Studying Christianity in the Hegel’s Periods of Thought

From Hegel's perspective, Christianity can be examined in three periods: Bern, Frankfurt, and Jena. Bern and Frankfurt belong to Hegel's youth or his verbal writings, but Jena belongs to the period of Hegel's perfection, where he builds his philosophy. Hegel in Bern compares Christianity to ancient Greece, and he argues that, unlike Greece, which is a religion of freedom, Christianity, through the necessities of its nature, has become a set of binding rules, that brings the denial of freedom. In this period he compares Christ with Socrates and says: unlike Christ, who believes in the salvation of the individual, Socrates is concerned with the salvation of the public, and for this reason he considers Socrates superior to Christ, but in Frankfurt his view is tempered and he finds a positive view of Christianity. There he insists that Christ replaces love with the irreversible sentences of Judaism, and this will bring human salvation, and finally, in Jena, which belongs to her perfection and maturity, Hegel says Christianity is the absolute truth as is philosophy. The only difference is in the way they are expressed; Christianity expresses the truth in the form of allegory and irony, and philosophy in the form of pure thought. In the end, of course, he concludes that he needs to escape from religion toward philosophy for Christianity is incarnate, not pure thought; and it is only philosophy that presents truth in a pure form. This paper is a descriptive-analytic study of these three periods.