Part 1: Jordan Wood Answers Hart Through Hegel

Welcome to Forging Plowshares, a community dedicated to cultivating the peaceful kingdom of God. We hope this part of our ongoing conversation stimulates your mind and challenges your heart about what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Please stay tuned at the end of the podcast for a short message about our ministry. This is Paul Axton, director of Forging Plowshares and Plowshares Bible Institute, and in this discussion with Jordan Daniel Wood, Matt and I then discuss with Jordan his recent publication on Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his embrace then of Hegel as an Orthodox Christian. We do this also then in conjunction with David Bentley Hart's critique of Jordan, and Jordan then rebuts this critique by turning to Hegel and pointing out that Hegel then is also an example of an alternative logic that he first encountered in Maximus the Confessor and which prepared him then for reading Hegel. And in this understanding then, there is the natural logic, but then there is also the logic of personhood, the logic that is encountered in the person of Christ. And this then seems to be the point at which Hart is no longer following or understanding what Jordan is saying. But in this discussion of Hegel, Jordan does a reassessment of Hegel in light and of this alternative reading. Forging Plowshares is a non-profit ministry, and we greatly appreciate your donations which allow us to continue both Forging Plowshares and Plowshares Bible Institute. Plowshares Bible Institute is one of the most in-depth seminary educations available, and it's open to all, that is, it is affordable for everyone. Donations can be made on the Outreach International website, oionline.org, through PayPal or through SimpleGive. Our project number is FP3901. Just select our project number when donating, but I hope you enjoy this discussion with Jordan Daniel Wood, part one of a two-part conversation with Jordan on his recent work with Hegel. Good to see you guys. Good to see you too. Your new job, everything going well? Yeah. Oh, are you talking to me? Oh, no. Yeah, you go first. We both have new jobs. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'll just say I got an office, you know, so, I got an office, and then, wait, hold on, I got the right tag for my -- Oh, nice. Oh, yeah. You ain't know who you are. That's all you need. That's the only, like, validation, that's the only credential that really matters. I don't even know where my diplomas are, but I have that, so. That's right. Yeah. No, I just started my first, I guess, kind of a job with a different hospice, so I just did it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Jordan, you got a bunch of classes? Yeah, I got a -- I got a 4/4 load, so I got, I mean, until, like, four sections, I technically have three preps, and one of them is a new prep. I've had -- this is my third semester, I've had at least one new prep every semester, so I feel like -- I don't know, I feel like I'm -- next semester, I won't have a new prep, and I'll only have two preps, and it'll be repeat, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. I think I'll get burnt out in terms of create, because the nice thing is, it's great here at Belmont, we have no micromanaging, they don't tell you anything about what to teach at all. I mean, it's like, you just get, like, a course title, and it's like, good luck, whatever you want to do, which is what -- which is, like, I'd prefer that to anything else. Oh, I can't beat that. No, but it -- but it does mean when you, you know, when you're asked to do a class you haven't done, that means you're building a class from, you know, from the ground up. So -- Right. I -- like, I had -- somebody's on sabbatical, and I -- so I'm teaching for this person the life and letters of Paul. Oh. So also, I'm kind of stupid, and I decided, oh, you know what I'm going to do to prep for this class, and to kind of just give it an interesting flavor, is I'm going to -- we're going to be working off my own translations of the letters. So I've been translating Paul -- Nice. It's just, like, it's great, and it's a good way to prep also, like, what I want to talk about, because it gets me really familiar with the text, but it's a lot of time, a lot of time. It's totally self-inflicted, so. Yeah. But once you do it, like, it's like, once you do that work, you know, you've got it. Exactly. Just for your own, for your own stuff. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's like, that is something that, at least, yeah, it'll have, like, a return -- a constant return to -- Absolutely. Yeah. Make some hard decisions, maybe, and -- Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. I've been translating it, and then I'll, like, I'll translate some, and then I'll look and see what David did, and then look at, you know, I don't know, NRSV or something, and just kind of see what people are doing. Yeah. But it's fun. Yeah. It's very fun. Awesome. But yeah, it's good. Good classes. So if you want to jump right into Hegel, or how do you want to do it? Well, I'm -- I think you're just getting over your computer -- Can you tell that my heart is racing, and -- Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty -- I think nothing makes me more angry than technology issues, man. Oh, let me introduce it a little bit, and then we can have some witty banter. Okay. And you guys do the witty part, and then Jordan, both Matt, and I was reading Hart's book today, and Matt has read it. So I want to -- I was hoping to kill two birds with a rock. And that is, of course, your piece on Hegel, but I really -- I think my questions will just sort of take you through that. But what I'm hoping will also happen, I almost think that in answering the questions about your Hegel piece, there is -- and maybe you want to correct me here -- there is the sense that you're already addressing Hart's criticisms of you. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think there's a lot -- I don't think that'll be forced, like, that connection, so. In my estimation, your appreciation of Hegel, which at this point is fairly unique in academic theology, at least in this country, but maybe in many places. I think the whole galaxy, because -- And Hart, of course, is, I think, a prime example of this, in that he says, "Well, you can either be a Gaelian or Christian." And I think that his form of thought is precisely -- and I'm not -- and you have it in a depth that I don't have, but is characteristic, then, of others who, then, are not able to make the leap, both that you are describing with Maximus and that you have this appreciation of Hegel. Is that accurate? Yeah. I think -- I mean, Hart is a little bit odd on Hegel, because on the one hand, I've heard him say in the company of Milbank and other people, after all, I think Trinity and Incarnation are truths of reason, like, I'm with Hegel on that. But then, I guess the question always becomes, like, who's Hegel, I guess, maybe is the problem, but then, yeah, but then he also has, to me, a remarkably crude read of Hegel's view of the, quote, unquote, "slaughter bench of history." I mean, it's almost like Hegel is just a