Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who taught Europe to think of truth as a story with a plot, and of God as Spirit coming to know himself in history. + He was a dreadful lecturer. Heinrich Gustav Hotho, who sat in the Berlin lecture room in the 1820s and later edited his teacher’s lectures on art, remembered a tired man with his head down, coughing, turning pages back and forth, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to hunt for a word. Students strained to hear him. Then, Hotho said, the thought would come out clear and the whole thing would stand there built, and anyone who could take it in felt as though he had found and thought it for himself. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the few philosophers whose influence you can trace in politics, art criticism, church history and revolution alike. He is a large part of the reason educated people say that ideas develop, that an age has a spirit, that history moves through conflict toward something. Karl Marx came out of his lecture hall by way of his students; so did the first modern life of Jesus written on the assumption that the Gospels are myth; so did a great deal of the language later theologians would use about a God who has a history with the world. He belongs on a Christian shelf for a reason that is easy to miss. Hegel was not a village atheist. He was a Lutheran who told a pietist critic that philosophy had only confirmed him in his Lutheranism, defended the Trinity when respectable Berlin theology was embarrassed by it, and called Christianity the absolute religion, the one that gets the truth right. The pietists were the party of heart-religion in the German churches, the people who measured a Christian by his conversion and his prayers rather than by his learning, and who were suspicious of a theology that lived only in the lecture hall. So the complaint had come from the wing of Lutheranism least likely to be talked round, and Hegel answered it in his own name. What he then did with that truth is the question, and it split his own students within five years of his funeral.

(●) 1770 AD: Born in Stuttgart to a duchy’s tax official, and orphaned of his mother at thirteen. + Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart, the capital of the small German duchy of Württemberg. His father, Georg Ludwig Hegel, was a secretary at the ducal revenue office, the kind of careful civil servant whose son is expected to become a pastor or another careful civil servant. His mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa, was the more educated of the two, and taught the boy the beginnings of Latin before he ever entered a schoolroom. In 1783 a fever went through the house. It killed her and nearly killed her husband and her thirteen-year-old son. Hegel kept the date of her death in mind for the rest of his life. In 1825, at fifty-five, he sent his sister Christiane a note saying only that the day was the anniversary of their mother’s death, which he would hold forever in his memory. He was not a brilliant schoolboy so much as a relentless one. From about his fourteenth year he kept notebooks of extracts, copying out whole passages of whatever he read, in alphabetical order, on loose sheets he could reshuffle: Greek tragedy, Roman history, mathematics, the astronomers, the newspapers. The habit never left him. The mature system that looks so airless in print was built by a man who spent forty years writing other people’s sentences into folders.

(●) 1788 AD: Five years in a Protestant seminary left him with a theology degree and no wish to preach. + At eighteen he entered the Tübingen Stift, the seminary of the Württemberg church, on a ducal scholarship that was understood to be a debt: the duchy paid for your theology and expected a pastor at the end of it. He roomed with two others who would also decline to become pastors. One was Friedrich Hölderlin, who became one of the greatest German lyric poets of the age and lost his mind at thirty-six. The other was Friedrich Schelling, five years younger and so quick that he was publishing philosophy while Hegel was still copying out extracts. Hegel and Hölderlin were already in the Stift in the summer the Bastille fell, and Schelling came up the year after. One story, told long after the fact and never documented, has the three of them planting a liberty tree in a meadow outside Tübingen on the fourteenth of July 1792, to celebrate the French Revolution. What is certain is that Hegel defended the Revolution for the rest of his life, long after it had eaten its own children and most respectable Germans had turned against it, and that in Berlin he was said to drink a toast every year on the fourteenth of July. He took his theological certificate in 1793 and did not go into a parish. Instead he did what a poor and unplaced young graduate did: he hired himself out to a rich family as a private tutor.

