IX. Freedom and the State: See the outline of Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
X. God and Religion (taken from Copleston’s History of Philosophy)
1. In an early work (1795), Life of Jesus, Hegel portrays Christ as a moral teacher who only uses the notion of being he divine messenger to gain credibility in his preaching to the Jews.
2. In his later work religion is a means leading to The Absolute. There are three stages in this process. First, there is the religion of nature or religion objectified which tends toward animism and pantheism. Examples of this include Chinese religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, the religions of Persia, Syria, and Egypt. God is here undifferentiated and immanent universal. Second, there is the religion of Spiritual Individuality or religion subjectified. This approach is reflected in the Jewish, Greek, and Roman religions. This approach views God as Spirit in the for of an individual person or persons who is over against or apart from the human. Third there is Absolute Religion or Religion synthesized. This approach is reflected in Christianity. God is perceived as Infinite Spirit that is both transcendent and immanent. Human beings are viewed as united with God and the divine life through grace.
The philosophical knowledge of The Absolute goes beyond religion. But religion, as related to faith and emotional experience, is more accessible to everyone God = The Absolute. Terry Pinkard, in his biography of Hegel writes:
“What is divine is not humanity as such but the principle of self determining ‘spirit’ which humanity brings to full consciousness about itself, and the Christian religious community is thus the form by which God Himself first becomes fully conscious of His nature . . .. In light o this conception, Hegel concluded, there need be no cleavage between the acceptance of a Christian outlook and a fully modern sensibility Christianity was thus indeed the only fully modern religion and the only one compatible with the kind of free institutions necessary for modern life to work. Faith in God was faith in the everlastingness of life, though not of one’s own individual life, and the goodness of being, in the conviction that what was absolutely good in life was written into the structure of thins and that we, humanity as a whole, were collectively capable of gradual realization of that good and of substantial realizations in our own lives.” (pp. 592-93)
Although Hegel views Christianity as the culmination of religions thinking he is most likely sincere in asserting this view, allowing for the interpretatively speculative nature of his philosophical method and system, we end up with an unorthodox Christianity, a pantheistic Idealism, that serves his philosophical thought more than it exemplifies more ordinary or traditional Christian thought.
