Hegel och Guds död

Sammanfattning: In this study, I will discuss Hegel’s words on the death of God as they are stated in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Faith and Knowledge. I will present a reading of what I consider to be the two different usages of these words, and relate their meanings to each other. Focus lies on what Hegel refers to as the “unhappy consciousness” and its experience of a disenchantment of the world, and on Christianity as the answer to this position. The discussion will be grounded on Hegel’s dialectical understanding of the concept of God. The divine and the human nature, must, according to him, be grasped as one and the same. The abstraction of the Christian deity must die, so that the notion of the unity of God and man, that actually constitutes the heart of Christianity, may be revealed beyond its spatial and temporal representations. I conclude that this for Hegel is the only way of escaping the situation of the unhappy consciousness.