I suppose I’m trying to get at the difference between Kant’s “transcendental idealism” and Hegel’s “absolute idealism”.
One of the side effects of Kant’s idealism was wrought in the Lutheran theologian Schleiermacher. Reacting to Kant’s idealism he reduces God to Natural Law.
Here’s how Kevin Van Hoozer summarizes Schleiermacher’s position: “Yet few modern theolgoians are happy to construe the God/world relation in terms of divine intervention. Schleiermacher influenced a whole theological tradition when he judged it a mistake to see God as overriding or supplementing natural causes, for to think of God in terms of exercising efficient causality is to think of God in terms appropriate to creatures: ‘It can never be necessary in the interest of religion so to interpret a fact that its dependence on God absolutely excludes its being conditioned by the system of Nature’”.
(Tyndale Bulletin 49.2 (1998))
Thus it seems the reaction to idealism in some theology is that God is reduced to merely Natural Law. Schleiermacher is the father of liberal Protestant pantheistic theology of which Obama drinks.
Usually it's Hegel who's classified as a "transcendental idealist," not Kant. Kant is usually classified as a "mere" idealist. At least last time I checked. [I don't like "school philosophies" anyway.]
God cannot be "reduced" to Natural Law, for the simple reason that He is the Author of it. The creation can testify to the Lord, but it cannot fully explain Him. It is derivative from Him; and no derivative possesses the type of knowledge that Schleiermacher seems to want to endue it with. (If the object had this kind of knowledge, it could create itself. And we don't see objects in nature doing this. I mean, an object in nature can perhaps create progeny of its kind; but it does not and cannot create itself.)
Who is Schleiermacher anyway, to "tell" God what He may or may not do? Seems to me God can do whatever He wants, whenever He wants.
But I digress. It seems to me the HUGE difference between Kant and Hegel was that Kant did not shuck Aristotelian logic, while Hegel absolutely had to, in order to make his system-to-end-all-systems "work."
Aristotelian (classical) logic is founded on the law of noncontradiction; that is, it is built up on the core idea of antithesis.
Hegelian dialectics, however, is built up on the premise of synthesis: the parties are thesis and antithesis, finally subsumed under a synthesis, which becomes the next "thesis" in the series, inviting its antithesis, which will in turn be subsumed in a higher synthesis. Which becomes the next thesis, ad in finitum, ad nauseam.
In short, Hegel is described as a transcendental idealist because he has removed all referents to a world exterior to the mind from his analysis/programme.
Kant never did this. (BTW Kant is on record as being "shocked" by Hegel's proposal.) Kant just suggested that there are "uncertainties" that obtain between the world of real objects and the way they are registered in human perception.
Hegel obviates direct perception altogether. He finds it needless to his project.... It's all "inside the head" with Hegel....