Heidegger and theology

The subtitle of Benjamin Crowe’s Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) highlights the twin themes of his book, both of which, he argues, were shaped by Heidegger’s study of Christian theology.

The notion that philosophy is Destruktion comes from Luther, who, Crowe argues, viewed his own theology as a polemical destructio of everything pertaining to the old man – that is, scholasticism, Aristotle, reason, philosophy, theologia gloriae . Inspired, Heidegger saw his philosophy as a “struggle against inauthenticity.”

Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, the other central theme of Crowe’s book, was also inspired by Christian sources, in this case by early Christian themes. Heidegger drew on the “Romantic personalism” of Dilthey (who began as a theologian) and Schleiermacher, but he particularly focused on Paul, as interpreted by Schweitzer and other New Testament scholars of the day. In Crowe’s summary Heidegger defined Christian life as “uncanny uncertainty that is suspended between the incalculable eruption of the ‘proclamation’ and the incalculable arrival of the Parousia.” When the gospel comes, it is not to be filed away; instead, in Heidegger’s words, the Christian is to persist “in anxious worry” and “to authentically appropriate [it] in factical life-experience.” In short, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity was shaped by his reading of early Christian eschatology.