In brief: In Hegel stands the strongest philosophical thesis ever advanced about Christianity’s contribution to the political world – and at the same time a treatment of faith that many believers find intolerable. Both stand in the same texts. Whoever takes away only one of the two has not read Hegel.
The thesis that meets faith halfway
For Hegel subjective freedom – the individual’s right to let count only what he sees to be right – is no invention of the Enlightenment but Christian in origin. He says so in § 124 note as plainly as it can be said:
The right of the subject’s particularity to find itself satisfied – or, what is the same thing, the right of subjective freedom – constitutes the turning and centre point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age. This right, in its infinity, is expressed in Christianity, and has been made the universal actual principle of a new form of the world.
Groundlines, § 124 note
And in § 185 note he draws the consequence for antiquity: Plato’s Republic cannot be saved at this point, because it lacks the principle of „the self-subsistent, infinite-in-itself personality of the individual, of subjective freedom“, which arose inwardly in the Christian religion. The modern legal order is for Hegel no break with Christianity but its kernel become worldly.
The thesis that is harder to bear
But the same movement also means: religion has its truth in the form of representation, philosophy has the same content in the form of the concept – and the concept is the higher form. What faith represents as an event between God and human beings, philosophy understands as a movement of spirit. Hegel does not deny the truth of faith; he claims to know it better than the believer does. Whether that is a rescue or a dissolution was already disputed among his pupils and has remained so – see Was Hegel a Christian, a pantheist or an atheist?
What the Groundlines say about it
Three passages repay attention here. First § 66: religion belongs to what is inalienable – no one can effectively bind himself to have it prescribed to him „what is a duty of conscience, or religious truth“. Second § 270 note: the state owes religious communities protection, but religion is only the basis of the ethical, not its standard; where it produces superstition and bondage, „a saving power is rather required which takes up the rights of reason and of self-consciousness“. Third § 137–§ 140 on conscience: Hegel takes it entirely seriously and shows at the same time how easily it turns into hypocrisy. That analysis has not been surpassed by any sermon.
A word of advice for reading
One should read Hegel neither as an apologist nor as an opponent. He is neither. He claims that Christianity brought about something in world history that would not be there without it – and that it can no longer take this contribution back, because it now lies in institutions. That is an unusually high estimation and an unusually uncomfortable one at the same time.
Sources. Groundlines § 66 and note, § 124 note, § 137–§ 140, § 185 note, § 270 note. – Encyclopaedia (1830) §§ 564–571 (revealed religion) and § 573 note. – In the glossary: Religion, State and Religion, Reconciliation. – Literature. Walter Jaeschke, Die Vernunft in der Religion, Stuttgart 1986, and Hegel-Handbuch, 3rd ed., Stuttgart 2016; on the split in the school David Friedrich Strauß, Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu, 1837.