Listening to the next lecture, J. Bernstein was going into the way the loss of Kant's imperious Law was too much for many. And then I recognised another way to understand what Hegel is doing.
He has set out to remove the 'dirensions', the divisions - self and other, mind and body, self and world, individual and society that seemed insuperably present in the best systematic philosophy. The morality that he is advocating is the freedom of the Christian under grace. The division between the Law, goodness and the person is erased through Christ, and realised in the Christian through faith.
Hegel is saying that the force of morality is in the situation, not in some abstract law. The good in loving someone is loving them, not satisfying some remote Law or third party. So then, if the moral force is in the particulars of the situation, it becomes possible to achieve creative, positive goodness, not just a jury-rigged approximation of the good which is actually bad. Not merely possible, but continuously there in our work and life. This is Christian. This vertigo of forgiveness and welcome into the creative universe of being no longer under Law but under Grace.
It is odd that Luther figures in Hegel as a German, protestant, analogue of Descartes, of the upholding of conscience (conscious in Descartes) above external authority. I think Luther was mostly about the end of the line of division between God and man, because that's what he found in Paul, who is all about Jesus being all about reconciliation. Neither greek nor jew, slave nor free, male nor female.
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