Hegel and Christian Theology

Abstract

Hegel and Christian Theology Guy Mansini O.S.B. Several years ago, Mark Jordan pointed out what a great mistake it is to think that contemporary theologians are to do what patristic and medieval theologians did by bending regnant philosophical discourse to dogmatic expression and systematic understanding of the mysteries of faith.1 As Augustine employed Plato, and Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, so the sapient theologian should take up Kant, as Georg Hermes did, or Schelling, as Johann Sebastian Drey did, and fashion a contemporary theological expression and understanding suited for the culture formed, or at least expressed, in part by these same philosophers.2 Jordan argued that this is a great mistake. Plato and Aristotle, innocent of the Gospel as they were, took up no position relative to its truth, for or against. Their metaphysical projects were underdetermined by the questions that Trinity, creation, Incarnation, and the end of man in the resurrection and beatifying vision pose. They remained plastic to the form of the gospel, which left its imprint across the board on the intussuscepted thought of Plato and Plotinus, of Aristotle and the Stoa. Post-Christian, modern philosophers, however, define themselves over against the Gospel, over against the doctrines of the Church. Their definition, what is essential to them, consists in their [End Page 993] anti-Christian character. If we adjust Enlightenment reason in such a way as to admit the truth of the Gospel, a truth beyond what reason can anticipate or demonstrate or judge but can only receive, if we adjust Enlightenment strictures on the power of God and the closure of the world so that miracles are possible, if we adjust Enlightenment standards of evidence so that miracles can reasonably be recognized, or if we adjust Enlightenment morality so that the love of friendship is not reduced to a higher concupiscence, then what is left? A sort of positivism that cannot even recognize itself as such and thinks it is the default position of unprejudiced reason. Nothing theologically useful is left. But this leaves out the post-Enlightenment Idealists, who mourned the passing of God even as the Romantics did that of the gods, and who regretted the wounds inflicted on European culture by those who ignored the wounds of Christ. Was there not a better way than the alternatives between the Reformation or Baroque versions of Christianity, on the one hand, and religion within reason’s limits, on the other? If, contrary to Kant, what we think is the real, and if how we think it, even in thinking its contraries, is to think how it is in itself, and if, contrary to Aristotle, potency is prior to act, then we can have a god who makes himself three in making the world, comes to consciousness in the logos of man, and pours out his spirit in the German state. Further, what the art of Europe expressed plastically and musically and dramatically, what the peasant celebrated in church and chapel, is stated in its complete and epic truth in the university tradition of that same German state, of which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, by his own estimation, is the crown and completion. Should so heterodox a Hegel be invited to the conversation of Christian theology?3 But he has already been invited. Part 3 of the first volume of Cyril O’Regan’s Anatomy details Hans Urs von Balthasar’s assessment of Jürgen Moltmann’s heavily Hegelianized Christology and Trinitarian theology.4 And Moltmann is not alone. In addition, Balthasar’s own list includes K. Barth, E. Jüngel, W. Pannenberg, K. Rahner, H. Küng, C. Bruaire, A. Chapelle, E. Brito, A. Léonard, and [End Page 994] G. Fessard—these are “unthinkable apart from Hegel.”5 O’Regan delimits the task thus: Balthasar’s engagement of modern philosophy must, on the one hand, recollect the Christian theological tradition more comprehensively and persuasively than Hegel’s remembrance of it and, on the other, show his deformation of it. For the first, Balthasar must be a more encyclopedic reader than Hegel. For the second, if the deformations and deflections of Hegel’s divine narrative fail to measure up...