Moral Interpretation of Scripture

For Kant, no historical document — however ancient or authoritative — can override the deliverances of practical reason. If a text appears to command something immoral, the fault lies not with reason but with the interpretation. Enlightened exegesis will find a moral reading even of troubling passages, or will honestly acknowledge that the passage belongs to the historically conditioned outer shell of religion rather than its rational core.

Kant reinterprets the figure of Christ as the personification of humanity's moral ideal — the perfect embodiment of the disposition toward duty. The significance of the Incarnation, on this reading, is not a metaphysical miracle but a moral symbol: the idea that holiness is achievable by a human being, that the gap between our actual state and our moral vocation can in principle be closed.

Kant's moral theology replaces doctrines of grace, predestination, and supernatural intervention with the rational postulates of freedom, God, and immortality. Much of what traditional religion has taken as constitutive — prayer, sacraments, miracles — is demoted to the status of aids for those not yet capable of purely rational religion, useful scaffolding but not the building itself.

The principle of moral interpretation is elaborated in Book Three of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason and in the General Remark following Book Four.