The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11841-011-0256-2SophiaDecember 2011, Volume 50, Issue 4, pp 641-655

Phenomenology and Theology: Situating Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Phenomenology; faith; theology; onto-theology; religion

1

2

Martin Heidegger, the Lutheran

In early 1919, Martin Heidegger wrote to Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic

priest and family friend, distancing himself from the Catholic faith

of his youth. He no longer wished to be thought of as a Catholic

philosopher but simply as a philosopher, free to pursue his

philosophical research unfettered by ‘extra-philosophical

allegiances’.1 And so he did. Within a decade he would be widely

regarded as the leading German philosopher of his day. But far from

signalling an end to his study of theology, the announcement of his

break with Catholicism coincided with a period of intense engagement

with some of the major figures of the Christian tradition: St Paul,

St Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Martin Luther, Friedrich

Schleiermacher, Søren Kierkegaard. How are we to interpret this

fact? Did his renunciation of the Catholic faith in fact represent a

Protestant conversion of sorts? The answer to this question is

complex, as we shall see below. What is clear is that his study of

these Christian thinkers, and Luther in particular, was decisive in

the development of his mature thought.

Among Heidegger’s students, it was no secret that his

philosophical position had been heavily influenced by his study of

Luther, the great Reformation theologian. To them it would not have

come as a shock that, shortly after taking up his appointment at

Marburg University in 1923, Heidegger taught a seminar on the young

Luther with the celebrated New Testament scholar and theologian

Rudolf Bultmann. Even into the 1950s and 60s Heidegger’s reputation

as a Luther expert persisted in Germany.2

1 Letter to Engelbert Krebs, 9 Jan, 1919. Cited in Safranski (1998, p. 107).2 For a summary of historical recollections to this effect, see van Buren (1994a, pp. 149–50).

3

One of Heidegger’s most readily demonstrable debts to Luther is

the idea that philosophy should take the form of a destruction or

destructio (Luther’s term) of the history of Western metaphysics, that

it should break through the crust of an ossified tradition to reveal

a hidden, pulsating core.3 The target of Luther’s destructio was a

scholastic theology that had forged a new—and to Luther alarming—

synthesis between patristic orthodoxies and the newly rediscovered

Aristotelian metaphysics. For Heidegger, that medieval synthesis

remained a worthy target for destruction, but he now also added to

the list of targets the paragons of modern philosophy—Descartes,

Leibniz, Kant and Hegel—each of whom had, in his view, contributed a

new chapter to a tradition characterised by the ‘forgetting of

being’.

Directly imported from Luther’s work as well was the idea that the

Greek philosophical tradition had compromised the transmission of

the Christian faith, such that the primitive dynamic and restless form of

life attested to by the New Testament found itself supplanted by a

foreign contemplative ideal of religious life. The deus absconditus who

gave himself to us in the humiliation of the cross had been replaced

by the God given in all his glory as an object of contemplation in

the beatific vision. The more primordial truth of the New Testament

witness would therefore have to be retrieved from obscurity and

allowed to correct the tradition. The work of destruction would have

to be completed by a retrieval.4

Heidegger thus learned from Luther to distinguish between two forms

of belief, each calling itself Christian. On the one hand stood the

positing of God as the highest being and/or highest good—this is the3 This connection is established by van Buren (1994b).4 The Pauline/Lutheran idea of radical faith only served as a desideratum for Heidegger for a few years, roughly corresponding to his ‘phenomenological decade’ (1919–29). But even after primitive Christianity ceased to possess for Heidegger the aura of authenticity, this ‘retrieval’-narrative remained determinative—only now (roughly stated) primitive Greek displaced primitive Christian experience as the desideratum of retrieval.

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path of Hellenised Christianity, which he would later call ‘onto-

theology’ and which I am calling ‘theism in the metaphysical mode’.

On the other hand stood the comportment toward God characteristic of

primordial Christianity, which I am calling ‘faith in the primitive

Christian mode’.5 The former, ‘onto-theological’ mode of belief is

exemplified for Heidegger by early neo-Platonic Christian theology,

medieval scholasticism, modern rationalism, German idealism and the

then contemporary Catholic neo-scholasticism. The latter,

‘primitive’ comportment of belief, by contrast, is identified with

the faith attested to in the earliest writings of St Paul, preserved

to some extent in St Augustine and medieval mysticism, and recovered

through the writings of Luther, Pascal, Schleiermacher and

Kierkegaard. In a note from 1917, Heidegger writes:

Protestant faith and Catholic faith are fundamentally different. Noetically

and noematically separated experiences… The ‘holding-to-be-true’ of

Catholic faith is founded entirely otherwise than the fiducia of the

reformers. (Heidegger 2004, p. 236)

This distinction is a constant feature of the early lecture courses

leading up to the publication of Being and Time, especially those of

the early Freiburg period (1919–23).