(●) 1793 AD: Seven years of tutoring in other men’s houses, writing about Jesus in notebooks he never published. + For three years he lived in Bern in the household of Karl Friedrich von Steiger, teaching the children and reading his employer’s excellent library: Gibbon on the decline of Rome, Montesquieu on laws, and Kant, whose new philosophy was going through Germany like weather. Hegel was lonely and wrote so to his friends. He was also writing for himself. Two of those Bern manuscripts survive. The Life of Jesus (1795) retells the Gospels with every miracle removed and Jesus presented as a teacher of the moral law within, and it opens with a sentence that shows how completely the young Hegel had swallowed Kant: pure reason, incapable of any limit, is the Godhead itself. The Positivity of the Christian Religion (1795 to 1796) asks how the religion of that free teacher had turned into an institution of authority, ritual and coercion, and does not answer kindly. A "positive" religion, in the vocabulary he was using, is one whose commands rest on somebody’s authority rather than on the hearer’s own reason, the way a court’s ruling binds you whether or not you find it convincing. In 1797 Hölderlin got him a better post in Frankfurt, and there the tone changed. The manuscript known as The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (1798 to 1799) turns on Jesus’ word that love fulfills the law, and the young man who had wanted a religion of duty begins to say that duty by itself divides a person against himself and only love makes a person whole. Not one of these manuscripts was published in his lifetime. They waited a century in boxes: The Life of Jesus was printed in 1906 and Herman Nohl gathered the rest in 1907, at which point everyone had to start reading Hegel again. His father died in 1799 and left him about three thousand gulden. It was not a fortune. It was enough to stop tutoring and go and be a philosopher, and in 1801 he went to Jena, where Schelling already held a post.

(●) 1806 AD: He finished his first great book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the week Napoleon’s army took the town. + Jena gave him five hard years: an unsalaried lectureship, small classes, borrowed money, and the slow discovery that he did not in fact agree with Schelling. Unsalaried is worth pausing on. A lecturer of that rank drew nothing from the university and lived on whatever fees the students handed him at the door, so a thin room meant a thin winter, and Hegel had thin rooms. Meanwhile the book he was writing to introduce his own position kept growing until the introduction was itself an enormous book, and he was under contract, and the printer in Bamberg was waiting for pages. On 13 October 1806 the French army entered Jena. Hegel wrote to his friend Friedrich Niethammer that he had seen the Emperor, that world-soul, riding out of the city on reconnaissance, and that it was a wonderful sensation to see such an individual concentrated in a point, reaching out over the world and mastering it. The next day the battle of Jena destroyed the Prussian army a short walk from his lodgings. French soldiers were quartered in his rooms, and he carried what he had of the manuscript out with him. The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807 with a preface he wrote that January. Two other things happened in that ruinous year. The university collapsed and he had no income, so he took a job editing a small newspaper in Bamberg. And in February 1807 his landlady in Jena, Christiana Burkhardt, bore him a son, Ludwig, whom Hegel acknowledged and provided for at a distance, and who was raised for ten years by others before he was brought into the household. It did not end well, and that is part of the record too.

(●) 1808 AD: Eight years as a headmaster in Nuremberg, a late marriage, and the Logic written after the school day. + Niethammer, now a school official in Bavaria, found him the rectorship of the Gymnasium in Nuremberg. So the author of the Phenomenology spent eight years running a boys’ school: setting timetables, keeping order, writing end-of-year addresses, and teaching philosophy to teenagers, for which he produced a set of dictated summaries that are still the clearest short statement of his views he ever wrote. In September 1811 he married Marie von Tucher, of an old Nuremberg family. He was forty-one and she was twenty. Two sons followed, Karl and Immanuel, and between them they show the two directions his work would take: Karl became a professional historian, Immanuel a churchman. The Science of Logic came out of these years in three instalments, in 1812, 1813 and 1816, written in the evenings by a man who had spent the day being a headmaster. It is the hardest book he wrote and the one he cared most about, and it is not a logic in the usual sense of rules for valid inference. It is an attempt to lay out, in order, every basic category that thought uses when it tries to say what anything is: being, nothing, becoming, quality, quantity, cause, substance, purpose. Each one, he argues, breaks down under pressure and drives you to the next.

(●) 1818 AD: Berlin gave him a chair, a crowded lecture room, and the reputation of being the state’s philosopher. + After two years at Heidelberg, where he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817) as a textbook to lecture from, Hegel was called to Berlin in 1818 to the chair that had been Fichte’s. He held it for thirteen years and became, for that stretch, the most talked-about philosopher in Germany. Students came from Poland, Russia, Greece and Scandinavia. He lectured in cycles on the philosophy of history, on art, on the proofs of God’s existence, on the philosophy of religion, on the history of philosophy itself, and those lecture courses, reconstructed from his notes and his students’, became half of what the world means by "Hegel". The Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) made him famous and made him enemies. Its preface says that what is rational is real and what is real is rational, which his admirers read as a demand that institutions be made rational and his critics read as a blessing on the Prussia that was paying his salary. The same preface contains a page attacking a rival philosopher, Jakob Friedrich Fries, who had lately been stripped of his chair at Jena by the government for a patriotic speech at the Wartburg festival. Hitting a man already down, in a book the censors would read, is the least defensible thing Hegel ever published, and his contemporaries said so at the time. He was elected rector of the university in 1829. A famous retort is put in his mouth, that when someone objected the facts did not fit his theory he answered so much the worse for the facts, and it belongs to no source anyone can name. What is documented is a dry humour, a fondness for cards and wine, and a Swabian accent that never left him.

