Heidegger, Destruktion of Theology

Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2018 DOI: 10.1111/moth.
12447
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
HEIDEGGER’S DESTRUKTION OF
THEOLOGY: ‘PRIMORDIAL FAITH’ AND
‘RECOGNITION’ OF THE MESSIAH
NORMAN K. SWAZO
Abstract
Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life offers important insights by engaging Paul’s Epistle to the
Galatians, where he distinguishes ‘Paul the Pharisee’ from ‘Paul the Christian’ in order to explicate the nature
of faith in contrast to systematic theology. Neither certitude in God’s existence is primordial to Christian faith,
according to Heidegger, nor is rabbinic nor theological disputation concerning God’s existence or God’s
nature. Instead, what is essential to Heidegger’s phenomenology of religious life are: (1) faith as lived
experience and (2) recognition of ‘the Christ’ (ho christos/ha mašíaḥ). This ‘recognition’, however, requires
phenomenological clarification and not philosophy of religion as traditionally construed.
Heidegger and Luther’s Insight

‘Theology is seeking a more primordial interpretation of man’s Being towards God, pre-
scribed by the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it. It is slowly beginning to under-
stand 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 “founda-
tion” not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it.’1 So
wrote Heidegger in Sein und Zeit in the spring of 1927. Heidegger also opined that ‘Protestant
faith and Catholic faith are fundamentally different.’2 The comment points to a stark con-
trast and self-identifies Heidegger ambiguously. In 1919 Heidegger distanced himself ‘from
the Catholic faith of his youth. He no longer wished to be thought of as a Catholic
Norman K. Swazo
North South University, Department of History and Philosophy, Bashundhara R/A Dhaka, Dhaka, 1229,
BANGLADESH
Email: norman.swazo@northsouth.edu
1
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 30
italics added. The German text of this passage [Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag), 10] is as
follows: ‘Die Theologie sucht nach einer ursprünglicheren, aus dem Sinn des Glaubens selbst vorgezeich-
neten und innerhalb seiner verbleibenden Auslegung des Seins des Menschen zu Gott. Sie beginnt langsam
die Einsicht Luthers wieder zu verstehen, daß inhre dogmatische Systematik auf einem «Fundament» ruht,
das nicht einem primär glaubenden Fragen entwaschsen ist und dessen Begrifflichkeit für die theologische
Problematik nicht nur nicht zureicht, sondern sie verdeckt und verserrt.’
2
Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna
Gosetti-Ferenci, edited by Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudies Strube (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2010), 236.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2 Norman K. Swazo
philosopher but simply as a philosopher, free to pursue his philosophical research unfet-
tered by “extra-philosophical allegiances.”’3 Yet Heidegger also stated a few years later (in
1921) that he no longer wished to be thought of as a philosopher – at least in any ordinary
sense of that term:, ‘I am no philosopher’…‘and have no illusions of even doing anything at
all comparable’…rather ‘I am a Christian theologian.’4
A decade away from the centenary of Heidegger’s foundational work reshaping
German philosophy and the phenomenological movement, we are now also 500 years
since Martin Luther startled the Christian world, inaugurating the Protestant
Reformation and a transformation in Christian systematic theology away from the dog-
matism of the patristic and late scholastic traditions. When Heidegger wrote Being and
Time, he understood the significance of Luther’s insight for the future of Christian the-
ology and the philosophy of religion.5 It behooves us today, in remembrance of Luther’s
world-historical act, to recall that Heidegger took a decidedly phenomenological ap-
proach to religion, in his winter semester 1920-1921 lectures, while nonetheless being at
least nominally a Roman Catholic Christian. If the early Heidegger before Being and
Time saw himself as a theologian rather than a philosopher, then this seems due to the
influence of Luther. He was ‘transformed’ by his reading of Luther’s works, surrender-
ing his extra-philosophical allegiance to Catholic systematic theology, to its dogma, and
moving forward with the ‘de(con)structive’ task of phenomenological hermeneutics.6
At that time, Heidegger distinguished philosophical and scientific concepts. For him,
religion is not to be construed scientifically; likewise with Christianity. Religion cannot
be ‘explained’, as the phenomenon that it is, against the background of ‘an objectively
and thoroughly formed material context’ proper for scientific investigation.7 What,
then, is the appropriate approach to Christian religion?
Heidegger engages ‘the phenomenological method’ to clarify the domain of inquiry
that opens up ‘the horizon within which specific facts of the matter are to be expected.’8
In the latter context (dating to 1923-1924) Heidegger asserts that ‘traditional philosophy’
is ‘at an end’, phenomenologists standing ‘before completely new tasks that have noth-
ing to do with traditional philosophy.’ In particular, ‘Heidegger rules out the possibility
of Christian philosophy.’9 In his phenomenological hermeneutics, Daniel Dahlstrom
argues, Heidegger appropriates the method of Christian theology.10 A provisional the-
sis is in order, in conjunction with Heidegger’s two assertions, viz.:
3
Matheson Russell, ‘Phenomenology and Theology: Situating Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion’,
Sophia 50 (2011): 641-655; at 641.
4
Cited in Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications’, The
Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 4 (June 1994): 775-95; at 794.
5
For a further discussion of Heidegger’s appropriation of Luther’s theological insights, see John van
Buren, ‘Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther’, in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earlier Thought,
edited by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). See
also Timothy Stanley, ‘Heidegger on Luther on Paul’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 46, no. 1 (Spring 2007):
41-5.
6
Russell, ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, 642, reminds us that Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ has a demon-
strable debt to Luther’s concept of ‘destructio’, targeting the scholastic theology that ‘forged…a synthesis
between patristic orthodoxies and the newly rediscovered Aristotelian metaphysics.’
7
See Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 3.
8
See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1.
9
See Brian Gregor, ‘Formal Indication, Philosophy, and Theology: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Heidegger’,
Faith and Philosophy 24, no. 2 (April 2007): 185-202.
10
Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method’.

