Eclipse of Grace E-Book

Nicholas Adams

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 582

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Eclipse of Grace offers original insights into the roots of modern theology by introducing systematic theologians and Christian ethicists to Hegel through a focus on three of his seminal texts: Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. * Presents brilliant and original insights into Hegel's significance for modern theology * Argues that, theologically, Hegel has been misconstrued and that much more can be gained by focusing on the logic that he develops out of an engagement with Christian doctrines * Features an original structure organized as a set of commentaries on individual Hegel texts, and not just presenting overviews of his entire corpus * Offers detailed engagement with Hegel's texts rather than relying on generalizations about Hegelian philosophy * Provides an illuminating, accessible and lucid account of the thinking of the major figures in modern German philosophy and theology

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Absolute Knowing

The Text

Chapter 3: The Absolute Idea

The Shape of the Text

God

The Absolute Idea

Chapter 4: God Existing as Community

The 1821 Lectures

The 1824 Lectures

The 1827 Lectures

Chapter 5: Eclipse of Grace

Bibliography

Index

This edition first published 2013 © 2013 Nicholas Adams

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To Peter Ochs

People talk of reason as if it were an actual entity, and of the good Lord as if he were nothing but a concept.

J.G. Hamann

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the British Academy for a Small Project Grant in 2008 to pursue study of Hölderlin and Novalis in Berlin. I am grateful to Timothy Jenkins and Peter Ochs for their challenges and encouragements, to David Ford and Sarah Coakley, whose skepticism about the need to spend so much time buried in German Idealism did not prevent them sending along graduate students in search of enlightenment, to Nicholas Walker for improved translations of the Phenomenology and for his probing questions about my generous interpretations at certain points, to Cyril O’Regan and Ian Cooper for their insights into how temporal forms of thinking are flattened in Hegel and Hölderlin, to Nicholas Boyle for providing the hospitality that made these conversations possible, to John Webster and Bruce McCormack, who strengthened my resolve to write a book suitable for graduate students in systematic theology, to the many students who read drafts and assessed its suitability for their peers, and to Rebecca Harkin at Wiley-Blackwell who willingly agreed to commission this book, on the condition that I produce something on Hegel that was actually readable, and who has remained steadfastly encouraging throughout the process. Her service to contemporary theology through the publication of an extraordinary range of material is unmatched. I would like to thank Janet Moth for expert copy-editing and skilful negotiation with typesetters. I would also like to thank Heidi Adams for her generous support, and most particularly for help in preparing the index. Finally I am grateful to Terry Pinkard for permission to use his as yet unpublished translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as the basis for the commentary in chapter 2. All errors are my own.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Extracts from G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Hans-Friedrich Wessels and Heinrich Clairmont (Hamburg, 1987); from G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik: Die Lehre vom Begriff (1816), ed. Hans-Jürgen Gawoll (Hamburg, 1994); and from G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion: Die vollendete Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke (Hamburg, 1995), reproduced by permission of Felix Meiner Verlag GmbH. Extracts from G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, are reproduced from a working draft by permission of the translator.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Preface

Scholarship on German Idealism has been transformed in the last twenty-five years by two phenomena. The first is the production of high-quality critical editions of post-Kantian philosophical texts. The second is the “constellation research” of Dieter Henrich, Manfred Franks, and their colleagues.1 These two developments are making possible a shift in scholarship away from the bold encompassing overviews that characterized scholarship after the First and Second World Wars.

Such overviews were at the time vital. Whole traditions of detailed scholarship had been arrested, and the cohorts of graduate students who transmitted the traditions from one generation to the next in many cases no longer existed. After the deaths of thousands of young scholars, twice over, who had been developing different facets of the intellectual traditions, it was necessary to reconstitute those traditions through lectures aimed at equipping a new generation of scholars. These lectures were extraordinarily influential, of course, because they were in some cases the sole means of transmitting an entire tradition of intellectual endeavor. This can be seen in the case of Hegel in the persistent influence of Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit at the École des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939 (assembled from notes and published after the Second World War), which shaped the imaginations of more than one generation of French philosophers.2 This approach amounted to packing a tradition in a suitcase so that it could be transported from place to place, and in some ways prefigured today’s publishing trend towards volumes that summarize vast areas of scholarship for the beginning student. It is important to remember that Hegel was mediated very significantly through the interpretations of Feuerbach and Marx (Kojève himself was a Marxist who, in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and Time, turned to Hegel for a more sophisticated metaphysics than was offered by Marxist materialism). It is also important to remember that the dominant intellectual strands in philosophy in the earlier parts of the twentieth century were Neo-Kantianism and various responses to Nietzsche’s critiques of the Kantian traditions, neither of which had Hegel’s legacy as their focus. Hegel’s diminished status at that time made attempts at capturing his principal contributions, such as Kojève’s lectures or Hyppolite’s commentary on the Phenomenology that built on them, all the more significant.3

There was in the 1960s a significant flourishing of interest in Hegel, including in his religious thinking, in Germany. It culminated in Hans Küng’s Menschwerdung Gottes and Theunissen’s Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist (together with a number of responses, including a well-known lecture by Pannenberg): these texts drew on scholarship (including English and French contributions) over a twenty-year period from a variety of significant philosophical figures, whether on the “left” (Adorno, Bloch, Habermas, Marcuse) or more traditional interpretations (Albrecht, Bruaire, Chapelle, Fackenheim, Fulda, Gadamer, Garaudy, Ritter, Rohrmoser, Splett).4 These works play little role in this study, but are cited here in order to show the flourishing of interest in Hegel, not least in his theological thought, in this period, where it can sometimes look as though Fackenheim’s contribution (well known because in English) stands alone. This tradition receives a thorough review both in Cyril O’Regan’s Heterodox Hegel and in Martin Wendte’s Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel.5 It is not obvious that this had much of an immediate impact on theology outside Germany, beyond an interest in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which entered the English-speaking cultural imagination via the left-wing intelligentsia. Theunissen’s intelligent and profound investigation of passages from the Encyclopaedia concerning absolute spirit has stood the test of time, however, and is one of the major works that still rightly appears in theological engagements with Hegel. It is an unusual work, in that the main central section is a long commentary on a dozen or so paragraphs from the Encyclopaedia; I have taken Theunissen’s textually detailed approach as a model for this current study, as well as taking up his concern with Hegel’s handling of false oppositions.

