David Hume is famous for his skeptical critique of any and all claims to our having knowledge of the world because he claimed that we can have no real knowledge of the world outside of our own minds since all our “knowledge” might simply be the creation of the mind itself. How can we know that there is a real world “out there” since we cannot get out there to see it for ourselves? We are trapped, Hume claimed, in the “ego-centric predicament” of not being able to know that what we experience is not simply a creation of our own minds.
Immanuel Kant claimed to have been shaken out of his rationalistic “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s critique of the possibility of any real knowledge at all. He set about to create an epistemological model which would guarantee that we do in fact have knowledge of the world outside of our minds. He argued that while it is the case that our minds provide the “structure” of our knowledge by means of what he called the “categories of the understanding”, such as space, time, and causation, the actual “content“ of our knowledge, involving sensations of color, weight, and size, for instance, arranged in space, time and causality, are the direct result of sensory impressions.
This way of thinking about the formation of our knowledge, Kant argued, admits that while we cannot get “outside” of or beyond our minds to experience the world “as it is” in and of itself, we can and do in fact know the world as filtered by the structure of our minds. This way of looking at the problem Kant argued allows for both Hume’s skepticism on the one hand and as much real knowledge of the world as we need to do science and have everyday experience. Kant did deny that we can have any knowledge of the real world “as it is in and of itself”, but he argued we have all we need to carry on scientific investigations.
Thus Kant claimed to have eliminated Hume’s skepticism by an understanding of the relation between the mind and reality which allowed for Hume’s skepticism and for real knowledge at one and the same time. This, of course, left us without any knowledge of how the world “really is” apart from the structure of our minds, but Kant did not think this was a real problem. We have the only kind of knowledge we need to live and gain scientific knowledge without having to worry about the question whether or not reality “really” is as we see it. Thus Kant solved Hume’s skept as dicism by redefining what we mean by knowledge.
Kant went on to argue in his later books that the kind of knowledge we seek can only be approached through a study of “practical reason”, or morality, as distinguished from the “pure reason”, of science. The latter, which we have discussed above, he termed discussed in his Critique of Pure Reason, while the former he took up in his Critique of Practical Reason. In the former he had pretty much eliminated the possibility of any knowledge about both the “real world” outside of our minds and anything “beyond”, such as God and anything eternal. In the latter, however, he reasoned “backwards” from our everyday moral experience to the possibility of God without making any reference to the “categories of the understanding”.
Thus, as he put it in one place, Kant had “done away with knowledge of reality in order to make room for faith”. Thus in his own mind not only had he solved Hume’s skeptical problems , but he had opened the way for speculative reasoning, based strictly on moral experience, about that aspect of human experience that really matters most. Kant really was the “watershed” between modern philosophy and contemporary thought. As some scholars have put it, Kant was the “continental divide” between the old thought world and the

If you think about it the Apostle Paul was and remains a really strange yet powerful set of paradoxes. To begin with, he was the son of a racially mixed marriage, which in turn entailed some sort of religiously mixed parentage as well. It seems that his mother was Jewish while his father was a Roman gentile. We know next to nothing about this family, except that Paul at an early age seems to have migrated to Jerusalem where he became a devout and serious follower of the Jewish religion. In his letter to the Christians at Galatia Paul, whose Jewish name was Saul, he insisted that he was trained by the scholarly Jewish scholar Gamaliel, and in the book of Acts of the Apostles we see him set out to persecute the early Christians.
However, as is also mentioned in the book of Acts, he is converted to Christianity by a vision in which he claimed that Jesus spoke to him and called him to become a follower. Because of this experience Paul eventually became the number one spokesperson for Christianity, organizing churches all over what is now Turkey and Greece, and eventually preaching in Rome itself. Along the way he wrote numerous letters to these churches and claimed his Roman citizenship. We know next to nothing for sure about when, where, and how he died. Moreover, he seems never to have had any family of his own. Many copies of his letters eventually came to comprise the majority of the New Testament.
Perhaps the most important and amazing thing about Paul was that in his missionary efforts he claimed that there should no longer be a difference between Gentiles and Christians. Thus, the early Christian churches sought to integrate Gentiles and Jews, not without a certain amount of serious difficulty. So, in the end Paul and Peter became the traditional co-founders of Christianity. Paul devoted his entire adult life to spreading the Christian faith, both personally and by means of his many letters to various early churches. He quite literally actually “invented” what became Christian theology by means of teachings and letters.
It remains a central puzzle in trying to understand Paul and his theological thought just why he came to see the Christian faith as he did. Not only did he teach that there should not be any differences between Christians and Jews but he also tried to overcome the differences between males and females, as well as those between slaves and free persons. He does not claim to have received any visions or teachings from others about such matters, nor does he claim to have received any direct revelations concerning them. Somehow he seems to have discerned that Jesus Christ, as he understood his teachings, would not have allowed such discriminations.
The biggest puzzle for me is his almost complete ignoring of anything having to do with what we would call the “Jesus of History.” His interest focused on what we call “The Christ of Faith”, on who and what Jesus was from a strictly theological perspective. He almost exclusively writes of “Christ” rather than ever saying anything about the person of Jesus. I find this extremely puzzling. He makes almost no references to Jesus’ teachings and next to none about his various activities. It is almost as if for Paul the Second Person of the Trinity, not the Jesus who taught, healed, and walked with the people of Palestine, was the person who mattered.
I must confess that not only do I find this perspective puzzling, I find it very disturbing. There is something wrong with a “divided Christ”, one who is of theological interest and value, but who is not humanly and historically of interest and value. Indeed, I fear that much of the history and theological thought of the Christian Church down through the ages has been lopsidedly “Christo-centric” at the expense of being short-sighted with respect to the implications of the idea of the Incarnation. Paul sacrificed the Jesus of history to the Christ of faith.