Abstract

In this article, I challenge the semiological interpretation of Kant’s Religion, particularly as advanced in recent years by James DiCenso and Allen Wood. As I here argue, their interpretations are neither compatible with broader aspects of Kant’s positive philosophy of religion, nor with how Kant himself describes the project of the Religion. Kant wrote the Religion in order to explore the compatibility between his theologically affirmative pure rational system of religion and Christian doctrines, particularly as understood by the Lutherans and Lutheran Pietists of his era, rather than as a treatise on how to make Christian theology compatible with contemporary secularism.