This Lutheran narrative, concerning a pristine Judeo-Christian

form of ‘factical existence’ subsequently contaminated by Greco-

Roman thought-forms—a narrative brought home to Heidegger through

his reading of Wilhelm Dilthey, Adolf von Harnack and Franz Overbeck

—was already a commonplace in Heidegger’s day, albeit a contested

one. What is noteworthy about the work of the early Heidegger,

however, is not so much that it takes up this well-worn narrative

5 The use of the contrasting terms ‘theism’ and ‘faith’ in this essay is an attempt to reflect Heidegger’s tendency to categorize onto-theology as a ‘theoretical’ comportment and primitive Christian belief as a more originary, pre-theoretical (roughly, ‘practical’) comportment.

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but that it attempts to provide a detailed philosophical—indeed,

phenomenological—analysis of the two forms of faith distinguished by

Luther and to show why the more primordial form of belief is the

more authentic. The analysis that he developed possesses a

philosophical creativity and sophistication arguably rivalled only

by Luther, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard themselves.

That this particular path of the young Heidegger’s thought through

Luther’s retrieval of primitive Christianity marks a stage on the

way to his magnum opus, Being and Time (1962 [1927]), is now generally

recognised. The influence of Luther in the genesis of Being and Time

has already been well documented.6 In this essay, I want instead to

concentrate on the significance of the young Heidegger’s

phenomenological analysis of Christian faith for contemporary

philosophy and theology. I aim to show, 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,

i.e. for a philosophy of religion in a phenomenological mode (as

exemplified most clearly in Heidegger’s lectures from 1920/21).

However, I shall argue that the theological roots of Heidegger’s own

phenomenological analyses subvert his frequently asserted claim

concerning the incompatibility of Christian faith and philosophical

inquiry.

The remainder of this essay falls into three sections. The first

sketches Heidegger’s destruction of theism in the metaphysical mode—

the piety of Greek philosophy and of Hellenised Christianity—

6 See especially van Buren (1994a, pp. 131ff.) and van Buren (1994b). See also the recent work of McGrath (2006, pp. 151–84, et passim). Earlier but still illuminating reports of Luther’s importance for Heidegger are found in Pöggeler (1987, pp. 24–31, 266–67).

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analysed as ‘onto-theology’. The second discusses Heidegger’s

analysis of faith in the primitive Christian mode. The third

critically explores the significance of these analyses.

The Deconstruction of Metaphysical Theism

From the time of the ancient Greeks at least until the

Enlightenment, Heidegger asserts, Western philosophy has treated the

question of being in such a way that it enfolds and appeals to the

idea of God—whether in the guise of ‘the good’, ‘the first cause’,

‘the self-caused cause’, ‘the eternal’, ‘the absolute’, or any

number of other philosophemes. Theism in its ‘metaphysical’ mode is,

on this analysis, distinctive for being at once a religious and a

philosophical stance: it gives theological form to a particular

interpretation of being, and philosophical form to a particular

interpretation of God. In fact, Heidegger eventually came to define

the dominant tradition of Western metaphysics in terms of its

coordination of the question of being and the question of God: (i) God

is defined (paradigmatically in Aristotle) as the highest being and

the ground of being; God is thus understood by reference to being.

(ii) But equally, being is accounted for by appeal to the highest being

and the ground of being. The reason, ground or account (logos) for

being (on) is found in the highest being (theos); hence the

description of metaphysics as ‘onto-theologically constituted’.7

For this reason, Heidegger takes the word ‘God’, when it is used

in the Western metaphysical tradition, to stand not merely for one

being among others but as a shorthand for a particular interpretation of

being: in its various articulations the concept speaks not only of a

7 This expression appears in a number of places, but is most famously and fully explicated in the 1957 essay entitled ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics’ in Heidegger (1974, pp. 42–74).

7

particular being but of the nature of being as such. God, conceived

as the highest being, represents the paradigm and measure of all

beings; God, conceived as the first cause, represents the ground of

all being, that which accounts for the totality of what is

(Heidegger 1982, pp. 29, 81, 148). And so, if God is mentioned on

almost every page of Heidegger’s writings—and it is an exaggeration,

but not much of an exaggeration to say that He is—this is explained

in part by the fact that, on his reading of the history of

philosophy, the concept of God has an intimate connection to the

philosophical topic that is Heidegger’s primary concern, namely the

question of being. For Heidegger, the history of metaphysics cannot

be understood without reference to its traditional theological

moment.

Nonetheless, Heidegger’s critical reflections on this tradition

lead him to the view that the entanglement of ontology with theology

has only served to obscure the most fundamental meaning of being.

For Luther, the theological tradition that attempted to think the

meaning of Christian faith via philosophical theology systematically

failed to understand the meaning of Christian faith; conversely, for

Heidegger, the philosophical tradition that attempted to think the

meaning of being via the idea of God systematically failed to think

the meaning of being in an authentic fashion. Why is this so?

