What i find interesting about the discussion of heidegger and Christian thought
is that it generally aviods the question it raises and we wander the wastelands
of tangential thinking --gods, atheism, mysticism, etc. -- rather than the
centrality of the question of the Christian faithworld and its relation to the
questions heidegger sought to answer or ask. Of course, for heidegger
philosophy is an atheist discipline to the extent that the economy of its
language was driven through greek mythology rather than the God of the Christian
faith (which is, in spite of what all of our pundits religious or not tell us
the god of the Christian Dogmatists, Jesus of Nazareth). In this manner
heidegger could write that he "could not be a theologian." Yet, he could not be
a philosopher either, he clearly -- in spite of his failings with regard to
other human beings -- was a christian doing intellectual work which i think is
best described as a clearing ground. He was nevertheless a failure. In spite of
his attempt at a phenomenological discussion of Christian time in the course on
Thesselonians -- which i think is central today for the reconstruction or
deconstruction of Church Dogmatics -- he never quite shook off the metaphysical
prejudice which assumes that all thinking must have a ground in being. His
concern for the theologians of the middle ages and the waning of the parousia in
their work overdetermined the problem of time in his work such that his work
concerns being and time and not kerygma and parousia. His failure, however,
outlines the possibility of a work distanced from the critical discourses in
which the truth of the evangelion may once again be bourne.
-leo
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