Preface. Following is a letter which clearly sets forth the essential promise of the Christian faith. The justification for the reference to Kant will be found in the last paragraph of the General Remarks to the first part of his Religion Within The Bounds Of Reason Alone Kant taught that there were three characteristics of a moral religion, namely: love of the moral law above all (which is given vernacular expression in the Golden Rule), the universality of the appeal to all people, and an insistence upon total sincerity in one's own efforts toward moral perfection, with any help by God depending upon that first.
The letter now follows:

Apropos the recent Baptist comments about the founder of the Islamic faith, we might note the essential and historical claim of the Christian faith.*

1. There is only one way to delight God and that is to love him and also to love neighbor as self.
2. We cannot love God (or any powerful person) until we first know that he loves us.
3. We cannot know that God loves us until we see that we are changed by beginning to enjoy loving neighbor as self.
4. The promise of the** death for Barabbas means that all people without exception are heirs of the delight of God excepting only to the extent they exclude themselves,*** i.e., all people are dear to God.
5. The promise of the Resurrection means that all people who sincerely try will be successful in coming to love neighbor as self*** (even if the advance must continue past death), i.e., they will be aided by God.
6. Hence it is through the proclamation of the death and resurrection of Christ (which engenders individual faith)**** that all people without exception can understand that they can come to love neighbor as self and by virtue of that to love God and finally by virtue of that to know that they are delightful to God.

It is for these reasons, and especially the meanings of 4 and 5, that Immanuel Kant, philosophy’s great “god-slayer,” declared the Christian faith to be the only truly moral faith in recorded history.

Best regards,

Philip McPherson Rudisill

Notes

* The editors changed this to something more general, without reference to other faiths, and I approve of this.

** The definite article was left out, I suspect inadvertently, so that the sentence as published seem to speak of "the promise of death for Barabbas." Of course I disapprove.

*** The sentence was truncated here. I disapprove of this change.

**** The verbiage within the parentheses was added by the editors, and I approve of this.

Correction made 8/31/02. Since writing this letter I have gained a deeper understanding of Kant’s thinking underlying his approbation of the Christian religion and want to rectify what I had stated in the letter. This religion is a moral religion because

1. its constitution is the statement by Jesus that it is not those who cry Lord, Lord, but those doing his fathers will in heaven who will enter the Kingdom of God. This means that it is striving alone for the moral law that is pleasing to God. Nothing else. This is the moral seed of the faith.

2. As a result the Christian faith has a principle for dispensing with the husk to this seed which is two-fold, namely:
A. extraneous, statutory laws
and
B. a particular history.*

[* The Council of Jerusalem relieved the Gentile Christian of all allegiance to the mosaic law (Acts 15). And in 1 Corinthians while Paul casts out an immoral man from the midst of the Christians he does not do so in the case of disbelievers in the bodily resurrection (even though he argues against them). These constitute a principle of dispensing with all law extraneous to the Golden Rule of Matthew 7:12 and with all requirements for believing in a particular history, and hence with anything except Christian virtue, i.e., a striving to live by this Golden Rule (Christian vernacular for Kant's moral law) alone.]

It is by virtue of these two that this religion can be approved of by all human beings, and it is by virtue of this universal approbation that the Christian faith can look upon itself as a moral religion (and no other religion has this constitution and this principle of dispensability).

By way of justification of my assertions in the letter: the psychological impact of the death of Jesus for the worthless criminal Barabbas is that all people can believe that God wants to help them become better persons morally, and so it promotes a change of heart in favor of a striving for love of the moral law. The psychological impact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides a guarantee to these same people (like Barabbas) that they will be successful in their moral quest. Kant put it like this in the Critique of Practical Reason (footnote on p. 229) when he was extolling the Christian moral above all that the Greek philosophies could supply: the Christian faith provides a hope that if the individual will do as best he can in coming to love the moral law he can be assured of success even if he is not able to understand how this can be. And so the meaning of these two events in the history of the Christians is a promotion of a commitment to, and persistence in, pursuing a love the moral law, and that is morally pleasing to God and to all human beings, including then of course Immanuel Kant.