A number of influential texts in English in the last quarter of the twentieth century brought Hegel back into the English-language mainstream. Charles Taylor’s Hegel (1975), Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), Jürgen Habermas’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985, trans. 1987), and Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism (1989) brought Hegel’s legacy to bear on contemporary philosophical problems in ways that have proven highly generative in the twenty-first century. It was Rose and Pippin who inspired my own forays into Hegel’s Phenomenology during graduate work in Cambridge in the early 1990s. They completely transformed a younger generation’s imagination as to what Hegel was about and why he might be important. They led, in part, to the development of a number of different transmissions of Hegel’s philosophy, including rapprochements between analytic, pragmatist, and continental philosophy in work by figures such as Robert Brandom, Paul Franks, John McDowell, Paul Redding, Robert Stern, and many others. They have also shaped more aggressive attempts to rehabilitate Hegel as a major figure of contemporary influence, such as the work of Stephen Houlgate, Terry Pinkard, and Kenneth Westphal.6

In France two magisterial contributions, one by a Cuban and the other by a Hungarian, are changing the way Hegel’s religious thought is interpreted. The first is Emilio Brito’s La Christologie de Hegel: Verbum Crucis (1983). This study, written in Spanish but published in French translation, is a painstaking interpretation of Hegel’s texts relating to Christology, in the early writings, the Phenomenology, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, combined with a seemingly exhaustive engagement with the secondary literature. The scale and the mastery of detail, both of Hegel’s texts and of Hegel’s interpreters, are intimidating. The second is Miklos Vetö’s De Kant à Schelling: Les deux voies de l’idéalisme allemande (1998 and 2000). This major work traces the two paths that stem from Kant’s philosophy, one that leads via Fichte to Hegel’s conception of reason, the other that leads to the late Schelling’s concern with the ground of reason. Rather than seeing these as rival interpretations of a single Kantian legacy, Vetö argues that they are better viewed as divergent paths with distinct developments. His study is noteworthy for its focus on Leibniz rather than Spinoza as the significant backdrop to the way Kant’s philosophy developed, owing to Leibniz’ concern with a dynamic metaphysics. This may also partly explain the unusual concern with the question of evil, which takes up a considerable part of the study.7

Theological engagements with Hegel in English remain rather limited in number, and more recent well-known contributions include Peter Hodgson’s interpretations of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Dale Schlitt’s descriptions of Hegel’s Trinitarian thought, Andrew Shanks’ championing of Hegel as a model figure who insists on thinking through the shapes of Christian life (with a noticeable focus on the figure of “the unhappy consciousness” from the earlier part of the Phenomenology), Cyril O’Regan’s thorough and charitable investigations into the whole range of Hegel’s theological thinking, including Hegel’s engagements with the Gnostic strands of German thought, William Desmond’s battling with Hegel in the development and articulation of his own “metaxalogical” project, and Martin de Nys’ introduction to Hegel’s relation to theology. Karl Barth’s short article on Hegel in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, from 1947, remains a major point of reference for many theological students in seminaries, despite its limited focus on one aspect of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: it is wholly inadequate as an introduction to Hegel for theologians. John Milbank’s chapter “For and Against Hegel” in Theology and Social Theory (itself one of the fruits of Gillian Rose’s work) is not intended as an introduction to Hegel, and cannot serve as one, yet along with Barth’s essay it is often the only thing on Hegel theological students read. Milbank’s essay falls into a familiar trap: it treats Hegel’s logical investigations as, at root, contributions to ontology. Hegel is thus criticized for his accounts of the subject, of negation, and of infinity; too much emphasis is laid on necessity and system (as if an inexorable logic drives the ontological claims), and not enough effort is made to discern the ways in which Hegel’s logical contributions call false oppositions into question and offer alternative ways of thinking – where ontological claims show themselves in certain ways rather indefinite and amenable to rival modes of logical handling. I offer a radical alternative to Barth’s and Milbank’s ways of reading Hegel.8

