In brief: Hegel was a baptized Lutheran and described himself as one all his life. The charge of pantheism he expressly and at length rejected — and the charge of atheism he held to be the more honest of the two. Whether what he calls „God“ is still the God of faith has been the real point of dispute since his death. It is not settled to this day.
The biographical finding
Hegel studied theology at the Tübingen seminary and took the theological examination. He never left the church, had his children baptized, and as a Berlin professor still appealed to the Lutheran confession — against a correspondent who was reproaching him with unbelief:
I am a Lutheran, and through philosophy equally wholly confirmed in Lutheranism.
Letter to F. A. G. Tholuck, 3 July 1826
That answers the biographical question and has not yet posed the philosophical one. For Hegel means this not as a confession alongside philosophy but as a claim about it: philosophy confirms what faith represents. It is precisely there that the dispute takes fire.
Why „pantheist“ is wrong
Pantheism in ordinary speech means: God is the world, the world is God. Hegel holds this to be not a dangerous but a threadbare doctrine — and disputes that any philosopher ever held it:
But the idolatry of the wretched Indian, in worshipping the ape or whatever else, is still not that wretched representation of pantheism, that all is God and God all.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 573 Remark
His argument is sober: whoever says „all“ means either the empty unity of a thing of thought — in which case he has said nothing — or the actual, endless multitude of singular things. And of that no one has ever claimed that it is God.
But it is that deception with the empty unity which alone makes possible and brings about the bad representation of a pantheism.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 573 Remark
For the systems usually called pantheistic — the Eleatics, Spinoza — he therefore proposes the opposite name. They do not make the world into God; they let the world disappear:
that they would more correctly have to be called monotheisms and, in relation to the representation of the world, acosmisms.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 573 Remark
Why he preferred the charge of atheism
The charge of atheism was already out of fashion in Hegel’s day; pantheism was the new one. Hegel holds the older to be the more decent, because it at least asserts something:
The accusation of atheism does after all presuppose a definite representation of a God with content, and then arises from the fact that representation does not find again, in the philosophical concepts, the peculiar forms to which it is bound.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 573 Remark
The charge of pantheism, by contrast, comes from a theology that itself no longer wants to know anything of God and has taken religion back into a feeling. Whoever knows only „a God in general“ finds one everywhere — and can hardly reproach philosophy with having none.
For this new theology, which makes religion only a subjective feeling and denies the cognition of the nature of God, retains nothing further than a God in general without objective determinations.
Encyclopaedia (1830), § 573 Remark
The point of the passage is therefore not defensive but offensive: Hegel reproaches piety with having too little God, while it reproaches him with having too much.
Where the dispute really lies
Hegel says that religion and philosophy have the same content and differ only in form: religion has it as representation, philosophy as concept. This can be read in two directions, and both were taken while his pupils were still alive:
– One reads it as meaning that the concept justifies the representation: philosophy proves what the Christian believes. That is the reading of the later so-called Right Hegelians.
– The other reads it as meaning that the concept replaces the representation: what faith represents as a God beyond is in truth the spirit of human beings themselves. That is the reading of the Left Hegelians, out of which the criticism of religion of the nineteenth century arose.
Both appeal to the same texts. Hegel did not decide which of the two readings was his — and there is something to be said for the view that he held the question to be wrongly put.
What of this occurs in the Groundlines
For the philosophy of right this is no side question, since in Hegel’s day it was claimed that religion is the foundation of the state. In § 270 Remark he concedes exactly as much as he must — and not a step further:
Now if religion in this way constitutes the foundation which contains the ethical in general, and more specifically the nature of the state, as the divine will, then at the same time it is only as foundation that it is this, and it is here that the two part ways.
Groundlines, § 270 Remark
And in the same Remark he records that religion can bring about the opposite as well — it can assume a form which results „in the harshest bondage under the fetters of superstition“. Against it „a saving power“ is then required: the state. Whoever takes Hegel for a theocrat has not read § 270. At length: State and Religion.
Sources. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), § 573 Remark (TWA 10, 378–394) — the most connected discussion of the charges of pantheism and atheism; further § 50 Remark and § 71 Remark. – Groundlines § 270 Remark on the relation of state and religion. – Letter to Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck of 3 July 1826 (Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeister, vol. IV/1). – The division into Right and Left Hegelians goes back to David Friedrich Strauß, who introduced the terms into the debate in 1837. – See also the answer to Is the state God in Hegel?