Into the Far Country: Karl Barth and the Modern Subject

Robinson.

Introduction: Against Innocence: Barth, Neo-Kantianism, and Modernity’s Pelagianism

Barth’s Historiography of Modern Theology

and the Kantian Barth

In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant compares his epistemological revolution to the Copernican revolution in cosmology. By offering a redescription of the solar system in heliocentric terms, Copernicus reimagined planetary motion from the vantage point of the surface of the sun rather than the earth—a change of vantage point was everything. When Kant states that in proceeding through the Critique we shall be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus’ primary hypothesis, he is suggesting that we invert classical modes of knowing. It has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects; however, according to Kant, these attempts have ended in failure insofar as they are unable to ground our knowledge in something a priori by means of concepts.[1] The shift, therefore, is to order objects to our knowledge, situating them subjectively. The analogy with Copernicus’s primary hypothesis, aside from being cosmologically significant and evocative, inverts the very ways in which we approach and determine our knowledge of the world—and, for the theologian, God. The quiet Kantian revolution, the systematization of the Cartesian turn to the subject, has had enormous consequences for Protestantism (if indeed it was not itself a product of a certain Protestantism). This book will explore and hold in question the theological integrity of this revolution in relation to the twentieth century’s most significant Protestant thinker, Karl Barth, who is often championed as offering a theology that can seamlessly operate within this Kantian space.

The prevailing narrative of Barth’s intellectual development places him firmly within the theological tradition, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Wilhelm Herrmann, concerned with the creation of an independent ground for theological knowing within the confines of critical Kantian rationality. Barth, it is said, was attempting to be orthodox under the conditions of modernity. This is elegantly narrated by Bruce L. McCormack, whose Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology[2] challenged the prevailing assumption that Barth’s theology underwent two moments of conversion: from liberalism to dialectic (1915), and from dialectic to analogy (1931), supposedly championed by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s 1951 The Theology of Karl Barth.[3] It is the contention of this book that attention to Barth’s historiography of modernity provides us with reason to question the prevailing assumption that Barth’s theological epistemology, and thereby the very foundations of his Church Dogmatics, assume the strictures and limits of Kantian epistemology, and, indeed, see these strictures as the inescapable conditions within which theological knowing takes place. Alternatively, it will be argued that Barth is continually intent on interrupting the stability inherent in the Kantian subject, seeing in modernity a proclivity toward a species of rational Pelagianism expressed under the guise of what he names "Enlightened Absolutism." That is to say, Barth is concerned with the assumption of innocence on the part of the modern subject, and divine revelation functions to interrupt, judge, and reorder self-justifying subjectivity, placing it in (a theologically modified version of) what Gillian Rose names the broken middle.

Alongside charting Barth’s criticism, we shall also be concerned with his reconstruction of the subject in the wake of modernity. Critics of Barth have often noted that his appeals to the Spirit tend to function within a noetic register that is ontologically reductive and difficult to locate within an adequate Trinitarian grammar. The Spirit can function as an epistemic bridge concept between the consciousness of the knowing subject and the content of divine revelation; or, to put it in the Kantian terms in which it is often described, between the noumenal reality of the Logos disclosed in the phenomenal reality of the flesh of Jesus.[4] The Spirit overcomes the strictures of Kantian rationality by providing the possibility of revelation as a (albeit dialectically fenced) datum. However, as critics have noted, this leaves us with an impoverished doctrine of the Spirit’s relation to the knowing subject. This book will argue that Barth is in fact doing something more complicated and interrogative if we pay careful attention to the ways in which he binds human knowing to a particular kind of kenotic unknowing that does not resemble the Kantian distinction between intuitable reality and unintuitable things-in-themselves. In fact, we shall see that Barth’s mode of thinking about human knowing is bound to a moment of embodied noetic kenotic displacement. This is shown by way of Barth’s ordering the divine life through the history of Jesus Christ. For, it shall be argued, if we liken revelation to the relation between the noumenal and phenomenal, the history of the humanity of Christ risks becoming epiphenomenal. The impoverishment of Barthian pneumatologies is then part of a much larger issue with embodiment and action under the conditions of Kantian epistemics. Alternatively, we shall see that Christ’s obedience on his way into the far country is possible by virtue of his being known by, and drawn to, the Father in the Spirit. The Spirit is, therefore, the possibility of the Son’s descent into the experience of dazzling darkness, and it is there that we find Barth speaking of the Spirit in terms of the sublation (Aufhebung) of the distance between the Father and the Son. The Spirit becomes the possibility of the difference between the Father and the Son. The temptation of post-Hegelian Protestant pneumatologies to process thought is thereby undone, for the world is not a logically necessary fourth, required to make sense of the reflection of the Spirit’s immanent role in the economic life of God. Rather, participation in the Spirit is a matter of the via crucis of the intellect and embodied life itself, and so the reordering of a rationality plagued by the affliction of original sin—self-justifying innocence. Barth is, therefore, in a deeply complicated and fragile way, undoing the Pelagianism of the modern subject and the stability of the Kantian ego.