The two phenomena named at the beginning – the availability of critical editions and the development of constellation research – have altered the landscape further since then. It has become possible to undertake detailed textual interpretation, on the one hand, and to gain a sense of the extraordinarily fertile intellectual context in which Hegel’s texts were produced on the other. I spent a useful sabbatical in Berlin becoming acquainted with work on the importance of Hölderlin and Novalis for an appreciation of the shape of German Idealism and its critics, especially Hölderlin’s investigations into being and Novalis’ explorations into the difficulty of representing the subject. The classic trio of Fichte–Schelling–Hegel as respondents to Kant is no longer a compelling way of thinking about the idealist tradition. Fichte is in fact a distorting figure in the tradition: his project warps the reception both of Kant (who is often treated as far more systematic, in a dull way, than he actually is) and of Hegel (who is often thought to be more totalizing – and frankly bizarre –in his philosophical ambitions than is warranted by the evidence of the texts). The images of Kant and Hegel are significantly distorted in many students’ imaginations by the shape of Fichte’s rationalism. Henrich’s interest in championing of Hölderlin as a philosopher and Frank’s explorations of Novalis as a critic of Fichte encourage a much broader set of investigations into questions of self-consciousness and language than a concern with just Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is likely to stimulate. Indeed it makes less and less sense sharply to distinguish early German Romanticism from German Idealism the more one sees the shared intellectual concerns, in Kant and Fichte, that stimulated both traditions. Frank’s work has shaped the strongly anti-Hegelian project of Andrew Bowie, which is focused on questions of how philosophy can articulate more than conceptual thinking can grasp. Bowie’s project is brilliant, and marks a high-water mark of writing about German philosophy in English. In some ways his rightly influential Schelling and Modern European Philosophy is an atheist retrieval of the medieval insight that God exceeds what human language can conceptually articulate (where God is substituted in Bowie’s work by other terms such as truth or being), and for this reason is (along with his two major works Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche and Music, Philosophy and Modernity) important work for theologians to read. It is compelling on Hegel’s failure to do justice to aesthetics, but has relatively little to say about Hegel’s approach to truth.9 The constellation philosophy project, and parallel scholarship in the USA such as that of Frederick Beiser, have vastly enhanced our understanding of how figures such as Hamann, Herder, Lessing, and Jacobi (in the eighteenth century) and Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck, and the Schlegels (in the nineteenth century) are vital to an understanding of the development of ideas developed in the texts and lectures by the better-known figures such as Hegel and Schelling.10 Schleiermacher is the wild card here: as his theological reputation becomes largely a concern only of aficionados and historians, his philosophical contributions are coming to be re-evaluated through the work of Manfred Frank and Andrew Bowie.

The turn to the texts, facilitated by readily available critical editions, has made possible a textually oriented interpretive approach to Hegel which stands in sharp contrast to the bold overviews of the twentieth century. Commentaries are obviously textually attentive given the genre. The newer development is detailed and textually attentive work even in thematic and argumentative studies. This can be seen supremely in the writing of Stephen Houlgate, who engages at a level of textual attentiveness unmatched by most other Hegel scholars, with the notable exception of Theunissen, and, in a more narrowly focused way, by Peter Dews, whose remarkable chapter on Hegel in his The Idea of Evil is a model for theologically minded readers who wish to describe, in English, Hegel’s approach to theologically significant topics.11

It is customary to begin any work on Hegel with a polemical attack on the inadequate accounts of Hegel that characterize encyclopaedia articles on his thought and with caveats about what is possible given the vastness of the secondary bibliography. I have chosen to begin with a statement of the field, or at least one way of viewing part of it. It can be summarized. There is a tradition of bold overviews of Hegel (Kojève, Barth, Milbank); there is a tradition of English-language philosophical engagements with Hegel (Rose, MacIntyre, Pippin, Pinkard, Houlgate, Westphal, McDowell, Brandom, Stern, Franks); there is a tradition in French scholarship of attention to detail (Brito, Vetö); there is a tradition, in English, of theological engagement with Hegel (Hodgson, Schlitt, Shanks, O’Regan, Desmond); and there is a tradition of contextual study of German philosophy including Hegel (Henrich, Frank, Beiser, Bowie).

In the midst of this complex scholarly situation, I wish to identify one problem for theologically minded readers. It is that theological interest in Hegel tends to focus on Hegel’s “religious” thought, even though some of his more important contributions for theology lie in his philosophical arguments (Theunissen and Wendte are notable exceptions). Philosophers, when assessing Hegel’s contemporary importance, tend to focus on the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic and to ignore the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Houlgate and Dews are exemplary exceptions). The problem is that there is no easy division between “philosophical” and “theological” work in Hegel: it is all philosophical, and it is all concerned with God in various ways. There is no “religious dimension” in Hegel (negatively to echo Emil Fackenheim) any more than there is a religious dimension in Descartes or Kant: the work is saturated and permeated with religious concerns.

Theological interest in Hegel tends to exhibit a further curious feature: it is overwhelmingly concerned with questions of ontology. It is Hegel’s approach to being, or more specifically to thinking being, that is often the focus. This concern is then allied with other questions such as what Hegel’s Christology or Pneumatology or theodicy might be. This is curious because Hegel himself is quite explicit that his primary interest is in logic rather than ontology. He certainly has emphatic ontological commitments (although I would prefer to say that he develops a distinctive system of classification): how could a philosopher not? But his contributions are not principally to ontology, and are not presented as contributions to ontology. They are contributions to logic, and are heavily advertised as such. At the same time he shows almost no interest in contributing to Christology or Pneumatology or theodicy, doctrinally conceived: and it is very hard work for scholars to reconstruct what such contributions might look like, as the impressive studies by Brito and O’Regan make clear.

This study thus takes a new tack in the English-language bibliography. It advances a simple proposition: Hegel’s importance for contemporary theology lies in his contributions to logic. Wendte makes a persuasive theological case for taking Hegel’s Science of Logic and his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion together, and I develop this insight along complementary and more emphatic lines. This proposition is defended (following the model established by Theunissen in Hegels Lehre, and developed by Wendte), through commentary on texts: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. These texts are enormous, and I am selective. I attempt to show how Hegel’s logical investigations display certain theological interests, without being contributions to doctrine. Hegel receives doctrines, above all the doctrine of the Trinity, and draws attention to certain logical features; in my reading he does not attempt to alter the doctrines themselves but rather to alter how those doctrines are received philosophically. I argue, as a secondary matter, that the shape of Hegel’s approach to Christian doctrine is broadly Johannine, although in a rather vague way that cannot be pinned down.

