Peter Crafts Hodgson (born February 26, 1934)[1] is an American theologian and the Charles G. Finney Professor of Theology, Emeritus, at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he taught from 1965 to 2003.
[2] He is considered to be one of the world's foremost translators of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a 19th-century German philosopher.
[8] His nineteenth century studies include G. W. F. Hegel,[9] F. C. Baur,[10] D. F. Strauss,[11] and George Eliot[12] (Mary Ann Evans).
Peter continues to live in Nashville, Tennessee, following retirement, and spends summers in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania.
[13] Following hints from George Eliot, Hodgson believes that theology is a kind of fiction that offers imaginative variations on what is real.
Many theologians and preachers today avoid the real: they offer escapes and fantasies rather than honest engagement with the material world and human culture.
This is the reality most people live in today, but theology and the church are disconnected from it and offer an alternative world that in many ways is less real.
Theology does not seem much interested in the hard task of reconstructing conceptions of God and Christ in ways that take into account the realities of life as we actually experience them.
These realities offer resources for theology if it is open to receiving them: the emancipatory struggles of oppressed peoples, the heightened consciousness of feminism and gender differences, the pluralism of religious and cultural traditions, the participation of humans in a vast ecological system that can be thrown out of balance all too easily.
This ideality goes forth from itself and creates an other than itself, the material and spiritual world, which has its own powers and autonomies that often go awry and conflict with each other, producing tragic and destructive consequences.
Hegel and Whitehead point to the same answer, namely, that the divine values and guidance function as a lure, a pattern, an invitation calling for a human response.
History has produced other great figures who provide moral and intellectual guidance, from Socrates and Plato to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.