Hegel’s project

Hegel wants to rebut the Enlightenment dismissal of Christianity.  He doesn’t do this by reaching back to pre-critical forms of faith, but by ingesting criticism, deconstructing traditional theology, and reconstructing what he claims is a purer form of faith.  Rowan Williams captures the reconstructive process very concisely:

“from the fundamental analysis of mental life as relatedness, we are led first to understand what ‘God’ means, as the guarantor of the thinkable (reconcilable) nature of our world; and thence to the understanding of divine identity as complete and inclusive relation to self (thus dissolving the idea of an ‘essential,’ relationless selfhood or mental/spiritual identity), as Trinity; and finally to the acknowledgement that our history has already told us all this, though in ways that have yet to reach full self-consciousness.”  By this process, Christian faith is raised from the level of “representation” to a “conceptual” level: “Scripture and doctrine must be unveiled for what they truly are, and this is the destiny of philosophy.”

For all the brilliant and fruitful insights along the way, one in the end has a hard time avoiding a “with friends like these . . . .” moment.