Philosophy as Handmaid of Theology: Biblical Exegesis in the Service of Scholarship

Abstract

“One can only grant the theological faculty the arrogant claim that the philosophical faculty is its maidservant (leaving aside the question of whether the latter bears the torch before, or carries the train after her mistress) on the condition that she is not banished or gagged.” Thus wrote Immanuel Kant, paraphrasing Peter Damian, in his Der Streit der Fakultaten of 1798, shortly after being freed from a ban on writing about religion. Kant argued that the role of the philosophy faculty in universities was to lay down the truth for the use of the more practically orientated higher faculties, including that of theology. It could only perform this function if it was totally free.