processed theologian, like a pretty unproblematic processed theologian who's collapsed trance and eminence. I was just reiterating the 1830 introductory lecture to philosophy of world history, it's just obvious to me that's not what he's saying. So I think whereas, like, Milbank will give, like, no kudos to Hegel or whatever. He's a little more into the absolute, like, O'Regan train. What selectively does it, and I don't always know what's happening there. Yeah. Like, I just re-read the, you know, the section on where he's doing Williams and you. And you know, and I've just been hearing people kind of talk about how the, you know, kind of like there's two sides here, there's like Jordan's side and David's side or whatever. And it's like, I don't, I don't really see, actually, I see a ton of similarities between like the work that you're doing. Like more similarities than not, for sure, in like the work that you're doing and even in the stuff that he's doing in the light of, the light of Tabor, Tabor, how do you say it, Tabor, Tabor, Tabor, whatever. And I can just ask you later, but I just wanted to see, like, if you would characterize your Christology as sort of like a, as something different from monism, you know, but I don't think, I don't see like some kind of like unbridgeable chasm between like what he's doing and what you're doing precisely because of what you're doing with Christ. And I think that he's headed in that same direction. Like that's what he's doing too. So I don't understand like what the, the big huge divide is, but I know that Paul might have a different reading. We haven't talked about it yet. And you, and you could too, you could too. Like it could be too, it could be, you guys are absolutely doing two different things with two different understandings. I mean, obviously he has the whole, you know, he wants to kind of go back through the language of everything, right? Nature and he wants to talk about kind of like the inadequacy of just kind of like how things have transpired and how the pendulum keeps swinging this way and that way and stuff like that. Um, and he's already done a lot of this stuff and you are gods, you know, so he's kind of just plugged it into what he's doing now, but we'll just see, we'll see where the guys. Yeah. You want to respond to Matt before I do anything? Yeah. Only briefly, and then we can maybe bring some of this up later. Like, so there's, uh, there's two questions, right? One is the, um, the question of the way heart has rhetorically framed the difference between us, which in his terms is absolute. So he has actually been the one that has said it's an either or by the way, just real quick, I sat in on that seminar. I don't know if you know, but I was, I heard you kind of making some, so go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that question. Uh, and so I think like I've never said that and I don't, I've never really necessarily thought that because, you know, you also have to investigate whether or not people are just using terms, the same terms differently. Right. Um, but then the other thing is like, um, yeah, so then the question, so then the, another question would be like, is, is there a way to creatively, like speculatively bring to a forge a reproach man between the two? And I think on that, I think we could think that is possible, but you know, sometimes with David's rhetoric, I'm not sure he wants to even allow that in principle, but I think we could. And so I, I have some, you know, ideas for that, but if it's the latter, I mean, I think that that's what's going to be good for theology kind of thing. Cause it's like, um, you know, because I did get the sense at least during that seminar that you were like a little bit frustrated with kind of the way he was framing your, uh, your arguments, um, kind of unfairly, which I kind of got. Like I was like, yeah, I don't think that that's what Jordan's doing. I think that you must know that. So it felt kind of weird. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not, you know what I mean, no, no, it's just, no, I'm with you. I was actually pulling back cause I have all these notes all over the first manuscript. Um, but, um, yeah, I don't think he, it's, it's weird to say cause it's the thing David would always say against his critics, but it's like, yeah, you know, it seemed like you can't even really, you can't even really articulate what I'm saying very like fully. Like he'll, he'll pick certain little aspects out and then sort of tell a story around that that I, I don't say in the, I don't really say in the book. And so it was a little bit, I did, I was frustrated at that a little more than I thought I would be cause I didn't expect it would be that egregious. Yeah. Like with perichoresis and stuff like that, like I didn't, yeah, like we basically don't even get there. I mean, he doesn't even really do like, he doesn't even, like I know, I thought I laid out pretty clearly. Like there are four elements to this logic, you know, and the fourth one's kind of not even an element. It's a characteristic of the whole, like I really meticulously tried to lay it out. And so when someone can't even really like recount each of those and how they relate, it's a little like, well, sure, I could pick up, I could pick one element out and criticize it. If that, if someone was saying that's all that's going on, right, anyone can do that. I mean, the whole interesting thing about analyzing them apart was to show how then you can bring them together in a new way. Right. So I just, I don't see that he like recapitulates that anywhere. And especially like with such a technical, right, exactly, you know, it's kind of cool though that you're in kind of like, you know, that you play such a big, you know, you play kind of a central role. And I do think it could provide you with kind of like a nice way to retort, you know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not necessarily here, but just in writing or whatever. Yeah. But eventually I just, oh boy, I got, I have it on the docket, but I don't know when I'm going to get to it. Hopefully soon. I mean, I've read his, I've read his book twice. And I mean, I, if I don't, if I do say so myself, I very graciously endorsed. You did. I was thinking that. I was thinking that same exact thing actually. I was like, you know, this is really like generous, you know, he is very like, he's always giving you props of saying like, you know, this, you know, this guy is like, you know, and he, you know, he's just doing his thing to kind of, because in my, you know, this might, this is probably better for the recording, but my, my, you know, my reading of the whole situation, who, you know, it's just who am I, but it's like you and David are kind of doing more for the whole Christological kind of debate, maybe than anybody in the world in terms of, right, like moving the conversation forward, which is what we should be doing. Yeah. And so it's kind of, it's kind of cool that, I mean, being in the same paragraph as like Rowan Williams is pretty cool. It is true. Okay. At the end of the day, it's like, yeah, it's like, I remember when he was first doing this or Milbank or whoever, I can't remember now, but yeah, it's like, it is odd. I mean, it's like, these are guys that I read, you know, when I was in college and they were, they were already like kind of the, the ones to look to for me and it is, I would have never guessed that, you know, with like my first book, I would be thrown, one of those guys would be critiquing my me with the other guy. Yeah. So it's amazing, man. It's a really, it's this beautiful thing and, but let me give you a darker reading. Matt is very, I love this Paul, very generous person, you know, he wants us all to be friends. I don't think, I don't think David's going to ever understand you. I don't think he can make the paradigm shift that you are advocating. I don't think he understands the shift. