Price to Pay: The Contraction and Omission of the Resurrection in Hegel’s Dialectics

In his dialectical reconstruction of Christianity, G.W.F. Hegel not only distorts theological events into philosophical moments through which the Spirit (Geist) comes to self-consciousness, but in doing so, he contracts each “stage” in such a way that each appropriates the role of the one that follows. The series begins with Hegel enfolding the function of the fall into the event of creation, reinterpreting it to be the introduction of alterity between the infinite and the finite. The fall of Adam, then, does not concern division between God and humanity, but becomes the condition for the possibility of their reconciliation, as humanity attains to a “knowledge” that enables the eventual fulfillment of the Spirit’s self-consciousness through the finite.

Rather than bringing to bear the possibility of reconciliation, the incarnation becomes the climactic moment of reconciliation between the infinite and the finite as the two find at-one-ment in the Monophysite Jesus. Christ’s death on the Cross cannot be the locus of salvation, then, but appropriates the role of the resurrection, acting as the “negation of negation” and “death of death,” not in virtue of death’s reversal but by integrating death—the quintessence of finitude—into the sphere of the infinite. At the end of this series, the historical resurrection of Christ drops out entirely. Not only is it no longer needed to triumph over death—as this was accomplished on the Cross—but the historical resurrection of Christ, and therein the particularity of Jesus, would prevent the possibility for the universality of the Spirit in the community of believers.

In this series of contractions, Hegel assumes the traditional Christian overture, yet by shifting each stage “back by a step,” his final product rings out in a dissonant key. Put otherwise, the necessary parts appear to be present in his system, hinging on the interplay of fall and reconciliation, but because Hegel locates each prematurely, his system is not only heterodox, but heterodox in a way that parodies orthodoxy and sounds deceptively familiar to the attuned ear. What is more, by enfolding the resurrection into the Cross yet omitting its historicity in the particular Christ, Hegel precludes a postmortem resurrection for humanity and sequesters divinization under the function of philosophy. In short, by neglecting the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ in his system, Hegel produces an eschatology unworthy of hope.

Creation Appropriates the Function of the Fall: The Alterity of the Infinite and the Finite

Hegel’s contraction of the fall into the moment of creation begins a “domino effect” that reshapes the subsequent stages of salvation history. In other words, his distortion of reconciliation corresponds with a misinterpretation of a “fall narrative,” displacing the doctrine of original sin by situating the “fall” within the act of creation itself. By doing so, Hegel acknowledges the existence of a division or alienation between God and humanity but misidentifies its nature. Instead of framing the rupture as moral disobedience originating in Eden, he reimagines it as an ontological division introduced at creation—the alterity between the infinite and the finite. Already, the attuned ear hears a discordant tone in Hegel’s system—the identification of a Creator-creature rift resonates with tradition, yet it emerges one note too soon.

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel writes of this separation of the infinite and the finite as a sort of “fall” or “falling away from God” that stands in need of reconciliation:

As finite spirit, it is placed in a condition of separation; it has fallen away from God, it is apart from God. Since it is still related to God in this state of being apart from God, the contradiction consists in its cleavage and separation from God. The concrete spirit, the finite spirit defined as finite, is therefore in contradiction to its object of content, and this gives rise above all to the need to sublate this contradiction and separation that appear in finite spirit as such—in other words, the need for reconciliation.[1]

Notably, the separation of the finite is inherent to the act of creation, and while not using language of culpability in this non-sinful “falling away,” Hegel nonetheless recognizes that God alone is responsible for this alterity, and for its restoration, as he alone “posits the separation.”[2] However, if the moment of the “fall” has already occurred in the creation event, then the Adam narrative requires a fresh interpretation. In presenting this next “stage,” Hegel continues the pattern of reaching beyond the parameters traditionally held by the event into that which follows, therein fashioning a new understanding of the Genesis 3 encounter between Adam, the serpent, and the forbidden fruit.

The Fall of Adam Appropriates the Function of the Incarnation: The Condition for the Possibility of Reconciliation

Having relocated the “fall” from Eden to the act of creation, Hegel presents a corresponding reinterpretation of the Adam narrative, characterized as the condition for the possibility of reconciliation between God and creation, an appropriation of the function traditionally located in the incarnation of Christ. Exegeting the Genesis 3 narrative, although he acknowledges that “on the one hand, it is formally set down that this eating was the transgression of a commandment,”[3] Hegel nevertheless regards the content of the narrative to be the “essential thing,” wherein “the sin consisted in having eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and in this connection there comes about the pretense of the serpent that humanity will be like God when it has the knowledge of good and evil.”[4]

Here, Hegel finds that “humanity has elevated itself to the knowledge of good and evil; and this cognition, this distinction, is the source of evil, is evil itself. Being evil is located in the act of cognition, in consciousness.”[5] Yet nuancing this claim, he clarifies that “in the same way as this cleavage is the source of evil, it is also the midpoint of the conversion that consciousness contains within itself whereby this cleavage is also sublated.”[6] Eating from the tree, then, is the turning point for human consciousness; it is the condition for the possibility of a complete reconciliation, not attained here, but awaiting the advent of Christ.

