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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 o...