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's also, I mean, if we're going to be fully honest about that, David's got a lot, like a lot of money in the bank, not to get it too. And I don't, I'm not at all suggesting he's like motivated by some kind of ulterior motives, but I'm just saying, it's not actually about that. It's not like anything political or whatever. He was fighting Robert Jensen on analogous or adjacent issues 20 plus years ago, when he was like my age. So he related to Jensen the way like now I'm coming along relating to him. It's just so having said, I'm probably closer to Jensen on some of this stuff than I am to him or I'm like a mediating figure or something. And so there's, there's a part of like, I sometimes wonder if he thinks like he's being haunted by, by the fights, the fights he picked two decades ago. You know, and, and that was the whole thing, you know, for a while and, and his, his stuff with Jensen and McCormick and some of his guys. So there's that. There's also just, he's, he's also very invested in a kind of like, I know he doesn't like it being called this, but sort of like a perennialist thing where, and actually I think Rowan Williams and him, he, those two were probably closer on this point where in the interest of an inter religious dialogue and stuff like that, they don't want to necessarily get in, they don't want to add to the distinction, the distinctive claims that Christian would make if, if they're superfluous barriers to kind of communication with other traditions and other perspectives, which on, which on that level, I, I like, I certainly sympathize with that because I'm not, I'm not like an intellectual colonialist or something. But yeah, so there's a lot of ways in which I think, I think Hart is pretty entrenched. Let's put it that way. He's pretty entrenched. Yeah. Which is weird too, because it like my reading, unless I don't have this right, is that he was basically saying something like Williams, Jesus is too human, Woods, Jesus is too divine or something like that. So in other words, it's like, unless I don't have that, you know, that, there's like a reduction, you know, reductive kind of way to like say it, but that just, I don't know, that seems weird. Yeah. That's how that would fall with being a perennialist. It's like, whoa. Right. If Jordan's Jesus is too divine, maybe, is that like a, I don't know. I like both. You know, I feel like there's got to be a way to kind of bring both of you guys together. I think here's what I think maybe. Paul doesn't think it can happen. Or we could, well, you know, you don't have to have the actual proponent personally convinced for there to be a reproachments. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm not sure David will ever get to a point where he'll say, you know, I think Jordan and I agree. I don't know if that'll ever happen. Yeah. Yeah. That's not going to happen for a lot of reasons. Yeah. I don't think that would happen. Yeah. However, you know, there could be other people out there that are pretty influenced by David or something and then they might see like, well, I don't know. Like maybe they might take your view and then, and just kind of be like, yeah, I don't know if David thinks that or not, but I think that about them. So like, no, what am I missing, Paul, that you're saying that, oh, you know, no, the, the, the chasm is too wide to harm, we'll never get it. And Jordan, this is, I think that I said this during the class is the same discussion. It's not a new discussion. Just that he's come out clearly now and said where he stands. He rejects bear's notion that there is no logos, a sarcos or that, you know, bear is embracing that as I see your work and I see the tradition. What bear is saying as I understand you're in line with what bear is saying is that understanding is really the key behind what is passed down through the Alexandrians to Maximus. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think there are ways we could reframe that. I mean, because there is like a, you know, that the way that that kind of discussion comes out of the Lutheran verse reformed people, and then the way you can find resonances or versions of that same discussion within the Orthodox tradition, you could make interesting like nuances, right? You could say, for example, like the logos, a sarcos, if, if it's only those terms, you know, sarcos or, or in sarcos or a sarcos, then there's a kind of way in which that's already kind of, that could already miss the point, right? Because the sarcos is the humanity. So, so it's, so the same word is both the fore and after the, the things that we conceive when we think of his nature, his human nature. So like, but those are kind of like nuance in the details thing, but I think the way your point is, is that, you know, that Jesus of Nazareth is identical in his person with the second person of the Trinity, such that Jesus of Nazareth himself becomes the kind of within himself, he becomes the reciprocal causality of all the other ways that we formulate binaries, right? And that's that I don't think, I think David wants to push that back into like, I don't know what he calls it different things, but like, divine Sophia or something like he wants to push it back to like God, God in the mode of becoming God in the mode of being. But I think his very need to push it back is already a sign that we don't have the same intuitions on some of this. Because I don't think you're, when you're going back, you're going more primordial. Yeah. And of course, this is a no way to take away from Hertz, genius and all that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And that is his vision that it, and I think this is partly your work. I think that you, but this isn't a paradigm shift that I think that Hagel is kind of the test case. So let me, let me introduce the, I'm here with Jordan Wood and Matt Welch. And today we're going to intertwine two conversations. Jordan recently published on his, what are you, not a blog, everybody tells me I should get one of these, but on Hagel, now, Jordan, I didn't actually go back. You had sent me the paper or did I assume you revised it some. Yeah. I revised it a little bit and added some stuff from his 1802 work, faith and knowledge. And so I, I have, since the time that you taught a class for us and we discussed Hagel, you sent me that, I encourage you to publish it, to put it out there. And you did. I don't think anybody's attacked you in any kind of physical way as of yet. Not