Theism in the metaphysical mode denotes, for Heidegger, a certain

theoretical stance. It is ‘theoretical’ insofar as it posits God as an

object of contemplation, an object given to the gaze—if not to the

eyes, then at least to the eyes of the mind, and if not now (Plato),

then at least in the heavenly afterlife (Aquinas). What theism

stands for in this context is the grasping after the eternal, the

objective, the unchanging. And ‘the divine’ is the title given to

this highest object of philosophical reflection, the goal of

absolute knowledge, of thought thinking itself (Aristotle). But, by

8

the end of the First World War, Heidegger had become convinced that

this posited highest object of thought is only a dream, an illusion—

not necessarily because there is no God, but because the desire to

contemplate the absolute, to achieve absolute knowledge, is a

chimera and an idol. More than an idol, it is what Heidegger

describes, with echoes of Marx, as a ‘lulling narcotic’ (Heidegger

2001, p. 124). That is to say, the positing of God as the

Archimedean point over against the apparent, the historical, the

changing, is seen by Heidegger quite simply as a pseudo-solution and

a dead end to the question of the meaning of being. Nor is it

ontologically illuminating to trace that which exists back to a

‘first cause’:

If we are to understand the problem of Being, our first philosophical

step consists in not , in not ‘telling a story’—that is

to say, in not defining entities as entities by tracing them back in

their origin to some other entities, as if Being had the character of

some possible entity. (Heidegger 1962, p. 26)

‘God’, in short, is nothing more than a Sunday School answer to the

most vexing and profound question the Western philosophical

tradition has even had the temerity to pose. Nonetheless, because of

its association with such a venerable tradition of philosophical

inquiry, not to mention the half-truths that it unwittingly bears

within it, it is an answer that cannot be set to one side without

first subjecting it to a careful de(con)struction.

The first matter that requires reflection is this: if it is such a

trap for metaphysics, why is the theological pseudo-answer to the

question of being so appealing? Heidegger locates the root cause in

the ‘inauthenticity’ of everyday Dasein. The positing of a first

cause, a stable ground, a nunc stans (standing ‘now’), is seen by

9

Heidegger as a reactive mechanism of flight, calculated to curb the

anxiety of life, to secure ourselves against the contingency and

fluidity of life itself (Barash 1994). To this extent, his critical

analysis of metaphysical theism lines up with his critique of

theoretical cognition in Being and Time (cf. §§15–16, §33, §§69–70). In

both contexts, the comportment in question is interpreted as a form

of inauthenticity, a falling away, insofar as it abstracts from the

temporality and facticity of existence (Da-sein; later, das Ereignis),

and serves to distract us from the concrete horizon of our

historical situation, our temporal having-to-be. This is the

existential motive for the ‘forgetting of being’ that Heidegger

famously takes to be native to Western philosophy and philosophical

theology. It is the task of the destruction of the history of

philosophy to expose and unsettle this soporific, fugitive state and

to promote a retrieval of human Dasein into wakefulness and out of

the clutches of the false ‘consolations of philosophy’.

Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology—as opposed to

the simple narration of that history—thus ultimately rests on the

supposition that the thinking of being must be freed from the concept

of God if it is to be ‘authentic’, i.e. if it is to look existence

in the face without taking flight. Put differently, we might say

that Heidegger’s argument is that the philosopher, the thinker of

being, misunderstands being if he or she takes contemplation of the eternal

(the good, the divine) to be a thinking of being. God and being are

not the same; God is a being, not being (Heidegger 1962, p. 125–26).

The meaning of being is not the atemporal (God) but time itself qua

horizon.8 Hence, the philosopher must renounce metaphysics in the

form of onto-theology, and with it any attempt to ‘possess or

determine God’ (Heidegger 2001, p. 148). In this sense, philosophy

8 This is the fundamental thesis of Heidegger (1962, p. 19, et passim).

10

‘must be a-theistic as a matter of principle’ (ibid).9 Such at least is

the conclusion that Heidegger reached, after some initial

vacillation, in 1921. And, despite Heidegger’s later talk of the

‘piety of thinking’, ‘the gods’, and ‘the holy’, it is a position he

never reversed.10

Now, if theism in the metaphysical mode is a particular

existential comportment or mode of being—namely, an ‘inauthentic’

mode of flight that leads to wayward philosophy—then any attempt to

overcome it is compelled to consider what existential mode might be

adequate to the thinking of being. If inauthenticity must be

overcome by authenticity in order for genuine philosophy to be

possible, how might the philosopher gain access to the standpoint of

authenticity? How might Dasein render itself questionable and

maintain itself in that questionability? This is one of the most

insistently recurring themes in Heidegger’s early lecture courses.

And these reflections ultimately spawned the analysis of

‘authenticity’ that appears in Division II of Being and Time.

‘Authenticity’ in Being and Time, in other words, is nothing other than

Heidegger’s attempt to explicate the way of existence that makes authentic

philosophising possible (Russell 2008).

It has been rightly observed that the existential analysis of

authenticity in Being and Time is modelled upon the primordial

Christian faith discovered by Heidegger through his reading of

figures such as St Paul, St Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard. On

this basis, it has been commonly argued that his analysis of

authenticity is in reality a secularised ‘formalization’ of the

Christian—or perhaps more accurately, Protestant—mode of existence.11

9 Cf. Heidegger (1985, p. 80).10 A survey of the evidence substantiating this interpretation is provided by Kovacs(1990, pp. 201–16). The persistence of Heidegger’s methodological atheism is explored in greater detail by Hemming (2002).11 A version of this claim was made by contemporaries of Heidegger such as Rudolf Bultmann and Max Scheler, and has reappeared often, including in remarks by such diverse commentators as John Macquarrie, John D. Caputo, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and

11

However, while the analysis of authenticity is indisputably informed

by these sources, this ‘formalization’ thesis is misleading for two

reasons.

