The Incarnation of God - Hegel's Theology

The Reality of the Incarnation of God (§758-787)

Out of its despair, however, the Spirit is driven to its essense: its knowledge of itself. It knows Spirit, thus it is a believer in Spirit, and recognizes Spirit as a "definite self-consciousness," as a reality, as the divine Self (§758) (critique of Descartes).

The incarnation of the Divine in human form, or Christ, is the obvious and natural revelation of the Absolute Spirit as a divine self. But the individual of Christ is in a way lacking, in a way not universal (as the Spirit revealed in government will). It must dialectically pass into the past (die) in order to synthesize a universal (Holy Spirit) that all of the believing community can participate in (§763-764). Concentrating religious belief on the individual (historical) Christ can stagnate religion (§766).

The dialectics of the Divine and the individual are procedurally the same, and are intertwined. The individual progresses from thought (logic) to material (Nature), then to self-consciousness (Spirit). The Divine progresses from essence (Father) to being-for-self (Logos, Christ), then to "self-knowledge in [the] other" (Holy Spirit) (§770).

Creation and the supposed fall of man is also a natural process, in which the pure thought of God becomes manifest in nature, then becomes an independent thinking Spirit of its own (§773-773). This independence is judged as evil (angelic or human) (§776). Hegel rejects, however, the theological view that evil is the absence of God. Instead, the big picture is that evil is a "distant" part of God (there is nothing outside God), and that in the individual (human/angel), an evil act is the beginning of morality, of self-ness. This understanding of evil characterizes it as disobedience, but not as unnatural, inhuman, or even entirely ungodly.

Disobedience and individual selfhood is our dialetical step "away" from identifying with God, and reconciliation is our step back, and salvation (unity with God) is the synthesis. Hegel explains that the reason believers see salvation as an occurence "something far away in the future" and reconciliation as "away in the distance of the past" is that the spiritual place inhabited by believers is still in the process, it has momentum between the antithesis and the synthesis (§787).