Where did Kant get the notion of moral "debt" in his rational theology?

What is it about?

One of the goals of Immanuel Kant's "Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason" is to separate the divinely revealed claims of Christianity from "rational religion," which can be known through reason. For example, belief in the historical person of Jesus Christ as the Son of God cannot be known directly through reason, and thus must be discarded in the project of rational religion. Nevertheless, Kant takes many concepts from Christianity and reformulates them on purely rational grounds. One such concept is the idea of sin (or "radical evil"). Kant holds that all humans, because of their propensity to evil, carry a moral "debt" that is owed to God and that this debt must be atoned for somehow. The purpose of my article is to argue that Kant could only have arrived at such a notion by (at least implicitly) relying on the revealed teachings of Christianity. There are no good grounds for him to accept this notion of debt in his rational religion, and thus Kant violates his own principles by including it.

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Why is it important?

Scholars have paid very little attention to the notion of debt in Kant's rational theology. In an article in Faith & Philosophy, Lawrence Pasternack offers a convincing interpretation of Kant's *resolution* to the problem of the debt of sin (i.e. how the debt is paid or "taken care of"), but no one has adequately addressed the question of why the notion of debt should appear at all in Kant's account.

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