First, we must not overlook the crucial fact that authenticity in

Being and Time is not a ‘formalization’ of the structure of Christian

faith, since it is itself an existentiell possibility of Dasein, just as

faith is an existentiell possibility of Dasein. This is Heideggerian

jargon meaning that authenticity and Christian faith are two

alternative ways to be. Though they may share a family resemblance,

they are nonetheless discrete possibilities that cannot both be

enacted at the same time.

Second, the account of authentic existence in Being and Time is

misunderstood if we do not appreciate that it is set up in

fundamental opposition to the comportment of faith. That this is so is

evident on the surface of Being and Time. It is implied, for instance,

by the blatant substitution of being-towards-death for the more

traditional being-towards-God (e.g. as judge), and the attribution

of the voice of conscience to Dasein itself rather than to God or to

the divine law. This interpretation is confirmed by contemporaneous

remarks made by Heidegger in his ‘Phenomenology and Theology’

lecture of 1927. The ‘definite ontic interpretation of authentic

existence’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 286) upon which fundamental ontology

is grounded, he claims, is atheistic and must be atheistic since

there is a strict incompatibility between the commitments of faith,

whether Greek or Christian, and the task of philosophy: ‘There is no

such thing as a Christian philosophy; that is an absolute “square

circle”’ (Heidegger 1998, p. 53).12 More precisely:

Faith, as a specific possibility of existence, is in its inner most core

the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essential part of

Jacques Derrida.12 See also similar remarks in Heidegger (1961, pp. 6–9).

12

philosophy and that is factically ever-changing. Faith is so absolutely the

mortal enemy that philosophy does not even begin to want in any way to do

battle with it. This existentiell opposition between faithfulness and the free

appropriation of one’s whole Dasein is not first brought about by the

sciences of theology and philosophy but is prior to them. (Heidegger 1998,

p. 53; emphasis in original)

What is ‘prior’ is precisely the opposition between the radical

self-disclosing questionableness of authenticity and the commitment

of lived faith—an antagonism written into the constitution of

philosophical questioning and Christian faith respectively. The

attitude of primordial faith is a non-philosophical attitude; the

attitude of philosophy is non-faithful.

All the worse for the life of faith? One would be forgiven for

assuming so. It would be natural to read Heidegger’s remarks as

implicitly critical of faith for its un-philosophical character. No

doubt at one level they are. And yet, it is notable that Heidegger

seems reticent to straightforwardly resolve this tension in the

favour of the philosophical life.13 He does not, for instance, urge

theologians to become philosophers. Quite the contrary. In 1927 he

even defends the possibility, legitimacy and dignity of theology as

a ‘science of faith’ (Heidegger 1998, pp. 43–50);14 and as late as

1949 he continues to plead: ‘Will Christian theology one day resolve

to take seriously the word of the apostle [Paul] and thus also the

conception of philosophy as foolishness?’ (Heidegger 1998, pp. 287–

88). Texts such as these intimate that, while he evidently regards

13 This unresolved tension does, however, seem to have resolved itself into an outright rejection of theology and hostility towards Christianity in the 1930s. SeeMcGrath (2006, pp. 54–7).14 Cf. Heidegger (1962, p. 30): ‘Theology is seeking a more primordial interpretation of man’s Being towards God, prescribed by the meaning of faith itself and remainingwithin it. It is slowly beginning to understand once more Luther’s insight that the“foundation” on which its system of dogma rests has not arisen from an inquiry in which faith is primary, and that conceptually this “foundation” not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it.’

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some forms of theology as little more than bad philosophy, there is

for Heidegger a ‘science of faith’ that does engage in a well-

founded form of thinking, a form of thinking that is not only non-

philosophical but even necessarily (and legitimately?) anti-

philosophical. In these remarks, the spirit of Luther abides, albeit

tenuously.

I shall return to consider the relation of theology and philosophy

in more detail below. For the time being, it will do simply to make

clear the implication that we cannot look to Being and Time if we wish

to understand Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life (i.e.

Christian faith), since the possibility of ‘authenticity’ attested

to there is something other than the possibility of Christian faith.

At the same time, as we have seen, Heidegger is clearly cautious

about writing off primitive Christian faith as straightforwardly

inauthentic. Faith in the primordial Christian mode stands,

therefore, in an ambiguous relationship to both authentic

(philosophical) existence and inauthentic existence. Not wholly the

one, neither can it be reduced to the other. It thus requires its

own dedicated analysis. Let us therefore turn now to an examination

of Heidegger’s phenomenology of ‘religious life’, i.e. Christian

faith.

The Phenomenology of Christian Faith

In the Winter Semester of 1920/21, Heidegger delivered a lecture

course entitled ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’. In

it, he followed the lead of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard by

redirecting philosophical study of religion away from questions

concerning God (the object of faith) and towards religious

experience (faith itself). ‘Religious experience’ here, it should be

14

mentioned, is not restricted to particular ecstatic experiences, but

has in view the entire lived experience of the person of faith, and

especially the way in which their faith enables the world, the self

and others to disclose themselves in a particular fashion and with a

particular significance. In the 1920/21 lectures, Heidegger’s own

analysis of religious experience in this broad sense is developed

primarily through a reading of three Pauline epistles: the letter to

the Galatians and the two letters to the Thessalonians.15 I do not

have the space to go into his interpretations in any depth, but I

shall try to sketch out some basic lines of the analysis.

