I: emporaryology Theont C Contemporary Theology I: ST503 ... · for Hegel, reality or life is the union of, if we can put it this way, union and non-union. And only the philosophy

Contemporary Theology I:

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 04 of 24ST503

Hegel: Key Concepts

Contemporary Theology I:Hegel to Death of God Theologies

This is the fourth lecture for the course “Contemporary Theology 1.” In our last lecture, we took a look at the Hegelian dialectical method. I explained it and then illustrated it from the writings of Hegel. In this lecture, I’d like to turn to look at some of the key concepts in Hegel’s system. But before we do that, let’s pause for a moment of prayer.

Lord, we just thank you again for the privilege of study. We pray that as we study these concepts in Hegel’s philosophy that You would help us to grasp what is being said. May we understand them not only in themselves but as a basis for understanding other theologians and philosophers in the contemporary movement. Bless our time together then this day, for it’s in Christ’s name we pray it, Amen.

Just so you can get an idea of where I’m headed, I’d like to look at several different concepts. I want to look first of all at Hegel’s concept of philosophy. Then we’ll look at his concept of religion. Then I want to turn to see how he relates philosophy and religion. And then after we’re done with that, we’ll turn to look at Hegel’s concept of God. Well that’s a full plate for this particular lecture. So let’s get down to it.

Hegel’s Concept of Philosophy

For Hegel, all philosophy is a rise of thought to absoluteness or divinity. And in Hegel’s thinking, any philosophy which doesn’t recognize itself as such a rise is only a phase of such a rise. Therefore, the purpose of philosophy in Hegel’s thinking is to be all-comprehensive. Now for Hegel, the true philosophy is the one which does rise to absoluteness without destroying that from which it arises. In other words, it doesn’t reject any partial finite standpoints as exemplified in one philosophy as opposed to another. But instead, it encompasses, it preserves, and transfigures all finite standpoints. The true philosophy then, according to Hegel, is not to be set over against reality as fleeing

John S. Feinberg, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Biblical and

Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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from it. In fact this was Hegel’s objection to Greek philosophy which he felt rose to a divine standpoint but at the cost of abandoning the world. Now the true philosophy then is not to be set over against reality but rather it’s all comprehensive of reality. I think Emil Fackenheim in his book, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought expresses it very, very well. He says,

That philosophy, it is Hegel’s own, rises like the Greek to divinity. But unlike the Greek, it can unite the knowledge of God with the wisdom of the world and indeed with the world itself. It does not flee from but stays with the modern world. The comprehended world is not destroyed by it but rather preserved and reinstated. Reason exists in the modern world in the midst of that very contingency without which there is no world. And the philosophic reason which is Hegelian thought recognizes both reason in the modern world and the modern world itself even though to be such a recognition, it must rise above all contingency.

Fackenheim later says, “Philosophy or at any rate, the true or final philosophy, rises to an infinite or absolute standpoint. And to encompass and transfigure the truths of the finite standpoints into a truth no longer partial is its sole aim.” Now this means that for Hegel, reality or life is the union of, if we can put it this way, union and non-union. And only the philosophy that recognizes this and preserves this feature of life has reached the absolute standpoint and is the true philosophy. Hegel distinguishes in his understanding of philosophy between scientific thought on the one hand and philosophical thought. Scientific thought requires external, empirical confirmation. That means we have to go out and look at the world outside of our mind and confirm our ideas by what we see. And it also—scientific thought—allows external empirical refutation because it is finite. On the other hand, philosophical thought is infinite and it has internalized all external verification and is incapable of external refutation. Thus, the question to be asked of the Hegelian system, which he saw as the absolute philosophy, is not whether this system meets external standards because there aren’t any external standards. They’re all internalized in the system. The question is to ask whether this system meets its own standards. Well that’s Hegel’s concept of philosophy and what he saw himself to be doing.

Let me turn now to look at his concept of religion. Hegel claims


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that in every genuine religion, the human is, on the one hand, both inwardly related to the divine and on the other hand, remains other than the divine. In no genuine religion is the divinity simply present as something other than the human being but unrelated to that human being. In order for it to be a genuine religion, Hegel felt that there had to be a relationship between the divine and the human. However, he felt that that relation could not obliterate the difference between the divine and the human being. Instead, there had to be a distinctiveness between them. If that difference between the divine and the human was blurred, then this would mean that the religion lacked any serious reality. As a matter of fact, this was Hegel’s complaint against the thinking of people like Spinoza where you really have the divine being all of reality. So there’s really not much of a difference, not a clear distinction between that which is human and that which is divine.

