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.

Surely enough has been said to show that what we have here is only the absorption of even the profoundest religious meanings into the vortex of an all-dissolving metaphysical system.  The most obvious meaning of the phrase ‘Son of God,’ its moral and spiritual, its real religious meaning, is dwelt on, here in Hegel, as little as Hegel claimed that the Nicene trinitarians had dwelt upon it.  Nothing marks more clearly the distance we have travelled since Hegel than does the general recognition that his attempted solution does not even lie in the right direction.  It is an attempt within the same area as that of the Nicene Council and the creeds, namely, the metaphysical area.  What is at stake is not the pre-existence or the two natures.  Hegel was right in what he said concerning these.  The pre-existence cannot be thought of except as ideal.  The two natures we assert for every man, only not in such a manner as to destroy unity in the personality.  The heart of the dogma is not in these.  It is the oneness of God and man, a moral and spiritual oneness, oneness in conduct and consciousness, the presence and realisation of God, who is spirit, in a real man, the divineness of Jesus, in a sense which sees no meaning any longer in the old debate as between his divinity and his deity.