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HEGEL’S LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Hegel lectured on the philosophy of religion for the first time in the summer semester of 1821 at the University of Berlin, lectures that he was to repeat on three occasions, in 1824, 1827, and 1831. His delay in addressing the topic of religion was not a sign of lack of interest. On the contrary, there was no topic in which he had a deeper and more abiding concern, as evidenced from his days as a theological student in Tubingen through the years in Frankfurt, Jena, and Nuremberg. Upon his departure from Jena, he wrote to a friend: “I was eager to lecture on theology at a university and might well have done so after some years of continuing to lecture on philosophy.” However, the opportunity to do so did not present itself until after his arrival in Berlin. He was stimulated to offer his own views by the impending publication of Friedrich Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre , a work with which Hegel had reason to believe he would find sharp disagreements. As a philosopher, he did not lecture on theology per se but on philosophy of religion, a discipline that he took to be engaged not simply with the phenomenon of religion but with the nature and reality of the object of religion, namely, God. Since this transcendent referent had been rendered problematic by Enlightenment philosophy, history, and science, Hegel set out to develop a new philosophical theology that would reestablish the conceptual foundations of religion by offering a postmetaphysical and postcritical way of thinking about God.

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.

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’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.

Hegel envisioned his philosophical enterprise as a "System of Science" that would encompass all finite realities in a systematic grasp of absolute reality. He also envisioned, initially at least, two ways of entry into this system. Part 1 would be "The Science of the Experience of Consciousness"the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, described as a "pathway to science" or as a "ladder" to the absolute standpoint. Part 2 would be the Science of Logic, published during the period 1812-16. These represent, respectively, the phenomenological and the logical (or speculative) entrees to the system. These two "sciences" were combined in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) but in reverse order and with the addition of a second, middle part, the philosophy of nature. The third part of the Encyclopedia, the philosophy of spirit, encompassed not only materials found in the Phenomenology of Spirit but also those covered by the

Hegel's interpretation of the history of religions in the second part of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Determinate Religion, has generally been neglected, a neglect attributable both to the length and difficulty of the material and to the unsatisfactory character of the older editions, which amalgamated quite distinct lectures into an editorially constructed scheme. The new edition, published by the University of California Press, separates for the first time Hegel's four series of lectures on the philosophy of religion1821, 1824, 1827, and (in the excerpted form provided by D. F. Strauss) 1831-publishing them as independent texts on the basis of a complete reediting of the available sources.' When the lectures are read in sequence as originally delivered, it is possible to trace Hegel's unrelenting efforts to work out an adequate philosophical conceptualization of the history of religions.2 Several factors account for the sweeping changes introduced by Hegel into his successive lectures on religion: the fact that philosophy of religion was a novel discipline at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of his concurrent lectures on other disciplines

The appearance of the first two volumes of a reprint edition of some of Ferdinand Christian Baur's most important writings marks an important event in contemporary historical theology: the rediscovery of a man whom Emanuel Hirsch has called “the greatest and at the same time the most controversial theologian to be produced by German evangelical Christianity since Schleiermacher.” Baur's greatness consists in his recognition of the radically historical quality of the Christian Church and Christian faith, and in his concomitant development of an historical method appropriate to a critical and theological study of the Church and its founding events, a study which he understood to be an intrinsically proper and necessary theological discipline. The controversy over Baur has been generated partially with respect to the extent of his alleged “Hegelianism,” and partially with respect to the validity of his attempt to discover the “truth” of Christianity by means of historical-critical theology. Criticism of him has arisen more often out of misunderstanding, but sometimes precisely out of recognition of what he was trying to achieve theologically. This new edition of some of his major works will help to base both acclaim and criticism on the latter rather than the former ground; and it surely will enhance our appreciation of the greatness and originality of this strangely neglected man, who stands as such an essential link between Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the Ritschlians at the end, but who belongs to neither.