Abstract

No student of Hegel would deny that the meaning of Christ as a religious symbol concerned the Master as a philosopher. In fact the division of Hegelians into a “right,” “center” and “left” was first made by David Friedrich Strauss in terms of the different positions taken about what Hegel’s philosophy implied concerning the historical referent of the Christ symbol. James Yerkes not only attempts to resolve this same issue which proved so fateful to the early Hegelians, but he also sets out to demonstrate what many of them contended, that is, that Hegel’s entire philosophical system can be properly interpreted only in light of his religious convictions about Christ. Yerkes claims that a Christian theological question about “the universal religious significance of the historic Christ event” is at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy, and, furthermore, that Hegel intended his speculative re-enactment of the Begriff of Christianity in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion to provide theologians with a language capable of conveying that universal significance.