The Essence of Christianity

There is a problem with the speculative doctrine of God because it is in conscious contemplation of God that God is thought. In the act of contemplating, the person brings God into self-consciousness: “We are necessitated to regard the fact of God being thought by us, as his thinking himself, or his self-consciousness” (142). God’s distinction from humanity is a consciously held proposition, but ultimately their intertwining is inescapable, especially in the doctrines of creation and revelation.

In creation, God is ordered to creation, and creation must return to God. Similarly, in revelation, God reveals, and yet can only reveal to a conscious subject brought into being out of nothingness. In truth, it is the human being who is a god because in humanity “the divine essence first realises and unfolds itself. In the creation of Nature God goes out of himself, he has relation to what is other than himself, but in man he returns into himself:—man knows God, because in him God finds and knows himself, feels himself as God” (142). Human consciousness that comes to know the nature of God is a consciousness that has grasped the true nature of humanity. Theology necessarily becomes