Heidegger states in the 1927 lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’

that ‘the essence of faith can formally be sketched as a way of

existence of human Dasein’, and just such a sketch is fleshed out in

these earlier phenomenology of religion lectures (Heidegger 1998, p.

43). He looks first to how Paul expresses his own Christian

existence. Heidegger highlights in Paul’s writings the theme of

struggle and suffering: the way of Paul’s existing is not one of quiet

contemplation but of tension and struggle to achieve and maintain

metanoia (repentance or conversion) from the life of the law to the

life of faith. The life of the law and the life of faith denote,

according to Heidegger, two distinct existentiell modes of being; the

‘how’ of living-according-to-law is opposed to the ‘how’ of living-

according-to-faith (just as the ‘how’ of philosophy and the ‘how’ of

faith are opposed, as we observed above) (Heidegger 2004, pp. 47–

51).

The Christian experience has two essential moments: the moment of

turning or ‘conversion’ and the moment of straining forward or

‘hope’. The entire Christian life is encapsulated for Heidegger in

one sentence from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians: ‘For the

15 These phenomenological sketches are revisited and developed in a slightly different register in the other lecture course reprinted in Heidegger (2004) from Summer Semester 1921, ‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’.

15

people… report… how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and

true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the

dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.’16

Heidegger emphasises the restlessness of this mode of being; it is

troubled, tempted, and fragile. The hope it has is not certitude; it

is not a guarantee but a challenge to be found faithful. Thus the

hope that it possesses is as much a provocation as a comfort—a call

to wakefulness. It is a mode of ‘becoming’ and of appropriating

one’s already ‘having-become’ what one was not (Heidegger 2004, pp.

65–67).

This is an ‘ecstatic’ faith, but not in the narrow sense of having

a mystical experience. It is ‘ek-static’ in its being temporalized

according to the paradox of the ‘moment’ (kairos). In the ‘moment’ one

is not given to behold the object of desire in the presence of the

nunc stans. Instead, precisely because of the absence of ‘things hoped

for’—i.e. the parousia or second coming, whose date is not known—one

is called upon to resolutely strain ahead in a performance of faith.

The ‘moment’ in which one’s commitment is tested is decisive for the

soberness and weight it brings to the existential situation; it

confronts us with the very temporality of our historical existence.

This, in fact, is Heidegger’s formal analysis of the essence of

Christian faith: it ‘lives temporality as such’ (Heidegger 2004, p.

55).

Such faith is what Heidegger elsewhere calls a ‘believing-

understanding mode of existing’. It has intelligible content that

can be expressed; but it is not, he stresses, ‘some more or less

modified type of knowing’. Faith is, rather, ‘an appropriation of

revelation that co-constitutes the Christian occurrence, that is,

the mode of existence that specifies a factical Dasein’s

Christianness as a particular form of destiny. Faith is the believing-

16 1 Thess. 1:9–10 (NRSV), my emphasis. Cf. Heidegger (2004, pp. 65–74).

16

understanding mode of existing in the history revealed, i.e., occurring, with the Crucified’

(Heidegger 1998, pp. 44–45). Through the appropriation of the

Christian revelation (i.e. the cross), this faith discloses being as

a totality, as a context, as a situation.

Paul’s letters are aimed at heightening the consciousness of this

existential situation, not lessening it. His articulation of self,

world and others, as they are disclosed to faith, is intended to

form the same ‘mind’ in his auditors (and not merely to communicate

facts) so that they too will enact or perform the faith (Heidegger

2004, pp. 83–89). It is for this reason that Heidegger boldly asserts

that there is no theological system in Paul but only the explication

of his own fundamental religious experience—his original self-

understanding and understanding of the world—out of which he lives

‘as apostle and as human being’ (Heidegger 2004, p. 51). It is this

fundamental understanding of being, i.e. of faithful existence, that

he seeks to communicate in his letters.

This connection between proclamation and factical life experience,

Heidegger argues, is often missed by theologians and philosophers of

religion who insist on abstracting away from the factical-lived

stratum to isolate what they consider to be the essential content or

object of faith. In truth, the existential stratum itself is the

essential content of faith; or, put more precisely, faith is nothing

other than an existential modality. If we accept the thrust of

Heidegger’s analysis, this implies that philosophy of religion must

be at the most fundamental level a phenomenology of religion, a

hermeneutic of its singular existential character. Only from such a

phenomenological hermeneutic can the meaning or significance of

discourse concerning God be properly surveyed, and thus only from

this perspective can it be determined how theology as a discipline

ought to be viewed and interpreted.

