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Introduction
Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that Kant erected an epistemological boundary between mental representations and external reality that precipitates an anxiety in modern theologians about whether one can properly refer to God.1Indeed, theologians have often felt the pressure of this boundary, drawing one to account for how theological work can continue to enjoy epistemic success. In an attempt either to recover or construct a theology that presupposes the legitimacy of Kant's influence, theologians have tracked various routes. Bruce McCormack's post-metaphysical interpretation of Barth argues that Barth's dialectical theology is critically realistic precisely in the sense that it assumes "the validity of Kant's epistemology" and the "success of Kant's critique of metaphysics," centered upon classical realism's supposed failure to attend seriously to "the role played by the human knower in constructing the 'objects' of knowledge."2Sameer Yadav, drawing upon the epistemology of John McDowell's Mind and World, recently suggests that theologians ought to disentangle the problem of whether one can perceive God from the general philosophical problem of perception altogether in order to retrieve an appropriately theological naïve realism, arguing that the question of whether reality is susceptible to mental assimilation is a pseudoproblem dependent upon the disenchantment that modern philosophy introduces.3Alvin Plantinga's influential Warranted Christian Belief argues that a re-examination of Kant's work itself would reveal some fatal flaws, freeing theologians from the anxiety altogether about the success of theistic predication.4Further, Martin Westerholm's recent article picks up on Wolterstorff's observation and argues that Kant's work and influence should not be seen as "facts of nature with which we must cope, but rather contingent artifacts that are bound to their context in such a way that it amounts, ironically, to a fall into heteronomy as normative for our own."5Theological work after Kant, therefore, continues to wrestle with the implications of Kant's thought no less than the ongoing philosophical work that tries to elucidate further the implications of Kant's influence or to recover some account of direct epistemological realism.6Most recently, Charles Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus offer a retrieval and reworking of realism precisely in order to counter the "dualist theory of representation" they encounter in the narrative of modern epistemology that began with Descartes.7