HEGEL’S NECESSARY JESUS (original) (raw)
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Abstract
Thesis: Hegel’s defense of Jesus Christ as being divine and necessary was motivated by his deep rooted desire to harmonize religion with the state.
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HEGEL AND RELIGION: SOME RECENT WRITINGS*
The Heythrop Journal, 1985
Although frequently pronounced to have no further influence, Hegel, God and religion are alike in that they simply seem unwilling to lie down and accept their fate. It was Hegel who first proclaimed the death of God to the modern world, and some of Hegel's better-known discipleschief among them Feuerbach and Marxwho considered his work to have hastened the demise of religion. God dead, and religion passing, it was not long before Hegel too was largely in eclipse. In this century it is not too unfair to suggest that all three have made something of a come-back. Certainly Hegel has. One hundred and fifty years after his death we are on the crest of a whole 'new wave' of Hegel studies, and, interestingly, a large number of them are concerned with his views on religion and the impact of those views on theology. It is my task here to describe some of the most recent of these books.
Hegelian Priorities in Christendom
Philosophy and Theology, 2010
Arguments from the nineteenth century concerning whether Hegel was an atheist or a theist are still ongoing. This paper examines Hegel's philosophical and theological milieu, his influence on the history of philosophy and on politics, his unique interpretation of the unity of theology and philosophy, and his unusually sanguine interpretation of the relationship between church and state, along with special problems he discerned in the emergence of democracies.
Hegelian Priorities in Christendom : A Reconsideration Howard Kainz
2018
Arguments from the nineteenth century concerning whether Hegel was an atheist or a theist are still ongoing. This paper examines Hegel’s philosophical and theological milieu, his influence on the history of philosophy and on politics, his unique interpretation of the unity of theology and philosophy, and his unusually sanguine interpretation of the relationship between church and state, along with special problems he discerned in the emergence of democracies. In graduate courses I have taught on G. W. F. Hegel, I usually start off soliciting opinions from students, to see if they have been affected by any Hegelian prejudgements or stereotypes. The responses I get are varied. Some may have heard of Hegel’s reputation for being difficult or even incomprehensible; some may have come across criticisms of Hegel’s alleged secularism or gnosticism by Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Karl Löwith, and others; those with a background in Anglo-American analytic philosophy may have an image of Hegel...
Hegel on Christianity in the \u3cem\u3ePhenomenology of Spirit\u3c/em\u3e
2017
There has been significant disagreement about Hegel’s view of Christianity in the “Revealed Religion” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This paper attempts to show that his view encompasses the breadth of the Christian experience that incorporates both orthodox and heretical teachings. It covers three doctrines: the Trinity, which features Sabellian modalism; Creation, which incorporates both Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism; the Incarnation, which shows a conceptual conflict in how the Son is portrayed as both the servant of faith and the naturalistic lord of the world
Sovereign Gratitude: Hegel on Religion and the Gift
In this paper I argue that one of the most important impulses that structure Hegel's account of religion is the need to show gratitude for the gift of creation. Beginning with the "Love" fragment and 1805-6 Realphilosophie, I first explore what it means to see God's relationship to spirit as one of externalization or divestment (Entäusserung). Then, relying on the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I argue that Hegel takes Christianity to be the Consummate Religion because it not only offers its own divestment to match God's, but actually takes itself to participate in God's own divestment. This leads to a discussion of revealed religion in the Phenomenology, which, in contrast to simpler forms of religion such as the worship of luminous being (Lichtwesen), is able to conceive of a divine generativity in which spirit actively participates. I conclude by identifying two political implications of the centrality of divestment in Hegel's account. First, it means that, since Hegel takes Christianity to be unique in its representation of divine divestment, he cannot be a simple pluralist on religious truth. Second, Hegel's emphasis on divestment in his various accounts of religion helps set up his critique of sovereignty from the standpoint of philosophy or absolute knowing. While religion still clings to a vision of humanity as sovereign over nature, its origin in gratitude for creation proves to be incompatible with this vision.
The incarnate God from Hegel to Marx
1993
The thesis argues that from Hegel's early critique of Kant to Marx's early critique of Hegel, the Judaeo-Christian incarnate God underlies a German metaphysical impulse to embody transcendental ideals in historical and political forms. Four motifs, alienation/humanisation, mediation, idealised Prussia and philosophical anti-Judaism, integrate the study's "incarnation thematic" into a secular framework. In terms of common Enlightenment values and a moralistic view of God, a Judaeo- Kantian convergence is developed as the "anticipatory" climate for Hegel's speculative thought. From the Pauline law/love dichotomy of the Frankfurt period, through the System, and three thematic components (the elevation of representations to concepts, becoming, and mediation), it is shown how the self-othering of God in Christ is reformulated by Hegel as the Absolute's coming to knowledge of itself in a particular historical form, the Prussian State. After challe...
