Bonhoeffer recognized this background and accepted it as the Sitz im Leben of the German theological and philosophical landscape. We might even say that Bonhoeffer believed Kant to be asking the right questions—questions worthy of a theologian. In fact, while in America studying at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer critiqued his American students, saying, “questions such as that of Kantian epistemology are “nonsense,” and no problem to them, because they take life no further” than what is pragmatic. America focused on William James not Immanuel Kant.

In our last post we concluded that juxtaposing Bonhoeffer against himself might not be the most useful way to determine whether the man was a pietistic evangelical or a German liberal. So, how do we sally forth from what some might consider a safe method of departure? Well, let’s begin with Bonhoeffer’s theological and philosophical background and then consider how he appropriated it to his own theology.

Theological and Philosophical Background

In Germany, less than fifty years before Bonhoeffer emerged on the scene, Nietzsche, had made an astute observation. He claimed that God had “bled to death under our knives.”[1] The knives that Nietzsche had in mind were the quills of the philosophers. Through their unbelieving reason he contended that they had murdered God. Surely, Immanuel Kant was one of the more prominent assailants.

After all, when Kant published his book, The Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781 he described it as a Copernican Revolution. Kant’s primary purpose in the Critique was to define the limits and scope of pure reason. In order to accomplish the task he had to answer a crucial question, “What are the necessary conditions of possible experience?” According to Kant, two complimentary conditions need to be met.

First, something must be given to our senses. Kant calls this something a percept or a perception (and at times impressions). Second, a percept must be brought under a mental concept. Or to put it another way, a percept must be brought under the constructive powers of the mind or what Kant calls the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. Kant’s pedagogical mode of expression for all of this was that concepts (the empty a priori categories of the mind) without percepts (discrete bits of data tethered to our sense experience) are empty and percepts without concepts are meaningless.

Now, do you see what effectively Kant has done? Follow his logic for a minute. If human beings can know only perceptions which are then constituted by the constructive powers of the mind, then what is the theological implication? God is not a percept that can be processed through the time/space manifold of the transcendental aesthetic so to be understood by the transcendental analytic. Thus, Kant’s conclusion was that human beings cannot know an imperceptible God. If God exists and created, thought Kant, then He created in such a way so as to forbid creation from knowing it.

[1]Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche; Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 97.

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