G. W. F. Hegel

Shao Kai Tseng

• Editorial: P Publishing
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781629954004
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Biografie in ambito storico

To do theology in the twenty-first century, we must understand Hegel. In this accessible introduction, Tseng examines the philosopher's significant influence on European thought in general and Protestant theology in particular.

1

WHY HEGEL MATTERS TODAY

Anecdote: From Hegel to Van Til and Vice Versa

During my freshman and sophomore years in college, I experienced an intellectual crisis of faith. God was still dear to my heart, as he always has been. Because no aspect of my life was of more fundamental importance than my very personal knowledge of God, I skipped many classes to visit the library, attempting to seek rational understanding of my own faith through philosophy. At that time, I attended a church in which most of the members, including the senior pastor, were intellectual elites from mainland China. The 1990s were a time when educated elites in communist or formerly communist countries began to give up faith in Marxism. Conversion to Christianity—be it theoretical, cultural, or personal—was a popular sort of “ideological turn to the right,” so to speak, for many Chinese intellectuals. Most of our church members were evidently born-again Christians, but embracing Kant and Hegel appeared to many of them, at least at the initial stages of faith, to be an integral part of their ideological right turn, along with their conversion to Christianity. Under the influence of that cultural milieu, I decided to begin my philosophical quest with Kant and Hegel, picking up from the library Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Phenomenology of Spirit.

I was, of course, puzzled by these works, primarily because of their difficulty. The vocabularies seemed esoteric; the arguments were too complex to follow. During my first reading of these texts, I developed only some very general impressions of these two Teutonic philosophers: Kant asserts that as long as we act morally, we do not need to know what God did for us, while Hegel contends that religion is intrinsically alienating as it separates human beings from absolute spirit, because of its necessarily “representational” form (we shall unfold this notion in chapter 2). These were, of course, vague impressions, and at that time I was not yet aware that all thinkers undergo intellectual development. Yet in retrospect I would say that these impressions were more or less correct, though perhaps not sufficiently precise or comprehensive. These philosophical views implied that I did not need to take the Bible literally as the Word of God, that I did not have to believe in the historical veracity of the death and resurrection of my Lord Jesus, and that while going to church would make me a better person, only by studying philosophy would I become consistently wise and good.

These were, of course, not the kind of answers that I was seeking, for truths such as the authority of the Bible and the historicity of the virgin birth were beyond doubt for me. My main problems as a sophomore student in physics in 2000–2001 were largely the success of naturalistic assumptions in the natural sciences (i.e., why would a scientific system that denies the workings of the hand of God in nature be so coherent and successful in explaining the physical world?) and the problem of evil (i.e., if God is good and almighty, why does he allow so much evil?). Walking away from Kant and Hegel with little gain (though, in fact, there was much to gain from them, if only I had been theologically and philosophically better equipped at the time), I devised my own theological explanations.

With much excitement, I presented this theology to my Campus Crusade leader, Dan MacDonald, a man of God who now serves as a Presbyterian (PCA) minister in Toronto. Dan told me that a long time ago someone named Pelagius had already come up with that theological explanation, and that it was deemed heretical. He invited me to walk with him to Regent College nearby, so that he could introduce to me the theology of John Calvin on our way. I was impressed by the theology he presented, so after we parted, I went to the Regent library and found a copy of Calvin’s Institutes. Unlike my first encounter with Kant and Hegel, I understood the basic meaning of every sentence that Calvin wrote (though every time I revisited the Institutes, I would gain some new understandings). I finished my first reading of the Institutes almost in one breath, repeatedly shouting in my heart, “This man is explaining to me the God whom I have always known since I was a child!”

At that time, I thought I was done with Hegel for good. I began to acquaint myself with historic Reformed theologians, starting with the English Puritans of the seventeenth century, using J. I. Packer’s introductory works. Eventually I made my way to modern Reformed theology, espoused variously by Old Princeton and Dutch neo-Calvinism. At that juncture, a friend who was studying at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia encouraged me to read Cornelius Van Til’s Defense of the Faith.

Van Til gave me the confidence to engage in intellectual dialogue with non-Christian friends from the perspective of a Christian worldview. I picked up from Van Til an apologetic method that assumes the presuppositions of one’s opponent’s worldview, for argument’s sake, in order to disclose their internal inconsistencies. In retrospect, I would say that my desire to debate with non-Christians in those days was driven more by youthful pride and audacity than by the glory of God in the proclamation of hope (1 Peter 3:15). Even so, the Van Tilian method proved to be immensely useful in practice.

Towards the end of my undergraduate studies, a Christian friend who knew me as an avid defender of the faith introduced me to a classmate from her church who was having serious doubts about Christianity. I tried to use Van Til’s conceptual apparatuses to resolve his doubts as the three of us took the same bus home. Our conversation attracted the attention of a stranger on the bus who happened to be a philosophy student from our own university.

“Are you talking about Hegel?” the stranger asked.

“No, we’re talking about Van Til,” I replied.

“Who is Van Til?”

“A Christian theologian and philosopher.”

“He sure sounds like Hegel.”