In order to set the stage for this book’s positive appraisal of Barth, I will examine the prevailing historical-theological paradigm that is giving shape to Barth interpretation. In this introduction I will detail McCormack’s reading of Barth’s relationship to modernity in general, and Kant in particular. This will allow us to see the ways in which Barth’s doctrine of revelation and Christology are being structured by Kantian epistemics, and, therefore, identified as a distinctively modern option in theology. I will then briefly examine several criticisms of Barth that bear a family resemblance insofar as they identify his assumption of Kantian epistemological limits as the root of a form of fideism or revelatory positivism. Finally, I will outline the overall shape of this book and locate the conversations that will guide and interrupt my reading of Barth.

Turning Modernity to Theological Advantage:

The New Paradigm for Barth Interpretation

According to the new paradigm of interpretation, Barth turns modernity to theological advantage by assuming the integrity of the basic Kantian distinction between the noumenal reality of things-in-themselves and our apprehension of phenomena in the interaction of understanding (Verstand) and intuition (Anschauung). God is not an element of phenomenal appearance, and so is, in this sense, hidden from the understanding. If God is to become available to us he will need to reach through the phenomena and grasp us from the other side, all the while remaining hidden in the mediating phenomena. For McCormack this takes shape, first, in Barth’s sharp dialectic of the Wholly Other in the second (1922) edition of The Epistle to the Romans, but is seen as, second, given christological ground in his discovery, via Heinrich Heppe, of the Reformed appropriation of the ancient anhypostasis-enhypostasis couplet. This couplet is seen as allowing for the Kantian apparatus of intuition Barth assumes as a given, while at the same time providing a logic for God’s self-disclosure in the noumenal reality that is the Logos’s enhypostatic union with the humanity of Jesus. The noumenal reality is the person of the union, but not the appearance of the flesh—Christ’s historicity and humanity—as such. There is, therefore, a critical difference between Barth’s appropriation of the couplet and its classical appropriation in that it is functioning to overcome a distinctively modern problematic—one set by the terms of Kant’s revolution.

By arguing that Barth is working on these terms, McCormack, whose new paradigm for interpretation dominates Barth scholarship, reads Barth as a theologian still very much dealing with the problems of his nineteenth-century forebears. The largest theological problem of the nineteenth century is identified as the relation of Kantian epistemology and (anti)metaphysics to theological epistemology.[5] Highlighting Barth’s debt to Marburg neo-Kantianism from the inception of his career, McCormack argues that Barth never really had reason to question his earliest teachers, particularly Wilhelm Herrmann, insofar as they were intent upon developing a theology that could stand on its own two feet before philosophy.[6] However, this meant granting philosophy a certain amount of territory in the description of the subject’s noetic capacities insofar as they give us to know objects in the world of appearances. Thus Barth granted integrity to the problem of the intuitability and unintuitability of God—or, theologically expressed, veiling and unveiling—on the ground of the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. This commitment to a form of Kantianism is evidenced, first, in that Barth is seen as quite intentional in his acceptance of the Kantian conditions for knowing, as stipulated in the first Critique, and thus his rejection of natural theology; and, second, Barth displays a tendency to historicize, which is displayed in his antimetaphysical actualism. Thus, again, Barth’s theological project is read as distinctively modern—he is attempting to be orthodox under the conditions of modernity.[7]

As McCormack articulates it, from Kant, Barth took the view that human knowing is the consequence of the synthesizing activities of the mind (the combination of intuited sense data with the categories of the understanding). Barth would never see any serious reason to question this basic epistemological commitment later—though his attachment to it was always relative, not absolute.[8] The theological question Barth asks is, therefore, how is knowledge of God possible in a world in which knowing has been limited in this way? This locates Barth firmly within a tradition of Reformed theology stretching back to Schleiermacher, and up to Herrmann. As McCormack notes:

