Hegel's Theology or Revelation Thematised
This book highlights Hegel’s application of Absolute Idealism’s logical truth, the basis of all mystical insight, to Christian orthodox confession. The systematic interpretation thus yielded illuminates the profound spirituality of this unitary sophia as (the) idea. The truth represented by spontaneous “pictorial” presentation, in Biblical or other proclamations at other times, is thereby further unveiled, “understanding spiritual things spiritually”.
The book traces philosophy and theology through Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas up to Hegel. It then applies its findings to topical issues, notions of revelation and creation principally, and then church order, sacraments, and ecumenism. Finally, history and theology are subsumed to the Absolute Idea or full self-consciousness. Philosophy is, thus, shown to be “highest Gottesdienst”, worship.
Transcendence of abstract moralism, value-theory and all dualisms, as of life itself, is carried out here by thought, Aristotle’s nous. Hegel claims coincidence of freedom and necessity in speculative reason. A Prologue unifies these threads, presenting Hegel’s system as grounded upon Trinity and Incarnation as in turn resulting from it.
Stephen Theron researched at Leeds University, UK, under Peter Geach (with a doctoral thesis titled “Morals as Founded on Natural Law”, 1979), and further at Münster University, Germany, with Fernando Inciarte and Joseph Pieper, which led to the publication of his books Philosophy or Dialectic (1994) and Natural Law Reconsidered (2002). He has published fourteen books (seven on Hegel), several articles, reviews and dictionary entries, in addition to conference papers delivered in several countries.
“Stephen Theron has […] read Hegel’s philosophy as the most exemplary form of Christian theology. In Hegel’s Theology: Revelation Thematised, he recommends that Hegel should be read beginning with what Aristotle had called ‘first philosophy’, where ‘being is thought, thinking’ (p. vii), ‘as the Idea of being’ (p. viii). He contends that philosophy must subsume ‘without destroying, both religion and art’ (p. viii). And he recommends an allegorical reading of Hegel ‘in a form suited to our age, of a Patristic commentary on Scripture’ (p. ix), in which ‘Hegel’s notion of spirit is thus equivalent to the Pauline view of the absolute, of God, as “all in all”’ (p. x).[…] Hegel’s Theology contains a lengthy prologue followed by twenty-one short essays divided thematically into the sections titled (A) Historical, (B) Theological, and (C) Philosophical. It opens with the prologue where Theron frames Hegel as a Christian theologian before proceeding to address the topics of traditional dogmatics from the Trinity to biblical exegesis. […] Stephen Theron’s theological essays and commentaries have brilliantly illustrated how Hegel can be read as a theologian, and his Logic can be read as a preparation for his theology. Hegel has, admittedly, often been read to have irreversibly departed from pre-Kantian metaphysics, scholastic logic, and the canonical doctrines of Christian theology, even as he can also be read to have critically recapitulated all of these categories for new philosophical purposes. Religion can, following Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, thus be sublated in and for secular philosophy. Yet as Theron’s intervention suggests, the role of religion in Hegel may have always been considerably more ambiguous. He recommends an allegorical reading of scripture alongside Hegel’s Logic. And he thus tends to endorse a circuitous reading of Hegel, in which, as with Origen and Augustine, the spiritual meaning of religious revelation may have always been determinative of its dialectical movements.”
Ryan Haecker
Peterhouse, University of Cambridge; Reviews in Religion and Theology, Vol. 26, Issue 5, December 2019
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