Now for Hegel, even in a religion where the divinity is radically different, radically incommensurate with everything finite, and even in a religion in which the radically infinite dissolves the radically finite, you still have these dual features. The relationship between the divine and the human is in fact still there. There is a relation between the divine and human. And in addition, the self recognizes itself. That is, the human self recognizes itself being dissolved and willfully surrenders itself. And because it does so, it gains itself even as it is dissolved. So you still have the human as something other than the divine. Now if we were trying to give an example of what Hegel is thinking of here, perhaps mysticism would be an example. Some others have suggested that perhaps this kind of thinking is to be seen in Hinduism where the individual self becomes unimportant, but it doesn’t sort of coalesce into the divine so it’s indistinguishable from it.

Well, religion is relation then between the divine and the human in which the divine is both other than the human and yet inwardly related to the human. If the divine were not other than the human, there couldn’t be any relation. If the divine were not inwardly related to the human, there would be no religious relation, according to Hegel. So religion then is human inward receptivity of the divine other without obliteration of the individual human. Now Hegel goes a little bit further, in fact a lot further than this in explaining his concept of a religion, because he says that there are certain traits that are true of every genuine religion. We’ve already said that it is a relation of the human to the divine other than the human and yet higher than the human. And it is a relation in which human beings have their very being involved. But to say all of this


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means, according to Hegel, that a genuine religion involves three key elements. And let me just mention them initially and then go back to explain each one of them. Genuine traits of a religion are first of all, feeling, secondarily what Hegel refers to as religious representation, and then thirdly what he calls cult. Now let me go back and look at each of these individually.

Feeling

To feel, according to Hegel, is to be geared to the felt. Even the most exalted god, says Hegel, is a mere concept unless he is my god. But feeling is not all that there is to religion, because feelings don’t provide any criterion or criteria for distinguishing between what we should feel toward and what we shouldn’t feel toward. So there has to be more to a religion than pure feeling. If we just had our emotions and our reactions, we wouldn’t know what to direct those actions toward. Now Hegel says that the quality of our feeling depends on the object to which it is geared. Religious feeling can’t be totally subjective and self-enclosed. It does, in fact, have to have a real object that it is geared toward. The object, as well, has to have content. That is, it can’t just be an empty mystery. It’s hard to feel something toward that which we know nothing about. And as well, Hegel would say that the object must be higher than human. In fact it must be absolutely higher. As a result of that, you can worship it. And you don’t worship it as an idol, but you worship it for what it really is, the infinite.

Religious Representation

Now all of these characteristics are united and contained in what Hegel calls religious representation. Hegel’s concept of religious representation is somewhat involved, so let me explain what he means. According to Hegel, representation is the human usage of language and thought which is limited to represent or point to that object which is infinite. Now the represented object must be other than the act of representing it. By that Hegel means that God is not a psychological projection and that He is actually something that’s different from our act of thinking about Him. The represented thing must in its divine infinity be radically other than the representing individual in his human finiteness or the relation would not be genuinely religious. But it can’t be so wholly other, that is the infinite object can’t be so wholly other as to be totally inaccessible. That would mean that there was no possible way to have relationship. The relation between the infinite and the finite then requires a symbol which points to the


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divine infinity while itself, that is the symbol, being finite.

Now Hegel characterizes a religious representation by the following six items. He says in the first place that a religious representation refers to the infinite in contrast with the merely finite picture. So this representation is a picture, but it’s one that refers to the infinite in contrast to a merely finite picture. Secondly, religious representation refers to the infinite in a finite way. For example, by using analogies from natural life, by employing externally connecting terms such as and and also and by taking the infinite referred to as external to the human person who does the referring, we are able to make this reference, this representation of the infinite in a finite way. Now because of the fact that the religious representation refers to the infinite in a finite way, the represented object is accepted by the representing person as given. This is the third point that Hegel makes about religious representation. You don’t try to prove that there actually is a thing that you’re representing. You just take that as a given. The representation though assumes that, and then it tries to link the person and the object he’s representing together. Then a fourth comment by Hegel—even while this representation remains a representation—it is capable of expressing its own fundamental inadequacy. By that he means that anything finite is going to be in some respect inadequate in referring to the infinite. So that at the same time that this symbol or this representation points us toward the infinite it also points to its own inadequacy. Now when it does this, it assumes an expression that is dialectical. Well a fifth comment, even though to begin with the represented object is accepted as given, both the represented object and the representation itself are in every genuine religion part of a spiritual God-man relation in which mere external givenness is transcended. There’s got to be a relationship between them and the representation helps out in that respect.

