The Hegelian Element in Von Balthasar's and Moltmann's Understanding of the Suffering of God

Abstract

The influence of G.W.F. Hegel on philosophy and theology since his own time could hardly be overestimated. Philosophers and theologians as diverse in outlook as Marx, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have all been variously influenced by Hegel's thought. Yet, as Karl Barth noted, much of the response of nineteenth-century philosophy and theology to Hegel was negative and critical, even to the point of being irrationally so. To a great extent, this has also been characteristic of the response of philosophy and theology of the twentieth century. Marxism and existentialism, while they drew on the Hegelian legacy, also fragmented it by attempting to construct philosophical expressions of reality out of what for Hegel would merely have been aspects of his own philosophical position. Even more significantly, these philosophical movements drew on the self-confidence that arose from Hegel's understanding of a universal self-consciousness. That self-consciousness became the foundation for the humanisms which have dominated the Western mind in the latter part of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.