(It's better to create than destroy what's unnecessary)

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Introduction To Christianity - pg. 120

The point of departure of this whole approach remains
the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is the expression
of the historical side of God and therefore of the way in which
God appears in history. Inasmuch as Hegel and - in a different
way - Schelling push this idea to its logical conclusion, they
reach the point where they no longer distinguish conclusion,
they reach the point where they no longer distinguish this
process of the historical self-revelation of God from a God
quietly resting in himself behind it all; instead, they now
understand the process of history as the process of God himself.
The historical form of God then becomes the gradual self-realization
of the divine; thus history certainly becomes the process of the
logos, but even the logos is only real as the process
of history. In other words, this means that it is only gradually in
the course of history that the logos - meaning of all being
- beings itself forth to itself. Thus the "historicization" of the doctrine
of the Trinity, as contained in Monarchianism, now becomes the
"historicization" of God. This again signifies that meaning is no longer
simply the creator of history, instead, history becomes the creator
of meaning and the latter becomes its creation. Karl Marx is the
only one who continued to think resolutely along these lines, by
asserting that if meaning does not precede man then it lies in the
future, which man must himself bring about by his own struggles.

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