Besides the outstanding work of Martin Wendte, there are to my knowledge no theologically oriented studies of Hegel that are primarily concerned with his logic, and for that reason this study exhibits two easily noticed features. The first is that it is developed through detailed commentary on texts rather than through bold overview. My argument is simple and is best demonstrated by showing how Hegel’s texts exhibit certain features. The second is that I engage with rather little of the English-language secondary literature. This is in part a reflection of my reading habits: the preparation for this book was largely oriented to Hegel’s texts (which I read slowly), to other philosophical primary texts of the period, and to secondary texts which deal with the philosophical context in which Hegel wrote. The latter have no immediate bearing on my argument. It is also in part a reflection that for the most part I am not arguing against any interpretations in particular. The theologically oriented interpreters do not make claims whose details I wish to dispute here: I take a different approach entirely. There are plenty of claims to dispute, to be sure, but again they have no immediate bearing on my argument. It is theological interpreters’ silence on matters of logic that are relevant to this study, and I aim to fill that silence. Finally, it is in part a reflection of the scale of the task: I rather exuberantly take on three big texts, each of which has a gigantic (and high-quality) secondary bibliography and I am aware that it cannot simply be ignored or dismissed. There is a lot of rubbish written about Hegel, to be sure, but a great deal is superb: Hegel has a tendency to make thinkers work harder, often with happy results. My selections are a matter of compromise and realism about what is possible within the scope of a book of this kind and length. If my broad proposals find a positive reception, there will be plenty of detailed further work to be done.

I am convinced that Hegel’s importance for theology lies in his philosophical arguments, rather than in his treatment of theological or “religious” topics. This book aims to spread that conviction. It also has a secondary purpose. My experience of teaching Kant and Hegel to postgraduates is that students tend initially to respond in one of two ways to the difficulty of the texts. The first is to seek refuge in the commentators; the second is to seek refuge in bold overviews. In extreme cases some students (even rather good ones) find it more congenial to read commentators than to read the text, on the grounds that the commentators are more accessible; and some students find it more impressive, at first, to talk about ‘Hegelian philosophy’ but soon get bogged down in rather unfocused discussions of “sublation,” “dialectic,” and “negation.” These tendencies are, I think, displays of fear. I have thus written a text whose secondary aim is to produce fearless (but respectful) theological readers of Hegel. I cannot claim that every reader will magically become capable of making sense of Hegel’s texts; but there have been good results with test subjects, and I am confident that few readers will emerge with a desire to read only commentators or to produce bold overviews with only tangential relation to the texts. The text of this study is laid out in a way that makes reading Hegel’s texts as attractive and compelling as possible.

1 Dieter Henrich, Konstellationen: Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991); Manfred Frank, “Unendliche Annäherung”: Die Abfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997); Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004); Dieter Henrich, Grundlegung aus dem Ich: Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des Idealismus Tübingen–Jena 1790–1794 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004); Manfred Frank, Auswege aus dem deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007); Martin Mulsow and Marcelo Stamm (eds.), Konstellationsforschung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005).

2 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (ed. R. Queneau and Allan Bloom, tr. J. Nichols, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980).

3 Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (tr. S. Cherniak and J. Heckman, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

4 Hans Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes: eine Einführung in Hegels theologisches Denken als Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Christologie (Freiburg: Herder, 1970); Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970); Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966); Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1954; trans. into German in 1962); Wolfgang Albrecht, Hegels Gottesbeweis: eine Studie zur “Wissenschaft der Logik” (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958); Claude Bruaire, Logique et religion chrétienne dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Seuil, 1964); Albert Chapelle, Hegel et la religion (3 vols., Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1964, 1967, 1971); Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967); Hans Friedrich Fulda, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1965); Hans Georg Gadamer, Hegels Dialektik: fünf hermeneutische Studien (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971); Roger Garaudy, Dieu est mort: étude sur Hegel (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962); Günter Rohrmoser, Subjectivität und Verdinglichung: Theologie und Gesellschaft im Denken des jungen Hegel (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1961); Joachim Ritter, Hegel und die französische Revolution (Cologne: Opladen, 1957); Jörg Splett, Die Trinitätslehre G.W.F. Hegels (Freiburg: Alber, 1965)

5 Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: SUNY, 1994); Martin Wendte, Gottmenschliche Einheit bei Hegel: Eine logische und theologische Untersuchung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007). As well as offering a comprehensive theological engagement with the German bibliography (it generally ignores the English and French traditions of interpretation), Wendte focuses not on the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia but on the Science of Logic and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

6 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone, 1981); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1981); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (tr. F Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert Brandom’s most relevant investigations are not yet in print, but are accessible on his website: http://www.pitt.edu/∼brandom/index.html (last accessed 17 Aug. 2012); Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); John McDowell, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Robert Stern, Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object (London: Routledge, 1990); Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), and The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006); Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Kenneth Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism (Heidelberg: Springer: 1989) and Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). The best introduction to Hegel, in my view, is Houlgate’s Introduction to Hegel. Rose’s Hegel contra Sociology is no longer fashionable, and although short is one of the most difficult texts, but it remains explosive and brilliant.

7 Emilio Brito, La Christologie de Hegel: Verbum Crucis (tr. B. Pottier, Paris: Beauchesne, 1983); Miklos Vetö, De Kant à Schelling: Les deux voies de l’Idéalisme allemande, vol. 2 (Grenoble: Millon, 2000).

