Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/104

 essentially belongs to faith. After His resurrection Christ appeared only to His friends; this is not outward history for unbelief, but, on the contrary, this appearing of Christ is for faith only. The resurrection is followed by the glorification of Christ; and the triumph of His exaltation to the right hand of God closes this part of His history, which, as thus understood by believing consciousness, is the unfolding of the Divine nature itself. If in the first division of the subject we conceived of God as He is in pure thought, in this second division we start from immediacy as it exists for sense-perception and for ideas based on sense. The process is accordingly this, that immediate particularity is done away with and absorbed; and just as in the first region of thought, God’s state of seclusion came to an end, and His primary immediacy as abstract universality, according to which He is the Essence of Essences, was annulled, so here the abstraction of humanity, the immediacy of existing particularity, is annulled, and this is brought about by death; the death of Christ, however, is the death of death, the negation of the negation. We have had in the Kingdom of the Father the same course and process in the unfolding of God’s nature; here, however, the process is explained in so far as it is an object for consciousness. For here there existed the impulse to form a mental picture of the divine nature. In connection with the death of Christ we have finally to emphasise the moment according to which it is God who has killed death, since He comes out of the state of death: this means that finitude, human nature, and humiliation are attributed to Christ as something foreign to His nature, which is that of one who is God pure and simple; it is shown that finitude is something foreign to His nature, and has been adopted by Him from an Other; this Other is represented by men who stand over against the divine process. It is their finitude which Christ has taken upon Himself, this finitude in all its forms, and which at its furthest extreme is