The Theological Significance of Hegel Today

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.