Heidegger and Religion

This page contains links to items on the internet about theology and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

The links below are ordered chronologically with the most recent additions at the top.

Randall Teal

The ecstatic structure of stimmung is the "reciprocal relation" between mortals and divinities. Seeing the divinities as the mood of encounter allows a clearer understanding of the nature of this reciprocation, in that the divinities announce themselves as a pervasive atmosphere that lights up one’s engagement with a specific situation

Hugh Williams

What we can agree on is that Heidegger’s critique does play a key role as an intellectual hinge between the modern and post-modern period in philosophy. This is perhaps why so many Catholic philosophers have felt compelled to engage him and yet have been unable to forge any clear consensus regarding the nature of his role in the revitalization of Catholic philosophy.

With an appendix on Aristotle's purely energetic god of the fair

The major difference between Hegel's and Heidegger's thinking on history is that Hegel conceives world history as a continuous unfolding of the Weltgeist in which what has been prepared, or can be seen retrospectively, in abstract philosophical thinking shapes an historical world, whereas Heidegger underscores the leaps and ruptures in the sendings from being.

Edward Moore

It is my belief that, philosophically, Anaximander's apeiron represents an originary moment in thinking - a moment more pluralistic than Heidegger's alêtheia, and not as delimiting - a moment that, once thought, is not repeated, but remembered, held close in thought as the uncanny immanence of the eternal flow of Becoming. Was this apeiron forgotten, then, or lost in later conceptualization, like alêtheia, according to Heidegger, was lost behind the idea of truth as correctness in representation?

Timothy Stanley

For Heidegger, the earlier Luther simply failed to finish the radical divide between metaphysics and theology which he initiated in his early deconstructive theology. As such, the early Luther offers an incomplete breakthrough which Heidegger realizes and seeks to carry forward.

[I]t would be misleading to say that Being has no definite 'is' for Heidegger. While it is the nature of Being to hide and reveal itself, this in itself is an 'is'. Just as for Heidegger it is our nature to have no nature, so too is it the Being of Being to have no definite Being. In this sense, Being is not 'stuff', but the rising-up of the possibility for encountering anything at all.

Yves de Maeseneer (ed.)

The papers from a symposium, on Laurence Paul Hemming's book Postmodernity's Transcending: Devaluing God, with the author. The individual papers and responses are linked here.

Marilynn Lawrence

It is true, and self-admitted, that Heidegger did not overcome subject and horizon in Being and Time, however, while he does not use the word Other in the same manner as Levinas, his preservation of the mystery of Being has the connotation of Other-never fully within our reach-always more than we can comprehend. I put forth that his struggle with question of Being was in fact a struggle with Otherness-an otherness that continues to reappear at the margin between the languages of philosophy and theology.

Laurence Paul Hemming

My projecting forward into a future is not something I will as such, but rather is how I could even know myself at all, how I could have the view that driving forward is the driving of my will. I am driven into the future because the present, through ruinance, decays into the past and leaves me with an absence, a nothing, which demands to be filled.

Matthew King

All of Heidegger's later work may be thought of as a response to the nihilism of our age, as an answer to the question: what does anything matter? What does it matter if we destroy everything we know, if we destroy ourselves? Indeed, the question of our age is not so much "why is there anything rather than nothing?" as it is "what does it matter that there is anything rather than nothing?"

Charles Habib Malik

Heidegger himself in the exposition of some text would focus sometimes for hours on a single proposition, a focusing onto which we the students would be thoroughly drawn at every step. He would bring to bear on that proposition the entire history of philosophy and much besides of the experience of other facets of Western civilization. He would show how the matter before us had its genetic roots way back in the Greeks, what transmutation, if any, it underwent in the Middle Ages, and how it received its final formulation, say, by Leibniz. Those moments of prolonged dwelling on a single sentence and bringing to bear on it all that went before constituted the most valuable experience I had under Heidegger. They were moments of sheer joy.

