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.Not only as a loyal civil servant, then, but alsoin matters of ecclesiology Hegel could claim to be a Lutheran.To resolve the question about Hegel s Lutheranism we onlyhave to ask ourselves what Luther meant to Hegel.He was alwaysvery clear about Luther s fundamental principle and role in his-tory (GP XX, 49 60/III 146 55).It was Luther who first articu-lated the principle of subjectivity, so fundamental to the modernworld, according to which I should accept no belief that does notagree with my own conscience.When Hegel declared that he wasa Lutheran he was affirming first and foremost this principle,which he took to be the very spirit of Luther s teaching.Sincethis principle plays such a fundamental role in his philosophy(pp.230 3), he had another good reason to declare himself aLutheran.In the end, then, Hegel s Lutheran confession was not merelip-service.It was a sincere statement of allegiance to a principle anda ritual.But it hardly implied Lutheran orthodoxy; for, as we shallsoon see, Hegel departed fundamentally from Luther s theology.CONCEPT OF GODHegel s ambivalent relationship with traditional Christianity ismost apparent from his concept of God.Hegel s concept preservesthe traditional definition of God as the infinite; but it negates thetraditional interpretation of the infinite as a supernatural entity thatexists apart from its creation.In the Logic Hegel argues explicitlyagainst any conception of the infinite that would separate it fromthe finite, or by implication against any conception of the divinethat would separate it from the world (WL I, 95 146).If the infinitewere conceived in opposition to the finite, he reasons, then itwould be finite itself, because it would be limited by the finite.There would then be per impossibile a greater reality than the infinite,namely, the unity of the infinite and the finite.The true infinitemust therefore include the finite, so that the divine encompasses The Religious Dimension 143the entire universe.This concept of the infinite ran counter to theorthodox theistic conception of God, according to which God tran-scends the world and it makes no difference to God s identitywhether it creates the world or not.Against this orthodox conceptHegel bluntly declares: Without the world God is not God(W XVI, 192).Contrary to traditional Christianity, then, Hegel conceives ofGod as immanent.God reveals or embodies itself in the finiteworld, and it is inseparable from its embodiment in nature andhistory.It is important to stress, however, that it is not reducible toits embodiment, even though it does not transcend it.Preciselybecause it is the foundation, substance and source of its embodi-ments, it is something more than them and so irreducible to them.In virtue of God s inseparability from the world, Hegel naturalizesand historicizes the divine; but in virtue of his non-reducibility tothe world, he divinizes history and nature.Some of Hegel s more orthodox contemporaries accused him ofpantheism, a serious charge in his day because it was commonlyassociated with atheism.Since his radical students also interpretedhim as a pantheist or atheist, both left and right were in this regardstrange bedfellows.Given that Hegel is still often described as apantheist and interpreted as an atheist, it is important to examinehis response to this criticism.32Hegel has two lines of defense against this accusation.His firstconsists in a defense of pantheism.It is a misrepresentation of Hegel spolemic to think that he repudiates pantheism to prove his ownorthodoxy.33 Rather, his strategy is to charge his accusers with hav-ing a distorted conception of pantheism.It is a complete misunder-standing, he argues, to equate pantheism with atheism.Such anequation assumes that the pantheist identifies God with the totalityof finite things.But, Hegel protests, no one has ever held such acrude position.The pantheist holds that God is the substance or essenceof all finite things, which are only appearances of it.Rather thangiving divinity to finite things, the pantheist makes finite things 144 Hegeldisappear in the divine.It would be better to call such a doctrine acosmism , Hegel contends, meaning by that term the disappear-ance of the finite in the infinite.The main source of misunderstand-ing about pantheism, he continues, is that people confuse twosenses of universality or unity: abstract universality or unity, wherethe parts precede the whole; and concrete universality or unity, wherethe whole precedes its parts by making them possible.What thepantheists or acosmists maintain is that God is the concrete uni-versal or unity behind all things; but their concrete universality orunity is conflated by their enemies with an abstract one, so that itseems as if the pantheists simply identify the divine with the total-ity of individual things.A simple point, to be sure, but one over-looked by contemporary Hegel scholars, who maintain that Hegel spantheistic God is only a more pious way of talking about theuniverse
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