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To communicate more fully what is distinctive in Heidegger’s

phenomenological approach to religious life, it may be useful to

situate it with respect to other approaches. Kant’s famous analysis

of religion (repackaged with modifications in Heidegger’s day by the

neo-Kantians17 and Ritschlians) removed faith from the column of

theoretical reason and relocated it under the column of practical

reason; the idea of God is established as a postulate of practical

reason. From Heidegger’s perspective, this marks an important

advance over the traditional metaphysical interpretations of faith

as a ‘holding-to-be-true’. But to correlate belief in God with

practical reason is to introduce a new distortion and reduction of

faith. As an existential modality, faith is something more

primordial than either theoretical or practical reason.

The forerunner and inspiration for Heidegger’s position in this

regard is undoubtedly Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose work Heidegger

had read closely in 1916–17 (Ott 1993, pp. 101–102). Already in his

famous On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1996), originally

published in 1799, Schleiermacher had taken the new Kantian

orthodoxy to task. Religion, he argued, could not be reduced to

metaphysics (as Kant had shown in the Transcendental Dialectic), but

neither could it be reduced to morality. ‘Religion’s essence,’ he

writes, ‘is neither in thinking nor acting, but intuition and

feeling’ (Schleiermacher 1996, p. 22). Religion is neither practical

nor theoretical; and yet, argues Schleiermacher, it is essentially

related to both: ‘To want to have speculation and praxis without

religion is rash arrogance’ (Schleiermacher 1996, p. 23). Why?

It is insolent enmity against the gods; it is the unholy sense of

Prometheus, who cowardly stole what in calm certainty he would have been

able to ask for and expect. Man has merely stolen the feeling of his 17 An illuminating reading of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion as a critique ofNeo-Kantian philosophy of religion is offered in Crowe (2008).

18

infinity and godlikeness, and as an unjust possession it cannot thrive

for him if he is not also conscious of his limitedness, the contingency

of his whole form, the silent disappearance of his whole existence in the

immeasurable. (Schleiermacher 1996, p. 23)

Religious experience discloses something that is essential if theory

and praxis are to be properly oriented: a sense of the infinite whole,

and of our human being as a finite part of this whole. Without it,

morality is stale and metaphysics is empty.

The religious intuition, therefore, is to Schleiermacher what

aesthetic intuition was to Schelling: that mode of conscious

awareness which uncovers the self and world as a whole, prior to its

dichotomised interpretation under the categories of freedom and

causality; that interpretive intuition which perceives the bonds

between ourselves and the world, which perceives the significance of

all things and thus motivates and orients our thought and our

action. At the heart of religion then, for Schleiermacher, is not a

faculty of knowledge, but an originary, affective, intuitive,

synoptic comportment towards the world and the self—something very

similar to what Heidegger would later describe in Being and Time as a

‘fundamental disposedness’ (Grundbefindlichkeit).18 In short, the

Schleiermacherian approach replaces the divine with experience of the divine

as the primary object of reflection in philosophy of religion, and

it sees religious experience as a kind of hermeneutic intuition of

the whole, an essentially pre-theoretical state of being,

irreducible to a set of theoretical or practical claims.

Heidegger’s work in the 1920/21 lectures strongly echoes these

basic commitments.19 Indeed, Heidegger’s phenomenological account is 18 See the discussion of Angst in Heidegger (1962, pp. 228ff; cf. pp. 172ff.).19 The influence of Schleiermacher on Heidegger (reinforced by Dilthey and Adolf Reinach) has been noted in the major historical studies. See van Buren (1994a, esp. pp. 147–48, 278, 304–18, 342–50); Kisiel (1993, pp. 89–93); McGrath (2006, pp. 49–51, 139–43). But the account given above suggests deeper philosophical affinities than are usually acknowledged. These affinities are given some attention by Crowe

19

best read as a continuation of Schleiermacher’s post-Kantian

radicalism. Roughly put, Heidegger mobilises the categories of his

existential analytic (still evolving at the time) to bring into view

that fundamental stratum of lived experience which Schleiermacher

had sought to thematise using the conceptual resources of German

Romanticism and Idealism, that stratum in which we are pre-theoretically

related to being as a whole.20 But he nonetheless parts company with

Schleiermacher by taking the emphasis off religious feelings and

instead focusing on the life-orientation that is effected through

the appropriation of the gospel that is proclaimed (kerygma). That

which is ‘given’ to Christian faith, the ‘positive’ content of

Christian religion, is not an immediately accessible ‘intuition of

the infinite’ but a narrative concerning the cross of Christ, a

narrative in which the Christian believer interpretively locates

him- or herself.

Moreover, Heidegger is evidently more reticent than Schleiermacher

about constructing a general account of ‘the essence of religion’;

he stays close to the particularity of his Christian sources. To the

extent that his phenomenology of religious life does prepare the way

for the account of human Dasein offered in Being and Time, nothing

essentially ‘religious’ remains in it. The existential analytic

presaged by the 1920/21 lectures will be rendered by Heidegger in

1927 in entirely non-religious terms. Schleiermacher’s ‘intuition of

the infinite’ will be re-interpreted as ‘transcendence’ towards the

being of beings (‘being-in-the-world’); and, as we have seen, the

latter, for Heidegger, is emphatically not to be confused with God

or with a religious intuition of any kind. Heidegger’s existential

(2008, pp. 66–70, 78–79) and Jensen (2008).20 It was not Schleiermacher who first opened Heidegger’s eyes to the existence of apre-theoretical ‘relatedness to being as a whole’. This was already established as a theme for Heidegger’s philosophical research through his earlier study of Brentano, Husserl and medieval philosophy. For an excellent reconstruction of Heidegger’s early path of thinking which gives attention to this topic, see McGrath (2006, esp. pp. 60–119).

