justification in Lutheranism. According to Wilhelm Mauer, this new description meant that Melanchthon believed that justification was “not made at a joyful wedding; it is a legal transaction in which God rewards faith by imputing to it what still remains to fulfill the law—whereby God himself makes full satisfaction to the law.”38 This is a key development, as it is at odds with Luther’s strong belief that justification is primarily related to a believer’s unity with Christ.39
Melanchthon introduced the word, “forensic,” in the Formula of Concord, where he defined the phrase “to be justified” as an agent being “pronounced righteous in a forensic way.”40 Hinlicky notes that this statement, alongside many others made by Melanchthon, includes “no personal encounter with Christ (one encounters a report about Christ)” nor “any public work of the Holy Spirit to supply justifying faith to the stricken sinner.”41 Here, Melanchthon’s doctrine of justification coheres with his deemphasis of the Trinity. For Melanchthon, it is not the person of Christ that is primary in justification, but rather the work of Christ and its benefits for the Christian. This differs from Luther who believes that both Christ “as a person in us” and the work of Christ are central to a Christian’s justification.42 This same divergence exists in articulating the role of the Holy Spirit. Prenter explicates that Luther prioritizes both the person and the work of the Spirit as really present in the justified agent,43 whereas Melanchthon prioritizes neither—as Hinlicky bluntly states, “this legal transaction is to all appearances also Spirit-less.”44
The Philosopher-Theologian: Finding Luther in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
In Paths not Taken, Hinlicky posits that the slow disappearance of the Holy Spirit in Lutheranism (here understood as primarily shaped by Melanchthon’s theology) was due to the rise of a “general pneumatology.”45 Ephraim Radner suggests that this tendency toward a general pneumatology is the result of a pneumatological expansionism which occurred during the early-modern period and resulted in disparate, vaguely pneumatized outlooks within disciplines ranging from metaphysics to physical sciences to history.46 Though Hegel likely falls both within Hinlicky’s category of “general pneumatology” and Radner’s portrayal of “pneumatological expansionism,” he differs from predecessors such as Gottfried W. Leibniz47 in one key respect—while philosophers such as Leibniz drew from the Lutheran tradition at-large, Hegel was directly influenced by Luther’s writings alone. Indeed, there is a discernible difference in how pneumatology is incorporated within the grand philosophical system of Hegel, even to the extent that the Spirit undergirds his entire corpus. In this regard, it can be persuasively argued that he was an ardent disciple of Luther.
Karl Barth once proclaimed that though Hegel was known primarily as a philosopher, his foremost desire was theological: to be the Protestant Aquinas.48 This claim is echoed by Robert C. Solomon who states that Hegel’s “Christian ambitions, however unorthodox, [are] the very heart of his philosophy.”49 This is readily evident in the breadth of Hegel’s engagement with Geist, a concept informing his metaphysics, understanding of history, conception of human progress, and, implicitly, his entire philosophical outlook. It is most comprehensively delineated in Phänomenologie des Geistes, and Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (VPR).50 Though Geist is understood differently in these two works, the importance of Hegel vis-à-vis this essay is his explicit affinity for Luther’s pneumatology. In this regard, Hegel believed that he was “more Lutheran than Lutherans,” insofar as he believed that Lutheranism had “become a pale reflection of its former self, especially with respect to the power of the Spirit undergirding Luther’s passionate and imaginative theological assertions.”51 To this end, Alan M. Olson posits that Hegel had an “instinctive appreciation of Luther’s dialectical conception of the Holy Spirit,”52 from which he structured his own pneumatology. Hence, J.M. Fritzman rightly characterizes Hegel’s theological-philosophy as “largely a radicalization of Luther’s.”53