Well one final point about the religious representation: religious representation moves toward but fails to reach the universality of speculative thought. Speculative thought won’t show religious representation as a human psychological projection and illusion, although an awful lot of people think that that’s what Hegel means. But he doesn’t mean that. He says that there really is something that is out there beyond our representation and our picturing or projecting in regard to it. Now in this sense, he is more like orthodoxy against some of the ideas that we see today that religion is just a psychological projection.


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Cult

Well, in addition to feeling and religious representation, there’s another element in every genuine religion; and that third element is cult. Religious representation preserves the mutual apartness in the relationship between divinity and the act of representing that divinity. Feeling also has to be there as well. Hegel says though that unless the feeling and the representation that are united are going to fall apart, something has to happen to keep them together. We need some way to express both of these items, the representation and the feeling religiously. The relation between the divine and the human must preserve its tension even while it does its relating. And Hegel says that it can only do this by acting it out in a labor that thoroughly permeates the whole length and breadth of existence as to cause it not merely to feel transformed but actually to be transformed. Now this labor, this acting out of that relationship is what Hegel refers to as religious cult. Christian cult is specifically the uniting of the divine and the human. And in particular in Christianity, the cultic life aspects which do this most are baptism and Holy Communion. Baptism and Holy Communion then are not mere external observances, but they are inward as well. That is, they are rites in which the human is inwardly related to the divine. Well, I think you can see by this description of religion from Hegel that the key to religion is not going to be some objective events in history. It’s not going to be some objective book like the Bible or some objective set of propositions, a theology, or a set of dogmatics. Religion, instead, is the subjective relation of the divine and the human in the way explained, or we might simply say religion is subjectivity. Well, we’ve looked then at Hegel’s concept of philosophy. We’ve seen his concept of religion. I want to turn now to talk about the relation of religion and philosophy as Hegel saw it.

Let me make a few general statements, and then we want to look more specifically at how he handled this matter. Hegel says that religion can exist without philosophy. But philosophy cannot exist without religion, for it encompasses religion. Now in explaining what this means, I need to just remind you that Hegel had said that philosophy, or at least the true philosophy, needed to be all-encompassing of every reality that there is. And if it’s going to do that, it’s going to also have to incorporate religious reality. You can see why then that religion could do without a philosophy, but philosophy in Hegel’s sense, could not possibly do without religion. And for Hegel, a key idea is that the true religion already is the true content of this all-encompassing philosophy. All it


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needs is the true form of speculative thought.

Now Hegel then goes about the task of explaining how it is that religion and philosophy can relate to one another. But as he approaches this issue, he raises a problem that faces philosophy in trying to relate itself to religion. Hegel says that for philosophy to be genuine, it must encompass all of reality by rising to an infinite divine standpoint. And as we’ve seen, some of the realities that have to be encompassed are religious realities. Of course, they have to be encompassed without being destroyed or left behind, because if they’re left behind then they are not included, and then the philosophy is not all-comprehensive.

Well this leads to the following sort of dilemma for Hegel. Hegel says that the true content of absolute philosophy already exists in religion. And he felt that it existed in the Christian religion in particular. All that philosophy has to do then is to reenact the content and transfigure it, giving it the right form. But in doing this, it can’t just shed the religious form of religious representation and symbol and myth without also losing the content that goes along with it. Instead, somehow or other, it has to transcend all of this and yet at the same time keep the content of religion. Well what’s the problem then that the philosopher faces as he tries to incorporate religion into his philosophy? Either the representational form of religion is essential to its content and this is why philosophy requires religion and specifically why the absolute philosophy requires the Christian religion, but if that happens how can philosophy transcend or transfigure the representational form without also losing the religious content? So the one horn of the dilemma is that either the representational form of religion is essential to its content but a problem arises there, or philosophy does achieve its unprecedented feat of rising to divinity apart from the content and the form of religion. But then the question is, wasn’t the representational form of religion all along inessential to the religious content that was there? And doesn’t then philosophy presuppose religion, if at all, only accidently?

Well, how then was Hegel going to unite all of these strands together? He wanted to both maintain the content of religion, but he wanted to transform the form of religion, do it in a way that he didn’t lose any of the content but made it into the final philosophy. Well, Hegel’s solution is to look for a theology or, if you will, a religion which will allow him to rise to a divine perspective and incorporate all the entities of that religion without having to strip


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away the particulars of that religion and thus lose the religion in the process. And Hegel felt that Christianity in particular was the right religion for this movement in his final philosophy. And I want to look for just a few minutes with you as to why he thought that Christianity was the right religion for this procedure of uniting philosophy and religion and transforming religion without losing it.

