospel does not say we redeem ourselves by mystical insight, rational thought, or moral effort. It declares that God, in love, sent His Son to bear our sin and rise again, so that we might be justified freely by His grace.
"But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8)."For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2
Corinthians 5:21).
Let every philosophy bow before the cross. Let every theory of progress fall silent before the empty tomb. In Christ, history finds its meaning—not in an idea, but in a Savior.
Modern Theology and the Shift Away from Grace Modern theology, especially as it developed after Hegel and through thinkers like Schleiermacher and Ritschl, continued to use Christian language—but gave it a different meaning. Terms like grace, conversion,
and justification were redefined to fit a more human-centered and less supernatural system.
In this new theology, conversion is no longer a radical change worked by God alone but a cooperative effort between God and man. Grace is no longer the power of God rescuing sinners from spiritual death, but more like divine encouragement—God guiding and shaping people through education and culture. Everyone, it is believed, will eventually respond to this process. Under this view, regeneration isn't necessary, and conversion is simply a person feeling regret over sin and choosing to live a better life, trusting in God's kindness.
Justification, then, is not God declaring a sinner righteous based on the righteousness of Christ. Instead, it is reduced to a change in how a person feels about their relationship with God—a clearing of the conscience. Once a person feels they are "at peace" with God, they are considered justified.
This modern view focuses almost entirely on a person's inner state or attitude. Sin is seen as ignorance more than guilt, and righteousness is seen as a personal potential that slowly unfolds, like a seed growing into a tree.
Schleiermacher: Faith as Feeling, Not Atonement Friedrich Schleiermacher, often called the father of modern liberal theology, tried to bring Christianity back to the center—but only by radically redefining it. He emphasized the person of Jesus Christ, not primarily as Redeemer but as the one who awakens in us a deep sense of God. Jesus, he said, entered our condition of sin and suffering in order to draw us into his condition of holiness and blessedness.
For Schleiermacher, conversion and justification are really the same thing, just looked at from different angles—human and divine. And in this model, people are not active or passive, but receptive—they have the
ability to accept grace when it's offered. Justification, then, becomes the moment when someone is brought into fellowship with Christ—not because
Christ's righteousness is imputed to them, but because they are morally and spiritually renewed.
Even later theologians who tried to stay more faithful to Christian doctrine often held that justification happens not through a legal declaration but through an inner transformation—by an infusion of righteousness, not its imputation. So while they emphasized the role of Christ and the Holy Spirit, they still saw grace as something that works within, not something that stands outside the person as a completed work of God.
Ritschl: Justification as Moral Confidence Albrecht Ritschl took a slightly different approach. He focused on Jesus' life and teachings, claiming that in Christ we see the love of God clearly revealed. But for Ritschl, this love of God had no place for wrath or justice.
There was no need for atonement. Sin, to him, was not deep guilt before a holy God, but more like human misunderstanding—a gap in our awareness, not an offense against divine righteousness.
Christ, in his unwavering commitment to God's will, showed us that God is loving and forgiving. This message, not his death as a substitutionary atonement, is the heart of salvation. Justification, then, is simply the awareness that we are loved and accepted by God. It belongs to the church as a whole, not to the individual believer. Individuals only experience this justification by joining the church and sharing in its moral vision.
Faith, for Ritschl, is not a miracle of grace but a natural response, developed through education and culture. It's more about recognizing the moral greatness of Jesus than trusting in his finished work. Justification,
reconciliation, and even regeneration are not supernatural acts of God but changes in attitude—where people stop fearing God as judge and start living as confident, moral beings under God's fatherly love.
A Shift in the Spirit of the Age In his time, Ritschl responded to an optimistic culture that believed in the power of science, progress, and education. He separated theology from philosophy, gave science free reign, and assigned religion a secondary role, mostly to inspire people to be good citizens and build a better society
—the "kingdom of God on earth."
But as time went on, people began to feel the emptiness of this vision.
Technological progress did not bring peace, and the human soul remained restless. With that growing discontent, there came a renewed interest in spiritual depth, personal faith, and the mystical aspects of religion.
People saw that cultural Christianity—one that merely teaches ethics and optimism—couldn't deal with the deeper problems of guilt, suffering, and death.
Ritschl's theology began to fade because it neglected the personal, spiritual life of the believer. He gave little attention to the experience of grace, the reality of regeneration, or the deep inner communion with God that Scripture describes. His system saw people mainly as members of a moral community, not as sinners in need of a Savior.
As the spiritual hunger of the age returned, new philosophies and mysticisms rose up, some rooted in psychology, others in metaphysical speculation. But the core problem remained: the gospel had been redefined. What God declares about us in Christ was replaced with what we feel about ourselves. Salvation was no longer a gift of grace, but a process of moral uplift and emotional reassurance.
Reflection: The Glory of True Justification Against this backdrop, the biblical gospel shines all the more clearly:
"God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."—2 Corinthians 5:21
True justification is not about human feeling or gradual selfimprovement. It is God's act of grace, where He declares guilty sinners righteous because of Christ alone. This righteousness is not infused into us, but imputed to us—credited to our account—through faith. And this faith itself is a gift, not a natural response.
The Reformation recovered this gospel. Modern theology, for all its eloquence, traded assurance for uncertainty, and divine grace for human effort. But the gospel remains the power of God unto salvation, not because it stirs our hearts, but because it rests entirely on Christ's finished work.