20

analytic appropriates all the main structures of Schleiermacher’s

theological anthropology without seeing any need to think of these

structures as a ‘being towards God’.21 A Christian mode of being is

of course still possible, but only because it is made possible by

the existential structures of being-in-the-world as such, structures

which bear no necessary reference to the divine.

Situating Heidegger’s Work

What then is the significance of Heidegger’s work as a whole for

contemporary philosophy and theology? What can we say about

Heidegger’s work as a philosophy of religion? To address these

questions, a further clarification of Heidegger’s atheism is needed.

According to Heidegger, Nietzsche’s word ‘God is dead’ brings to

philosophical awareness a profound event that has occurred and is

occurring in the history of the West; and his interpretation of this

famous ‘word of Nietzsche’ becomes, from the mid-1930s, a persistent

reference point for his discussions of the contemporary age as well

as his discussions of the task of thinking. It points the way to the

properly philosophical mode of being and thinking (see Heidegger

1977). Yet, for all this—and in contradistinction to Nietzsche—

Heidegger steadfastly refuses to tell us whether or not to believe in

God. Qua philosopher, Heidegger steadfastly abstains from pronouncing

on the question of God; and this means abstaining from any kind of

doxastic stance, whether it be positive (‘God exists’), negative

(‘God does not exist’) or undecided (‘I do not know whether God

exists’). Heidegger’s philosophy, therefore, cannot be properly

described as theistic, atheistic or agnostic; it suspends all

doxastic attitudes. Its atheism is methodological. This theological

21 Cf. Heidegger (1962, pp. 30, 74–75).

21

epoché might even be central enough to Heidegger’s view of philosophy

for us to regard it as the decisive component of his philosophical

method. In any case, the main point here is to appreciate that for

Heidegger, from at least as early as 1921, such an abstention is

understood to be a condition for the possibility of philosophical

inquiry or ‘thinking’ in his strict sense of the term.

But, if this is the case, and if we understand philosophy of

religion in traditional fashion as involving the taking of a

reasoned stance on the question of God’s existence, then we must

conclude that there is no philosophy of religion at all in

Heidegger’s work. He repudiates philosophy of religion qua

philosophical theology, regarding it as a betrayal of the very task

of (philosophical) thinking.

At the same time, insofar as Heidegger’s entire career is occupied

with the critique of metaphysical theism in its various guises, his work

has every right to be called philosophy of religion. The question of

God re-enters into Heidegger’s thinking via the destruction of the

history of Western metaphysics as ‘onto-theology’. As a whole, it

represents a case against the God of onto-theology. And this, in turn,

has bequeathed to philosophers after Heidegger a rather unexpected

and no doubt controversial way of thinking the phenomenon of

religion, and especially metaphysical theism, namely destructively, from

the perspective of the question of being or ontological difference. In an added twist,

however, this deconstruction of the God of onto-theology has also

been interpreted by some as a kind of via negativa, far removed from a

simple atheism, which once again opens the way for a particular mode

of theological reflection. Along this trajectory we find a series of

subsequent thinkers, exhibiting varying degrees of fidelity to the

letter of the Heideggerian beginning, including Jacques Derrida,

Jean-Luc Marion, John D. Caputo, Merold Westphal and Laurence Paul

Hemming.

22

But we have seen another way in which Heidegger constructs what

might be described as a philosophy of religion, namely in his work

as a phenomenologist of primitive Christian faith. This is a mode of

philosophical reflection carried out within the methodological

abstention that suspends any judgments concerning the existence of

God. And yet, by means of this theological epoché, Heidegger is able

to embark on a project of phenomenological interpretation that seeks

to shed light on the character of Christian faith, albeit not on

religious experience in general. This phenomenological task is

perhaps more familiar and less unsettling to philosophers and other

scholars of religion than the ‘deconstructive’ task described above.

And this too is an aspect of Heidegger’s work that has inspired a

growing body of phenomenological studies of religion: for instance,

in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion,

Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Merold Westphal and Anthony

Steinbock.

It has been debated whether such work is strictly phenomenological

—the worry being that by taking on an investigation of the

experience of God, the transcendent par excellence, it transgresses the

bounds of immanence that the phenomenological reductions are

intended to circumscribe and thus yields philosophically invalid or

suspect results.22 It would be imprudent to wade too deeply into

these fraught waters here. Suffice it to say that what many post-

Heideggerian phenomenologists of religion have in common is a

sensitivity to the way in which the so-called Divine Names, icons,

sacraments, and so forth, function precisely within the horizon of

factical existence to direct our ‘intentional’ regard toward the God

who is hidden, thus functioning as a moment within a comportment of

faith that is not assimilable to the theoretical stance that seeks

22 See Marion (1998); Caputo et al. (1999); Janicaud et al. (2000); Horner (2001); Janicaud (2005).

23

God as an object of the gaze. And this seems to me an entirely valid

area for phenomenological reflection, and not at all to transgress

the bounds of immanence any more than any other kind of

phenomenological reflection.

