I am also grateful to Jasmin Allousch, programme assistant, Emma Clarke, assistant editor, Alice Emmott, editorial assistant, and Lucy Melville, publishing director, at Peter Lang for their assistance.
The index was prepared by David Rudeforth. Therefore, the book will, I hope, fill a gap in the literature on Hegel, in general, the young Hegel, in particular. Christianity lost its initial pure character when it became institutionalized as a state religion. As a state religion, Christianity ceased to be a religion of moral teaching. For Hegel, the modern phenomena of individualism, private property and social differentiation are due to the disintegration of these ethico-political communities.
In this way, Hegel contrasts antiquity to modern times. In Chapter 5, W. Raspa offers an analysis on three levels: theoretical, historical and political-cultural. In addition, we encounter Platonism in the religious teaching of Jesus. Here I will offer a short introduction on the intellectual background to these writings, as well as an account of the writings themselves. The repression was felt even more strongly by the students, given that in the Revolution had taken place in France and a new age had begun.
After the French Revolution the world would not be the same again. Young students at the Stift were enthusiastic about these developments; they endorsed the spirit of freedom of the times and opposed the authoritarianism of the seminary. Not only did they feel the repression of the strict rules which organized their lives at the Stift, they also disliked the theology they were taught there.
This was the theology of Gottlob Christian Storr, who held the theological chair at the Stift. Kant accorded the human mind i. The understanding subsumed the manifold of sensible intuition under concepts categories. But he also believed that our conception of reality is constituted by the faculty of the understanding, so that what we know is not just the sensations caused in us by objects, rather the objects as we constitute them for ourselves through concepts.
Now, Storr argued, if, as Kant says, we cannot grasp what is beyond experience — namely, God —, then we should allow room for faith and revelation. And if there has been development in the concept of freedom, there will also have been development in the nature of spirit, since spirit is characterised by freedom. In more detail, Hegel distinguishes this development into four particular stages. In the Oriental world, the people knew that only the ruler is free. Since the spirit of freedom was therefore immanent or manifested only within a single individual, whose freedom was realised by an accident of birth, this freedom is thus merely arbitrary.
The consciousness of subjective freedom first appeared in the Greek world; but even the Greeks did not realise that all human beings as such are free. The ethical life or absolute spirit of the Greeks was distinguished by an underlying satisfaction with convention. People lived in relative harmony with the norms and traditions of society.
In Greek society there was therefore an inherent tension between individual freedom and the universal principles of the state. Hegel compares this tension with adolescence. It took the figure of Socrates to encourage people to reflect on the accepted notions of ethics, and thus for the spirit to re-awaken itself.
In the subsequent period of the Roman Empire, subjective freedom was recognised in terms of the introduction of formal rights for citizens. But this notion of freedom was too abstract, above the concrete, everyday world of citizens. Hence, spirit was in a stage of self-alienation.
True freedom only emerged with the rise of Christianity in the Germanic world, when freedom was understood as the very essence of humanity. Christianity was at the fore of intellectual life throughout the Middle Ages. So the world spirit has developed dialectically throughout history by a series of struggles with itself. Spirit can only overcome its stage of alienation from itself through realising this very alienation.
What drives the world spirit towards a full consciousness of freedom? And how do individuals become aware of the goal of history, that is, this fulfilled consciousness?
They alone are able to influence the tides of history and drive forward the self-consciousness of freedom. However much these world-historical individuals are inclined to pursue their own interests, they are unknowingly used by spirit to move towards the realisation of its own self-consciousness. But how then can the pursuit of their own interests by world-historical individuals be a result of the working of reason in history and so aid the development of freedom?
In the Old Testament he saw a gradual development of Hebrew religion from a nomadic stage thesis through that of the prophets antithesis culminating in the Law synthesis. Wellhausen later concentrated on the New Testament, where he laid down many lines for the later development of form criticism.
We see the Hegelian influence more specifically in the movement that flourished between and , the history-of-religions school Religionsgeschichtlicheschule. This school advocated extensive use of data gathered from a comparative study of religion in interpreting Christianity.
Hermann Gunkel — , who was one of the first to develop the form-critical method in relation to the Old Testament, not only traced historical developments within Israel but also sought parallels in Egyptian and Babylonian religious systems.
He claimed that many of the biblical passages were based on the ancient myths of the nations surrounding Israel. Similarly, Richard Reitzenstein — made an exhaustive study of the Hellenistic world in order to discover the roots of original Christianity.
Where formerly it was assumed that Christianity was an isolated phenomenon, without affinities in the world to which it came, now Christianity was related to its environment. Thus Christianity dissolved into its Hellenistic environment, with all God-created originality gone. Paul was made to appear as the interloper who had grafted into the simple Gospel of Jesus and the primitive Church thesis ideas culled from the syncretistic Oriental mystery cults, and in so doing had changed the essential character of the Gospel antithesis.
Thus it was that Wilhelm Wrede — maintained that Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah during his earthly life thesis. Within this context Johannes Weiss in expounded the principles of form criticism, which were later elaborated by Martin Dibelius — and Rudolf Bultmann, his pupil. This method of Formgeschichte was an attempt to trace and assess the historicity of scriptural passages by analysis of their structural forms. Its success depended on the assumption that the same forms can be traced in non-biblical literature.
Dibelius in analyzed the Gospel into various literary forms, such as were used by preachers, teachers, and narrators. Here Bultmann contended that anything that suggested transcendence in the New Testament was to be understood as the outmoded language of Jewish apocalyptic and Gnostic redemption myths. To understand what the New Testament is trying to say, Bultmann proposed that we demythologize it, that is, interpret the outmoded imagery used there antithesis in such a way as to challenge modern man to decision at the depth of his existence.
From this revolutionary proposition it is but one small step to J. We would expect the real need of religion in our day to be a firm reiteration, in fresh contemporary language, of the faith once delivered to the saints, but Dr. Robinson is not of this persuasion. For him a more radical recasting is required than a restatement of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms.
For him the very fundamental categories of theology, such as God and the supernatural, are suspect and must go into the melting pot. All theological statements must be treated as Hellenistic metaphysics—the creeds must be dedogmatized.
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