yet. Not yet. Who knows. I think this is a marker. And so we want to discuss, I just want to kind of take you through that with some questions. But at the same time, David Bentley Hart has finally articulated in a book where he is clearly departing and at least in his mind. And I think in reality that is that he says this Jordan Wood has got it wrong. He's a bright guy, but unfortunately he just can't get his logic together. And, you know, and so he has clearly come out in disagreement with both you and Rowan Williams, that Rowan Williams, the book, the heart of creation. So I think there's, there's a similar text. So we'll try to do both. We don't absolutely have to. But I want to, I want to start, George, you know, I, if somebody would come along and say to me, tell me your confidence in pronouncing judgments on the Hegelian corpus. I don't think my confidence would register on the meter at all. Maybe a little bit. I've done some reading. I've read, you know, especially his work around the philosophical arguments. I've dipped into Hegel. But so just give us an idea of if somebody asked you, what is your familiarity with the Hegelian corpus and how would you rate yourself in terms of your confidence, your acquaintance with, with, in regard to Hegel. Oh, that's a tough one. Well, I'm certainly no Hegel expert, you know, I wouldn't say I have the exact sort of mastery over the texts of Hegel as, as I might be expected to have for Maximus or Origen or Gregory or something like that. But however, I will say that I've, I've read quite a bit of Hegel by this point. And I did so originally at all, actually with the motive of critique. I mean, I didn't go to read Hegel because I thought I was going to find an ally. I was looking for a foe because I had been told, A, that my reading of Maximus sort of sounded Hegelian. I didn't quite know what that meant, but I knew it meant something bad. I'd never been formally taught Hegel or Kant for that matter or any of them. So anyway, as an Ozark, you know, the funny thing about that is at Ozark, I, I was going through a Wittgenstein phase. So in some ways, you know, I still like picture, but so I actually did read all of Wittgenstein except his lectures on mathematics at Ozark because I convinced the Dean to let me do that instead of take the philosophy class. So no, I didn't do Hegel and Ozark, but I did do Wittgenstein. But um, yeah, no, I, I, you know, and I just, I kind of always heard the sort of very vague, uh, you know, bogeyman narratives and caricatures of Hegel where it was like, like Hegel was just to me the absolute ambitious, prideful rationalists. Like that's always what I, like he stood in as a symbol for that. It was like, it was like the hubris, the kind of almost the, the, the imperian heights of enlightenment hubris like that. That's really because Hegel was the guy who thought all the entire history and, and, and unfurling and culmination of human rationality, uh, was summed up or as it were, he recapitulated in himself, like in his actual person. And so, and so it was sort of, I was, I was primed to, to really find something wrong with him. And I thought it would be along those lines as a kind of, you know, I don't know, uh, over overweening process, theologian or something. So um, I started reading him while I was already well underway writing my dissertation on Maximus just in, uh, after I read Kant. And so then I read, uh, Hegel. And so, but yeah, since then I would, I, I spent a lot of time carving out time on the side as I could reading him. So I wouldn't, I'm no expert whatsoever. I'm still a dilettante and an amateur, but, uh, I've, I've been pretty, and I have to say too, this, the other thing that's important, I am not very good on like the secondary literature out there, the vast secondary literature and the right left, uh, legacies of Hegel. I don't have mastery over that at all. I wouldn't say that I do, I have, I've dipped into, you know, certain kind of, uh, touch points, but I almost intentionally though have issued that. I mean, that sounds better than saying, I just haven't had time, right? But no, but the truth is this is what happened to me as well with Maximus. Like there's, I always, once I get an inkling that I really want to know someone's thought, but they're a pretty controversial figure, I intentionally stopped reading secondary accounts until I've read a sufficient amount, we'll say, of, of the corpus of the person for myself and try to interpret them for myself, that might be idealistic, that might be whatever. But, um, so that's what I've done with Hegel. So I've required a lot of, of Hegel, the greater logic, the lesser logic, the phenomenology, a lot of the early writings, faith and knowledge, several, you know, lectures on the history of philosophy and lectures on, uh, philosophy of real history, you know, parts of, I had not read all yet of the philosophy of right, but the, so I've read a lot of those. And I think the only exception to what I said about secondary literature, you know, besides listening to the lecture off here and there is that I have, I have read quite a bit of a, the Jewish Hegelian philosopher, Gillian Rose, and she's, I really like her for a lot of reasons. And as you know, Paul probably pretty well, she doesn't, other than, other than her work Hegel-Contra sociology, she doesn't, she's not like an expo, a mere exposer of Hegel. She'll bring him in. I mean, she's a thinker in her own right and doing her own thing, but, uh, you know, when she brings in Hegel, it's like bringing in the hammer. So she's, she's, and I think she's a very good, when you do get glimpses of like her sustained readings of Hegel, especially in Hegel-Contra sociology, but in some other ones as well, it's, she's one of the better reading readers of Hegel that I've ever heard of. Although as I said, I, you know, I wouldn't say I'm well acquainted with all of them out there. So anyway, that might be too much there, but that's kind of my relation to Hegel, or where my interest in reading him came from and kind of where I stand. Did you happen to read Kierkegaard before or after Hegel? Because I'm wondering if, I'm wondering, I spent a summer at the Kierkegaard Library with Gordon Merino up there. And we, you know, I, I'm wondering, I want to go back through Kierkegaard, but I'm wondering if he read, uh, I'm wondering if he read Hegel correctly or if he got it wrong. But I'm just wondering, did you, did you do Kierkegaard before or after? Do you remember? Uh, mostly before, but also a little after, since then, although I would like to do a more full revisit at some point, because, um, so just as a side note to some of you, Julian Rose is a really interesting interaction with Kierkegaard in, um, her book, um, The Broken Middle. And, uh, she has, you know, what she's really attentive to, and this kind of gives me pause and makes me kind of want to go back and read him a little more carefully. She's really attentive to the, the, what she calls the author ships in, in Kierkegaard. So she does, she is not, she does not think we should take just anything, you know, he writes under whatever pseudonym as his view whatsoever. And I think that's not so controversial, but even like what he