Schleiermacher’s response to this challenge [viz., Kantianism], as is well known, was to assign the origins of religion to a region of human being and existence which he called feeling. . . . [Feeling] is distinguished from knowing and doing in two ways. First, unlike knowing and doing—each of which involves a self-movement of the human subject towards something which lies without—feeling is not effected by the subject, but simply takes place in the subject. Feeling, in other words, belongs wholly to the realm of receptivity. Second, and even more basically, the Source of this feeling does not belong to a series of objects known and acted upon by the human subject but is to be fundamentally distinguished from them.[9]

On Schleiermacher’s account the subject is placed in a posture of pure receptivity, absolute dependence.[10] God is inviolably absolute Subject and so cannot be made an object of phenomenal perception, for this would place God in a relationship of reciprocity with the knowing subject, thereby making God an object among other objects (or an element in the synthesis of appearances). The posture of receptivity assumed in feeling (Gefühl) avoids this problem by making God the wholly other agent of feeling. Thus humans stand in a posture of reciprocity with regards to the ‘world.’ Not so with respect to God. God, as the Whence of our feeling of absolute dependence, may not be given to us as intuitable objects and persons are given . . . any possibility of God being in any way given is entirely excluded, because anything that is outwardly given must be given as an object exposed to our counter-influence, however slight this may be.[11] There is thereby a religious a priori isolated in feeling.[12] Schleiermacher created an independent conceptual arena in which religion can operate without falling into the traps of a problematic idolatrous (or naively mythological) metaphysics on the one hand, and a relegation to a contentless guarantor of ethical intuition (practical reason) on the other. Kantian rationality can be upheld, all the while finding a space for religion in further analysis of the subject.

This characterization of theology as an independent discipline underwent a radicalization due, above all, to the work of Wilhelm Herrmann. . . . The primary source of this radicalization lay in Herrmann’s commitment to the so-called Marburg neo-Kantianism of his philosophical colleagues Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp.[13] This entailed a commitment on Herrmann’s part to Cohen’s radical idealism. The call back to Kant from neo-Kantianism represented a call back to a well-founded scientific epistemological system.[14] However, through advances in mathematical sciences, Cohen rejected the residual realism in Kant’s account to the point where he developed a transcendental logic for reason’s generative power; being became a function of thought. This allowed for an escape from Kant’s account of the distinction between noumena and phenomena, as Cohen located a residual precritical ontology in the Ding an sich. Ultimately, thought "provides not only the form of the objects known (through the categories), it also generates the contents of its objects.[15] So, as Simon Fisher notes, being achieves existence by becoming thought, and the two are held together by a dynamic, never-ending, process of knowing."[16] Notice, however, how the knowing subject’s capacities remain entirely stable insofar as the world of appearances is concerned. Even given the continual dynamic revision of being becoming thought, the constitutive subjectivity itself remains stable.

Herrmann’s project is remarkably elegant at this point. Again, if God is not to become an element of appearances, God is to be articulated as the Wholly Other, completely severed from the world of nature.[17] A separate domain of inquiry was therefore required in which knowledge of God is made possible, and this entailed a return to Ritschl’s separation of theology from metaphysics. A dualism is created between the knowledge of things in the world of appearances, for our knowledge of which Cohen’s neo-Kantianism had articulated the conditions, and the Wholly Other object of theological inquiry. Knowledge of God is of a wholly different order from that of ordinary scientific knowledge, and is given in a judgment of faith independent of human synthesis.[18]

