Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad.

In this book, John H. Smith investigates the influences of classical and humanistic rhetoric on Hegel's theory and practice of philosophical representation. Smith focuses on Hegel's concept of Bildung (roughly, education, development, or formation) which occupies a central position in his philosophy.

This chapter examines how Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came to embrace the notion of God's _logos_ as spirit. To understand Hegel's approach to religion, it shows how his conception of God is defined in terms of _Geist_ and goes on to review the significance of that concept in terms of uniting the oppositions maintained by previous theologies. It also considers how Hegel arrived at this philosophical and theological concept himself through a process of intellectual development, from his theological manuscripts to (...) his later philosophy of religion. It argues that Hegel's God is spiritual in a new sense defined by him, that is, religion is defined in terms of a living _Geist_ that is both objective and subjective, transcendental and concrete. For Hegel, God reveals himself in the historical unfolding of a spirit, which is both substance and subject. His philosophy is one of the greatest modern attempts to save Christianity by grounding the identity of _logos_ and God in a notion of absolute spirit. (shrink)