This article explains some of the major intentions the author had in writing the book Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? It especially focuses on the question of transcendence, both with respect to the question of God as such, as well as Hegel’s option for a version of holistic immanence. It spells out some of the details of the book itself, and explains the guiding thread of the counterfeit double. The texts of Hegel may be saturated with the word “God,” but in Hegel’s dialectical-speculative reconfiguration of God, what God comes to signify is devoid of the strong transcendence we find in Biblical monotheism. The strengths and deficiencies of Hegel’s position are explored.

Can the conception of God in Hegel’s philosophy of religion provide a resource for current philosophical theology? The argument in William Desmond’sHegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? entails a strongly negative response. Desmond argues that the basic commitments of Hegel’s speculative philosophyentail a systematic inability adequately to conceive of divine transcendence. In this article, I address this claim by examining Hegel’s conception of God inrelation to the issues of (i) the religious representation and the philosophical concept, (ii) the nature of speculative thinking and the conception of God, (iii) the idea of creation, and (iv) affirming the truth about divine transcendence. In each case I argue that Desmond’s critique is unwarranted. A more appropriate attitude towards Hegel on the question of God combines critique with an effort at discovering and appropriating philosophical principles that are productive for current philosophical theology.

William Desmond maintains that preserving the difference between God and humanity means retaining the transcendent otherness of God. In this article, by contrast, I argue that Hegel is right to maintain that insisting on God’s transcendent otherness actually turns God into a finite divinity and so eliminates the very difference Desmond wishes to retain. The only way to preserve the genuine difference between God and humanity, therefore, is to give up the idea that God is a transcendent other and to understand him to be immanent in humanity itself. I argue that this Hegelian position is closer to the orthodox Christian understanding of God than Desmond allows.

Desmond argues that the God portrayed in Hegel’s philosophy of religion is not the true and real God of Christian faith but an idol, a counterfeit. In this he articulates a critique of Hegel that goes back to Kierkegaard and Feuerbach, both of whom read Hegel as a pantheist and monist. My response is that such a reading is a misinterpretation—indeed, perversely so given Hegel’s repeated critiques of pantheism and atheism. For Hegel, the whole is not simply the one (a philosophy of identity), but the one and the many. Instead of identity, Hegel posits holism. Without genuine difference and otherness, without transcendence as well as immanence, there is no whole, no system of relations, no spiraling into novelty, but simply an eternal repetition of the same. God is this whole, the whole in which everything finite comes into being and passes away, the whole in which time and history transpire and God becomes concretely self-determined. Hegel’s holism offers an alternative to the monism of modern philosophy and the dualism of classical theology. As such, it is an authentic reading of original Christian faith.

This is a response to issues raised by Martin De Nys in his article, “Conceiving Divine Transcendence,” dealing with Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? The response focuses especially on the question of religious representation, the issue of the autonomy of philosophy, the issue of creation, the actual practice of Hegel in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Hegel as a contemporary resource for philosophical theology.

This is a response to issues raised by Stephen Houlgate in his article “Hegel, Desmond, and the Problem of God’s Transcendence,” dealing with Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? The response focuses especially on the hermeneutical finesse we need in reading Hegel on religion, on the nature of “release” in Hegel, on the need for an agapeic God, and on the differences between Hegel’s speculative philosophy and Desmond’s metaxological approach to the practice of philosophy.

This is a response to issues raised by Peter Hodgson in his article “Hegel’s God: Counterfeit or Real?” dealing with Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? The response focuses especially on Hodgson’s identification of Desmond’s view with that of Kierkegaard, on the question of whether Hegel is an agapeic thinker, and on the issue of the contemporary relevance of Hegel for theological reflection.