It is within this tradition that McCormack locates Barth’s thought. After the destruction of World War I, having watched his most admired theological teachers support the devastation, Barth brought into radical question Herrmann’s Schleiermacherian account of the knowledge of God. "Revelation, Barth now wanted to say, occurs within a realm of theoretical knowing . . . it has its source in an act of God by means of which the human knowing apparatus described by Kant is ‘commandeered’ (laid ahold of, grasped) by God from without and made to conform to God as its object."[19] Thus feeling is replaced by God’s revelatory act, in which objective knowledge of God is mediated to the human subject through created media so that if the unintuitable God is truly to be known, God must make Godself intuitable.[20] Barth then returns to a form of realism not present in Marburg neo-Kantianism, yet present in Kant via the Ding an sich. McCormack then argues that this commitment to Kantian epistemic categories leads Barth to think about revelation through the famous dialectic of veiling and unveiling, which first presents itself to us in the Romans commentaries. This dialectic allows revelation to be an act of Self-mediation in the execution of which God remains ontologically other than the chosen medium—and therefore hidden in it.[21] The Schleiermacherian patterning is quite apparent as revelation takes the mantle once occupied by feeling in that God reveals himself to a passive subject, wholly receptive, independent of other natural means of knowing. In McCormack’s review of Graham Ward’s Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology this is made abundantly clear:

The coherent integration of his [viz., Barth’s] theological epistemology with this Kantian epistemology is easily grasped where once it is realised that, for Barth, God is the noumenal reality which—precisely because He is the omnipotent divine Subject who created all things and is therefore Lord even over the subject-object split—is capable of grasping us through the phenomena from the other side.[22]

Emerging from all of this is a very stable vision of the knowing subject. For the basic Kantian knowing apparatus is assumed to have integrity insofar as it describes the conditions and the limits of the subject. In short, the first Critique is taken as a given. If God is to be known by the human subject then God must commandeer this knowing apparatus. That is what McCormack means when he states that [if] the idea that the work of the Holy Spirit completely reorients our thought without altering our rationality is theologically defensible then it will not be indefensible to say that God ‘commandeers’ the human knowing apparatus described by Kant without altering it.[23] God reorients our thought by becoming objective to us in taking human form, yet this does not penetrate to the level of reorienting our rationality, for that would call into question the stability of the ego itself—and, indeed, modernity itself. Clearly we need to ask further questions as to the appropriateness of this distinction not only as it pertains to reading Barth well, but also as it provides a logic for the positioning of theology. First, however, we shall examine several contemporary criticisms of Barth in the light of McCormack’s construction of things.

The Problem with Barth: Criticisms of the Kantian Barth

One of the interesting facets of McCormack’s account of Barth is that, genealogically at least, it makes very little use of British readings of Barth. Indeed, McCormack oscillates between American and continental European discussion with a lucidity that is quite remarkable.[24] However, British reception of Barth in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has important questions to ask over the binaries that tend to open in McCormack’s account between ‘non-foundational’ and ‘postmodern’ accounts of Barth. The story of Barth reception in Britain is a long and complicated one, which I do not intend to relate here.[25] However, what I will do is point to several readings of Barth that are indebted in one way or another to developments in the British theological landscape. The suggestion is that attention to these readers will not necessarily provide us with adequate lenses through which to offer a rereading of Barth, but rather they offer a criticism of a certain kind of Barthianism. Paying attention to these figures, we shall see a remarkable coincidence of their Barth with the Barth presented by McCormack and others who want to read him as orthodox under the conditions of modernity.

Sarah Coakley articulates well the anxiety many feel concerning the register in which revelation seems to function for the Barthian by pointing to the ways in which absolute divine difference and Kantian noetic limitation serve to isolate the risen Christ from contingent historical circumstance.

The ‘Barthian’, in other words, is no less in search of foundational certainty than the ‘Lockean’ approach which he rejects; he merely chooses not to risk letting it reside in philosophical ratiocination or historical evidences. His ‘foundation’ is the risen Christ himself, encountered in the unspeakable Krisis of judgement, so elusive that his revelatory presence intersects history only as a tangent touches a circle. By appealing to the pure paradoxes of Kierkegaardian thinking, the early Barth protects the resurrection from the probings of secular historiography (an apologetic gain, seemingly); but at the same time he wraps it up in total epistemological obscurity (an apologetic loss, one might counter). If one is not one of the elect, the cognoscenti, it is unclear how one could do anything about it . . . ; the leap into the void . . . is on this view more like a lurching beyond Kant’s boundary into the noumenal realm than being progressively lured by the ‘dazzling darkness’ of the pre-modern apophatic tradition. . . . [It] remains ironic that Barth—as we have seen—accuses those who approach the resurrection as a ‘historical’ event of falling into ‘obscurity’; for nothing, it seems, could be more epistemologically obscure than the early Barth’s own ‘ahistorical’ alternative.[26]

The criticism Rowan Williams makes also begins to make some sense when read against the backdrop of this kind of Kantian reading. The fall, it seems, obliterated any theological significance in the created order as such in the Barthian picture.[27] The fall is emptied of any significance in terms of creaturely ontology, in that the problem of redemption is simply a problem of human ignorance shaped in Kantian terms. The subject’s problem, as Williams detects, is purely noetic in that sheer distance from God precludes knowledge of God. Hence, for Barth revelation is fundamentally the impartation of God’s self-knowledge: we participate by revelation in this ultimate epistemological security.[28] Revelation has little to do with the actual shaping of embodied living, for it is doing the work of resolving an essentially noetic problematic.

