Saturday, December 15, 2007

For Hegel mankind per se is divine, at least potentially

Evans on Hegel from Per Caritatem by Cynthia R. Nielsen
After a semester of immersion in Hegel-The Philosophy of Logic, The Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit-I find the following exceedingly refreshing, not to mention on the mark.
“Hegel’s own understanding of Christianity was significantly different from traditional orthodoxy. For example, Hegel seems to rule out the possibility of miracles. His understanding of Jesus is … quite complicated, but it seems rather unorthodox. Hegel accepted the claim that Jesus was divine, but he did not seem to understand this as implying that Jesus was uniquely divine. For Hegel mankind per se is divine, at least potentially. Jesus’ uniqueness is merely that he was the first person in history to recognize man’s true identity and destiny” (C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, pp. 18-19).

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