Hegel , Lutheranism And Contemporary Theology

ion of the metaphysical concept of divine being is thus overcome, and the concrete unity of God as Spirit for Hegel, the trinitarian conception is ultimately embraced. What is thus advocated, and what emerges ultimately from this Calvary of absolute Spirit, is meant to be a deeper and purified conception of God. The result is that spiritual transcendence is no longer distinct from immanence, but is to be thought together with it. What emerges is a thoroughly modern view of God, a view clearly intended to be post-enlightened, but also, equally, one which has emerged naturally from the inner logic of the religious picture of God inherited from a previous age. There is no doubt that what is thus attained represents a remarkable conception of God, one, for example, in which the divine is not only transcendent, but is also the ultimate reality in the depth of things, whether history, or consciousness, or Jesus Christ (a name that is strangely never mentioned in the Phenomenology!). Only in this way could God be placed again at the centre of philosophy or for that matter, it would appear, at the centre of theology too. On the other hand, it is extraordinarily difficult for the theologian, in approaching the bewildering argument of the Phenomenology, to make an informed response to the question that we face: Is this really Christian orthodoxy, as Hegel appears to claim? Or does it instead represent a reductionist call for the grandest of all the modernist programmes of religious demythologisation, on the grounds that what is 10 Cf. Küng, op. cit., p. 228. G. BADCOCK: HEGEL, LUTHERANISM AND CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY 149 uncovered is a quasi-naturalistic "christ-principle" which operates independently of religious revelation and theology, but which nicely explains the emergence and the power of both? D.F. Strauss, who valued the Phenomenology highly, provides a clear indication of one of the possible directions in which one could move theologically at this point. It is clear that this is a possibility that is still available to us. At this point, therefore, it is wisest to take refuge in the wider Hegel corpus. Two further references to the theme in question can be cited, the first from the Encyclopaedia and the second from the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The importance of the former work in general for our purposes is that it shows that Hegel intends a genuine development of the Christian concept of God in his philosophy, a development involving no move towards religious reductionism, but rather, the development of an advance on the standpoint of natural religion in Enlightened philosophical theism. As to the question of the christological reference we are pursuing, the relevant passage in the Encyclopaedia is again extremely dense, but the point made is nevertheless of interest: the divine, Hegel argues, is "actualised out of its abstraction into an individual self-consciousness. This individual, who as such is identified with the essence (in the Eternal sphere he is called the Son) is transplanted into the world of time, and in him wickedness is implicitly overcome." The last phrase is less than transparent, but it is most likely a reference to the classical christological theme sometimes called the "wonderful exchange," according to which what was achieved by Christ was the overcoming of death by Life, the overcoming of evil by Righteousness, and so on. Such a "Christus victor" soteriology has frequently been identified in modern times as a distinctive feature of the theology of Luther. It is in fact, however, a much more general soteriological theme which, where it appears, is always strongly incarnational, in that it regards the event of salvation as located decisively at Bethlehem, and in that it interprets the content of soteriology in relation to the coming of the Son of God in the flesh. This represents a rather different approach to salvation than is characteristic of some Christian thought, which prefers to focus on the event of the cross, and which tends to view the rest in its light (a good example being Anselm's famous Cur Deus-homo?). To say that wickedness is implicitly overcome is to say that human nature has been raised above wickedness by God's action in the whole complex of the birth, growth, life, obedience, death, resurrection and ascension of the God-man. The theological question is then how we come to have a share in what has been accomplished in him, how it is that what is done "in principle" in the sphere of human nature can come to have a life-giving impact on humanity. On some views, we come to be so affected purely by being human, since human nature as such has been raised to a new dignity in Christ; on other, somewhat less generous but certainly more common views, it comes about by the awakening of faith, or by participation in the sacraments. These are the major alternatives offered in the Christian theological tradition. Such an approach to the basic mystery of salvation is not, therefore, unique to Hegel, but is integral to important sources in patristic and mediaeval theology, to the theology of Luther, and indeed, to the theology of all the magisterial Reformers. 11 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §569. 12 Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor, trans. A.G. Herbert (New York: Macmillan, 1931). G. BADCOCK: HEGEL, LUTHERANISM AND CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGY 150 In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, our theme receives a series of successive and much fuller formulations. For the sake of economy, I shall take one of these as representative of the rest. In the Lectures of 1827, which have already been cited in connection with the "human" view of Jesus in the rational theology of the Enlightenment, Hegel treats the death of Christ as the point of transition in religious consciousness to the genuinely religious sphere. This transition, he goes on to argue, is to be understood as a function of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit: "The relationship [of believers] to a mere human being is changed into a relationship that is completely altered and transfigured by the Spirit, so that the nature of God discloses itself therein, and so that this truth obtains immediate certainty in its manner of appearance" (pp.324-5). This is a statement both of Lutheran orthodoxy as it appears, for example, in the comments on the third article of the Creed in Luther's Kleiner Catechismus and of Hegel's own speculative grasp of the content of the Christian religion. Faith itself is presented in religious terms as the act of grasping the truth subjectively through the gift of God in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the community. It is only thus that the church believes or can believe, or as Hegel puts it, only thus that the history of Jesus "receives a spiritual interpretation" (p.326). It might well be added that it is only thus that God is truly known, as the trinitarian or "speculative" conception of God is embraced, and the abstract and therefore inadequate idea of God in Enlightenment theology transcended. It is only now that the well-known reference to the "Lutheran hymn" is introduced: But this humanity in God and indeed the most abstract form of humanity, the greatest dependence, the ultimate weakness, the utmost fragility is natural death. "God himself is dead," it says in a Lutheran hymn, expressing an awareness that the human, the finite, the fragile, the weak, the negative are themselves a moment of the divine, that they are within God himself, that finitude, negativity, otherness are not outside of God and do not, as otherness, hinder unity with God. Otherness, the negative, is known to be a moment of the divine nature itself.... This is the explication of reconciliation: that God is reconciled with the world, or rather that God has shown himself to be reconciled with the world, that even the human is not something alien to him.... (pp.326-7) Hegel's reference to a Lutheran hymn is not accidental. The reason for this lies in a basic feature of classical Lutheran orthodoxy, which places a strong emphasis on what is called the communicatio idiomatum. The communicatio doctrine has a long history, emerging both in Alexandrian and Western theological sources amid the christological debates of the patristic period, but it has a particular status in Lutheran theology that we need to note. The doctrine refers to the sharing of qualities between the two natures of Christ, so that it becomes possible to say, for example, that the Son of God wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11.35), or that Jesus of Nazareth is rightly worshipped as Lord and God 13 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, III, p.322ff. 14 On the relation between faith and the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit in Lutheran and Reformation theology, see my Light of Truth & Fire of Love (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998),