Hegel saw clearly that God can be known to us only in and through
manifestation. We can certainly make no predication as to how God
exists, in himself, as men say, and apart from our knowledge. He exists
for our knowledge only as manifest in nature and man. Man is for Hegel
part of nature and Jesus is the highest point which the nature of God as
manifest in man has reached. In this sense Hegel sometimes even calls
nature the Son of God, and mankind and Jesus are thought of as parts of
this one manifestation of God. If the Scripture asserts, as it seemed to
the framers of the creeds to do, that God manifested himself from before
all worlds in and to a self-conscious personality like his own, Hegel
would answer: But the Scripture is no third source of knowledge, besides
nature and man. Scripture is only the record of God's revelation of
himself in and to men. If these men framed their profoundest thought in
this way, that is only because they lived in an age when men had all
their thoughts of this sort in a form which we can historically trace.
For Platonists and Neoplatonists, such as the makers of the creeds--and
some portions of the Scripture show this influence, as well--the divine,
the ideal, was always thought of as eternal. It always existed as pure
archetype before it ever existed as historic fact. The rabbins had a
speculation to the same effect. The divine which exists must have
pre-existed. Jesus as Son of God could not be thought of by the ancient
world in any terms but these. The divine was static, changelessly
perfect. For the modern man the divinest of all things is the mystery of
growth. The perfect man is not at the beginning, but far down the
immeasurable series of approaches to perfection. The perfection of other
men is the work of still other ages, in which this extraordinary and
inexplicable moral magnitude which Jesus is, has had its influence, and
conferred upon them power to aid them in the fulfilment of God's intent
for themselves, which is like that intent for himself which Jesus has
fulfilled.