Grace and Law: St. Paul, Kant, and the Hebrew Prophets (Paperback)

by Heinz Cassirer (Author)

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Text: English, German

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co (December 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802803172
• ISBN-13: 978-0802803177
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,207,916 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating study of St. Paul versus Kant on the Moral Law, January 26, 2003

By	Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I am saddened to see both that this fascinating little book has gone out of print and that it has been equally ignored by the theological community. Heinz W. Cassirer was the son of one of the most famous Kantian scholars of the 20th century, Ernst Cassirer. Like his father, he was for many decades a dedicated Kantian in his moral philosophy. Briefly, this entailed a belief about the possibility of fulfilling the demands of the moral law. Kant believed that the moral law placed an inescapable demand on every individual to fulfill its demands, and he further believed that the "ought" of the moral law logically meant that we "could" keep its demands. In other words, every individual is essentially capacitated to be a moral individual. Kant also felt that it was undeniable that none of us actually was able to keep the demands of the moral law because of our sensual nature. But since the demands of the moral law were inescapable, he believed that the demands of the moral law entailed human immortality, that in an afterlife where we would no longer be enthralled to a sensual nature--i.e., a body--we would be able to fully keep the laws demands. Still, the emphasis is on each individual's innate capacity to fulfill the laws demands, whether in this life or in an afterlife.

In middle age, however, Cassirer began to read the New Testament for the first time. In it, he was fascinated by a different account of the moral capacity of human nature. Unlike Kant, St. Paul was struck by the innate incapacity of human beings to do not merely what the moral law demanded, but what they wanted themselves to do. Gradually, and against his own intellectual inclinations, Cassirer came to feel that Paul, and not Kant, provided the more accurate understanding of human nature. This, of course, opens up the possibility greatly at odds with the overly rationalized nonsectarian religion one finds in Kant. In other words, it drives one more to a religion that sees the need for a redeemer as much as a legislator, Paul's own Christian faith.

Although Cassirer doesn't seem to be aware to be especially aware of his work, his book points very much in the direction of Kierkegaard's work, in particular PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS and THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH. In both books Kierkegaard displays the logic of Christianity, in which people who are incapable of meeting the demands of the moral law are brought into contact with a redeemer who is the only remedy. I would have loved to see Cassirer explore this, but he doesn't seem to be aware of the sharp parallels to his own reading of Kant and St. Paul.