 As well as this focus on religious and political freedoms for the individual, the emphasis on the relation between Lutheranism and freedom in Hegel may be seen to have four more fundamental aspects, which reveal Luther’s influence on Hegel’s conception of freedom, which is a central theme in the latter’s philosophy. First, as we have seen Hegel took Christian freedom to involve finding oneself in the other, which may reflect Luther’s turn from God as an alien and forbidding judge, to God as forgiving and loving, in which a freedom as reconciliation can be achieved—albeit a unity that must be achieved through a prior sense of alienation.  [17]  In Luther this alienation involves an element of hiddenness which is not so evident in Hegel. Nonetheless, It could be added that just as Luther’s conception of divine hiddenness can involve the idea that God’s nature is concealed under its contrary (abscondita sub contrario) (such as his mercy under his wrath, his strength under his weakness and suffering in Jesus  Christ),[18]  so there is a further connection here to Hegel’s conception of the dialectic, where what appears one way to the understanding can be seen to be otherwise by reason, such as necessity really being freedom, in a way that the former will find incomprehensible. Moreover, Hegel’s conception of freedom and self-knowledge as requiring recognition by the other may be said to reflect Luther’s conception of our relational dependence on  God.[19]  Second, Hegel takes up the idea that this reconciliation with the other requires a kind of self-surrender, where he writes that: 