Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

• Deuteronomy 6:5

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
    He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
    he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake.

• Psalm 23:1-3

I will be glad and rejoice in your love,
    for you saw my affliction
    and knew the anguish of my soul.
You have not given me into the hands of the enemy
    but have set my feet in a spacious place.
Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress;
    my eyes grow weak with sorrow,
    my soul and body with grief.

• Psalm 31:7-9

“ ‘The Finite Has No Genuine Being. ’ – Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel”

• Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), was a German philosopher who was said to have found middle ground between Fichte and Schelling.  He had been a roommate of Schelling, but his philosophy blossomed later.

Hegel was a Lutheran, but some read his philosophy and thought him to be an atheist, at least only a Christian in an intellectual sense.

But the short quote above provides a candlelight on Hegel’s prime theme.  We all have a need to explain that which is between the mind and the spirit.  He called it Geist, but Geist is simply the German word for “spirit.”  But if you look at much of his writings, he is writing about the soul.  Our soul is eternal, thus it is not finite.

I might lose a few animal lovers here, but animals are not the same as humans.  They do not have a soul.  There will be animals in Heaven, but other than humans, everything is finite.

I am going through a Thursday Bible study on First Corinthians, but I am also going through a similar study in my Sunday school class.

Note: Do not do that at home.  It gets very confusing as to which chapter you are talking about at the time.

But in 1 Corinthians 12-14 we see a discussion on Spiritual Gifts.  In the middle of this, Paul takes a side turn.  Spiritual gifts are good in their own way, but many are temporary.  When we are with Jesus, prophecy, understanding, and teaching are meaningless.  We have Jesus right there.  But what is lasting are faith, hope, and love (charity).  Our soul is eternal, but even Spiritual gifts have time limits.

Hegel spent a great deal of time developing his philosophy when the Bible already had the answers.  Yes, the philosopher must work through his arguments logically and determine an intellectual answer.

But that is where Hegel had his stumbling block.  We see the spiritual from an intellectual standpoint, but how does Geist, or the soul, connect intellectually with the spiritual world?

This is where faith steps in.  We have to stretch out toward God and grasp the gift that He has given us to realize the means to connect the spiritual world with the world of the intellect.

And until you surrender to Jesus, the intellect by itself can never reach the goal.

But once the Holy Spirit is within you, everything makes sense.  All the intellectual pieces fall into place.  And you look back wondering why you had not seen it all along?

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.