(●) 1831 AD: He died at sixty-one in a season of cholera, and his school broke apart within five years. + 1831 took a great deal from him before it took him. His son Ludwig, the boy born in Jena, had quarrelled with the household, been apprenticed away, and enlisted in the Dutch colonial service; he died of fever in Batavia in the East Indies that August, and there is no evidence that his father ever learned of it. Cholera reached Berlin in the same weeks, and the family fled to the suburbs and came back when term began. Hegel opened his courses on the tenth of November and sat through examinations on the twelfth, fell ill on the thirteenth and died on the afternoon of the fourteenth. The attending physicians recorded cholera. His wife insisted it was the stomach complaint that had troubled him for years, and later biographers have generally thought her right; the cause is still argued. He was buried, as he had asked, beside Fichte in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery. His students published his lectures from 1832 onward and then fell out over what he had meant. Within five years the school had a right wing that read him as a defender of Christian orthodoxy and a left wing that read him as its most thorough dissolver, and the argument between them is one of the doors through which the nineteenth century walked.

What He Taught

(T1) Truth is not a single correct sentence but the whole, and the whole has a history. + Ask a child what an acorn is and you will get a small brown thing. Ask a forester and you will get a description that includes the oak. Neither is lying, but the second answer contains the first and the first does not contain the second, and if you want to know what an acorn actually is you have to include what it is on the way to being. That is the move Hegel makes about everything. A true statement, on his account, is not a snapshot that matches an object, the way a good photograph matches a face. It is the finished whole with all its stages held inside it. He calls that whole Spirit, in German Geist, a word that covers mind, spirit and the shared life of a people all at once, so that the spirit of a nation and the mind of a thinker are the same word. English keeps a trace of the same range when we talk about team spirit, or the spirit of an age, and mean something that is nobody’s private property and yet is genuinely a mind at work. Spirit for Hegel is not a ghost inside the world. It is the whole process of mind coming to understand itself, in a person, in a nation, in the history of art and law and religion, and finally in philosophy. The Phenomenology of Spirit is the ladder. It begins with the poorest possible claim to knowledge, a consciousness that thinks it can know something just by pointing at it here and now, and shows that even pointing already uses concepts. Then it climbs: through the struggle of master and servant, through the Stoic and the sceptic, through the unhappy consciousness that puts everything it values in a heaven it cannot reach, through the Enlightenment and the Terror, up to art, religion and finally philosophy. Each stage is a way of living as much as a way of thinking, and each collapses from strains inside itself. Christians reading this will feel two pulls at once. The insistence that reality is finally personal rather than a heap of matter, and that mind is at home in the world because the world is the sort of thing mind can understand, is close to what Scripture says when it calls the world the work of a Word. The distance opens over whether the whole includes God, or whether God made the whole.

(Q) "The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development." + Source: Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Preface (Baillie translation, 1910). The preface was written last, after the book was finished and the French were in Jena, and it is the closest thing he wrote to a plain statement of his method. The sentence is aimed at readers who wanted a result they could carry away without the argument that produced it (T1).

(T2) Contradiction is not a dead end but the engine: a position breaks down and is carried up into a larger one. + Everyone has had the argument where you defend a position so hard that you talk yourself out of it. You start out sure that lying is always wrong, and then somebody asks about the family hiding refugees in the attic, and you find that your rule, pressed all the way, turns into its own opposite. The ordinary response is to shrug and admit you were wrong. Hegel’s response is to say that you have just learned something, and that the position you now hold is not simply the opposite of your old one but a bigger position that has room for what was right in it. This is what people mean by the Hegelian dialectic. Two cautions, both of which he would insist on. The famous formula of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is not his; it comes from Fichte by way of a textbook writer named Chalybäus, and Hegel scarcely uses those words. And his word for what happens at the turn, aufheben, is a pun he chose on purpose. In ordinary German it means both to abolish and to preserve, the way "to keep" can mean both to hold onto something and to put it away, and the English translations render it "sublate" or "supersede" for want of a word that does both jobs. What is superseded is cancelled as a standing position and kept as a stage. The claim underneath is bold and worth stating plainly, because a great deal follows from it. Hegel thought contradiction is not merely a mistake in our heads but a real feature of things in motion, and that anything finite carries in itself the seeds of its own undoing. Aristotle’s rule that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time is not something Hegel denies so much as something he thinks is too thin to describe a living process. Whether that is a profound insight or a licence to call any two opposed things "moments" of a higher unity has been argued ever since, and the argument is not settled.

