The Hegelian Dialectic in Theology: First of Two Parts

Oscar Cullmann, in an article published in 1959, said: “The historiography of the origins of Christianity has long been dominated by a scientific dogma from which we should free ourselves. It is the so-called Tübingen school, inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, which is responsible for it. According to this dogma, with its scheme of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, there existed at the beginning of Christianity the community of Jerusalem, completely dominated by Jewish theology and especially by Jewish hopes; later through contact with the Hellenistic world, a very different kind of Christianity was supposed to have arisen—Gentile Christianity. Early Catholicism would then represent the synthesis” (“A New Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel,” Expository Times, October, 1959, p. 8).

Professor Cullmann refers to this Hegelian dialectical schematization in an attempt to interpret the Fourth Gospel without the excesses of Hellenization usually attributed to it. My interest, however, is somewhat different. I believe that a great deal of biblical, historical, and theological thought in our time has been excessively influenced by the Hegelian dialectic, and my purpose in this article is to trace the influence of this false dialectic in order to offer some guidance toward theological perspective. This is not just so much academic hullabaloo—it is a matter of fundamental importance for theology in our time. For it concerns the basic presuppositions that influence our understanding of the origin of Christianity, biblical hermeneutics, semantics, the relation of faith and history, and the relation of the Jesus of history and the Christ of dogma. Not least, a right understanding here will serve as a corrective to the “God is dead” theory.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), the German idealist philosopher, developed his system of “absolute idealism” out of the critical idealism of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. Working from the thesis that “the real is rational and the rational is real,” Hegel developed a “logic” for all human knowledge, not in terms of being but in terms of becoming. Development followed through a dialectical process of a thesis followed by an antithesis, in which the conflicting factors issued in a higher synthesis. He propounded an evolutionary view of the development of the universe that included not only the realm of natural science but also law, history, and religion, with truth contained within the whole.

The influence of Hegel’s thought has been vast. In the materialistic direction, his doctrines have been developed by Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx and contained within the whole Communist movement. Of particular interest to us is Hegel’s influence on the modern study of biblical and ecclesiastical history and systematic theology.

As Cullmann points out, it was at Tübingen that the modern study of biblical and church history began. The so-called Tübingen school was founded by F. C. Baur (1792–1860), a theology professor, who developed his characteristic doctrines under Hegel’s concept of history. In 1835 he applied Hegel’s principles to the New Testament; primitive Christianity was represented as a struggle between divergent views, the Catholic Church as the synthesis. In 1845 Baur roused a storm of controversy by applying his dialectic to Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, whom he represented as being violently opposed to the apostles to the Jews.

The principal endeavor of the Tübingen school, therefore, in the attempt to apply Hegel’s dialectic to the primitive Church, was to divide the Church into the Jewish Christians or Petrinists (thesis) and the Gentile Christians or Paulinists (antithesis), a cleavage that was healed in the second-century Catholicism of the Church (synthesis). Although the school lost its prestige toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Tübingen thesis was at the basis of the theologies of no lesser figures than Ritschl, von Harnack, and Strauss.

D. F. Strauss (1808–74), a pupil of Baur, in his famous Leben Jesu applied the “myth theory” to the life of Jesus. His book denied the historical foundation of all supernatural elements in the Gospels. These he spoke of as creative myths developed between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels, which he dated during the second century. The growth of the primitive Church was to be understood in terms of the Hegelian dialectic. This work profoundly influenced German theology.

One detects something of this Hegelian dialectic also in the higher criticism of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). 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 1880 and 1920, 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 (1862–1932), 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 (1861–1931) made an exhaustive study of the Hellenistic world in order to discover the roots of original Christianity.

This “school” represented a new approach in biblical studies. 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. Once it was held that everything in the Christian faith was new and distinctive; now parallels of expression and practice were sought and “found” in the surrounding nations. Thus Christianity dissolved into its Hellenistic environment, with all God-created originality gone.

Even Paul, the “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” was made to appear a “Hellenist of the Hellenists” as he penetrated the heathen world. Under Paul’s genius, it was claimed, the simple Gospel of ethical redemption as found in the prophet of Nazareth, the man Jesus (thesis), was transformed into a metaphysical redemption, with Jesus the prophet and teacher transformed and raised to the rank of transcendent divinity (antithesis). 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 (1859–1906) maintained that Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah during his earthly life (thesis). The gospel record was but a reading back of the Church’s later beliefs about his Person into the narrative (antithesis). The Christian religion, he contended, received its essential form largely through Paul’s radical transformation of the teaching of Christ (antithesis). Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) contributed to the discussion by viewing the metaphysics that came into Christian theology, as found in the Christian dogmas and creeds, as an alien intrusion from Greek sources, which he termed “Hellenization” (synthesis).

Within this context Johannes Weiss in 1912 expounded the principles of form criticism, which were later elaborated by Martin Dibelius (1883–1947) 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 1939 analyzed the Gospel into various literary forms, such as were used by preachers, teachers, and narrators. Others argued that the forms of the gospel narrative arose from the early Church “community debates,” while the Passion narratives were influenced by the needs and practices of the early Church.

All this prepared the way for the more skeptical analysis of Bultmann, followed by his shattering essay “New Testament and Myth,” which appeared in Germany in 1941. 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. A. T. Robinson’s thesis in Honest to God. 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. And this is precisely what the “God-is-dead” theologians tell us to do. All theological statements must be treated as Hellenistic metaphysics—the creeds must be dedogmatized. All concepts of transcendence must be viewed as outmoded mythological language—the New Testament must be demythologized. Dogmatic terms like “Christ”, “Son of God,” and even “God” must go by the board, for only along these radical lines will we be able to arrive at the so-called prophet of Nazareth, who challenges his day and ours with the example of love.

When one reflects upon the contemporary image of theology in this kind of melting pot, it becomes evident that the so-called new theology is really nothing more than an extension of the older forms of radical and skeptical dialectic, driven to their logical conclusion. For this reason, a survey of the historical development of the Hegelian dialectic should show up the God-is-dead theology in its true light. Those who are impressed by this theology’s method of reducing all theological categories to the “theology of Jesus” can at least question whether a dedogmatized and demythologized Christ really brings us face to face with the Jesus of Nazareth raised to glory, as the New Testament would have us see him.

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