At that time, my impression of Hegel was too vague to draw the connections, but I would soon find out that Van Til had actually been accused of corrupting Christian theology with Hegelian idealism in the 1940s and 1950s. Such accusations, launched by J. Oliver Buswell and others, were of course prejudiced, but they were not completely without reason. Van Til’s doctoral dissertation at Princeton University was specifically directed against British idealism, of which Hegel was the patriarch, so to speak. Yet Van Til’s opposition to Hegelian idealism was not at all simplistic. As Timothy McConnell puts it, “Idealism provided Van Til a framework for problems to be dealt with, and thus provides a reference for understanding his apologetical approach.”¹

As we proceed, we shall see more concretely how Van Til’s apologetics—among other treasures of recent Reformed theology—is at once informed by the thought-form (Denkform) of Hegelian philosophy and opposed to the fundamental aspects of its ontology. Here Van Til serves as an example of how faithful Christian witness can benefit from critical appreciation of a philosophy that stands at odds with the presuppositions of biblical Christianity.

Hegel’s Global Influence

Now the question is: in our own day and age, can we still benefit from a critical appreciation and charitable (though uncompromising) criticism of Hegel, like Van Til once did? There have been periods of time when Hegel’s thought seemed to lose its contemporary relevance. The young Van Til lived in a time when British idealism was still a respected voice in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Hegel was felt within the culture. However, this philosophical movement, which began in the mid-nineteenth century, started to lose its cultural relevance in the early twentieth century. It faded into the background, with the rise of new philosophical traditions like analytic philosophy, existentialism, and logical positivism. Thus, McConnell suggests that Van Til’s “usage of idealism . . . provides a potential limitation on the continuing applicability of certain aspects of . . . [his] apologetics.”² The reason is that “by tailoring so much of his analysis to idealist philosophy, he lost his voice when his audience in the general culture changed to other forms of philosophy.”³

However, history has shown us time and again that Hegel is one of those philosophers who keeps coming back, as it were, in different parts of the world in various circumstances. It is true that in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hegelian thought and Hegel studies in continental Europe were briefly overshadowed by existentialism and postmodernism. Soon, however, philosophers began to realize that without a firm grasp of Hegel’s system, it was impossible to truly understand twentieth-century European philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Derrida.⁴

Another occasion for the revival of Hegelian philosophy and Hegel studies in the mid-twentieth century was the rise of communist regimes around the globe. Marxist philosophers in the Soviet Union and continental Europe were quick to acknowledge Karl Marx’s intellectual indebtedness to so-called Left Hegelianism, which turned Hegel’s idealism into a materialistic and atheistic system. Ernst Bloch and other Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century gave rise to renewed interests in Hegel, aimed at reinterpreting him as one of the fountainheads of dialectical materialism.⁵

Ironically, the eventful year 1989 in communist states around the world, which led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, also spawned a new generation of Hegel scholars, both in the West and in countries like China. Western scholars of this generation tended to emphasize an ad fontes approach to Hegel’s texts, allowing these texts to speak for themselves, without reading political agendas into them. In China, this new wave of academic interest in the German philosopher came with Deng Xiaoping’s economic “reform and opening,” which attempted to integrate right-wing ideologies of the West with Chinese communism. The events of 1989 meant for many Chinese intellectuals that Marxism had come to its dead end. Many of them went back to Hegel’s texts to rediscover their implications for China’s possible ideological turn to the right. So-called cultural Christians—scholars who appealed to Christianity as a way to reform Chinese culture without personal conversion—turned to Hegel, Kant, Max Weber, and others in their attempt to culturally “Christianize” Chinese society. It is worth mentioning here that the economic success of the “socialism with Chinese characteristics” program under the leaderships of Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping has led some of these scholars to “turn left” again and abandon the agenda of cultural Christianity. Others, however, gave up cultural Christianity to become born-again Christians, living as members of the visible body of Christ. As far as Hegel studies is concerned, China is starting to become a world leader in the Marxist camp of Hegel interpretation.⁶

The foregoing examples serve to demonstrate how multifaceted and sophisticated Hegel’s philosophy is, such that it has been found deeply pertinent in so many different cultural-historical contexts. It is unlikely that it will become obsolete any time soon. For Christians and non-Christians alike, Hegel’s writings will continue to be a source of both inspiration and challenge, in many different ways.

Hegel and Modern Theology

Another reason for Christians in particular to read Hegel has to do with his influence on modern theology, an area in which he stands as a towering figure. Virtually no major dogmatic theologian since the nineteenth century has been able to bypass him. The founder of modern liberal theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), once Hegel’s colleague at the University of Berlin, interacted intellectually with him at a profound level in a rather bitter rivalry.⁷ Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), next in line to Schleiermacher in the liberal tradition of modern theology, rejected Hegel’s “speculative” metaphysics to embrace the “anti-metaphysical” approach of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).⁸ The ghost of Hegel’s philosophy would continue to cast its shadow over the great anti-Hegelian Ritschlians, Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922) and Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930).⁹ David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), a pioneer in historical-critical studies of the Bible, who was once associated with the so-called Young Hegelians, introduced Hegelian methods into modern biblical scholarship (see chapter 3 of this book). This Hegelian influence has been there to stay in the discipline, even if many biblical scholars today are unaware of it.

In twentieth-century biblical scholarship, this Hegelian legacy was carried on by Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976).¹⁰ Karl Barth (1886–1968) is another twentieth-century theologian who was deeply indebted to Hegel, and the precise role of his influence on Barth’s theology is an important ongoing debate in contemporary English-language Barth studies.¹¹ Among living theologians, Jürgen Moltmann (born 1926) is one of the luminaries most often compared with Hegel, not least because Moltmann sees God as needing the world as an other in order to realize himself as God, and sees the transience and sufferings of the world as having ultimately arisen from the inner nature of God. R. Scott Rodin puts it ...