A God who fully reveals himself can never give himself as a gift.

Evidence

The claim that Hegel’s God lacks a future is based, in the final instance, on three main arguments. First, according to the theologians, the transparency implied by the speculative concept of self-revelation is a transparency without surprise. In so far as the dialectical process of God’s coming to himself assumes the sublation of the temporal form intrinsic to the representational process, it would seem that God can neither occur nor arrive. The necessity to which the Entäußerung of the movement of kenosis is submitted, is a necessity which deprives the Father of his fullest possibilities. Accordingly, Hegel’s God is a God who does not promise. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 752 (#expands, via linked claim)

Spirit, whose task is to comprehend itself, to anticipate itself in everything that is now and is to come, can never encounter anything wholly other, can never come face to face, one might say, with the event. How, then, could there be room in Hegelian thought for the question of the future, if everything has already been permeated by spirit and, in this fashion, already completed? — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 202 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A fully self-transparent God can neither occur nor arrive, and so cannot promise — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 752; A God who is fully present may never actually happen; A fully self-comprehending spirit can never face the event — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 202 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• A fully self-transparent God can neither occur nor arrive, and so cannot promise #expands (0.92) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 752
• A God who is fully present may never actually happen #expands (0.90)
• A fully self-comprehending spirit can never face the event #exemplifies (0.88) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 202
• God is the hypostasized ideal of the impossible self-synthesis #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363
• A God bound by dialectical necessity is stripped of the freedom to give. #corroborates (0.85)
• A God bound by conceptual logic can give nothing freely. #corroborates (0.80)
• God’s self-alienation paradoxically offers no genuine outside to escape into #complicates (0.78) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 753
• God’s incomprehensibility means he exceeds knowledge, not that reason fails him. #qualifies (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 744
• God’s incomprehensibility means he resists possession, not that reason fails #qualifies (0.75)