(Q) "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom." + Source: Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Preface (Baillie translation, 1910). He goes on to say that these stages do not merely differ but displace one another, and that the same restless nature which sets them against one another makes them moments of a single organic life. It is his most concrete picture of what he means by a contradiction that builds rather than destroys (T2).

(T3) History is going somewhere: it is the growth of the consciousness of freedom. + Hegel opened his Berlin lectures on world history with a claim that sounds obvious now and did not then. History is not one thing after another. It has a direction, and the direction is freedom: in the ancient East one man was free and everyone else existed for him, among the Greeks and Romans some were free and slavery held up the rest, and only with the Germanic and Christian world does it dawn on people that a human being is free as such. Nobody planned this. It came about through war, ambition, greed and accident, which is why he says that reason works by a cunning of its own, letting the passions of great men wear themselves out while what gets built outlasts them. Napoleon wanted an empire and left behind a legal code. Freedom in this account is not being left alone. That, for Hegel, is the freedom of a man in a hotel room, free of everyone and belonging to nothing. Real freedom is being at home in a shared life whose rules you recognise as your own: a family you are not merely trapped in, work you are not merely selling, a state whose laws you could have written. That is the argument of the Philosophy of Right, and it is why he can call the state the actuality of the ethical idea, a phrase that has frightened readers ever since. He meant a constitutional order under law, with trial by jury and public debate in the estates, the representative assemblies of that world, in which the landed nobility sat by right of birth and the towns and the trades sent deputies to speak for them. He did not mean the machinery of the twentieth century, and he wrote the book in a Prussia that had recently abolished serfdom. It is worth being honest about what this costs. If history is reason working itself out, then the wreckage in it needs accounting for, and Hegel accounts for it by calling history a slaughter-bench and then asking to what end the sacrifice was made. The answer he gives is that the whole was worth it. That is a genuine theodicy, a defence of the ways of God, and he uses the word. Whether it is a Christian one is a question the gospel answers differently.

(Q) "The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom." + Source: Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Sibree translation, 1857). The lectures were given five times in Berlin between 1822 and 1831 and published from students’ notes after his death. He adds at once that this is a progress whose development, according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate, which is the whole programme in a clause (T3).

(T4) Christianity is the true religion, and it holds its truth in pictures that only philosophy can state as thought. + Here is where a Christian reader has to slow down, because Hegel says warm things and then says something else. The warm things are real. He called Christianity the absolute or consummate religion, the one in which religion arrives at what it had been reaching for all along, and he said so in a Berlin where the fashionable theology was quietly dropping the doctrines it found awkward. He defended the Trinity when Schleiermacher put it in an appendix. He took the death of Christ with a seriousness almost nobody else in German philosophy managed, quoting in his Berlin lectures on religion the old Lutheran Good Friday hymn of Johann Rist, "God himself is dead," and building on it: God is not a supreme being safely outside all suffering, but one who goes into death and comes out the other side. Later Christian theologians would find that they needed something very like this. Then comes the distinction that changes everything. Religion, he taught, holds the truth in the form of Vorstellung, which Baillie renders "picture-thought": the mind representing something to itself in images and stories, the way a child understands justice through a story about a fair share of cake. Philosophy holds the same content in the form of Begriff, the concept, which is thought grasping itself without pictures: the grown reader who can say what justice is and no longer needs the cake. Same content, he says, higher form. So the Trinity, pictured as a Father who begets a Son and sends a Spirit, is really the eternal structure of Spirit going out from itself and returning to itself. Creation, pictured as a beginning, is really the eternal going-out. The Incarnation, pictured as one Galilean carpenter at one date under one Roman prefect, is really the truth that the divine and the human are not two separate worlds. Notice what has happened. Nothing has been denied. Everything has been promoted. A reader may well say at this point, so what exactly is the complaint, since he has kept every doctrine and given each one a better address? The complaint is that what the church has always said is the heart of the gospel, that this happened, once, to a particular man, has quietly become a picture of something that would be true anyway. His disciples split precisely here, and it is not hard to see why.