Conor Cunningham makes a similar criticism in connection with Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis, which he supposes to be on the grounds of this kind of Kantian negative theology. Furthermore, it is not impossible to trace Karl Barth’s understanding of analogy from this version [viz., Cajetan’s] of analogical predication, especially when this is coupled with his explicit Kantian understanding of knowledge . . . knowledge for Barth involves a grasping of the known by the knower. This then results in Barth’s being unable to think of knowledge otherwise than philosophically (ontotheologically), and consequently his thinking was forced to remain otherwise than knowledgeable.[29]

John Milbank makes a criticism very similar to that of Williams and Cunningham in his now infamous long footnote on Barth: In the case of Karl Barth a broad acceptance of the post-Kantian understanding of philosophy is turned to neo-orthodox advantage, in that he [Barth] can insist that natural reason discloses nothing of God and yet that this opens the way to a renewed and, indeed, now more radical recognition that only God discloses God in the contingency of events as acknowledged not by reason but by faith.[30] This is seen as a concession to the secular autonomy of philosophical discourses. So, philosophy is then allowed to articulate categories of being in general, or else of what it is to know in general independent of a theological ground.[31] This inevitably leads to Barth’s acceptance of the Kantian conditions for knowing things in general. The problem is then the autonomy of rationality: natural reason can recognise certain features of the created order—whether ontological or epistemological—in their pure finitude, without reference to any ratio of finite and infinite, as well as certain features of the fallen created order, which it nonetheless fails to decipher as fallen.[32] Milbank’s unease with Barth is then predicated upon Barth’s apparent assumption of the autonomy of philosophical knowledge and so the autonomy of the knowing subject; that is, he is worried that Barth is far too modern, having come to a truce with Descartes.[33] It is interesting in this connection that Milbank sees something rather problematic in a genealogy of modern theology that locates Schleiermacher at its source. Is it not eccentric, in the face of this consideration, to make Schleiermacher pivotal for the history of modern theology? One does so, I would suggest, only because one has already assumed a liberal sundering of philosophy from theology, and because it was Schleiermacher who first defined, for modern times, a discrete theological domain and method.[34]

It seems that, in many ways, these criticisms function well insofar as they are directed against the distinctly modern Barth presented by McCormack. All worry that Barth is unable to account for the reality of the fall insofar as it pertains to creaturely being, and thus the knowing subject herself. For all three, Barth’s preoccupation with the problem of knowledge of God on the terms of Kantian epistemology has torn open a gap between Creator and creature with two important consequences: first, the creature’s knowing of the world has been torn asunder from its knowledge of God, and therefore the subject is left self-determining in her relation to the world independent of its theological character or the theologically given formation of subjectivity itself; second, and as a corollary of the first, the subject is entirely set in its relation to the world—that is, the subject remains stable in that the apparatus of intuition and apprehension are given naturally and simply taken hold of to theological advantage. The complications of embodied difficulty, of the messiness of human relation, are overcome by God’s reaching through the phenomena from the other side. Embodiment and historicity risk being emptied of pedagogical import, and revelation reduced to a simple noetic exchange. We might wonder what to make of the kind of dereliction experienced by Christ, in which the believer is said to participate in prayer (Rom 8:12–17, 26–30), in terms of this Kantian scheme.

