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).

Religion

VII. Religion (§672-758)

Hegel's goal in this section is to run through the manifestations of religion, as the process relates to the process of the Spirit realizing itself in the individual. Like the individual consciousness, the process is a unity, with each religion/religious type represents one coil in the spring. Hegel sees history as bearing out this growth, as well as (more vaguely) the journey of the individual Spirit in religious investigation.

"Religion" as Hegel uses it is perhaps not what we mean by the term today. I would say we understand it today to mean an organized institution composed of believers, as opposed to spirituality (personal belief and experiences with the divine). Hegel seems to use it to mean something different than an institution or spirituality. His meaning is closer to understanding, that is, how the Spirit (individual) understands the Spirit (the Absolute and itself -- it is the 'and itself' that distinguishes this "Religion" from the religious impulses discussed in previous sections).

Hegel runs through historical examples of each of the coils of the spring: understanding the Absolute as energy, vegetable, animal, and man-made object; as man-made beauty, artists and participatory art (e.g. hymns), sacraments and traditions, and as language and drama. Like our experience of developing self-consciousness, history's experience of developing religion grows from a dimly perceived vague generalization to a entirely concrete (and controlled) object, and then from that to an increasingly dynamic and also increasingly self-oriented object. Religion begins pass "from the form of substance into that of Subject" (§748).

As the understanding of Religion becomes more self-oriented (the Spirit seeing itself in the Absolute), there is a temptation to reject the divine Absolute "and [bestow] on the spiritless self, on the individual person, complete existence on its own account" (the Roman Empire) (§750). The inherent emptiness of the self cuts short this temptation. Spirit despairs in its temptation.