(Q) "Pictorial presentation constitutes the characteristic form in which spirit is conscious of itself in this its religious communion. This form is not yet the self-consciousness of spirit which has reached its notion as notion." + Source: Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, Revealed Religion (Baillie translation, 1910). "Pictorial presentation" and "picture-thought" are Baillie’s renderings of Vorstellung; "notion" is his rendering of Begriff, which later translators give as "concept". In the same chapter Hegel writes that the divine nature is the same as the human, and that it is this unity which the religious community beholds before it can think it (T4).

(Q) "The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering." + Source: Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface (Dyde translation, 1896). Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom and the owl is her bird, and the sentence before it says that when philosophy paints its grey in grey, a form of life has grown old and cannot be made young again by understanding, only known. Philosophy arrives at dusk. It is the sober admission of a man usually accused of thinking his own system was the end of history, and it made a fitting epitaph: within a generation his students had turned his method into a programme for changing the world rather than understanding it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His own students split over whether the Absolute he taught was the God of the creeds. + The word the whole quarrel turned on was one of Hegel’s own. The Absolute is his name for the whole of reality thought all the way through, Spirit that has gone out into nature and history and come the long way round to knowing itself at last. Is that another name for the living God who made heaven and earth and was under no obligation to make anything? Or is it a name for the world grown conscious of itself and deciding to call that God? The men who had sat in the lecture room taking his words down could not agree, and they discovered it almost at once. Hegel died in November 1831. By 1835 a young repetent at Tübingen named David Friedrich Strauss, one of the junior tutors the seminary kept on to drill its students through their theology, had published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, which used his teacher’s own distinction to devastating effect: the Gospel narratives, Strauss argued, are myth, the picture-thought in which the early community expressed an idea, and the idea survives when the history is dissolved. The book cost Strauss his career and set the terms of Gospel criticism for a century. Two years later Strauss himself supplied the labels. He borrowed them from the seating plan of the French assembly, where the men who sat to the president’s right had spoken for throne and altar and the men on his left had wanted both swept away, and he sorted the school into a right, a centre and a left by how much of the Gospel history each could still hold. The right Hegelians, among them Karl Friedrich Göschel, Georg Andreas Gabler and Philipp Marheineke, who edited the lectures on religion, held that the master had defended Christian orthodoxy in a deeper vocabulary: a real Trinity, a real incarnation, a personal God, a soul that survives death. In the centre he put Karl Rosenkranz, who would write the first full biography of Hegel and who could keep part of the Gospel history but not all of it. The left read the same pages and came out the other side. Strauss himself, Arnold Ruge and above all Ludwig Feuerbach held that the system had at last said out loud what religion secretly is. Bruno Bauer, whom Strauss had counted on the right in 1837, was on the far left within a few years and lost his licence to teach theology for it in 1842, which gives some idea of how quickly the ground was moving under these men. Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841) turned the whole thing around in a sentence: theology is anthropology, by which he meant that talk about God is really talk about man, and that the God we worship is our own nature projected onto the sky. A young journalist named Karl Marx read Feuerbach, kept the inversion, and moved the engine from ideas to economics. The honest thing to say is that both wings could quote him. Hegel wrote in a way that let a believer and an unbeliever each find their own man in the text, and he was asked about it in his lifetime and gave answers his friends found reassuring and his critics found evasive. Ferdinand Christian Baur, meanwhile, took the method in a third direction. He applied its picture of growth through conflict to the history of the early church, reading the New Testament as the record of a long struggle between a Jewish Christianity around Peter and a Gentile Christianity around Paul, with the later writings as the peace terms. That is how the Tübingen school got its Peter-against-Paul reading of the New Testament.