8 The main English-language theological engagements with Hegel are Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, The Development from Kant to Hegel, with Chapters on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882); Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension; Darrel Christensen (ed.) Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion: The Wofford Symposium (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970); Bernard Reardon Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (London: Macmillan, 1977); James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1978); Dale Schlitt, Hegel’s Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection (Leiden: Brill, 1984) and Divine Subjectivity: Understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (London: Associated University Presses, 1990); Andrew Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2011); John Walker (ed.), Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel (London: Kluwer, 1991); John Burbidge, Hegel on Logic and Religion: The Reasonableness of Christianity (New York: SUNY, 1992); David Kolb (ed.), New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion (New York: SUNY, 1992); O’Regan, Heterodox Hegel; William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Peter Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Martin De Nys Hegel and Theology (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009). See also Karl Barth, “Hegel,” in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (tr. B. Cozens, London: SCM, 1972), pp. 384–421; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 147–176. For those seeking a good theological introduction to Hegel I recommend Burbidge and Shanks followed by O’Regan. Burbidge frames his account as a series of answers to questions posed by Lessing; Shanks offers one of the best accounts of why Hegel’s account of reconciliation remains compelling; O’Regan is long and difficult but superb.

9 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993); Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Music, Philosophy and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

10 Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

11 See especially Houlgate’s The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, above all the introduction; Theunissen, Hegels Lehre; Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 81–117.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is a study of portions of three texts by Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The subtitle “Divine and Human Action in Hegel” is grander than is strictly warranted: not all of the relevant texts in Hegel’s corpus are surveyed, and of those that are, only small portions are considered in detail. This reflects a decision not to offer an overview of Hegel’s thought, but to engage with particular texts in a sustained fashion. The book is for readers who wish to understand Hegel’s significance for theology, and covers one aspect of that significance: Hegel’s development of a logic in which false oppositions (between subject and object, thinking and being, individual and community, divine and human, philosophy and theology) are overcome. It is in this context that one can best evaluate whether Hegel gives a problematic account of the relation between divine and human action, and determine whether there is in his work an eclipse of grace.

Those who teach the classic German theological texts of the twentieth century – by Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Balthasar, Rahner, Pannenberg, Moltmann – face a well-known problem. Hegel’s philosophy is an important source for understanding these texts, both as an explicit reference (the texts engage with Hegel) and as an implicit influence (the texts are shaped by his thinking in various ways). Yet there are few studies of Hegel that equip graduate students in systematic theology with what they need. Theologians tend to write about Hegel’s “religious” thinking; philosophers tend not to engage with Hegel’s theological significance, owing to a lack of interest in theology by philosophers in general. There are good introductions to German philosophy, such as Andrew Bowie’s Introduction to German Philosophy and Terry Pinkard’s German Philosophy 1760–1860, but connections to the theological tradition are few and far between in their pages.1 There are likewise good introductions to the German theology, such as the Cambridge Companion series on individual figures, but connections to the German philosophical tradition in these studies are rather half-hearted. The unhappy consequence is that students must read philosophical works by philosophers reluctant to engage with the theology and theological works by theologians whose focus is other than philosophy: it is left to the students to make the connections as best they can. This book aims to make some of those connections through a theologically informed engagement with Hegel’s philosophical texts.

There has never been a better time for theologians to read Hegel and his contemporaries. There are excellent critical editions from the publishing house Felix Meiner of the major works, together with inexpensive Suhrkamp republications of older editions. There are good translations, often with carefully produced apparatus and indices. There is plentiful contemporary commentary and analysis in English, French, and German. The work is available as never before, and there is secondary material to suit all levels of reader from beginner to archive researcher.

There has never been a more perplexing time for theologians to read Hegel. There is an increasing gap between the wirkungsgeschichtlicher Hegel passed down from lecture hall to lecture hall, whose influence on theologians is visible in nearly every text by Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and von Balthasar, and the textual Hegel who can be studied in the latest critical editions. The Hegel who is “historically effective” is almost a different figure from the Hegel one encounters through detailed engagement with texts. Again and again one encounters bold claims about Hegel in classic works – bold claims which then shape later thinking – which do not stand up to scrutiny when one reads the actual texts. This is not surprising: those making the bold claims were repeating and developing what they learned as students more often than they were offering commentary on texts. There are thus two Hegels: the received wisdom about Hegel’s ideas, which has an influence on the theologians, and the actual texts, which contain what Hegel actually said, which may have had rather less influence in the past, but which are shaping current scholarly engagement with Hegel. Encyclopaedia articles on Hegel tend to repeat the received wisdom; the latest scholarship on Hegel tends to explore the texts. Keeping track of both Hegels is strenuous labor. Worse, there seem to be as many Hegels as there are interpreters, and the old quip about the Bible being a nose of wax that can be reshaped to suit any reader seems to apply just as much to Hegel. Hegel’s own texts seem so irremediably vague as to require translation into an alternate idiom just to get started with what his basic questions are, let alone permit disagreements on details.

The philosophers who champion Hegel today are prone to justify Hegel’s relevance on the grounds that it speaks to their contemporary concerns, rather than the (much more plausible) grounds that it continues to be generative and offers a powerful critique of the poverty of much contemporary philosophy in English. Worse, those philosophers often neglect Hegel’s theological interests and some even deny (astonishingly) that Hegel has a metaphysical project at all. Theologians wanting help with Hegel’s perplexing remarks about God, the Trinity, Jesus Christ, Spirit, the Church, and so on find rather quickly that the philosophical commentaries in English are rather timid on (or simply uninterested in) these questions. It is small wonder that Barth’s famous essay “Hegel” in Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century remains a primary source for theologians, even though it is largely based on a questionable reading of a dated edition of a single work.2 Barth’s essay is easy to read, magisterially confident in tone, and neatly places Hegel as a modern Pelagius. (It comes as a real shock to students who know Barth’s Church Dogmatics to read the various versions of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and to discover just how neo-Hegelian Barth actually is in many significant respects.) Hegel is more inaccessible than ever: the secondary literature is massive and refers to a bewildering number of German editions whose paginations do not agree.

