Abstract

Adopting Kant´s implicitly secular standpoint, Hegel in his first major work, the Phenomenology of the Spirit, overcomes Kant´s ambivalence by formulating an explicitly secular theory of Religion. In addition to that, he elaborates a hermeneutic approach which enables him to explain the genesis of his secular position. Therefore, it has to be acknowledged that Hegel formulated a secularization theorem referring to a dynamics inherent in Christianity, and that he did so nearly one hundred years before Max Weber.