If you are familiar with Barth’s Covenantal theology, and how he reifies that in his doctrine of God and election, then the following development, from Michael Gillespie, on Hegel’s view of the state might be rather striking to you. Here is Gillespie:

This reconciliation of natural consciousness and spirit, of natural causality and freedom, of the individual and society is the state. “This essentiality is itself the unification of the subjective and the rational will: it is the ethical whole—the state, which is the actuality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom, but in which it is the knowing, believing, and willing of the generality.” True freedom for the individual is only possible insofar as his actions are in accordance with the general movement of spirit itself. The “freedom” of capricious natural desires is only license and in truth the subjection to natural causality. Real freedom is thus only possible in an through the ethical life of the political community which unites the natural desires of the individual with the rational objects established by society for those desires: it is only the state that can guarantee a reconciliation of these two through laws and education.

Human beings in Hegel’s view can be truly free only when they live within convention, within the prevailing ēthos, and yet they tend naturally to obey only their desires and to seek only their own satisfaction. The state imposes a necessity supported by force and ultimately by the power of life and death that constrains the individuals to act in accordance with prevailing conventions. The freedom that men enjoy within the state is thus not the freedom that arises from a mutual limitation of their natural freedom but the concord of individual and society, of the subjective will of the individual and the objective general will of the society. “The subjective will, passion, is the motivating, the actualizing; the is the inner; the state is the present-at-hand, actual ethical life. For it is the unity of the general, essential will and the subjective, and that is the ethical community.” The state in Hegel’s view is neither a collectivity of individuals nor a people (Volk) as a whole, but the concrete actuality and ground out of which both arise and within which both subsist. Both the subjective will, i.e., natural consciousness as both consciousness of nature and natural desiring soul, and the objective or general will, as the inner idea or rational form, constitute the twofold that in its synthesis is the state: “For the true is the unity of the general and the subjective will; and the general is in the state in the laws, in general and rational determinations.” What is fundamentally true and real is neither the individual nor the society but the state, which establishes and maintains laws as the expression of its rationality. Moreover, as we saw earlier, the absolute alone is true or the true alone is absolute. The state is not merely the corporeal and therefore ephemeral reconciliation of the individual and society but a moment of the absolute itself, of the ultimately real phenomenological ground. It is in this sense that Hegel concludes, “The state is the divine idea, as it is present-at-hand on earth.”[1]

Some say Barth equally suffers from Hegelianization, as much as the classical theists (who in many ways he is in critique of) suffer from Hellenization. No matter, it isn’t ultimately the form, per se, but how much the form is capable of being evangelized in a way that the pressure of the kerygma is magnified rather than the grammatical form it commandeers.

It is interesting though, when the thinker can see the parallels between Barth’s reification of God’s covenantal relationship to the world, and how that seems to be anticipated in Hegel’s philosophy of the state. For Hegel the inner ground of historic and civil order, per Gillespie is the state. For Barth, the inner ground of creation is the covenantal life of God’s graciousness. In this we can see how Barth was a modern theologian, indeed. Just as he flipped Kant’s dualism of the noumenal and phenomenal on its head, through the Deus absconditus/Deus revelatus combine in the hypostatic union of the singular person, Jesus Christ. Similarly, Barth flips Hegel’s style of immanentized dialecticism on its head by using his categories, and redeploying those in such a way that the creaturely realm is re-creaturized, and God is re-divinized by seeing the divine attributes that Hegel collapses into Geist, as understood as rightfully and always God’s to begin with.

This is how all constructive theology, and its attendant grammars, have always been done; i.e. by appropriating current ideation and philosophical constructs in such a way that the grammar supplied by said constructs is reified or ‘evangelized’ in such a way that the material content of the philosophic is so gutted, so non-correlationized, that the Gospel itself shines as bright as the morning sun shines on our weary and horizontal faces. Solo Christo.

[1] Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 90-1.