Daniel J. Martino

What is crucial at this point is not so much a thorough grasp of all the intricacies that enable Heidegger to arrive at the all important concept of Ereignis as it is to acknowledge that the step back into the differing difference between beings and Being leads to an awareness that Being does in fact possess a giving, granting, and bestowing quality. Moreover, the prime opportunity that this step back offers for the possibility of overcoming metaphysics and inauthentic nihilism is to foster an even deeper appreciation of the full nature of this giving quality of Being.

Jeremy Byrd

[A]uthentic Being-towards death has the state-of-mind of anxiety which is what separates Dasein from its they-self and allows authentic choice. Similarly a proper understanding of death plays a crucial role in Luther's concept of salvation. As Luther states in A Sermon on Preparing to Die, it is in understanding that he will die that man realizes his need for salvation in this life

Brian J. Shanley

Marion wants a God without Sein or Ereignis as well as without onto- theological being. Marion does want to make a Heideggerian end-run around a corrupt metaphysical tradition, but now the latter is more properly interpreted to be the one beginning with Scotus and running through Suarez to Wolff and beyond.

Michael Hull

According to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's preface, "the Pontifical Biblical Commission took as its task an attempt to take the bearings of Catholic exegesis in the present situation one hundred years after Providentissimus Deus and fifty years after Divino afflante Spiritu."

With Heidegger, the focus of understanding has been shifted from the method(s) of understanding to the very (existential) nature of understanding itself. The impact of Heidegger's thought on philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics, and biblical hermeneutics was, to say the least, transformative.

Garry Deverell

Heidegger proclaimed that even when people have forgotten about Being altogether, even when they have become captive to the belief that technology is nothing more than a utilisation of the world according to our own measure and will, Being nevertheless reasserts its claim on us precisely as revelation.

[H]aving deprived the world of both its mystery and of a God worthy of worship, onto-theology opens the way for the unfettered self-assertion of the will to power in the form of modernity, namely the quest of science and technology to have everything at human disposal. This is the ultimate hybris of western humanity, in which, under the banner of modernity, it arrogates to itself the place of Plato's Good and the Christian God.

Eberhard Jungel

Toward the end of his life I had a conversation with Heidegger about the relation between thought and language, and I asked whether it wasn't the destiny of thought to be on the way to God (unterwegs zu Gott). He answered: "God -- that is the most worthy object of thought. But that's where language breaks down."

Marvin C. Shaw

[C]oncepts are developed, according to Heidegger, as tools and maps to be used in our attempt to subdue and control nature; therefore, to introduce a concept of that which encompasses us means that we are functioning on the level of willful goal-seeking. And this way of living, just because it seeks to command and manage things, is incapable of sensing the way in which our lives are graced by Being.

Richard Kearney

So we are back once again, it seems, with that possibilizing-appropriating of human thinking by Being itself: a form of happening (Ereignis) and giving (Es gibt) which remains beyond our ken and control. Being is thus reinterpreted as "that which is capable of being," the esti gar einai of Parmenides now being rethought by Heidegger as the "possibility of Being." From a human point of view this suggests, quite simply, letting things be what they can be.

Barry A. Woodbridge

Perhaps Heidegger's greatest contribution has been his demonstration that we do not invent language to name our world but that, on the contrary, language which discloses our world is given to us.

Mario Enrique Sacchi

[T]he authentic thought about the Sein would not be an ontotheology; it would be a non-metaphysical thought which overcomes the disappointment arisen from its historical oblivion in Western philosophy, especially since Plato and Aristotle --the pioneers of ontotheology, according to Heidegger-- have established a new style of philosophizing which cannot allow to think the Sein as a pure Sein, i.e. independently of its commitments with the being which the metaphysics deals with.

Garry Deverell

'Enowning', then, is about the way in which Dasein ('we ourselves') is always already claimed by the givenness of our being in the world. We wake to 'thrownness', finding ourselves 'enowned' by Being. And to this thrownness we are 'called' to make some kind of response. To 'enown' or not to 'enown' that givenness in a foundational act of freedom.

Robert Masson

It is now much clearer than when Rahner studied with him that Heidegger's issue, die Sache selbst, is not the question of traditional metaphysics. This could almost be taken for granted-except that the scandal for Heideggerian inspired philosophy, as Sheehan himself points out, is that both Heidegger and his commentators have had such difficulty articulating the all important "difference" from metaphysics in language accessible "to those who stand outside the circle of Heideggerians of the strict observance."