Hegel sees truth in the words of the serpent, later compounded by the very words of God at the close of the narrative. What Adam had done in the act of eating from the forbidden tree is less of a “fall” than it is the first step taken towards being like God, which Hegel will soon locate in the comprehension of the infinite by the finite mind, itself a reconfiguring of deification.[7] What would be traditionally seen by the majority Christian synthesis as the moment of rupture between God and humanity, Hegel reinterprets as a sort of first necessary step towards full reconciliation. In a sense, the fall of Adam bears the function of the incarnation, for while atonement theories typically locate reconciliation in the Crucified Christ, which intimates that the incarnation is the necessary precondition for the death of the God-Man, now under Hegel’s system, the Adam narrative becomes the precondition for reconciliation, in turn located in the incarnation. The condition for the possibility of reconciliation can be found in this “elevated” human cognition, yet given that it stands only as the “midpoint,” this moment cannot yet celebrate total reconciliation between the infinite and the finite. Yet again, the attentive listener hears a familiar yet distorted melody. Hegel follows the traditional path of salvation history, yet by pressing this key prematurely, it contributes to a final product that falls flat.

The Incarnation Appropriates the Function of Christ’s Death: Reconciliation of the Infinite and the Finite

At the next stage in this series, Hegel transfers redemption from its traditional placement in the Cross to the incarnation of Christ. In his dialectical purview, reconciliation does not mend the fissure of human sinfulness; rather, the reconciliation attained in the incarnation restores the alterity between the infinite and the finite that surfaced at the moment of creation. Hegel writes of this reconciliation as the reunion of an “antithesis” or “incongruity,” noting in his Lectures that

This antithesis (or evil) is the natural state of human being and willing; it is human immediacy, which is precisely the modality of natural life. Along with immediacy, finitude is likewise posited, and this finitude or naturalness is incongruous with the universality of God, with the infinite, eternal idea, which is utterly free within itself and present to itself. This incongruity is the point of departure that constitutes the need for reconciliation.[8]

Moreover, Hegel’s conception of reconciliation not only disregards a consideration of atonement for sin, but inverts the “subject” in question, presenting reconciliation as not centered upon humanity, but as a drama of divine self-redemption, for “reconciliation is what is demanded by the need of the subject, and this exigency resides in the subject as infinite unity or as self-identity.”[9] This is to say, the Spirit redeems to itself the “contradiction” it intended upon the creation of the finite; it synthesizes its antithesis. While humanity surely plays a significant role in this drama, Hegel refrains from suggesting that this is human atonement; rather, it can only be characterized as the infinite’s at-one-ment with the finite it created.

To reiterate this distortion, reconciliation is not located in the Cross of Christ, but rather in the incarnation, and even so, on a broadly philosophical level; it is not a reconciliation of humanity on account of sin, but the at-one-ment of the infinite and the finite in this “Monophysite Jesus.”[10] Christ is the necessary lynchpin, and from him, the community of believers gains assurance of their own potential to be united with the infinite, because “in order for it [this divine-human unity] to become a certainty for humanity, God had to appear in the world in the flesh.”[11] Albeit Hegel’s Christ is not merely an exemplar for the community, revealing the way in which others can follow after him, but does affect a real ontological change by his nature, nevertheless, Christ is the one who brings certainty to the community. He is the concrete reality of reconciliation, seen and known by those in his immediate context.[12] He is the admixture, or the synthesis, of the infinite and the finite, the divine and the human, in a way that bridges the alterity of the two.[13]

Christ enables this union for the community of believers, yet the incarnation is a “disappearing moment,” as Christ must give way to the Spirit; the particular must give way to the universal.[14] As “a self, but a self that is transitory and passes away,”[15] Christ must fade into obscurity in order for the rest of humanity to partake in this unity for themselves. Albeit reminiscent of the words Christ speaks to his apostles before his Passion—that he must go in order to send the Holy Spirit (John 16:7)—the departure that Hegel constructs for Christ ends on the Cross. This death will not give rise to Christ’s resurrection and ascension, nevertheless, Hegel enfolds the functions of these two events into the Cross. That the Cross bears the role of the ascension—insofar as Christ “makes way” for the Spirit—may be self-evident; however, much more needs to be said of how Hegel enfolds, and therein obscures, the resurrection into the Cross in this oddly Johannine parody.