This book will not solve these deep problems. It does acknowledge them, however, and is intended to provide encouragement and assistance to systematic theologians, Christian ethicists and their graduate students who know they should read Hegel but scarcely have time to devote to serious study of Kant, let alone the figures who succeed him.

This book will be focused on texts, not a figure. More specifically it will be concerned with small portions of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Happily these texts are available in recent translations, and the discussions here will be oriented to the latest paperback critical German editions in a way that makes reference to the translations straightforward.

The renaissance of interest in Hegel by American and British philosophers is for the large part bypassed here. The exceptions are Stephen Houlgate and John Burbidge. These two commentators write with deceptive simplicity and lack of pretension and it is easy for the unwary reader to assume that their arguments lack the intellectual force of more flamboyant figures like Žižek or writers with a more authoritative style like Habermas. It is purely a matter of branding. I consider Houlgate and Burbidge to be far superior to them, when it comes to Hegel, in nearly every way, and I draw extensively on their insights. The reason for not thoroughly engaging other philosophers is that while they provide excellent commentary on Hegel’s epistemology they offer almost nothing of interest on Hegel’s significance for theology, for it is not in the area of epistemology that Hegel’s theological significance lies. Some theologians (above all Andrew Shanks and Peter Hodgson) have promoted Hegel’s significance for theology, and these (very different from each other, as they replay the nineteenth-century split between “left” and “right” Hegelians) are largely in the service of a broadly liberal theology attempting to engage contemporary culture. This is valuable and fascinating work, but it is of limited use to the systematic theologians and Christian ethicists who are the imagined readers of this study. Those theologians need an account of Hegel’s logic, because this generates the German philosophical lexicon through which many of the imaginative theological moves in the twentieth century are cast. Hegel’s theological innovations are quite secondary in significance to his production of the powerful philosophical lexicon.

Finally, and more eccentrically perhaps, this book is not much interested in Hegel’s theological ideas. Hegel wrote from time to time about the Trinity, he had an identifiable Christology, and he was utterly fascinated by the Church. There are good studies of this and my argument will be misunderstood if I am taken to deny it.3 Their absence from this study certainly calls for some explanation, which I shall offer now.

This book is for theologians who want to know what it is about Hegel’s philosophy that was important for the great German-speaking theologians of the mid twentieth century, and what remains generative about that philosophy for theology today. Part of the answer to that question about significance can be summed up in one name: Aristotle.

Hegel’s philosophy is, as I read its contributions to logic, a modern reauthoring of a series of Aristotelian insights.4 His thinking is dynamic and teleological; it generates extraordinarily technical meditations on ordinary practices of thinking; it is interested in the difference between investigations into phenomena (in Aristotelian terms: Physics) and investigations that are simultaneously into phenomena and the categories that describe them (in Aristotelian terms: Metaphysics); it is dialectical rather than deductive; it undermines and repairs false oppositions; it is ultimately interested in God.

Each of these requires further elucidation, but it is probably useful to have them laid out in this bald way at the outset. It should be clear that the primary interest here is philosophical rather than theological, but in such a way that philosophy cannot be readily split off from theology. Just as any serious study of Aquinas propels the reader to study Aristotle, so any serious study of Barth and his contemporaries and successors should stimulate serious study of Hegel. Putting it this way reveals a problem for contemporary theology. We teach Aquinas in our theological courses perhaps without enough attention to Aristotle, and we certainly teach Barth and his contemporaries without proper study of Hegel. In fact, in some well-known institutions we tend to teach theology as if it is such a different discipline from philosophy that we often engage in the disastrous practice of sending theologians off to the philosophy faculty to learn their philosophy. In many universities this is almost guaranteed to mean they receive a diet deficient in classical Greek or modern German philosophy. Theological students today are more likely to read Derrida than Hegel, and more likely to read Žižek than Aristotle. In no imaginable universe can this be a good thing.

This book will test five claims about Hegel’s logic: (1) it is a product of reflecting on Christian doctrine; (2) it is concerned with pairs of terms; (3) it stands independently of his heterodox doctrinal experiments; (4) its generativity for theology can be seen more clearly if one ignores those doctrinal experiments; (5) such doctrinal experiments are in any case fewer than sometimes supposed. The chapters on the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic will develop the first two of these claims. The fifth claim will form the substance of the chapter on the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion; the third and fourth claims are the concern of the study as a whole. Aspects of these claims can be briefly introduced in advance.

First, the claim about the “doctrinal” shape of Hegel’s logic. Hegel’s thinking (in my reading) will strike theologians as bearing a remarkable structural similarity to certain aspects of doctrinal theology. The reason for this may be because Hegel was, in fact, rather interested in doctrinal theology, as is amply evidenced in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. To see this structural similarity, I echo some fascinating insights in Martin Wendte’s recent study of Hegel.5 We can take for example the latter part of the Chalcedonian formula of AD 451 and the logic it displays in relation to the full divinity and full humanity of Christ:

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.

The logic this formula displays is one in which the two principal terms (divinity and humanity) are related to each other in various ways. The logic that governs these relations rules out reduction of the two terms to a single term; it also rules out separation of the two terms so that they are opposed to each other; the relation of the two terms is simultaneously a union and a preservation of the difference between the two terms, in this case by predicating union of “person” and difference of “natures.” This is a sophisticated logic which generates non-biblical terms like “person” and “nature” in order to handle the relation between the principal terms “divine” and “human.” Starting with the next chapter, on the Phenomenology, I echo Wendte’s claim that Hegel thinks in a distinctly “Chalcedonian” fashion.