Jeffrey Bloechl

In this belonging-together of being and thinking, Heidegger discerns the ungrounded wellspring, or essence (Wesen) of all meaning. These are one and the same event (Ereignis): Being appears as beings (or: difference is manifest as identity) in and through thinking, and thinking is the act or process of being manifesting itself as beings.

Helmut Hoping

[I]t is necessary to consider Heidegger's "step back" into the essence of metaphysics. Systematically viewed, this "step back" is that transcendence that leads to the "essential origin of identity" to which both Being and thinking belong and that Heidegger calls Ereignis.

Douglas R McGaughey

'Heidegger is particularly aware that the common reading of Aristotle's notion of οὐσία as raw Substance is far from Aristotle's own understanding. Heidegger observes that the "central phenomenon" explicated in Aristotle's Physics is "[individual] being in the how of its movement." Neither Aristotle nor Heidegger is concerned with things as mere objects, but with the world as it is encountered.'

Wayne J. Hankey

'[Narbonne] finds a good basis to regard the Ereignis as brute fact, its play mere chance, a game without rules; it is the whirlwind or maelstrom. Granting to Heidegger that henology remains metaphysical because the One is a vertically mediated and elevated ground, Narbonne finds the Seyn of Ereignis as immediate horizontal ground to be gravely problematic.'

Joaquin Trujillo

'This study works to make ontological sense of who the Islamic terrorist is through an existential-phenomenological interpretation of his acts and statements.'

Scott David Foutz

'Of import to our discussion is Heidegger's unwillingness to conceptually equate God with Being nor even linguistically employ the term "Being" in discussions of God. This unwillingness clearly derives from what he sees as a diametrical opposition of philosophical definition to faith. According to Heidegger, somewhere along its history theology misunderstood the unique nature of its task and rather than pursuing the "interpretation of the divine word of revelation" or the "interpretation of man's being toward God", it adopted theiology's discussions of the Being of "God". Christian theology does not have to do with "God" in this sense, but with the fact of faith in the Crucified, a fact that only faith receives and conceives.'

Sonia Sikka

Tim Ambrose

'In his poetry, Juan Ramón Jiménez speaks of the universal and absolute field of being in terms of bliss, transcendence, and infinity. His reference to these qualities is based on transcendental experiences he had at several times during his life. A detailed analysis of one of Jiménez's poems permits an explanation of these and other aspects of Being and brings out the importance of the element of direct experience. Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, approaches the question of Being, in his later philosophic doctrine, through extended commentaries on pre-Socratic philosophers such as Anaximander, and poets like Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidegger was especially fascinated with the ancient Greek word for Being and attempted in his analyses of certain pre-Socratic fragments to recapture by means of his own thinking the Being which he felt he had discovered in them. Heidegger also held that, in poetry such as Hölderlin's, it was possible for Being, which had been lost, to re-enter into the sphere of human life. Heidegger's commentaries are especially useful in analyzing Jiménez's poetry, for the latter embodies many of the principles Heidegger felt he had found in the pre-Socratics and Hölderlin.'

Peter P. Kenny

Jinnam Yi

Neal E. Magee

Takeshi Umehara

Steve Odin

Charles J. Sabatino, Ph.D.

Dr. Golfo Maggini

and

Alan G. Padgett

A. Scott Moreau

Jeff Robbins

Philippe Capelle

ABSTRACT: The history of Heideggerian commentaries confront us with a string of parallel concepts: metaphysics and theology, onto-theology and Christian theology, thought and faith, Being and God, and so on. It should also be noted that these different dual concepts have served, in various ways, several strategies for the interpretation of Heidegger. These various strategies are summarized as follows: the relation between philosophy and theology in the thought of Heidegger is threefold and should be read to the rhythm of his thinking according to the themes of facticity and transcendence.

Josef Seifert

in Aletheia An International Journal for Philosophy

makes some connections with Heidegger.

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Created 2000/7/10

Last updated 2009/05/06

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Pete