Part 2 of Kant’s treatise on rational religion is a philosophical allegorization of traditional Christology and soteriology, which he pursues in an effort to explain the formation of a humanity pleasing to God. Some notes on this section:

1) Kant approves of the Stoic notion of virtue as manly courage and valor in combat, but he thinks the Stoics, like many philosophers, mistake the opponent. What we need to combat is not natural inclination, which is good and needs only to be curbed by prudence. What needs to be combated is the natural propensity to evil. We wrestle against principalities and powers, which can be imagined as either an external tempting spirit or an internal inclination to evil. Violence is incorporated into the heart of the moral life.

2) Kant allegorizes Christology in a thorough way. Reason gives us an ideal prototype of perfected humanity in all its splendid purity, and this is the Son of God. We cannot explain the presence of this prototype; it’s as if it dropped from heaven and abased himself for us. A humanity pleasing to God must be a suffering ideal: “a human being willing not only to execute in person all human duties, and at the same time to spread goodness about him as far wide as possible through teaching and example, but also, though tempted by the greatest temptation, to take upon himself all sufferings, up to the most ignominious death, for the good of the world and even for his enemies.” Practical faith in this son of God means being conscious of a moral disposition that enables us to believe that, under the same pressures and circumstances, we would do what Jesus did. Only a person with such a disposition should consider himself worthy of God’s pleasure.

3) There are several obstacles to the realization of this ideal in actual humanity. In connection with God’s holiness, we are faced with the infinite gulf between the evil disposition of humanity and the holiness of God. Our hearts must change (as described in part 1), but how does this change of heart count for the deed, which is always defective. Kant answers this problem by distinguishing between humanity’s temporally limited perspective and God’s infinite perspective: God sees the disposition of the heart, and though deeds are imperfect he accounts the person to be pleasing, “generally well-pleasing” at least.

Second, in connection with God’s goodness, we have the problem of the constancy of the good disposition. We might appeal to the supernatural witness of the Spirit, but Kant says that internal witnesses are always ambiguous. Yet, we cannot do without some hope. And we can find a confidence that we have had a fundamental change of heart by comparing our current conduct to our earlier conduct. We can infer a fundamental change from the progress that is evident in our lives. Our “good and pure disposition,” to which we have no direct access but only indirect through our actions, is “our Comforter (Paraclete)” that “carries confidence in its own perseverance and stability.” (In this connection, Kant mentions the boundlessness of the future progress in good or in evil, the thought of which arouses the conscience whether or not there is an actual heaven or hell. In fact, he argues that this eternal extrapolation of our dispositions is more practically effective than the dogmatic belief in heaven or hell, since on the dogmatic basis an evil person can always hope for deathbed absolution.)

Finally, with regard to God’s righteousness, we have the problem of atoning for sins. We may incur no new debts after our conversion, but what of the old ones? They are not transmissible; no surplus of good can cancel them; in fact, we have an infinity of guilt because evil once existed in our disposition and its maxims, and therefore we deserve infinite punishment. Yet, the person who deserved that punishment no longer, in God’s eyes, exists: He’s become a new man by adopting the moral law as a self-sufficient incentive of all conduct, and God won’t punish the new me for the old me’s sins. The atoning sacrifice has to take place, then, in the act of conversion itself. The conversion is a “crucifying of the flesh” and a “death of the old man.” By incorporating the good disposition, the convert is incorporating the “Son of God,” and this disposition “bears as a vicarious substitute the debt of sin for him, and also for all who believe (practically) in him.” Atonement, absolution and justification are achieved by a change of heart.

4) Redemptive history also gets allegorized. The story of the Bible is a story of a conflict between good and evil principles. Humanity is enslaved by the evil principle and a Kingdom of Evil is established on earth. The germ of the good is kept alive, embodied in the “Jewish theocracy,” which yet was too enamored of the world and too burdened with ceremonial regulations to do any “substantial injury to the realm of darkness.” Finally, the good principle appears in fullness, and seems to be beaten down in death. On the contrary, this death displays the freedom of the children of heaven and provides an example of all to follow – an example of obedience without regard to opposition or suffering. Simply by revealing the possibility of a new order of life, this death shatters the monopoly of the evil principle. It also alerts those who adopt the good that their lives will be filled with “physical sufferings, sacrifices, and mortifications of self-love.”

5) Kant defines salvation as something that comes through the adoption of good moral principles into humanity’s dispositions. Evil, he concludes, “cannot be overcome except through the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity, combined with the consciousness that this idea belongs to our original predisposition and we only need to be assiduous in keeping it free of any impure mixture, and to accept it deeply in our disposition, to become convinced by the gradual influence that it has on the mind that the dreaded powers of evil have nothing to muster against it.”