How did Immanuel Kant influence Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s early writings on Christianity?

In his early writings, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel initially adopted Immanuel Kant’s framework, which led him to misrepresent the life of Jesus and the history of the Christian church. Under Kant’s influence, Hegel viewed the moral experience as a tension between inclination and the law of duty, a division he later sought to overcome.12

Hegel eventually moved toward an "emancipation from Kantianism," concluding that Kant’s philosophy imposed artificial limitations on human reason. While Kant argued that reason could only grasp a finite world of appearances and became entangled in contradictions when addressing the infinite, Hegel rejected this restriction. Instead, he developed a philosophy based on the concept of Geist (spirit), viewing it as a unity that synthesizes opposites, such as the finite and the infinite.1

In his essay "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate," Hegel used this new insight to critique the legalism he associated with Judaism and to interpret Jesus’ teachings as a transcendence of the Kantian split between duty and inclination, proposing instead a unity of the divine and human through love.1