Neo-Kantianism’s Transcendental Register

Gillian Rose, who will reappear at several moments throughout this book, helps us bring to light some of the ways that neo-Kantianism has affected modern moral discourse, driving a wedge between theory and praxis by placing certain concepts in a transcendental register, determining the relationship between subject and object a priori.[35] These neo-Kantianisms of different forms preclude learning as something immanent to consciousness itself by supplying a mythology of atomized selfhood and rational stability. Rose sees the way a conceptual a priori can so quickly stagnate into a political and ideological given, filtering perception of the material world. Vincent Lloyd summarizes this well:

One of Gillian Rose’ insights was that philosophy, since Kant (and before Kant), has most often conducted its investigation by placing certain privileged concepts in a transcendental register. These concepts determine the conditions of possibility for the empirical world. The content of the transcendental register is immune from criticism; nothing in the empirical world can affect it. But where does the content of the transcendental register come from? What is the source of its authority? Perhaps it seems self-evident, perhaps it seems god-given, or perhaps it seems the result of exhaustive reflection. In fact, any content of the transcendental register is merely an elevated, sanctified aspect of the ordinary world. Any content of the transcendental register is rhetoric usurping the place of philosophy.[36]

Neo-Kantianism becomes identified with a number of diverse philosophical projects that dirempt law from ethics, the universal from the particular.[37] The corruption in Kant’s project is seen as lying in his distinction between the knowable realm of experience and the unknowable realm of things-in-themselves and the moral law. This then works to distinguish the question of fact from the question of law—that is, in the former, the acquisition of concepts in experience, and, in the latter, the establishment of an a priori relationship with objects. In turn this enables a mode of thinking about law that is detached from the difficulty of the negotiations of lived experience, for the establishment of the possibility of the apprehension of experience is not derived from reflection upon experience. Reason and actuality, therefore, are held at a distance by what Paul Natorp called general logics, logics that function in a linear fashion starting from an abstract proposition.[38] This leads to the debasement of experience and excludes any inquiry into empirical reality.[39]

We need to probe further into the way Rose sees this form of neo-Kantianism shaping the subject in order to really problematize the way Barth has been read. She rehearses a neo-Kantian criticism of Kant: a transcendental approach to knowledge functions in such a way that knowledge is the synthesis of the manifold of perception into appearances. These appearances do not exist in themselves, but only relative to the subject in which they inhere.[40] Appearances are not, then, things-in-themselves, but are contingent upon the subject’s apprehension. Because of this, objective validity belongs to the synthesis of experience, but not to any things in themselves.[41] Hence, as we have already heard Fisher note, being exists as being thought.[42] So, then, if the idea that the mind synthesizes the objects of knowledge is accepted, then it can be argued that it makes no sense to retain ‘reality’ for something beyond our knowledge.[43] The Marburg neo-Kantian criticism of Kant, then, is that the unity of consciousness does not refer to the opposition between subject and object but to unity based on the principle of pure logic, the logic of scientific consciousness. Scientific thought is the unity of the creating and its creations and its activities of unifying and diversifying are a never-ending, infinite task.[44]

It is important that we are attentive to the way the subject is being construed here, because it is the subject in full possession of her intellectual faculties that is able to do this. For Rose, this is a product of the Enlightenment search for ‘authority’ that is read as a continuation of the crisis of the Reformation. So, in her Paradiso, Rose boldly claims, Modernity is Protestant, not humanistic.[45] The problem is Kant in all his pietism.[46] The Kantian subject becomes divinely confident that no work needs to be done for his salvation[47] because ignorance is the only fallen condition, not sin,[48] which is indeed the gnostic (and Pelagian) condition with which Rose diagnoses modernity and postmodernity. According to Rose, Kant then knew that

since Luther, authority and skepticism keep changing places: one person’s authority is another’s skepticism. . . . When Scripture was substituted for sacerdotalism by the Protestant Reformation, it was claimed that reason had replaced superstition and worldly authority. Subjective whim has replaced the apostolic tradition, ripostes the counter-claim. Once this exchange had been launched, all authority is relativized, because both sides are ultimately skeptical.[49]

Kantian logic functions in binary oppositions grounded in the subject’s difficulties apprehending the object. The Ding an sich, hidden from view as we only apprehend through the senses mediated by a priori categories of judgment, precludes the subject from ever really apprehending the object and so isolates us from ever engaging the world in any generative or creative way—hence neo-Kantianism’s radicalizing of Kant’s knowing subject. Because God is only apprehended in reason, we are equally unable to apprehend God; he does not present himself to us in the world of sensory experience and thereby engage the faculty of judgment, and thus does not suspend and reframe our action. God has nothing to do with the structure of thought itself. These binaries are fixed, and it is this that is deeply problematic—particularly as it is radicalized in