Now the task of philosophy, of course, for Hegel was to be all-encompassing. And yet to do that, it had to rise to comprehensiveness of all finite philosophies. But in rising to a comprehensive standpoint, it had to be careful not to destroy all the finite standpoints that it left in its rise. In other words, it had to be infinite. But in its infiniteness, it had to maintain the relation between the infinite and the finite. Well religion of course is the relation between the infinite and the finite. So that’s why Hegel felt that the place to look, to begin with, was at religion. But you had to have a religion that would indeed unite the finite with the infinite at the same time that it was able to maintain the importance of the relation between the finite and the infinite.

Well, Hegel began to look at various religious systems. And as he looked at different religions, he came to the conclusion that they failed in one of two fundamental respects. In some cases, the religion really never got off the ground, so to speak. It really didn’t rise to an infinite standpoint. The gods that were conceived in those religions were very, very much embroiled in finitude. In the other case, the problem turned out to be that there was a rise to divinity but one became so transcendent in his understanding of god that there was no longer any relationship with the real world. For example, Hegel’s criticism of Judaism was that it did just this thing. Judaism wouldn’t work as the religion for incorporating philosophy and religion because in Judaism, there is indeed a rise to the infinite, transcendent Lord, but the problem is that Judaism just leaves Him there. There’s really not a union between the finite and the infinite in Judaism, as Hegel understood it.

The Greek religion wouldn’t work for this transformation into the all-encompassing philosophy. But the problem with Greek religion was different than with Judaism. Whereas Judaism saw God as too transcendent, the Greeks saw god as too immanent. In fact, Hegel felt that the gods were fundamentally the projection and creation of the poets. And in presenting the Greek gods, they presented them as very much embroiled in the various aspects of everyday life. They were just too finite to really be infinite


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beings. So that if the Greek was going to think of an infinite god, he had to sort of flee, so to speak, or move away conceptually from the gods of Greek religion. But then again, you wouldn’t have the proper relation between the infinite and the finite. So neither Judaism nor the Greek pantheon of gods would serve as the appropriate candidate for the all-encompassing philosophy. But Hegel thought that Christianity did work. And he felt that it would work because the relationship that philosophy needed with reality in order to be comprehensive without blurring the relation and the distinctness of human and divine was already present within Christianity.

Now there are several ways in which he understood this to be true of Christianity. And let me just mention those ways. For one thing, Christianity focuses on Christ. Now Christ as the God-man unites both the finite and the infinite in His one person. Neither the finite nor the infinite obliterates the other, but what transcends each part without obliterating either is the person Jesus Christ. So you can see that this, in fact, accomplishes what Hegel wanted to do: have something that would unite the finite and the infinite without destroying either. Now there’s another respect in which Christianity turns out to be the right religion for philosophy, namely what Christianity says about the relationship of God and man.

Hegel elaborates this by several points. According to Hegel, in Christianity Christ as the God-man is an actual human being external to any human representation of Him. In other words, He really does exist outside of our minds. Thus, in that sense He is transcendent to us. That is He’s other than the worshipper. He’s transcendent just as the Lord of Judaism is also transcendent. But at the same time that Jesus is other than the worshipper, He is the same because He has revealed Himself as a human being to unite the finite with the infinite. Well in addition to that, Christ is received as historically externally existent. But He is also appropriated by man, by a free representation. That is the human being unites himself to that which is at once transcendent, or other and thus divine, and at the same time immanent, the same and thus human. But the human freedom that is used in appropriating Christ is itself, according to Hegel, a gift of divine grace. So what you have in this relating of God to man is really a double activity in this appropriation of God for man. There’s one activity from the human side, and there’s one activity from the divine side. The human moves to unite the finite and the infinite by means of freedom. But the divine also moves to unite the finite


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and the infinite through grace.

Therefore, other religions have two separate activities, the divine and the human. And in other religions, the emphasis is usually going to be on one or the other, either the divine or the human. But in Christianity, there’s an emphasis upon both the divine and the human. In these other religions, the divine and the human are not fully united. And they’re not maintained in their distinctness as they should be. But in Christianity, Hegel believed that all of this uniting, the act on God’s part and the act on man’s part, occurs simultaneously in a double kind of appropriating, a double kind of activity. And in so doing, you find that the divine and the human part in the activity make the divine human relationship without destroying either the divine aspect or the human aspect. But then Hegel believed that this was why Christianity was the right religion for philosophy. Namely, he felt that in Christianity, the relationship between God and man is a relationship which is all-comprehensive because it unites the finite with the infinite. But in so uniting the two, it doesn’t obliterate the importance of either the finite or the infinite in this union. Well, that lays out for you then Hegel’s thinking in regard to the nature of philosophy, also his understanding of religion, and then how he sought to relate religion to philosophy, and why he felt that Christianity was the religion to use in this process.