Freedom and Totality: How Hegel Became Hegel
History of Political Thought, 2024
Hegel saw freedom not primarily as a property of the individual’s will, but of a totality (from which individual freedom is metaphysically derived). This aspect of Hegel’s political theory stemmed from his attempt to construct a state that could foster a renewal of Christian spirituality. This project had to confront the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire, which Hegel attributed to the self-interestedness of its component parts. This historical case for the priority of the whole over its parts, however, was soon supplanted by a philosophical argument for a political totality whose freedom entailed its subordination of conflicting parts within itself.
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The Incarnate Word, 2023
This article was originally published as Cornelio Fabro, “Hegel e Cristo,” Il Regno 11, no. 1 (1953): 33–38 and republished as Cornelio Fabro, “Hegel e Cristo,” Aquinas 13 (1970): 355–366.
Hegel (A Short Introduction for Theologians)
Theology and Philosophy (ed. Oliver Crisp, Gavin D'Costa, Mervyn Davies, Peter Hampson, London: T&T Clark, 2011), 2011
The purpose of this essay is to describe some of the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy can serve contemporary theology. It is not concerned with Hegel’s relations to his own theological tradition, nor with Hegel’s own inventive recasting of central themes in theology, notably the concepts of God, Spirit, Trinity and the idea of evil. These are important, indeed central, topics that any theological account of Hegel must satisfactorily address. What follows is not a theological account of Hegel. I take it as generally agreed by the majority of Hegel’s interpreters that his own theology diverges significantly, but implicitly and probably unintentionally, from orthodox Christian doctrine, and that for this reason his theology (as opposed to the tools his philosophy offers to theology) is less relevant to the concerns displayed in this collection of essays. Those concerns (which Hegel shared too to a degree) presuppose a fidelity to doctrine, conceived within western broadly Catholic and Protestant tradition. The aim here is narrow. I leave to one side evaluations of Hegel’s explicit treatment of doctrinal themes, and present those aspects of his philosophical approach that can serve a doctrinally oriented theology today.
2005
Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is one of the most important resources from the nineteenth century for theology as it faces the challenges of modernity and postmodernity. A critical edition of these lectures was published in the 1980s, which makes possible a study of the text on a level of accuracy and insight hitherto unattainable. The present book (by the editor and translator of the critical edition) engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel’s lectures, and it provides a close reading of the text as a whole. The first two chapters argue that Hegel’s philosophy of religion is a philosophical theology focused on the concept of spirit, and they provide an overview of his writings on religion prior to the philosophy of religion. The book analyses Hegel’s conception of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the co...
This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy " has no other object than God " as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. on this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel's version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them – the " paradox of perspectivism " .
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2014
The main goal of this paper is to argue the relevance of Hegel’s notion of the Trinity with respect to two aspects of Hegel’s idealism: the overcoming of subjectivism and his conception of the I. I contend that these two aspects are interconnected and that the Trinity is important to Hegel’s strategy for addressing these questions. I first address the problem of subjectivism by considering Hegel’s thought against the background of modern philosophy. I argue that the recognitive structure of Hegel’s idealism led him to give the Trinity a decisive role in his philosophical account. Next, I discuss the Trinity by analysing the three divine persons. This analysis paves the way for the conclusion, where I argue that the Trinity represents a model for re-thinking the I in a way that overcomes a “naïve realist” and a “subjective” account of the self. I suggest that Hegel’s absolute idealism can be conceived as an approach to the I that considers the role of acts of mutual recognition for the genesis of self-conscious thought, and that the Trinity is the Darstellung of the relational and recognitive structure of the I.
Towards a theological interpretation of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectics. ‘The hill and the eye which sees it are object and subject, but between humanity and God, between spirit and spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity subjectivity; one is to the other an other only in that one recognizes the other’ (Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827) At heart Hegel suggests man is fundamentally a religious being. Religious not in a sense of fulfilling liturgical ceremonies and thus reaching apotheosis. Religion here indicates the order of the world and the self which is not in conflict, an order in real sense of its meaning. Order -where everything is clear and thus apotheosis is reached through as a form of total knowledge. In this sense Hegel is a religious man, and according to him, all men are religious in their roots, as they are part of that ethereal world order. This quest for order thus makes his philosophy a theological one.