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God is the absolute truth and substance of all things, the universal in which everything subsists. As such God is also absolute subjectivity, or spirit. The concrete development of this idea of God yields the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. But Hegel first reflects on the concept of God in a more abstract philosophical sense, where he is at pains to distinguish an authentic panentheism (all things have their being in God) from a spurious pantheism (everything is God). The analysis then shifts from the being to the knowledge of God, of which, according to Hegel, there are four basic forms: immediate knowledge (faith), feeling, representation (Vorstellung), and thought. Each is valid, but each is also superseded by the next form. Thinking about God appears in the various religions as proofs of the existence of God (cosmological, teleological, ontological). If knowledge of God is the theoretical form of the religious relationship, the worship of God is the practical form—indeed the form in which the relationship is consummated by the participation of the believer in God through cultic acts such as devotion, sacrifice, and sacraments.

This chapter provides a brief survey of Hegel’s life and career, then examines the way that his speculative philosophy attempts to move through and beyond Kant’s critical philosophy to reestablish the possibility of knowing ultimate truth and reality. A logical deep structure underlies both thought and being, and it appears in a great diversity of shapes in the empirical world. Philosophy of religion is the culminating element of Hegel’s philosophical system, and he understood it to be a philosophical theology whose task is to know God and rethink the central theological doctrines in a more adequate conceptuality. For Hegel, ‘spirit’ designates the distinctive ontological quality of God as a living process of creating, communicating, and consummating.

With the passage from the sensible to the spiritual presence of Christ, the community formed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit comprises a unique and unsurpassable intersubjectivity of self-divesting love for the other. The community necessarily takes on institutional forms: it becomes a church with doctrines, teachings, orders, and sacraments (the highest of which is the eucharistic sharing in the life and death of Christ). By this means reconciliation is realized in the world. Hegel identifies several stages in this process: the individual heart, the church as a worldly power, the ethical realm where the principle of freedom penetrates into the world, new forms of subjectivity (which are in danger of becoming subjectivistic), and speculative philosophy (which provides ‘refuge’ for religion in the modern world). Whether the community of faith will pass away in the process is one of the unresolved tensions in Hegel’s thought.

The thesis of this chapter is that Hegel’s philosophy of religion provides fruitful resources for theological reflection today. The first task is to consider those who question this assumption. Indeed, a strand of interpretation going back to Hegel’s own time claims that his philosophical reconstruction of religion is really a destruction (Kierkegaard), that the outcome of his thought is atheism (or humanism) rather than theism (Feuerbach). Along similar lines, William Desmond has recently argued that the God of Hegel’s system is a counterfeit rather than the true God of Christian faith. The chapter then turns to six sets of distinctions or contested sites in postmodernity and their Hegelian resolution: heterodoxy and ontotheology, totality and infinity, language and logic, tragedy and redemption, self and other, unity and diversity. The mediating categories of spirit, wholeness, narrative, Christ, community, and pluralism contribute to the project of theological reconstruction at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Hegel did not address the topic of religion only for the first time in his Berlin lectures of 1821 and following. There was no topic in which he had a deeper and more abiding interest, as evidenced from his days as a theological student in Tübingen through the years in Jena and Nuremberg. This chapter provides a survey of Hegel’s writings on religion from the 1790s to the early 1820s: Early Theological Writings, Faith and Knowledge, Jena system outlines, Phenomenology of Spirit, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and Hegel’s Foreword to a book by Hinrichs. It is argued that differences between Hegel’s four series of lectures on the philosophy of religion (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831) are of significance, and that spoken lectures display his thinking at its best.

In the introductions to his lectures, Hegel orients himself to the culture, philosophy, and theology of his time. He takes account of the novelty of philosophy of religion as a discipline, arguing that its object is not only religion as an aspect of human experience but also the knowledge of God by reason alone; as such it is a necessary branch of philosophy. He provides an analysis of the characteristics of modernity, focusing on its secularism, agnosticism, and compartmentalization of religion, which together comprise ‘the discord of our times’. He assesses previous and concurrent theologies, which for the most part fail to address this discord: metaphysical or classical theology, rational theology (the Enlightenment), historical theology, agnostic and ethicotheology (Kant), theology of feeling (Schleiermacher, Jacobi), atheism (Feuerbach), pantheism (Spinoza).