says to the being of fear and trembling, you know, where he's really mocking, like satirizing Hegel and have mastered the system. And, you know, I've found this, you know, um, the, she's, she's not even, I don't even know if she's totally sure that that's straightforward, what he's actually saying. So anyway, I, I, I want to, you know, I, I'll suspend my judgment on him. Uh, for now, uh, until I give it, give him, go back and give him what I think he deserves more closely. I almost think Kierkegaard is so wrapped up in, in who you think Hegel is that I almost can't think that I can now, uh, trust someone's intuition on Kierkegaard unless I know what they think about Hegel and maybe vice versa. Yeah. Yeah. That's the same. I mean, I just think that, you know, you can get that same kind of like poison, like in other words, like if you eat Kierkegaard in the wrong way, um, and not according to the pseudonyms and stuff like that, like you could get that same kind of almost call like a fundamentalist sort of like, um, suspicion of, of Hegel. Um, but I'm wondering if you, if I would go back now, um, you know, and kind of look at it again. Um, so, yeah, absolutely, and I am guilty, uh, of this thing. I, everybody told me, you know, this is what Hegel says. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. That's what, you know, and Giac, I thought, at least gave him a reading that, you know, was, he gave him, so I, until, uh, uh, it was you, it's your fault. Uh, I, you caused me and in an, in, you know, when the class that we were doing, then I was teaching an apologetics class and I went back and started reading his stuff on the philosophical arguments. Yeah. And then you read a little bit about his stuff on John and it, and suddenly, well, certainly there, and I can't claim everywhere, but there, Hegel is an orthodox Christian. That's what he's saying. He's saying he's Trinitarian and that he's more Trinitarian than his contemporaries. In fact, he accuses his contemporaries of not really, you know, he said, well, do you really believe he thinks they, they would deny that. So when we come to the two interlocutors that you take on William Desmond, who I don't know, did you ever listen to our interview with? I listened to, because you had multiple ones, right? I had two. Okay. I only listened to, I think the first one, but I haven't got to the second one yet. Okay. So William Desmond has more or less spent his career reading Hegel and Cyril, Cyril Regan. I know people who say, well, who's the, who's the guy you're going to read is, you know, he's also then put on a major work on Hegel. And of course I read, I read both those guys, at least in part, again, prior to dipping into Hegel. But you question their reading at several levels and cook. Can you explain then the, the way in which you critique the two of them? Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, and that's, look, I mean, I say in there, I mean, there are accomplished readers of Hegel. There are a lot of people that are, that do spitball sort of the caricatures in the summaries. And I don't really consider them that I don't consider them people that are just saying stuff or whatever, you know, obviously they know the text and they've struggled with it. So I mean, you know, props to them on that, of course. And I've learned from their work as well and I will continue to read them. I focus on, there's two ways you could kind of consider their reading. I think, I think their understanding of Hegel's relationship with like Kant and his sort of critical on the one hand, appreciation of Kant and thinking of Kant as a necessary moment to sort of delimit the kind of, kind of reason zone, as he would maybe say, a negative self, like it's sort of the negativity or negative philosophy that kind of ends in using enemies and limits. But he thinks that's necessary. I also think Shelling thinks that too, but not everybody agrees with me, I guess on that. But then, but then going beyond Kant from within Kant's own system, I think they kind of, I don't think they get the exact way he does that. That's one sort of critique. And so, right, he, like to me, the very, one of the very points that Hegel is trying to make against Kant's limitations is that basically you can't delimit, like to, here's my shorthand because there are several different angles we can go here. To call it limits, to call the, the antennae's limits is already a kind of interpretation handed on by, by that which is limited, which is supposed to be the intellect or the understanding as they put it. But it's, it's not, I mean, to say that's an absolute limit already implies that the thing that's limiting is, is the thing that's perceiving the limits and interpreting it that way. But then that would mean it's not limited, maybe it's limited in a certain way, but it's not totally limited in another way, et cetera, et cetera. So I think what, but the important thing about that, that's not, I don't think super yet groundbreaking or anything, but what's important to see that is that the, then these limits where Kant sort of breaks them, like sort of where the water sort of breaks along the shores, say between subject and object, the breaking between, you know, the thing in itself and the phenomenon or the numinal and the phenomenon, these sort of breakages are, then are going to be themselves subject to reinterpretation, if it is the case that the limits aren't absolute. That's very important specifically for the kinds of critiques, and I think the kinds of rhetoric and sometimes in some ways that those, those critics of Hegel will often kind of jump into, because they really need Hegel to be that thing that I said earlier, which is a kind of almost like prideful, impious, rash subject who thinks he can sort of master the objective given by the powers of his own subjective intellect. It's almost like Satanic. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's very, so you can quickly, it's, it slips into notions of yeah, possessiveness, a kind of imperialist mentality or something like that. And so I just think it's, that's already questionable from the get go because Hegel's very careful in multiple places to say, even to know, yes, he uses the word concept, like in the concept being and thought are one, but he explicitly says it's not the way we normally use concept and the way we normally use it is more like the idea stuck in my head or my theory that I've sort of concocted through my own head. That's just a mere model that's a subjective take on the world. And that's not at all what he's, what he's after. So there's the philosophical kind of a critique there, but I think probably where my essay weighs in a little more directly, and I do have some inspiration, I should say, from like Peter Hodgson, who's, who's gave his entire career to Hegel and editing Hegel's texts and translating Hegel's texts and writing books on Hegel, and F.C. Bauer and some others. Hodgson also has critiques of Desmond that are similar to mine. And so I cite, I cite some of his work that it's worth looking at, as well as Stephen Holgate, another person. But I would say the two, what I call like the two theological motives or reasons that Hegel has, I basically think those now, somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me the way I read Desmond and O'Regan, they basically just don't take him seriously. That is to say, they either don't register that, register what he brings up kind of all over the place in terms of these two theological reasons that I'll get to in a second. Or they think, or they really think kind of more, I would especially say on the O'Regan side, they kind of think it's, it's like he's speaking in bad faith or something. I think I say in the piece, like almost like a planned conspiracy or something like a true, I mean, they use words like expressions like Trojan horse and stuff, a counterfeit and all that. So the idea is that Hegel is constantly speaking in Christian concepts and language and Christian doctrines and ideas and beliefs, but He's constantly undermining those very things. Well, that's a complicated sort of charge to make. And because I would think, and this is my initial point, I would think if you're going to make that kind of argument, then you better lay out very clearly what you think is the genuine, proper Orthodox Christian, and oddly to me, I never see them do that. You say that in the piece too, it's like, we might want to be specific. Right. I mean, I think, and then it does get a little disconcerting, especially in O'Regan's case where like an anatomy of misremembering, he's actually, he actually is citing Kierkegaard, I think in this text. And he says something like, I don't know, I don't think this is a quote from Kierkegaard, but he's sort of glossing something else. Kierkegaard said, he's like, basically with Hegel, you can't ever fight him head on. All you can do is like, sort of, you know, put a stick in the spokes of the tires and have him like trip or whatever. Like you can, you always have to indirectly argue against Hegel because as soon as you think you can directly outwit him, you're already caught up in like his dialectic or something. Okay. I mean, my thing is like, so then it becomes this task of genealogical argument where you want to link Hegel, I think I call it in the piece, argument by adjective. You know, so you just give him bad association and bad, you know, bad company corrupts good morals. So, so I think like, it's not that they're the only ones that have done that, of course, I don't mean that. But if you're going to engage in that kind of thing, you're going to have to get very clear on what is orthodox Christian theology on things like the Trinity and the Incarnation and their relation to deification and the creation of the world and all that. You're going to have to be very clear on what you mean when you use adjectives like Gnostic or Valentinian or etc, etc, etc. You're going to have to be then very direct and and and like offer a very compelling exegesis of exactly where Hegel is going wrong on almost like an objective sense, like where does he to use O'Riggins term swerve away from the tradition, right? And if you're going to even go further, like to be honest, I do think sometimes they do and actually start to attribute ill will and intent like like an intentional, um, yeah, like third deception. Yeah, exactly. It's just a deception, a sort of artifice. Then then you got to really do some work to do that. That's a tough argument to make. I mean, now we're talking about being in someone's head, knowing exactly what their will is that they don't state. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I get pretty nervous about all of those moves. So anyway, I'm sorry, that was a lot of throat clearing in terms of my red flags. The two theological, I'll just list them and then you guys can tell me where you want to go. The two theological arguments that Hegel himself, so my move rhetorically here and kind of polemically is to say, well, I'm going to go ahead and just revisit what he actually says instead of speculate about his sort of the deep intentions and the recesses of his heart. And I'm going to say what he says constantly is number one, faith is basically the divine self-knowing in us. So that there is no such thing as an autonomous, as to say severed off an independent autonomous human reason. It is always already the, if you will, the divine logos, the reason in us. I mean, it's very, I just taught this text the other day to my students, but 1 Corinthians, you know, one in two, where, where, you know, no one knows a man's spirit better than that, that man's own spirit. No one knows the man, what's in a man, that's what it says. No one knows the things in a man better than that man's own spirit. But we have the spirit who searches the depths of divinity. We have the mind of Christ is how that paragraph ends, which is an amazing thing. It's very hard for me. Yeah. I mean, that's a very hard for me not to read and get the sense that that's awesome. The only reason why we can know God is because God is knowing God in us. Mm hmm. Yes, it's a process. Yes, they're involved. Cooperation. Yes, it's, it's not. And I mean, all of that is true. It's not an immediate insight that a flash that lights up the entire system. And now you know everything, but nevertheless, it is it's also not just humanity trying to claw its way up by its own autonomous severed off bootstraps of, you know, the mind's bootstraps in order to storm the gates of heaven and, you know, coerce God into giving up the secrets of his own divinity. No, no, no. It's always an only a response to the descent of human reason in, I'm sorry, divine reason in and as human reason. So that for me, this is why Hegel thinks faith needs to be considered a modality, if you will, or even in a way, a beginning and an end of knowledge, not its mere and synthesis as you will find in Kant or Jacobi or other people. So that's one faith. That's one theological theme that I don't see them paying much attention to. It's important. It's important in terms of what we're what we can know, you know. And secondly, the other one is then as it were the object of faith. So there I was speaking a little bit more in the subjective what's going on with faith in the believer and the one who is, you know, trying to know God, essentially. Of course, the object of faith and Hegel states this very clearly is the is the God human is Christ. It's just that he thinks, as you all know that I do, that even though the finite initial finite manifestation of that incarnation, yes, had to be in a sense individual, and of events in history, had to be an actual time and place. He's very clear on all that too, Hegel is, he thinks it has to be an object in human history, because since objects, it must be subject to sense certainty, which is the first sort of levels of awareness for him. Nevertheless, the scope of that, the scope of those events that do arise in the middle of history are not themselves absolutely limited by the initial conditions of that history. And so those, I mean, he at one point he says, I quoted somewhere in there, he almost sounds like Irenaeus or somebody, because he ends up saying like, the events of the gospels, like of the life of Christ as it's laid out is quote, something like an entire, a whole articulation of the divine nature itself. And you know, and, and, yeah, I mean, that to me sounds