There are, however, theological objections to this

phenomenological project that deserve to be mentioned. The most

obvious worry, which will occur to any student of Karl Barth, is

that it might tip over into an anthropological reduction of theology

as a whole. This would be the case if the phenomenological analysis

is taken to yield all there is to say about religion, eliminating

any need to posit a God who truly exists (or a God ‘beyond’ or

‘without’ being, if you prefer) as the origin and end of the

religious life. At first glance, it appears that such a

reductionistic view will be safely held at bay provided that the

phenomenologist remembers that his or her abstention regarding the

question of the existence of God is methodological and is not to be

confused with a negative judgment (‘God does not exist’). After all,

as we have just stated, the bracketing of the question of God upon

which phenomenology relies is nullified when it collapses into a

simple denial or affirmation of God’s existence. The phenomenology

of religion must respect its own limits. It will never settle

questions of God’s existence; it may, however, go some way towards

clarifying the nature of faith as a mode of factical life.

On the other hand, it may still be problematic that Heidegger’s

philosophical standpoint claims for itself a priority—ultimately, if

fact, autonomy—over against the standpoint of faith. After all, does

a methodological atheism not amount to a decision to exclude in

advance certain theological terms of description? For example, does

it not risk the presupposition that the ‘transcendence’ that is

characteristic of being-in-the-world is comprehensible without

reference to God? And does it not thus exclude the possibility of

24

any specifically theological insights into the theme of human

nature, and thereby dogmatically rule out in advance the idea of a

theological anthropology?23

Furthermore, what if a relation to God were not the enemy of

philosophy, as Heidegger argues, but on the contrary were precisely

what is needed to sustain the kind of truthful self-relation that makes it

possible to go on in an attitude of radical questionability? What if

the attitude of the wretched sinner before the God of grace, and not

the attitude of resoluteness in the face of the abyss of non-being,

were the necessary condition for the possibility of becoming a question

to oneself? Augustine’s famous words in the Confessions provoke just such

a counter-proposal: ‘In your eyes I have become a problem to myself,

and that is my sickness’ (in cuius oculis mihi quaestio factus sum, et ipse est

languor meus) (Augustine 1991, Bk X.31, p. 208). Indeed, in the

Confessions, Augustine’s relation to God is both the source of his

restlessness and the ground of his philosophical inquiry. Far from

being a ‘lulling narcotic’, openness to the judgment of God prepares

the space of self-reflection that Augustine’s philosophical

questioning inhabits, indeed it compels that questioning.24 What’s

more, something similar would appear to hold for all of the towering

figures of the Protestant tradition to whom Heidegger’s own path of

thinking is so deeply indebted. Could it even be that the most

profound questioning of Heidegger’s own thinking is sustained by a

disavowed relation to the deus absconditus, a divine interlocutor for

whom the ‘impossible possibility’ of death was only ever a weak

substitution?25 If not, even so the fecundity of Heidegger’s not-so-23 The most important recent formulation of this objection is perhaps that found in Marion (1991, chs. 2 and 3). A Thomist variation on this objection has been developed at length and stated with considerable force recently by McGrath (2006).24 Heidegger himself even notes the novelty of Augustine’s self-questioning in comparison to the philosophical question of the Greek tradition (Heidegger 2004, 124).25 This claim is offered here as little more than a speculative possibility for the purposes of the argument. It is conceivable that, for essential reasons, such a claim could only ever have a speculative status. Although, perhaps a study of

25

hidden sources ought to give us pause to wonder whether there might

not remain a radical philosophical potentiality within the

standpoint of faith despite Heidegger’s relegation of it as the

‘mortal enemy’ of philosophical thought.

The early lectures on St Paul, and on St Augustine especially,

show that in the early 1920s Heidegger had not yet lost sight of the

philosophical potency of the standpoint of faith. By the time of

writing Being and Time, however, his judgment had hardened and the

matter had been settled. While he clearly maintained his regard for

theology and even entertained hopes for its revival as a discipline,

he had reached the decisive verdict: genuine philosophy cannot take

root in the soil of faith. The letter to Father Krebs had, in

retrospect, heralded the start of a journey away from the

Catholicism of his youth, through Protestant way stations, and into

a post-Christian—and, in particular, a post-Nietzschean—world. Is

this the only track Heidegger’s journey could have travelled? Is it

a direction contemporary philosophy must of necessity follow?

Heidegger’s own explorations of ‘faith in the primitive Christian

mode’ point towards another possibility, one ultimately disavowed by

Heidegger but never conclusively discredited. In the very

inconclusiveness of his own reflections, it must be said that

Heidegger has bequeathed to philosophy and theology difficult

substantive and methodological questions, and they remain open.

Heidegger’s late work could provide the means for a textual substantiation of such a reading. It is suggestive, for instance, that Heidegger speaks in his final yearsof ‘holding oneself open for the arrival, or for the absence, of a god’ (Heidegger 1981, 58).

26

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