The Death of Christ Appropriates the Function of the Resurrection: The Negation of Negation

In both his Lectures and The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel adopts the words from a hymn of Luther that “God has died, God is dead.”[16] In an extended quotation on this reference, he adds,

Now, however, a further determination comes into play. God has died, God is dead—this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God. The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievability, the annulling of everything that is elevated, are bound up with this thought. However, the process does not come to a halt at this point; rather a reversal takes place: God that is to say, maintains himself in this process and the latter is only the death of death. God rises to life again and things are reversed . . . the death of Christ is the death of this death itself, the negation of negation.[17]

Far from intimating the use employed by Nietzsche, this death of God is the necessary dialectical step in the Spirit’s development through history. This is not a crisis of atheism, but a burgeoning of the Spirit in the community; it is not a death at the hands of unbelief, but a death that makes belief possible.

Now that the incarnation fulfills the reconciliation traditionally attributed to Christ’s death in various atonement theories, the Cross subsumes an alternative purpose, yet again overreaching its domain by appropriating the role of the resurrection. Hegel employs the concept of the “negation of negation” or the “death of death” within his speculative Good Friday. He writes in the Phenomenology that

The death of the Divine Man, qua death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the process which terminates only in the universality belonging to nature. In spiritual self-consciousness death loses its natural significance; it passes into its true principle of conception, the conception just mentioned. Death then ceases to signify what it means directly—the non-existence of this particular individual—and becomes transformed and transfigured into the universality of spirit, which lives in its own communion, dies there daily, and daily rises again.[18]

It is a quasi-victory over death, yet not on account of its reversal through a true resurrection of Christ’s body, but insofar as death—“the most complete proof of humanity, of absolute finitude”[19]—has been integrated into the sphere of the infinite. This negation adopts the function of resurrection, and for Hegel, “the death of God is infinite negation, and God maintains himself in death, so that this process is rather a putting to death of death, a resurrection into life.”[20] In the Phenomenology, Hegel nuances this idea, writing that “The immediate existence of actuality has thus ceased to be alien, or external, to that essence, as it is what is sublated, or what is universal. Thus, this death is its resurrection as spirit.”[21]

In this contraction, Hegel’s depiction of the Cross demonstrates Johannine overtones, yet once again, in a manner of parody. The Johannine Cross contains a foretaste of the resurrection and ascension of Christ, as he is lifted up in glory,[22] while simultaneously foreshadowing the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, as he gives up his spirit (πνεῦμα) upon breathing his dying breath.[23] To interpret the Cross in light of these mysteries would be expected for any theologian, yet Hegel takes a different approach. He does not see the foretaste of the resurrection in the Cross; rather, he supplants the function of the resurrection from its proper setting and neglects its historicity. He errs where he conflates these mysteries, as opposed to keeping them distinct.

At the end of this series of contractions, the historical resurrection of Jesus drops out entirely. The empty tomb no longer stands as the “touchstone, so to speak, by which the faith is verified,”[24] as that function has been moved to the Cross. Put otherwise, the community of believers forms from the dead Christ, not the historically risen Christ. Thus, the sequential “enfoldings” end abruptly upon reaching the Cross, from which point, the Spirit knows itself through the community of believers, universalizing what had been particular in Jesus. The overture of salvation history comes to a close, yet the final note rings out as a deceptive cadence, with no clear resolution. In this final stage, Hegel maintains the elements of the resurrection—and even ascension—in the death of Christ on the Cross, but it is incomplete. The historical resurrection has been eclipsed. In its absence, numerous consequences emerge, problematic for the broader Christian presentation of eschatology. With no resurrection of Christ’s body, there can be no hope for the general resurrection, no particularity within community, and no room for grace in a deification based on Hegelian philosophy.

The Omission of the Historical Resurrection of Christ and its Consequences

Broadly speaking, Hegel omits a proper recognition of the historical resurrection of Christ. However, in rare instances, and often in footnotes to his works, he will refer to the risen Jesus and even note that “The resurrection is something that belongs just as essentially to faith [as the crucifixion].”[25] Nevertheless, “to consider the resurrection of Jesus as an event is to adopt the outlook of the historian, and this has nothing to do with religion,”[26] a conclusion which accords with his claim that “the history of the resurrection and ascension of Christ to the right hand of God begins at the point where history receives a spiritual interpretation.”[27] Hegel’s treatment of the historical resurrection is thus sidelined from his religious system. The reality of the resurrection seems to lurk around the corner, but never does Hegel confirm it directly; rather, he would consider his dialectic complete without it, having appropriated its function to the moment of the Cross.

