Comment on absolute knowledge and the experience of faith
pp. 169-178
in: John Walker (ed), Thought and faith in the philosophy of Hegel, Berlin, Springer, 1991Abstract
Hegel's attempts to bring together both philosophical and religious truth and experience in his speculative system have on the whole met with hostility from both sides: neither philosophy nor religion has been happy to be "encompassed" or "grounded" in the other, and both have remained suspicious of the system which sought to bring them together in this way. Thus, philosophers have tended to find too much theology in Hegel; and theologians have found too much philosophy. John Walker in his enthralling paper has attempted to calm the fears of the theologians, by insisting that religious experience has a vital and irreducible role to play in Hegel's philosophy. In this comment on his paper, by contrast, I want to suggest that Hegel's philosophical reconstruction of religious truth leaves little that is distinctively religious in his philosophy; if I am right, it follows that the worries of theologians such as Karl Barth et al1 are on the whole fully justified.