Hegel in his lectures first sets forth a philosophical definition of the concept of religion, then traces the development of the concept in the various determinate religions of humanity, and finally finds the consummation of the concept in the Christian religion. The concept of religion can be approached both empirically and phenomenologically. When the latter takes on speculative form it grasps religion as the self-consciousness of absolute spirit mediated in and through finite consciousness: religion is both a divine and a human action. This truth appears partially in the historical religions and completely in Christianity, which is described by Hegel as the consummate or absolute religion, the revelatory and revealed religion, and the religion of truth, freedom, and reconciliation. The chapter examines Hegel’s speculative redescription of the Christian metanarrative and asks whether his claims on behalf of this religion are excessive, heterodox, and/or heretical.

Hegel locates the focal point of reconciliation and redemption in the figure of Jesus Christ, in whom the unity of divine and human nature is believed to be definitively accomplished. He attempts to establish by philosophical arguments the possibility, necessity, and actuality of the incarnation of God in a single and specific human being. That Jesus of Nazareth is this person is a claim of faith, but it is a claim corroborated by the historical evidence of his life, teaching, and death. Viewed historically, his crucifixion is the death of a criminal; but viewed religiously, it is the death of God—a point on which Hegel places considerable emphasis since it is only by undergoing death (as the pinnacle of finitude) that God overcomes it. The resurrection of Christ symbolizes the triumph of highest love over deepest anguish and the transition from a single individual to the community of faith.

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is one of the most important resources from the nineteenth century for theology as it faces the challenges of modernity and postmodernity. A critical edition of these lectures was published in the 1980s, which makes possible a study of the text on a level of accuracy and insight hitherto unattainable. The present book (by the editor and translator of the critical edition) engages the speculative reconstruction of Christian theology that is accomplished by Hegel’s lectures, and it provides a close reading of the text as a whole. The first two chapters argue that Hegel’s philosophy of religion is a philosophical theology focused on the concept of spirit, and they provide an overview of his writings on religion prior to the philosophy of religion. The book analyses Hegel’s conception of the object and purpose of the philosophy of religion, his critique of the theology of his time, his approach to Christianity within the framework of the concept of religion, his concept of God, his reconstruction of central Christian themes (Trinity, creation, humanity, evil, Christ, Spirit, community), and his placing of Christianity among the religions of the world. The concluding chapter makes a case for the contemporary theological significance of Hegel by identifying currently contested sites of interpretation and their Hegelian resolution (focusing on the categories of spirit, wholeness, narrative, Christ, community, and pluralism). Hegel, it is argued, provides a basis for a revisioning of central doctrinal themes in contrast to the reigning dogmatisms of our time, namely philosophical agnosticism and religious fundamentalism. The book is being published concurrently with the reissuing by Oxford University Press of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

God creates by ‘releasing’ the otherness that is intrinsic to the divine life into actual, independent existence, which is the world vis-à-vis God. The world divides into the realms of nature and finite spirit (humanity). God’s wisdom is at work in both realms, but a free and conscious relationship to God is possible only in the latter. Estrangement, self-securing, and evil are the condition of possibility of free relationships, and thus Hegel’s view of human nature takes on a tragic aspect, as is evident from his interpretation of the story of the fall in the book of Genesis. Whether his understanding of evil as the distortion of knowledge is sufficiently radical is a question with which the chapter ends.

The specifically Christian idea of God is as absolute spirit, which means that the divine life takes on a trinitarian structure: immediacy or self-identity, self-differentiation or positing of otherness, and self-return or consummation. This is the life-process of spirit itself. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity articulates this insight in representational language that introduces numbers (three-in-one) and persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). In Hegel’s speculative reconstruction, God is to be understood not as three persons but as infinite personality or subjectivity, which constitutes distinctions within itself but suspends these distinctions and remains in unity with itself. Life, love, and friendship all exhibit this dialectical structure. Traces and anticipations of the Trinity are to be found in everything and everywhere—an insight grasped by a heterodox tradition going back to Pythagoreans, Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and German mystics such as Boehme.

The second and longest part of the lectures treats religions other than Christianity under the theme of ‘determinate religion’. It is a topic in which Hegel evinced a growing fascination, but he never achieved a satisfactory arrangement of the materials. What he offers has more the character of a geography or typology of religions than of a history of religions, despite his claim to track the movement of spirit through history. This chapter focuses on Hegel’s affinity with and critique of Asian religions and his evolving treatment of Judaism. The chapter concludes by proposing that the depth structure of Hegel’s thinking is closer to religious pluralism than to inclusivism, and that he envisions a future religion of free and concrete spirit.