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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.

“The shape of the new paradigm is not yet clear … but we have intimations of what it will be like. The stress will fall more upon the public than the private, the social rather than the individual, liberation rather than liberty, equality rather than hierarchy, inquiry rather than authority, praxis rather then theory, the ecumenical rather than the provincial, the plural rather than the monolithic, the global rather than the national, the ecological rather than the anthropological.”

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 title, "Son of Man," occurs some sixty-eight times in the Synoptic Gospels, invariably on the lips of Jesus. It is precisely this fact which constitutes the baffling interpretive problems with respect to the "Son of Man" and which makes this title, or the use of it, so important for understanding Jesus' self-consciousness. For no other character in the Synoptic narratives refers to the Son of Man, nor do the several Gospel writers themselves, nor for that matter do the authors of the Epistles. It is a term used exclusively-according to the tradition-by Jesus, who, moreover, employs no other title to characterize the messianic redeemer of God, to whom he is somehow mysteriously related. As John Knox puts it, in The Death of Christ:' "This striking fact creates a very strong presumption that Jesus was actually remembered to have used the phrase and that he used it with some seriousness and impressiveness. The early Church can hardly be thought of as originating the phrase and then confining it so narrowly to Jesus' own usage." This puts the dilemma about as sharply as possible, and, of the scholars investigated for this study, only Hans Lietzmann argues that none of the Son of Man sayings are authentic. All others have attempted to show that at least some of the sayings are authentic, which accounts for the fact that Jesus was actually remembered to have used the phrase. It can also be used as a device to explain why the community was led to attribute further usage of the term to Jesus in contexts of which the authenticity may now be questioned. Invariably, the argument for unauthenticity of one group of sayings rests upon a prior judgment that another group, or groups, are authentic. On the other hand, no modern critical scholar claims that all the sayings are authentic. It is already apparent that the Son of Man sayings can be grouped fairly unambiguously into three categories, which must become the basis for any analytical investigation.2 Among scholars, there are discrepancies in detail, but on the whole this schema is accepted in one form or another. We have said that the title occurs sixty-eight times in the Synoptics. When parallels are eliminated, the number of different occurrences is reduced to forty. Of this number, the Son of Man is referred to in the general context of apocalypticism nineteen times, according to Knox,3 and sixteen times, according to Eduard Schweizer.4 Following the suggestion of Knox, we shall call this Group A; here the exaltation of the Son of Man at God's right hand is being affirmed, or his coming on the clouds of heaven is being predicted. A second category, Group B, has to do with the suffering which Jesus has to undergo, specifical* Peter C. Hodgson has an A.B. degree from Princeton and B.D. and M.A. degrees from Yale. He is presently working for a Ph.D. in contemporary theology in the Department of Religion at Yale University.

LAUDE Welch has written the first truly significant history of nineteenthcentury Protestant thought in the English language. In fact, among the more recent works available in German, there is nothing really comparable to it, with the possible exceptions of Barth's Die protestantische Theologie (eleven chapters of which have been translated into English) and the great history by Emanuel Hirsch, which is on a different scale. In short, the appearance of this book is a publishing event of the highest significance for the theological world. Here, for the first time, the extraordinarily rich heritage of the nineteenth century, without which contemporary religious thought (Catholic as well as Protestant) cannot properly be understood, is made available in a singularly attractive and useful format. Although citing the best critical studies and monographs and often being guided by their interpretations, Welch works primarily with the original sources, offering fresh and creative interpretations of his own. His descriptive analyses of the major figures are economical in the use of language yet extraordinarily rich, finely textured, and very clearly developed. In place of extensive quotations, he catches in his own words the inner logic and distinctive mood of individual thinkers, whose positions are presented straightforwardly and sympathetically. The author has no axes to grind. Rather, he insists upon heeding "the actual theological intentions of the thinkers themselves." This he does to a remarkable degree, and it is the most distinctive feature of his book. In an introductory chapter on "The Problem of a History of NineteenthCentury Theology," Welch points out that all previous treatments of this subject

* Peter C. Hodgson is assistant professor of theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton University in 1956 and his B.D., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1959, 1960, and 1963. He taught at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1965. In addition to articles in the Journal of Religion (1961) and Church History (1964), he has published The Formation of Historical Theology: A Study of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and is editing and translating a volume of materials by Baur for "A Library of Protestant Thought." the one to which all other claims, including the understanding of God, are related and from which they derive their peculiar meaning-and that when this conviction collapses or becomes meaningless, as it by and large has in our time, the internal coherence of the Christian faith dissolves.

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.

The fundamental problem facing contemporary theology--one radicalized by the death of God theologies-concerns a proper understanding of the relation between God and the world. Traditional "religious" conceptions of this relation have collapsed as a result of the process of secularization in its various aspects. This is the essence of the cultural revolution of our time as it bears upon theology and the Christian faith. We know clearly enough that the world can no longer be confused with divinity as in primitive religion and in modern idolatries. But neither is it to be subordinated to a supramundane deity, who stands above the world in dualistic antithesis, as in traditional Christian theism (or, as Bonhoeffer put it, in "religious" Christianity). Secularization on the one hand has meant freeing the world from confusion with the divine, permitting, indeed demanding, the recognition of its finitude, contingency, temporality, historicity. This was the secularization accomplished in the first instance by biblical faith vis-a-vis the nature religions of ancient man, and by literary iconoclasm against modern forms of idolatry. Secularization on the other hand has meant freeing the world from subservience to a putative religious, supernatural realm, evoking recognition of its genuine autonomy and creativity and of the capacities of man within certain inexorable limits to constitute and humanize his world. This is the secularization accomplished by the rise of historicalscientific-technological consciousness against the otherworldliness of Christianity, and mirrored in various configurations of the death of God theme. We are left, then, with the question of a proper understanding of the relation between God and the world-one in which God is neither confused with the world nor separated from it, one that transcends the alternative of monism versus dualism. If this question cannot be intelligently answered, the possibility of belief in God will tend to evaporate for contemporary man, whose experience no longer allows him to fit the world into either of these religious models.