As has been shown, the resurrection has been enfolded backward into the Cross; yet unique to this stage, Hegel also extends it forward, locating a resurrection of the Spirit in the living consciousness of the community.[28] In such a way, the resurrection overreaches its domain in two directions, while leaving untreated any notion of the empty tomb at the center. Because of this oversight, the final depiction of Christianity which Hegel presents temporalizes and naturalizes eschatology, offering a blurred facsimile of the ultimate vision of human fulfillment made possible through Christ. The particularity of Christ, as well as the particularity of each individual believer, gets subsumed into the universalized collective and amorphous Spirit. With no glorified, risen Christ to whom the believer can maintain their hope of being united, the “end times” become both immanent and bereft of grace. There can be no postmortem resurrection of the body for believers, the universality of the Spirit occludes the particularity of salvation associated with judgment, and deification becomes sequestered to human cognition without the aid of grace.

As the “first fruits” of those who have died, Christ enables and reveals the reality of life after death. Yet nothing could be stranger for Hegel, who sees the belief in the risen Christ as a “sad need of the community for an actual [human to worship].”[29] Instead, Jesus “resurrects” in the mind of the community, not bodily but amorphously in the spirit of the believers. In this way, the resurrection does not engender the faith of the community, but the reverse; the community engenders his “resurrection.” Christ does not exist as a person, but an idea in the minds of Christians, and so lives on. With such a framework of an incorporeal “resurrection” in place, it is thus impossible for these Christians to have hope in their own bodily resurrection from the dead.

Keeping in theme of warping traditional Christianity to an extent that is both subtle yet detrimental, Hegel’s conception of “deification” mirrors elements that are reminiscent of theosis, yet is ultimately its false reflection, as it does not transform the believer into the likeness of God through grace but simulates transformation of the individual as it assimilates them under the historical progression of the self-consciousness of the Spirit by finite cognition. That “God became man that man might become God” rings true in Hegel’s system, yet not in the way the Christian would anticipate. Because a postmortem resurrection has been outmoded for an immanent eschatology, deification must be fulfilled in the historical present. For Hegel, then, “the community itself is the existing Spirit, the Spirit in existence,”[30] or, put conversely, the “Spirit as existing and realizing itself is the community.”[31]

Notably, this transformation does not concern human nature, but more narrowly, cognition, and emerges not by the aid of grace, but philosophy. As demonstrated in Christ, yet made available to the wider community after his passing, a reconciliation of the infinite and the finite occurs, and for Hegel, “this reconciliation is philosophy . . . [which] presents the reconciliation of God with himself and with nature, showing that nature, otherness, is implicitly divine.”[32] To this, Hegel adds that “this reconciliation is the peace of God, which does not “surpass all reason,” but is rather the peace that through reason is first known and thought and is recognized as what is true.”[33]

Hegel’s depiction of deification is thus a mere facsimile of the true Christian presentation of divinization through the grace of Christ. Framed under the language of a previous “stage” in his system, Hegel’s idea of deification does not differ from the serpent’s empty promise of deification in the Garden, which is a sort of self-deification. It is a cheap imitation of the deification on offer through Christ, a vain grasping at likeness to God, and in the end, the Hegelian thinks himself to be an instantiation of the Spirit in the world, cognizing the infinite through the finite, yet in reality, this is a reduction of what is really promised to the children of God.

Transposing Hegelian Dialectics?

Surveying the whole of Hegel’s system of salvation history, one finds an all too familiar yet distorted picture. It is as if a pianist placed his hands one note below where the score intended, or as if he entered into the symphony one note too soon. The resulting piece follows the intended melody—as Hegel presents all of the critical elements of a history of salvation, from the fall to reconciliation—and thus sounds familiar to the attuned ear, yet because of this subtle shift, the system in its entirety becomes dissonant. No element escapes this mismatch. It functions systematically, and thus it fails systematically, yet to transpose Hegelian dialectics by shifting each stage forward cannot amend Hegel’s obfuscation of Easter.

At the end of this sequence, the historical resurrection of Christ becomes eclipsed, both enfolded backward into the moment of the crucifixion and also projected forward into a “resurrection” of the Spirit in the community—a cheapening both of Pentecost and deification. As such, the eschatological vision that Hegel offers back to the Christian faith is unworthy of hope: it is a deflated celebration of human dignity, ending not with an eruption into glory, but a whimper. It is a mockery of the traditional presentation of deification, a depreciation of its value, all while playing to the ear the sweet melody that promises that all has been maintained. This is the price paid by Christianity when “rescued” by the post-Enlightenment Hegel.

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Tags: Contraction Dialectics Hegel’s Omission Price Resurrection