Consider also the errant logics that guide the various heresies that have been tried out from time to time in the Church. Arianism names the view that the Son of God was created and not divine. Apollinarianism (a reaction against Arianism) names the view that Jesus had a human body but a divine mind. Pelagianism names the view that salvation can be achieved by unaided human will, and does not rely on divine grace. Semipelagianism (a reaction against Pelagianism) names the view that the beginning of faith can be achieved by unaided human will, but is completed through divine grace. All of these views were deemed heretical. Arianism and Apollinarianism display the same errant logic, even though they produce contrary judgments. The errant logic is one in which a pair of terms (“divine” and “human”) are falsely opposed to one another. Arianism denies divinity of Christ; Apollinarianism denies humanity of Christ. The repair of this errant logic, which is displayed in the logic of the Chalcedonian formula, is one in which the relation of the pair of terms is handled in a different, more complex way. Indeed, it handles them precisely as a “pair.” Pelagianism and Semipelagianism display the same errant logic, even though they produce contradictory judgments. The errant logic is one in which a pair of terms (“free will” and “grace”) are falsely opposed to one another. Pelagianism denies outright that grace is needed for salvation; Semipelagianism assigns free will to one period of salvation (the beginning of faith) and assigns grace to another (the growth of faith). The repair of this errant logic, which is displayed in the theology of Augustine, in works such as “On Nature and Grace,” is one in which the relation of the pair of terms is again handled in a different, more complex way. Most historical accounts of these developments concentrate on the condemnation of heresy, and the production of doctrines which articulate a position which becomes dominant. It is far more interesting to investigate the logics of the heresies and the logics of the doctrines which replace them. In nearly every case, the errant logics are those which produce false oppositions, and the reparative logics are those which overcome those false oppositions, and generate different relations between pairs of terms. A purely historical account is one in which one side happens to win out over the other. A logical analysis is one in which one can see distinct forms of reasoning at work, and can see that the heretical logic “must” fail, in a sense, because the production of false oppositions produces its own collapse in the long run. Hegel thinks in a recognizably orthodox way, in one sense, not because he holds one doctrinal view rather than another, but because he is often repairing errant logics which produce false oppositions.

Karl Barth famously wondered if Hegel might become for Protestant theology what Aquinas eventually became for the Catholic tradition.6 This way of putting things is guilty of its own false opposition, in this case between Protestant and Catholic theologies (which, in the decades since Barth’s death, have come to have a highly complex relation that is other than one of mutual exclusion, and Hegel can be just as much of a Catholic inspiration as a Protestant one), but it undoubtedly captures something of Hegel’s promise for theology. Barth’s question can be repaired and reformulated as follows. Might it be possible that Hegel might become for modern theology what Augustine became for patristic theology? Just as Augustine repaired the errant logics of heresies which produced false oppositions between nature and grace, so Hegel repaired the errant logics of modern philosophies which produced false oppositions between subject and object and above all between thinking and being. So long as Christian theologies perpetuate errant logics which falsely oppose nature and grace, Augustine will not command the respect which is his due. In the same way, so long as Christian theologies perpetuate errant logics which falsely oppose subject and object, thinking and being, the same goes for Hegel. This way of putting it also accounts much more satisfactorily than Barth for Hegel’s failure to become a titan of modern theology in the way that Augustine and Aquinas did in their ages. This is not to suggest that one should “agree” with Hegel, any more than one needs to endorse Augustine’s theological claims in order to recognize his genius. Rather, it is to point out what the real obstruction to recognizing Hegel’s greatness is. It is Hegel’s generation of alternative logics which is the problem: his readers are often guided by logics that are errant, from Hegel’s perspective, and their attempts to interpret him are doomed to failure until they grasp the reparative logics he generates, in his tireless assault on false oppositions of various kinds.

Hegel thinks “like Augustine” and “like Chalcedon,” but this likeness is more at the level of logic than of doctrinal affirmation. (His logical insights are quite compatible with such doctrinal affirmation, however, as can be seen in the Hegelian shape of thinking one can discern in some of Rowan Williams’ thinking about the incarnation.7 Hegel’s doctrinal experiments are far less easily reconciled with such theology and in my view can be treated quite independently of the logics he develops.) It is for this reason that any attempt to appreciate Hegel (and such appreciation goes much deeper than, and often in a contrary direction to, his particular theological claims) must engage with the Science of Logic, and cannot remain satisfied with considering the particular doctrinal recommendations that Hegel makes (which are in any case fewer than often supposed). In this study, for polemical reasons, I almost completely ignore Hegel’s doctrinal claims in order to focus on the logics he produces. My aim is to encourage theologians to recognize Hegel’s logical investigations as reparative for philosophy and generative for theology, and this aspect of his thinking stands quite independently of his views on, for example, the deficiency of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity.