At this juncture, one might ask: what pneumatological commonalities with Luther can be observed in Hegel? At least three exist: (1) the priority of the Holy Spirit in elucidating the Trinity; (2) an emphasis placed upon the linguistic mediation of the Spirit; and (3) the “incarnational” aspect of Luther’s pneumatology as it relates to personal and communal unity with God. Concerning the first item, it was previously noted that Luther inverted the order of the Trinity in his Large Catechism to mirror the experience of the believer. As a reader of Luther, Hegel extended this inversion and speculatively reimagined his Trinitarian framework “from the concept of God as Spirit.”54 This is evident in his 1821 manuscript of VPR, where he states that “God is spirit—that which we call the triune God.”55 This pneumatological priority is noteworthy, as similar to Luther, the Trinity is central to Hegel’s worldview. In fact, Dale Schlitt argues that without the doctrine of the Trinity, Hegel’s categories of history of the world, principle of freedom, and true religion all cease to be coherent.56 Though there is some uncertainty as to how far Hegel removes the notion of personhood from the Trinity,57 and for that matter, “being” itself from the Trinity,58 Olson aptly notes that Luther’s catechetical instruction was highly formative for Hegel, both for his doctrine of the Trinity and his philosophical corpus as a whole.59
Second, Luther’s insistence on the Spirit’s mediation of Christ through the preached Word is reworked in Hegel’s emphasis on the linguistic mediation of Geist.60 This is most readily observed in First Philosophy of Spirit, where Hegel asserts that “language is the first and primary manifestation (or potency, as he puts it, emulating Schelling) of Spirit separating itself from ‘air’ as its primal element and positing itself as speech.”61 This emphasis of both Hegel and Luther may be contrasted with Melanchthon’s understanding of the spoken word as primarily testifying to salvific work—a linkage which Powell claims “did not loom large in Hegel’s thought.”62 As a note, Hegel’s (and Luther’s) emphasis on the Spirit’s linguistic mediation will be revisited when discussing Karl Rahner.
Third, Luther’s parallel of God in Christ with the Holy Spirit in the Christian—V-M. Kärkkäinen’s posited “incarnational” language in Luther’s pneumatology—is incorporated into Hegel’s expansive panentheism63 Unlike Luther, Hegel articulates Geist (and God) as not a Creator apart from the creation, but rather, a substance permeating the created order.64 This extensive presence of Geist extends to human individuals in history via the historical event of the Incarnation. For Hegel, the unification of the divine and human in the historical Jesus de-particularized the incarnation (and the Holy Spirit), and thus, universalized both the possibility of unification of these natures and the Incarnation itself for all human agents.65 Although the notion of Hegel’s universal incarnation would be anathema to Luther, Hegel’s emphasis on unity with the Divine certainly resembles both the mystical language present in Luther’s early writings and Mannermaa’s Finnish interpretation of Luther. Moreover, other assertions of Hegel regarding the Incarnation event, such as it being the moment of God’s self-revelation,66 are exactly in tandem with Luther’s positions. Evidence of Hegel’s close-reading of Luther’s “unity language” is also apparent in his description of communal unity, where he posits—in agreement with Luther—that the mark of the hurch is the “indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the gathered community.”67 Additionally, Hegel borrowed Luther’s understanding of the Spirit’s work as the Agent who “calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies” the Body of Christ.68 For all of the above reasons, in some strange way, Hegel was as he claimed to be, “more Lutheran than Lutherans.”
Several decades after Hegel (1770–1831), an extraordinary pneumatologically-shaped historical development arose in the work and theology of Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984). What was extraordinary was not merely the novel content of Rahner’s theology. Instead, the adage of fashion (or history!) repeating itself every so often was transposed to the sphere of theology and manifestly exhibited in modern Catholic theology. Perhaps stranger than Hegel’s “Lutheran-ness,” the pneumatology of the rabble-rouser Luther—an individual who casually called the Pope the “Antichrist”—heavily influenced Rahner’s theology due to his appropriation of Hegelian philosophy. It is to this striking development that we now turn.
Lutheran Hegelianism in Karl
