present age, the ultimate principle by which the self-consciousness of the spirit is produced and maintained …15 This meant, more or less, a collapsing of history and theology into one another. History was not simply the sphere in which one might occasionally encounter the divine, but ‘the self-expression of God as Absolute Spirit in the unfolding process of history’, so that ‘God lives in history, and history is the life of God.’16 We note that the word ‘history’ here basically means ‘what has happened’,
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