Heidegger's God: Against Caputo, Kearney, and Marion

Sophia, 2011

This essay considers the philosophical and theological significance of the phenomenological analysis of Christian faith offered by the early Heidegger. It shows, first, that Heidegger poses a radical and controversial challenge to philosophers by calling them to do without God in an unfettered pursuit of the question of being (through his ‘destruction of onto-theology’); and, second, that this exclusion nonetheless leaves room for a form of philosophical reflection upon the nature of faith and discourse concerning God, namely for a philosophy of religion in a phenomenological mode (as exemplified most clearly in Heidegger’s 1920/21 lectures on the phenomenology of religious life). However, it is argued that the theological roots of Heidegger’s own phenomenological analyses subvert his frequently asserted claim concerning the incompatibility of Christian faith and philosophical inquiry.

2014

Martin Heidegger is the 20th century theology philosopher with the greatest importance to theology. A cradle Catholic originally intended for the priesthood, Heidegger's studies in philosophy led him to turn first to Protestantism and then to an atheistic philosophical method. Nevertheless, his writings remained deeply indebted to theological themes and sources, and the question of the nature of his relationship with theology has been a subject of discussion ever since. This book offers theologians and philosophers alike a clear account of the directions and the potential of this debate. It explains Heidegger's key ideas, describes their development and analyses the role of theology in his major writings, including his lectures during the Nazi era. It reviews the reception of Heidegger's thought both by theologians in his own day (particularly in Barth and his school as well as neo-Scholasticism) and more recently, suggesting throughout directions for theology's possible future engagement with Heidegger's work.

Rough draft of an essay to appear in J. RIvera & J. O. Leary, Handbook of Phenomenology and Theology, Routledge.

Open Theology, 2021

The Origin," one of Martin Heidegger's most important notions after 1934, is tightly related to being-historical thinking, and to the peculiar kind of divinity that being-historical thinking indicates. However, the notion of the Origin appears already in Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures (given between 1919 and 1923), thus placing it among the fundamentals of his early thought. This article argues that Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology emerges from that early notion of the Origin, preparing the way for its flourishing in his later thinking. Attending to Heidegger's early notion of the Origin, I suggest, reveals a unique feature of Heidegger's thinking; namely, an element of genuine religiosity ungraspable in terms of both philosophy and theology. Thus, rather than interpreting fundamental ontology as a transcendental project encompassing a de-theologized version of early Christianity, it should be taken as an attempt to think the truth of the Origin, thus preparing the way for the genuine religiosity of Heidegger's later thought. In this light, a unique sense of divinity underlies Heidegger's lectures between 1919 and 1925; a sense which can only be comprehended through Heidegger's triple sense schema (enactment-relation-content).

Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, Bloomsbury, 2014, 242pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780567033765.

Continental Philosophy Review, 1994

Religious Studies

This article explores Heidegger's later philosophy with regard to the problem of a philosophical interpretation of religious language. In what follows, I will draw upon the work of Wittgenstein and refer to the cosmological argument to read Heidegger in terms of a post-theistic understanding of religious language that avoids the shortcomings of both theistic realism and non-cognitivism. At the same time, I am proposing a new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy against this background. I will show that, in spite of its hermeticism, Heidegger's later philosophy has a specific relevance to philosophy of religion that still needs to be explored.

LSU Master's Theses, 2017

Following his newfound celebrity upon publication of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger delivered a lecture in 1927 and 1928, titled “Phenomenology and Theology,” where he discussed how his recent groundbreaking work in existential phenomenology relates to Christian theology. Far from offering his philosophy as a method for theology, he instead attempted to utterly separate the two, setting the former as fundamental ontology and the latter as a positive science more akin to history, with the Christian faith as its positive object of study. The lecture was left unpublished until 1969, when Heidegger added an appendix, a piece exemplary of the later Heidegger’s thought. The point of this thesis is to properly expound the lecture and provide critique regarding his classification of theology as a positive science. Due to his existential description of Christian faith, his formula of theology as the study thereof sets that science as an ontology more akin to philosophy than he allows. Rather than correct this problem, it is more fitting to let stand Heidegger’s existential definition of faith and elucidate its consequences for Christian theological praxis. This leads to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Act and Being, a dissertation on the role of ontology in Christian theology which addresses Heidegger’s phenomenology. Bonhoeffer claims that the Cross event in Christianity requires a Christian existential analysis independent of Heidegger’s own analytic of pre-Christian Dasein. Here I conclude that this provides an opening for theological work in ontology, one which theologians must take if they wish to assert independence from and fruitfully engage with philosophy. I then provide an epilogue concerning the appendix, where I suggest the later Heidegger himself recognizes this need for theology, though only in a subtle manner.

2022

In this article, I argue that Heidegger's notion of "God(s)" can only be properly understood through a new phenomenological interpretation of his esoteric/private writings of the 1930s and 1940s. Through this interpretation, I will hold that Heidegger built a philosophy, heavily based on poetic devices, in which an "ontic atheism" is the condition of possibility of a true understanding of the divine, and therefore of the sacred, as the phenomenological dimension of the world that is beyond any kind of human technical and scientific reductionism. Until 1928, Heidegger maintained that true philosophy has to be methodologically atheistic , and that his own thinking denied the ontic existence of God. Nevertheless, after being unable to write the projected second part of Sein und Zeit due to the insufficiencies of traditional metaphysical language, Heidegger started to use poetic and prophetic language around the concept of being. In Beiträge, Heidegger talked about a future and mysterious "Last God" linked to a new understanding of being in general, hidden now in the epoch of planetary technique. In his Brief über den Humanismus, Heidegger rejected Sartre's consideration of his own philosophy as atheistic, and in other texts Heidegger divided the world into earth, sky, mortals, and the god(s). Finally, in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger famously held that only a God can save us. Simultaneously, however, Heidegger presented his thinking as a Destruktion of onto-theology , understood as the worldview that considers God as the Supreme Being that explains all the other entities. Moving away from the most common interpretations, my paper will investigate who this enigmatic God is, and why did Heidegger decide to combine the language of philosophy, poetry, and prophecy in order to lead towards a deeper understanding of existence.

A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life, 2010