Kant scholars and analytic philosophers use varied perspectives to address problems surrounding Kant's theories of God and religion.

The thought of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is often regarded as having caused a crisis for theology and religion because it sets the limits of knowledge to what can be derived from experience. In The Intolerable God Christopher Insole challenges that assumption and argues that Kant believed in God but struggled intensely with theological questions. Drawing on a new wave of Kant research and texts from all periods of Kant’s thought — including some texts not previously translated — Insole recounts the drama of Kant’s intellectual and theological journey. He focuses on Kant’s lifelong concern with God, freedom, and happiness, relating these topics to Kant’s theory of knowledge and his shifting views about what metaphysics can achieve. Though Kant was, in the end, unable to accept central claims of the Christian faith, Insole here shows that he earnestly wrestled with issues that are still deeply unsettling for believers and doubters alike.

God is a problematic idea in Kant's terms, but many scholars continue to be interested in Kantian theories of religion and the issues that they raise. In these new essays, scholars both within and outside Kant studies analyse Kant's writings and his claims about natural, philosophical, and revealed theology. Topics debated include arguments for the existence of God, natural theology, redemption, divine action, miracles, revelation, and life after death. The volume includes careful examination of key Kantian texts alongside discussion of their themes from both constructive and analytic perspectives. These contributions broaden the scope of the scholarship on Kant, exploring the value of doing theology in consonance or conversation with Kant. It builds bridges across divides that often separate the analytic from the continental and the philosophical from the theological. The resulting volume clarifies the significance and relevance of Kant's theology for current debates about the philosophy of God and religion.

This book sets out to present Kant as a theological thinker. His critical philosophy was not only destructive of 'natural' theology, with its attempt to prove divine existence by logical argument, it also left no room for 'revelation' in the traditional sense. Yet Kant himself, who was brought up in Lutheran pietism, certainly believed in God, and could fairly be described as a religious man. But he held that religion can be based only on the moral consciousness, and in his last major work, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone - discussed here in detail - he interpreted Christianity purely in terms of moral symbolism. It would be no exaggeration to claim that Kant's influence has been decisive for modern theology.

The book offers a definitive study of the development of Kant's conception of the highest good, from his earliest work, to his dying days. Insole argues that Kant believes in God, but that Kant is not a Christian, and that this opens up an important and neglected dimension of Western Philosophy. Kant is not a Christian, because he cannot accept Christianity's traditional claims about the relationship between divine action, grace, human freedom and happiness. Christian theologians who continue to affirm these traditional claims (and many do), therefore have grounds to be suspicious of Kant as an interpreter of Christian doctrine. As well as setting out a theological critique of Kant, Insole offers a new defence of the power, beauty, and internal coherence of Kant's non-Christian philosophical religiosity, 'within the limits of reason alone', which reason itself has some divine features. This neglected strand of philosophical religiosity deserves to be engaged with by both philosophers, and theologians. The Kant revealed in this book reminds us of a perennial task of philosophy, going back to Plato, where philosophy is construed as a way of life, oriented towards happiness, achieved through a properly expansive conception of reason and happiness. When we understand this philosophical religiosity, many standard 'problems' in the interpretation of Kant can be seen in a new light, and resolved. Kant witnesses to a strand of philosophy that leans into the category of the divine, at the edges of what we can say about reason, freedom, autonomy, and happiness.

This book examines the transcendental dimension of Kant's philosophy as a positive resource for theology. Firestone shows that Kant's philosophy establishes three distinct grounds for transcendental theology and then evaluates the form and content of theology that emerges when Christian theologians adopt these grounds. To understand Kant's philosophy as a completed process, Firestone argues, theologians must go beyond the strictures of Kant's critical philosophy proper and consider in its fullness the transcendental significance of what Kant calls 'rational religious faith'. This movement takes us into the promising but highly treacherous waters of Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to understand theology at the transcendental bounds of reason.