Yesterday, I combined consideration of one of modernity’s greatest philosophers Immanuel Kant and Grunge god rocker Kurt Cobain of Nirvana in a contemporary theology class, as students struggled to understand Kant. Talk about adding confusion to confusion! My reason for talking about Kant and Cobain together in my context was that we have as much trouble in conservative Christian circles understanding Kurt Cobain with his talk of aborting Christ as we do Kant who limited knowledge to the natural domain.
Do conservative Christians familiar with Nirvana’s music ever ask what Cobain meant by the expression “Abort Christ”? Perhaps, and just perhaps, Kurt Cobain was not reacting to Christ or Jesus, but to oppressive religion that coopts Christ or Jesus to do its bidding. So, too, do we ever ask why Kant wanted to limit knowledge to the natural sphere to make room for faith? Was it because Kant hated biblical religion and biblical authority, or was it ultimately because he saw religion being essentially about morality? Wasn’t Kant’s real concern in bracketing faith from knowledge (but not reason) to safeguard against reducing humanity to material phenomena, which would inevitably lead to jettisoning moral freedom and the mystery of human existence?
In all these things, we need to ask why Kant and Cobain wrote what they did. In fact, we need to ask all those who reject our conservative Christian claims the reason for their rejection, and why they hold the positions they do. What are they after? Why do their claims matter to them? All too often we pass by those with whom we disagree without really hearing them. We take offense at trigger words without coming to terms with what it is about those terms that trigger us.
Whether conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, we all have a tendency to shoot first in making judgments on the views of others and ask questions later. Perhaps we are so ambivalent about truth in one way or another that we simply seek to confirm our own biases, searching for those who will partner with us in our own tribal pursuit of group think. As a result, it gets harder and harder to step across the ideological aisle and ask others what they mean and why their views matter to them.
Now to return to Kant and Cobain. Christendom had imploded by the time of Kant. In a sense, he was trying to preserve Christian morality in his day. Cobain may have been ransacked by Christian moralism, and saw how Christianity had imploded and was used to enslave rather than free people. Like Millennials after them, they were sold a poor bill of goods from the preceding generations and sought whether to make the best of it or start from scratch.
We need to move from inquisitional frames of reference to inquisitive and empathic understanding. That is the only way we will be able to bridge cultural gaps and cultivate the common good with people from across the ideological spectrum. But it is much harder to have empathy toward those outside one’s framework.
Perhaps there is a sense in which we abort Christ when we don’t go the extra mile to try and understand the other. It is much easier to shorten the journey by writing the other off whereas Jesus takes the “far journey” to earth to reconcile us to God, as Karl Barth claimed. Instead of aborting Christ by aborting Kant and Cobain, we must try our best to understand them fully. Whether or not they or other critics ever want to be Jesus’ sunbeam (to allude to a song Cobain sang “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam”), we should seek to learn from their criticisms, pursuing reconciliation wherever possible.
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