very much like, so if that's the object of faith, and if the faith on this quote unquote, subjective side is already God's self-knowing, and what we're talking about here is you put those two together, we're talking about faith as the subjective appropriation of the objective accomplished fact of the incarnation in you. And this for him is the ground of, what do you want to call it, I don't know, speculative philosophy, the knowing, yeah, knowing the perfection of Christianity, I mean, you know, of course, for him, the whole idea is, none of those divisions are absolute, right? So eventually they sort of become, they have the same content, and then the mood sort of come together. Anyway, that was quite a lot, but I, those are the themes and like kind of the, those are the things that my Hegel constant, Hegel thinks it's impious. This is the other final, this is more the rhetorical side of all that I just said. He thinks that it's, he quote, calls it quote, a striving against the spirit, a resistance to the spirit itself, to tell anybody abstractly you cannot know God, you cannot know the infinite, you cannot know, beyond just our immediate intuitions, but you never hoped to articulate any of this and concepts or whatever. He thinks that's basically amounts to a denial of a the object of faith, which is the incarnate God that God can become something knowable and still remain God, and it's a denial of the faith's character, as knowledge and as God's self knowledge, and it's almost like you're saying, surely the spirit of God cannot reside in me, surely I am not the temple. I am not the body of Christ, but it's Paul who says you have the mind of Christ. So what are you going to do, reject that? And now who's impious? Right. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like, you know, it's kind of interesting what you're doing. You're saying, let's, let's take, let's read Hegel in good faith and actually take him seriously. So familiar? Exactly. Yeah. So you do the same, like the same exact move, you know, with Maximus, right? Right. And you say, Hey, it sounds like all these different readers are not actually taking Maximus at his word when he says this, you know, seemingly sort of outlandish or, you know, awesome, really thing. Um, you know, and, you know, so I'm kind of, first of all, I don't remember if you, I don't think you just told us this just now, but did you read Hegel before Maximus or Maximus before Hegel? That would be part one. And then the second thing is, you know, how did you end up concluding sort of, um, that Hegel was more orthodox than, was it through the help of Maximus or? Yeah. Um, I mean, so first of all, yeah, I read lots more of Maximus prior to really reading Hegel. Before I had owned, before I really read Maximus very, very in depth, I think I'd only ever read one brief excerpt from the introductory lecture of Hegel's philosophy of world history. And it's always the excerpt, they cut it in such a way, honestly, it's pretty shameful. A lot of people cut it in such a way that it sounds like Hegel when he makes, that's where he makes the reference to the slaughter, the slaughter bench of history and to whom are these sacrifices given and all this. Um, that's all I had read. So actually, so again, I was primed against him. The only text I really ever knew of Hegel himself was setting me up to think Hegel really did think all this evil tragedy and the violence and the nonsensical, uh, you know, sort of perotactic, you know, and we need it all. We need it all. We need it all. Yeah. So that's all. No, I had read, so then I, I was well into Maximus, but so then the other side of that, the second question, it does mean, look, I can't, I don't know what it would have been like for me to read Hegel having not already started to think pretty deeply through Maximus. And yes, so maybe, maybe I, maybe I was more, I could see things in Hegel more clearly because of what I've seen in Maximus. That's definitely possible. It's also, I also have to consider as a sort of, you know, as a reader who can make mistakes that maybe I'm reading into Hegel, what I've already found, I think in Maximus, I, I don't think so. And I try to, that's why I try to give all the texts that I do in the, in the, even just in the short article and anything else I ever write on Hegel, I'm going to do the same. But, um, but, uh, but yeah, but, uh, but I have no problem saying, you know, look, I'm not, I wasn't trained as a philosopher, uh, or, and so certainly not a Hegelian or something. So I, I didn't have any stakes in like, right. You know, Hegel's my guy, I very much am reading him deliberately as a, uh, yes, in his time and place. And so you've got to consider what's going on in philosophy and all that stuff. I mean, I get it. And the tension between philosophy and theology at the time and all that. But I'm reading him as, you know, he is a Lutheran Christian who also was one of the most brilliant philosophers of the past many, many centuries to cause somebody that's dear to your heart, Matt, Matt Welsh, uh, it's Vladimir, Vladimir Soloviev, who has said that all of these guys, I mean, he's including Hegel, Shelling, uh, I think Kant as well. There's been a footnote in one of his lectures to God, manhood. He says, look, basically he says in a paraphrase, he says basically what Plato and Aristotle were to the entire pre-modern world. These guys are to our world. And uh, I think he's right. So I'm, you know, so, uh, I would even maybe change a little bit and say, and Hegel differently from Plato and Aristotle, Hegel is also a Christian and explicitly bringing in the content of the two mysteries of the Christian faith in the philosophy, but in a way that's also philosophically rigorous. So that's a very tough, it's a tough one. That's a tough project, but it's a really interesting one. So yeah, I'm, so I'm definitely reading all these guys together for sure. Cause ultimately, as you guys know, I mean, you know, look, if Maximus is wrong about something then he's wrong. If Hegel is wrong about something, he's wrong. I don't, I don't need anybody to be all right all the time. And so I want to think about the truth through these guys. And so yeah, I'm doing it kind of in concert, but I think that reading Maximus, I had the same experience or this is preparing you to read Hegel in an alternative fashion that I don't think most people understand the shift that is taking place with Maximus. That is preparation for Hegel in other words, it's almost like you do, you do Maximus in the way that you've done Maximus and then you pick up Hegel again and suddenly this argument is so familiar and exactly not this thing that people have portrayed. Just for people who may have not read the whole mystery of Christ, which by the way if you haven't you should pause the podcast and jump online right now and go buy it somewhere. But what is that shift and what was it from and what's it to? Yeah, yeah, great question. The shift is, I think there's a lot of ways to characterize it and Paul, you could speak into this too, because you've had this experience, but here's one way I'd put it. The shift is two, two steps, at least. One is to see that the Incarnation is never some sort of afterthought