But you’ll notice something crucial in Hegel’s analysis here if you’re paying close enough attention: what Hegel states to be the true content of Christianity is something Christians don’t actually believe! The believer does not celebrate Christ because he represents the Absolute Spirit. Rather, the Christian genuinely worships Jesus Christ as God. The Incarnation is not, to the Christian man, a metaphorical expression of a truth about the nature of Spirit. The Incarnation is instead an actual divine intervention on the part of God and a necessary step in His greater plan for our salvation. The truth of Absolute Spirit is not registered properly to the believer because its truths are rendered in what Hegel calls “picture-thought.”11 Myth, allegory, symbolism, and metaphor take the place of the pure concepts they are trying to express. The truth of Christianity is not simply conceptually stated, but is rather rendered in a pictorial form that is “alien” to the consciousness to which it is presented.12 The truth is not recognized as a truth about consciousness, but is instead crudely projected onto something external, as something other than consciousness, namely, the figure of Jesus Christ. “When placed in the medium of picture-thinking,” the content of Christianity is “uncomprehended” by consciousness.13 Therefore, consciousness “misunderstands its own nature” and “degrades the content” of Christianity “into a historical pictorial idea.”14 In the end, despite possessing true content, because Christianity presents itself in the form of picture-thinking, “only the external element in belief…is retained,” leaving the religion’s real truths “as something that is dead and cannot be known.”15