(†) He gave theology a way to take history and suffering seriously, and later Christian thinkers came back for it. + Two things Hegel put into circulation have been useful to Christians who reject almost everything else he said. The first is development. Before him, a doctrine was usually defended by showing it had always been believed in exactly its present words, and any change looked like corruption. Hegel made it thinkable that a truth might be genuinely the same truth while its understanding grows, the way a person’s understanding of a marriage vow at sixty is the same vow understood better than at twenty. John Henry Newman, no Hegelian, was working the same soil in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), and the whole modern discussion of how the church came to say "of one substance with the Father" runs on the idea that doctrine has a history without therefore being an invention. The second is a God who is not sealed off from the world’s pain. Classical theology had always insisted that God does not suffer, a doctrine that goes by the name of impassibility, and it was guarding something important: that God is not a creature pushed about by events, worn down by them the way we are worn down by a long illness in the family. Hegel pressed the other way, insisting that the cross is God’s own history and not something that happens outside him. The pressure told. Karl Barth, who thought Hegel’s system a magnificent error, still gave him a full chapter in his lectures on nineteenth-century Protestant theology and asked why he had not become for Protestantism what Thomas Aquinas was for Rome. In the generation after Barth, Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (1972), Eberhard Jüngel’s God as the Mystery of the World (1977) and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s work on history and revelation all argued with Hegel on nearly every page, and none of them could have been written without him.

(†) Kierkegaard answered him for the single individual, and the answer became a tradition of its own. + In Copenhagen a young Dane sat through the Hegelian lectures of the Danish professors and decided that something had gone missing: himself. Søren Kierkegaard’s complaint was not that the system was false in this or that detail. It was that a man can build a palace of thought and go on living in the shed beside it, and that no amount of world-historical significance tells you how to be a Christian on a Tuesday. So he wrote against the system in every way he could think of. He insisted that existence cannot be finished the way a system can, since the one doing the thinking is still alive and still has to decide. He insisted that faith is not a lower form of knowledge waiting to be promoted into concepts but a relation of a single person to God that no concept can stand in for. Where Hegel had made the Incarnation a picture of a general truth, Kierkegaard made it the absolute paradox: the eternal God present in one particular man at one particular date, which offends reason precisely because it is not a symbol of anything. And where Hegel had the individual carried along by Spirit, Kierkegaard put a lone man on a mountain in Moriah with a knife and asked what any system could possibly say to him. That protest founded the Christian existentialist tradition, and through it a good deal of twentieth-century theology and philosophy. It is the sharpest evidence that Hegel mattered: the answers to him are as large as he was.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who needs the world, an Incarnation demoted to a picture, and a slaughter-bench called reasonable. + Hegel meant to be a Christian philosopher, and taking him seriously means saying plainly where the road forks. - A God who needs us. On Hegel’s account Spirit comes to full self-consciousness in and through finite minds, so that God’s knowing of himself happens in our knowing of him. That makes the world necessary to God rather than freely given by him. Scripture says the opposite in Athens, of all places: God "does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:24-25). The Son had glory with the Father "before the world existed" (John 17:5), which is exactly the surplus Hegel’s system has no room for. - The Incarnation as picture. Promoting the story into a concept sounds respectful and is not. The claim of the New Testament is not that divinity and humanity are secretly one in general; it is that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), once, at a date, in a body that ate fish afterwards. Peter is emphatic that this is reporting rather than symbolism: "we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). Paul stakes everything on an event with witnesses who could be questioned, most of them still alive when he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). - Suffering absorbed into the process. Calling history a slaughter-bench and then justifying it by the whole is not the Christian answer to evil. Scripture never tells the bereaved that their loss was a moment in a larger rationality. It says that God entered the slaughter himself and "humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8), and it leaves a great deal unexplained rather than explained away (Romans 11:33-34). - The individual. Hegel is candid that individuals are largely the means by which the world-spirit does its work, and that the great man is great because his private aim happens to coincide with the age’s. Jesus tells a story in which a man leaves ninety-nine sheep in the open country and goes after the one that is lost (Luke 15:4), which is a rebuke to every philosophy of history ever written, his included. Two things from his own hand belong in the same ledger. The preface to the Philosophy of Right attacks Jakob Friedrich Fries at a moment when the government had lately taken Fries’ chair away from him, which even sympathetic readers have found ungenerous and imprudent in a book the censors would read. And the lectures on world history rank the peoples of the earth on a scale of Spirit’s progress and place Africa outside history altogether, in language that is his own and that no context repairs. He was a man of his century in ways his century itself did not require: his contemporary Wilberforce was in Parliament, and the Clapham men were arguing from Scripture that no such scale exists. None of this makes him small. He asked, harder than almost anyone, how a truth can be eternal and still have a history, and Christians who want to say that God has genuinely acted in time have to answer that question rather than ignore it. He is the great modern instance of a mind that gets religion’s importance entirely right and its object subtly wrong.