ABSTRACT
Hegel's speculative concept of God is a piece with his philosophy as a whole, and with his understanding of the nature of thinking, as epitomized by philosophy. A repeated claim in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion is the essential connection of thinking and religion. Hegel's triadic logic also bears on a Trinitarian view of God. The Christian trinity is the representational form of what Hegel articulates in terms of his speculative logic. Speculative logic articulates an original unity/universal that differentiates itself into subject (S) and object (O). Further, in relating them (S and O) to each other, the unity/universal relates them to itself. The structure of this, qua structure, is the same as the structure of self-consciousness: not the dyadic subject-object relation (S-O); but the triadic self-relation which includes in itself the dyadic subject-object relation: S(S-O). Hegel claims to address the difficulty by providing, as he says, the natural consciousness with its 'ladder to the absolute'.