Second, we can consider in a little detail the claim about pairs of terms. It is worth clarifying my use of the term “pair,” which will pervade the analysis of Hegel in this study. This is my own logical device for identifying the logic of the Science of Logic. Hegel does not often use the word “pair,” and certainly not as emphatically as I am going to in the course of my commentary.8 (1) A pair is not two things that happen to be in relation. A pair is two things, where each is what it is because of its relation to the other. Two people going on their first date can be taken as a pair only in an attenuated way. A couple who have been married for twenty years can be taken (even by themselves) as two opposed terms or they can be taken as a pair: it hardly needs to be said that how things turn out may depend on which logic is operative. Flesh and spirit in St. Paul can be taken as opposed terms or as a pair, and how one takes them makes a significant difference to one’s scriptural interpretation. Being and nothing can be taken as opposed terms or, as for Hegel, they can be taken as a pair. The term “being” has the scope it has because of its relation to the scope of “nothing.” (2) A pair is not one thing with two parts. A pair is two things, where each is distinct from the other, but each cannot be adequately described independently of its relation to the other. One can describe each of the persons who has been married for twenty years, and it is not a mistake to try to describe just one of them. An adequate description of that one, however, will involve some account of his/her relation to the spouse – the other, and also some account of his/her being as a married person. (3) Pair-talk is triadic. This sounds absurd, on the face of it. Surely pair-talk is binary! It is in fact triadic. In the case of the married couple, there is the husband, the wife, and their relation in marriage. If one subtracts the third term – their relation – one has two terms and not a pair. In the case of many pairs the third dimension is often a language, or an institution, or a history: the first term is related to the second term by virtue of both being terms in the same context of use. Words have meanings because of the other words to which they are related. (4) To identify a pair is not to have reached the limit of relations between terms. There could be three terms in relation to each other, or four or… But a pair is the simplest form of this kind of relation. The minimum number for a phenomenon of this kind is three: two terms and their relation.

A coin with two faces is not easily taken as a pair: it is one coin. A snail in a shell is not easily taken as a pair: it is one snail. Bread and butter is an interesting case. It could be taken as two things that happen to be related to each other; it could be taken as one thing with two elements; it could be taken as a pair: in the moment of eating there are two things, where each tastes the way it does because of its relation to the other. The case of bread and butter shows that “a pair” is a logical, rather than an ontological, term. A pair is a pair because of how its terms are taken, not because of what something is. A pair is not part of a scientific system of classification, but a logical term that can be operative in any system of classification whatsoever. To talk of pairs is to draw attention to how things are considered rather than to their essential properties. There are pears but not pairs in the world. Assigning the term “pair” to two terms is a logical operation that governs how the relation between the two terms is to be described. It does not determine what kind of thing one is dealing with. It is this kind of distinction that is in play when I say that we are considering logical rather than ontological issues.

Third, we can take the strong claim about taking Hegel’s philosophy independently of his theology. If one wishes to know what implications Hegel’s thinking has in relation to Christology or the Trinity there are thoroughly researched monographs, some of them available in English.9 There can be no doubt that Hegel has been read in such a way as to influence the substance, and not just the shape, of theologians’ doctrinal claims.10 In my view this is one of those areas where the historically effective Hegel (the Hegel who changed how we think) is different from the textual Hegel (the texts we can read for ourselves). Hegel derived logical forms from Christian doctrines, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, but these logical forms are not themselves doctrinal formulations. Talk of false oppositions, or of pairs, is not doctrinal talk, although one may use such terms in order to clarify what effects doctrinal formulations have on how we think about the kinds of relations things have to each other. Hegel may well have an identifiable Christology or Trinitarian theology (although I am more circumspect about this than others). He certainly has a great deal to say about Christology and the Trinity, however, in the service of developing certain philosophical (and especially logical) insights. This is less often noticed.

Talking in this way obviously presupposes a certain way of distinguishing philosophy and theology, and this needs to be spelled out a little. I generally suppose that theology concerns itself with ontological claims whereas philosophy deals in shapes of thinking. Put differently, theology is a system of classification whereas philosophy investigates systems of classification. Theological questions take the form “when we say x, what sense does x have?” or “when we say x is y, is this true?” or “when we say x is y, what does this mean?”. The answers to these questions will be truth claims of various kinds. Philosophical questions take the form “how are the categories x and y generated?” or “what rules govern the predication of y to x?” or “what shape does this system of classification have?”. An example may help. The question “is the logos pre-existent?” is a theological question which invites a theological answer. The question “what views of time are implied in various versions of the claim that the logos is pre-existent?” is a philosophical question which invites a philosophical answer. We can also take the Chalcedonian example. The question “in what sense is Jesus fully divine and fully human?” is theological. The question “what logic governs the relation of sameness and difference in the claim that Jesus is fully divine and fully human?” is philosophical. This way of distinguishing the disciplines is intended to clarify that they do not have distinct domains or objects of knowledge, but different ways of approaching the same phenomena. Theology investigates phenomena; philosophy investigates phenomena and categories simultaneously. Theology is rather like natural science: it classifies things. Philosophy is not like this at all: it asks about what kind of classification is in play and even asks about what kind of action classification is. I have also attempted to distinguish the disciplines in such a way as to make it very difficult to keep them wholly separate. Most theological question-and-answer will have moments of philosophical inquiry; all philosophical question-and-answer requires a prior “scientific” practice (whether theological or otherwise) on which to reflect.

It is in this sense that I claim that Hegel’s thought is best taken as philosophical rather than theological, if one is concerned with his continuing generativity for theology: his work reflects on prior theological practices and draws attention to the rules that govern them, to the systems of classification in play, and to the categories in which they cast their descriptions of God and the world. In this study I do not merely argue this; I show it through detailed commentary on texts.

Having suggested in a simplified way that Hegel is to Barth as Aristotle is to Aquinas, and having made it clear that Hegel is himself a kind of modern Aristotle in some of the interests and concerns he has, it is worth making explicit which questions of Hegel’s will be the focus of the textual commentary that follows.

Hegel asks the following questions, among many others. What is the relation between thinking and being? What is the relation between analogical and conceptual thinking? What is the relation between cognition and performativity? In Hegel’s terms: what are the relations between Denken and Sein, Vorstellung and Begriff, Wissen and Tun?