Let me move to another area of Hegel’s thinking. In particular, I want to talk about Hegel’s concept of God. And actually when you look at Hegel, there’s not just one concept of God that you find. You find a variety of different concepts. And I think as I go through these different concepts, you’ll see that the concepts, in one way or another, have been incorporated into contemporary thinking. I doubt that you’ll find that any contemporary theologian incorporates all of these concepts of God. But I think that you’ll find that various theologians incorporate and adapt to their own purposes one or the other of these concepts of God.

Well, as I mentioned, in Hegel you find various concepts of God. The first concept that I’d like to point to is spoken of in his Phenomenology of Spirit in the section on label “The Unhappy Consciousness.” In this section, there is a god who’s mentioned. But since Hegel is talking about self-consciousness in this section, there are many thinkers who believe that the god to which Hegel refers is merely a projection of the human consciousness in an attempt to unite itself with itself. Well, whether one wants to interpret Hegel that way or not, this is indeed a way that many


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thinkers have understood him. This concept of god, then, sees god as merely a psychological projection of the human mind. A second notion of god that we find in Hegel understands god as spirit. But, of course, it’s spirit in Hegel’s sense of spirit. Now a couple of lectures ago I gave you Hegel’s notion of spirit, and just incorporate that idea right into this concept of god. Now with this notion of God, there really is no room for God to be a person in the Judeo-Christian sense. Instead, God is to be understood as a force or general consciousness uniting all finite consciousnesses. And, of course, spirit in Hegel is absolute, so God would be absolute as spirit. But of course it’s absolute in Hegel’s sense of absolute. Now as spirit, God is not a person then. Moreover it’s pretty clear that He is extremely immanent.

Well, there’s a third notion of God that we find in Hegel. Sometimes Hegel thinks of God and refers to Him simply as equivalent to the infinite. When Hegel speaks of philosophy, for example, as rising to infinity, he will oftentimes say that it rises to divinity or a divine viewpoint. In this case then, the term god or the term divinity seems to be equivalent with transcendent, all-encompassing thought. Well, with this notion of god, god is portrayed as transcendent, but he is not necessarily personal at all. There’s a fourth concept of god that you can find in Hegel. God can also be seen in Hegel as the object toward which religious representation points symbolically or in symbol. This God is going to, of course, be the transcendent wholly other. He doesn’t though really act in the world at all. He may be personal, but he is so totally transcendent that there’s no way that we can know exactly what he’s like. Hegel’s characterization of Judaism’s transcendent God with whom man cannot possibly be united, most likely fits into this notion of God.

Well then, there is a fifth notion of God that we can find in Hegel, namely God as Christ. But of course we have to understand that Christ represents for Hegel the union of the transcendent and the immanent. And He does so in two ways. For one thing, Christ is God and man united. But then secondly, in Christ we see a person who is other than us who is to be worshipped. He’s transcendent in that sense. And yet at the same time, He is the same as us. He’s immanent in that sense of the relationship that we have with Him. He’s like us in that He’s human. Now, though we might be inclined to think that this concept of God as Christ gets us into

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the orthodox notion of Jesus Christ, it probably really doesn’t. This may be the closest of all his concepts to anything that we find in Judaism or Christianity. But it probably is not exactly the same thing. Christ, for example, is seldom spoken of by Hegel as God. And more often He is referred to as God-man in order to show His important function of uniting both the immanent and the transcendent. Well, you can see that in Hegel there are a number of different concepts of God, and there really aren’t many of them that resemble much of anything that we’re acquainted with in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Well, there are a number of other ideas that we find in Hegel’s philosophy that are extremely important not only for his own philosophy but for later philosophy and theology. But I think that these concepts will suffice us for our purposes now.

In the next lecture, I want to turn and look at some of the key themes in existentialism. And when I do that, you’ll begin to see why I began and spent so much time with Hegel. The reason, of course, is that the existentialists were very, very much aware of Hegel. In particular, Kierkegaard was directly reacting against Hegel. And unless we understand what Hegel has to say and how he operates, it becomes difficult to understand what Kierkegaard, and what the existentialists more generally, were trying to say. So next time we’re going to look at some of the key themes in existentialism.

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I: emporaryology Theont C Contemporary Theology I: ST503 ... · for Hegel, reality or life is the union of, if we can put it this way, union and non-union. And only the philosophy