or an accidental act of God to say in reaction to the fall or something like that. As I've been saying recently, it is the first, last and only idea for the entirety of the world, so it's the Incarnation, which is, again, this is just Maximus' question 60, response to questions of the last, this is where you go, I mean, very clear there, what is achieved in Christ, which he there calls the perfect identity in every way of humanity and divinity, that's what he says there, that he says also there is the reason for which we were made, it is the reason for which we receive our beginning, our key, our principle or origin, and our telos in this, and he says this is the reason for which all things were made and which itself, it was made for nothing higher, there is no higher reason, it is the first and only fundamental and highest reason, which is to say what was accomplished already in the midst of history, in the perfect identity in every way of humanity and divinity is the very thing that ought to be accomplished in all the rest of history, and in every creature and in everything, so that's one, one is to see the Incarnation as the disclosure or the revelation, not just of how we can be saved from sin, but of what creation was always meant to be from eternity. So it's the reason for the world, not just the disclosure of God's reason of himself, it's the disclosure of the God-world relation itself. Number one. Number two, and more quickly, when you start thinking through the details of what that Incarnation really is, one of the things I make a big deal about in the book in the whole Mystery of Crisis is this distinction of logics. Now, the logic is not a thing, so I'm not distinguishing things, I'm distinguishing aspects or intelligibilities of one and the same life. And when you do that, I do think you have to, both in the Incarnation, for that matter, for the Trinity, you have to distinguish between what I would call the logic of nature and then the logic of person or a hypothesis. Calling it a logic does two things. I just have to say this because we're sort of forecasting maybe some discussions with critics from heart, but critiques from him. But a logic, first of all, as I've already said, is not a division in the actual being itself, it's an analytic division in order to understand it. So it's like a heuristic slash, but it has its own intelligibility, but you never separate there is no hypothesis that has no nature. And there's no nature, in fact, that has no hypothesis. So there's never separate number one. But the number two, it also means that you can speak about like you can articulate logics in different terms that are not necessarily the terms of like so it's not like Hegel not won't be using hypothesis and was the or anything like that. He's not using the Calcedonian definition. But he will use human and human and divine. He does he does use, as I said, right, the human life of Jesus articulates the divine nature. I mean, he'll use things that are analogous to that. They're close to it. And I want to say that that when you do that, what becomes possible on the level of the person or the dimension or the logic of the person is not necessarily possible when when you limit yourself simply to the logic of natures. And so a nature like say human nature is what what do we want to say it's human nature has a beginning is created. God the creator isn't is not created. This is kind of where we start. This is how you start thinking. Now, what you come to realize when you really contemplate Christ, in my opinion, is that what you first apprehended as distinct, because like they're distinct ideas and you called two different natures, which is to say two different kinds of reality, that seemed like on the level on the level that you distinguish them eternity time without a beginning with a beginning, all these things, right, they're not reconcilable on that level. You can't reconcile realities by the same principle with the same principle by which you divided them in the first place. That would actually be called a contradiction and an absurdity. So it would be absurd to say divinity is humanity period. It is not absurd to say the person of Jesus is divine and human. Those are not the same claim. Right. So yeah, distinguishing logic of nature person I think is important because it creates the sort of possibility for a difference kind of dialectic. And that's we've just entered the territory you you've really in this simple little conversation. You've introduced an alternative logic, an alternative concept in Hegel's terms, that is then parallel with in fact a seeming an extension of I don't know, of Maximus to Hegel. And this is precisely where somebody like heart, he can't follow you. Why, why do you think he can't? Paul, from your perspective, because he is entrenched and you you'll know better, you can tell me if my understanding is. In other words, he's entrenched. He's he's committed to a neoplatonist reason in which by nature all have this capacity for the divine. And he wants then not to make the logical distinction that you're making. And I think he has a vested interest in his whole study of Vedantic religion, in his understanding of Japanese religion, in his reading of the New Testament and his interpretation of Paul, that he can't go where you're going. In other words, he wants to flat out is the right word, but he wants there to be a singular logic and a singular reason that is open to all equally. And I think that's why he can't follow you. Yeah. Yeah, as I said before, I think like he he has cast it in terms of sort of an absolute difference between us, I think his words were something like an absolute gap, chasm, maybe lies between us. I don't think that necessarily. But I do agree that I mean, obviously, I think that the way I'm trying to articulate it through Maximus and through Hegel and so forth is superior. It's a better way of executing what I think are common intuitions. So and I think Matt, you were talking about this before we got on here, but like, I do think David and I have what are our intuitions are way closer to each other than most of the time either of ours is to most people out there. I think so. Yeah. And I do think sometimes the difference ends up being around the execution of those intuitions. And I don't think it's convincing to say, you know, we should consider root vegetables and acorn doesn't turn into a rabbit. Yeah. And the reason why I don't is because if you elide the moment, the essential moment of distinction or contrast, a difference, what I would just call a distinction of natures, then you actually simultaneously lose the sense of the peculiarity of the sense of identity when those two natures are in how those two natures are one. Forging plowshares is a community dedicated to cultivating the peaceful kingdom by providing in depth transformative biblical and theological education and discipleship. If you have found this podcast valuable, please remember to share on social media. If you have questions about what you've heard, or if you'd like to learn more about how you can get involved with forging plowshares, or even support this ministry financially, please visit our website forgingplowshares.org. [BLANK_AUDIO]