Immanuel Kant's view of Biblical Ethics

Immanuel Kant holds that individuals are free to act out of principle and moral duty. There are three aspects of Kantian thought that define Kant's views of morality.

Morality originates from rational mind: According to Immanuel Kant, foundation of morality is the ability of humans to think and act rationally. It is the human capacity to reason that makes humans refrain from acting out of impulse or the desire for pleasure. 

Human beings are intrinsically important: Immanuel Kant says that all human beings are intrinsically important and that the well being of each is an end in itself.  This intrinsic importance leads to the fundamental principle that all humans are autonomous and that is the only true freedom.

Even though humans are autonomous, as rational beings they are bound by rational thinking and should arrive at the same universal moral principle which he called categorical imperative.

Categorical imperative:   Categorical imperative states that you should do only those acts which you are willing to allow to become universal standards of behavior applicable to all people, including yourself.

All these three fundamental thoughts go against the moral absolutist position of Christian morality. 

In the four essays that constitute Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Immanuel Kant articulates his understanding of religion and its place in relation to his rational metaphysics of morals in works such as the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), the Critique of Practical Reason(1788) and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).

Kant viewed personal freedom as autonomy to decide for one selves the laws that one follows.  To Kant, this alone is true freedom.  Immanuel Kant was very critical of presenting moral actions as a means to any end including ways of pleasing God.  Kant articulated in the fourth essay some of his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of Christianity that encourage what he saw as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees all of these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in the choice of one's actions. The severity of Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of the possibility of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and his philosophical reinterpretation of some basic Christian doctrines, have provided the basis for interpretations that see Kant as thoroughly hostile to Christianity.

In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:

But suppose there were something whose existence in itself had an absolute worth, something that, as end in itself, could be a ground of determinate laws; then in it and only in it alone would lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative, i.e., of a practical law.
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If, then, there is supposed to be a supreme practical principle, and in regard to the human will a categorical imperative, then it must be such from the representation of that which, being necessarily an end for everyone, because it is an end in itself, constitutes an objective principle of the will, hence can serve as a universal practical law. The ground of this principle is: Rational nature exists as end in itself. 

The rational being must always consider itself as giving law in a realm of ends possible through freedom of the will, whether as member or as supreme head.

Thus, neither a scripture nor its historical context of related experiences can ever be the source of the catgotical imperative.  The one and only one source is the rational nature underlying all human beings.

Immanuel Kant, in his writings on ethics, refused any role for experience or history in the development of human morality.  Kant held that morality is a pure metaphysical  concept.  Rational beings are capable of developing an innate sense of objective morality without recourse to anything external - either empirical experience or intervention of God.  In other words, empirical knowledge can only illustrate morality but cannot lay the foundation for morality.  

Kant sees human will as the Universal legislator of the law, the only law that it abides by.  The human will is an end in itself, with freedom from any form of external coercion.  Kant gives the name Categorical Imperative to the Universal law that the will legislates itself and at the same time remains subjected to it:  Always act in such a way that your are both legislator and legislated in the kingdom of ends.  Always act in such a way that you could will that the maxim of your act become a Universal Law.  This stands in stark contrast to Christian apologists who require a Biblical God to be the moral giver.  Apologists like William Lane Craig and Ravi Zacharias insist that there cannot be objective morality without a moral law giver.

Kant completely disagrees with this Biblical view.  In his seminal work "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals", where Kant lays down the foundations of his moral framework, Kant writes:

One could not give worse advice to morality than by trying to get it from examples. For every example of morality that is to be represented to me as such must itself be previously judged in accordance with principles of morality as to whether it is worthy to serve as an original example, i.e., as a model; but it can by no means by itself supply the concept of morality. Even the holy one of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before one can recognize him as holy; he says this about himself too: Why do you call me (whom you see) good? No one is good (the archetype of the good) except the one God (whom you do not see).  But where do we get the concept of God as the highest good? Solely from the idea that reason projects a priori of moral perfection and connects inseparably with the concept of a free will.

Kant sees reason and free will as the sole foundations of morality.  Not Biblical scriptures.  

Kant asks a sharp question: Where do Christians get the concept of God as the highest good?  Christians simply define highest good in terms of God Himself.  Is that a useful definition when we do not know what God is?  Bible offers divine commandments as examples of morality.  Can these examples supply an adequate concept of morality on their own?  

Does Bible define morality in broader terms and not merely offering a few elementary moral precepts such as the ten commandments?  It does, very narrowly, by saying that it is a sin to violate God's commandments and, where there are no commandments there is no sin.  This restriction cripples the possibility of evolving a broader scope for Biblical morality.   In fact, some of the ten commandments even do not match the general human understanding of morality.  For example, a commandment of God identifying Himself as Jealous God and asking us to avoid idol worship cannot be called a moral.  Same goes with the requirement of Sabbath.

To reach a satisfactory moral framework, Kant avoided moral examples from Biblical scriptures altegether and chose to take a pure metaphysical approach - pure in the sense of completely avoiding all empirical knowledge.  History-centric Biblical knowledge offers just that circumstantial empirical knowledge of God-given moral rules.

Kant sees no use of Biblical God or the Biblical moral rules for human morality.  For Kant, all that is needed is a rational creature with free will to develop an innate sense of morality without recourse to anything external, including the Biblical God.