There seems to be no clear and consistent distinction between philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. Yet, on purely linguistic grounds one would seem to have God and the other religion as its primary subject matter. I think it is not an accident that the editors of this volume used the term " philosophical theology " in the titles of the preceding fi ve chapters, but switched to " philosophy of religion " for the present one. For during the time from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche the focus shifted from philosophizing about God to philosophizing about religion.
Thus G. W. F. Hegel complains bitterly about the prevailing assumption that we do not know God, which, therefore, " permits us to speak merely of our relation to Him, to speak of religion and not of God Himself. " The result is that " we at least hear much talk โฆ about religion, and therefore all the less about God Himself " ( 1962 [1832] , pp. 191 -2).
The matter is not that simple, for talking about religion cannot so easily be separated from talking about God. Still, Hegel calls our attention to what amounts to a sea change in modern philosophy, the transition from philosophical theology to philosophy of religion in the narrower sense of philosophizing about religion. In light of his intended resistance to this feature of post -Kantian modernity, it is ironic that we owe to him more than to anyone else the notion that there is a subdivision of philosophy called the philosophy of religion , that he develops this in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion , and that the three parts of these lectures are " The Concept of Religion , " " Determinate Religion , " and " Consummate Religion . " When philosophical theology will return in our own time, often as if nothing had happened in the meanwhile, it will call itself the philosophy of religion.
Pre -Kantian Philosophical Theology
Two species of philosophical theology form the background for the movement Hegel deplores. I shall call them, rather loosely, scholastic and deistic. Both are concerned with exploring what can be established about the existence and nature of God by means of human reason unaided by revelation. But the scholastic versions of this enterprise share the Augustinian assumption that pure reason, on the one hand, and A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition Edited by C. Taliaferro, P. Draper and P. L. Quinn