This chapter re-examines the post-Kantian character of modern theology. Its aim is to indicate how pervasive are its transcendentalist presuppositions and to suggest that these be eradicated. At the same time it argues that the possibility of theology ‘at the end of epistemology’ has to be construed at once as a historicism and as a ‘metaphysics’.

In the first part of the paper I shall examine the way in which Kant is considered to have put a critical block in front of the ‘way of eminence’ and of what one might call the ‘discourse of participated perfections’ as discovered, especially, in Thomas Aquinas. Having shown that the basis of critique is here itself dogmatically metaphysical, and in a disguised fashion, political, I shall then proceed in the second section to suggest that theology proceeding in the wake of transcendentalism is partially reducible to a liberal rights ideology. This verdict will be applied both to theologies seeking for themselves epistemological foundations, and to theologies which assume that ethics has some extra-theological and well-grounded autonomy. In the final section I shall ask whether the recent revival of a neo-Aristotelian ‘ethics of virtue’ and a specifically theological exposition of ‘the good’ as prior to ‘the right’ points a way towards the retrieval of the ‘discourse of participated perfections’. But the answer given will insist that there can be no relapse towards pre-modernity; rather, any retrieval must assume a post-modern, metacritical guise.

In his book God As the Mystery of the World Eberhard Jungel seeks to escape not only from Cartesian foundationalism, but also from Kantian transcendentalism.