The opening chapter introduced the crisis of interpretation faced by theology in late modernity, first by demystifying the rather intimidating term hermeneutics and then by placing the problem of scriptural interpretation in cultural and historical perspective. I also invoked Paul Ricoeur's suggestive thesis about the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: that sea-change in the way we read authoritative texts that Ricoeur associates with the “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Starting in this chapter I want to step back in time to the eighteenth century, when the modern age was young, in order to explore the origins of the problems that confront us now, in the “twilight” of modernity. The protagonist (perhaps it would be more accurate to say the villain) will be that great philosopher of the modern age, Immanuel Kant; and the key term will be one unfamiliar to late twentieth-century ears, positivity.

The concept of positivity

When the 25-year-old Hegel wrote an essay in 1795 on “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” he appealed to a concept that had become one of the staples of philosophy of religion in the Enlightenment.