Heidegger’s Destruktion of Theology 3
(1) Any elucidation of religious experience at the end of philosophy is to occur only
with reference to a phenomenological clarification and interpretation of human
existence.11
(2) One is to proceed with this task of clarification and interpretation ‘free for the pos-
sibility of giving up a prejudice at the decisive moment on the basis of a critical en-
counter with the subject matter.’12
These two theses are consistent with Heidegger’s remarks in the later lecture on
‘Phenomenology and Theology’ (1927 and 1928), taken as an occasion for ‘repeated re-
flection on the extent to which the Christianness of Christianity and its theology merit
questioning.’13
The two theses are important in sorting out how a phenomenology of religious life—
specifically the Christian-ness that ‘belongs’ to, that is ‘given’ for, Christianity—is to
move beyond traditional philosophy of religion’s engagement of problems. The latter
inevitably moves within its prejudices of concept and system (its ‘system of dogma’—ihre
dogmatische Systematik). This is true even for nineteenth-century discussions of ‘the phe-
nomenology of religions’ associated with Protestant theology, according to which we
have ‘a doctrine concerning the various manners of appearance of religions.’14 Yet,
Heidegger is careful about how one would characterize the ‘appearance’ of Christianity
as a religion. He takes the following description to be in error: ‘What is given for
Christian theology is Christianity as something that has come about historically, wit-
nessed by the history of religion and spirit and present visibly through its institutions,
cults, communities, and groups as a widespread phenomenon in world history.’15 The
latter entails a ‘science’ of Christianity. For Heidegger, the proper focus is rather on
what he calls the ‘Christianness’ of Christianity.
In a scientific approach to a subject matter, Heidegger says, ‘it is necessary to estab-
lish what facts of the matter are meant by the words.’16 Given the stipulated distinction
of ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical’ concepts, one has to be careful here not to speak
11
It is to be noted here that Heidegger’s method of phenomenological clarification—referred to by him-
self and scholars revisiting the ‘early’ Heidegger’s thought as ‘formal indication’ (formale Anzeige)—is a
matter of interpretive debate. For a summary overview, see Matthew I. Burch, ‘The Existential Sources of
Phenomenology: Heidegger on Formal Indication’, European Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2011): 258-78.
Burch summarizes the differing interpretations of Theodore Kisiel, ‘On the Operative Role of Occasion,
Situation, and Context in Heidegger’s Works’, Session on Becoming Heidegger, Western Division Meeting of
the American Philosophical Association, 2008, and Steven Crowell, as articulated in his Husserl, Heidegger,
and the Space of Meaning (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001).
12
Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Method, 2.
13
Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), 3. It is im-
portant that Heidegger, in his ‘Kant’s Thesis about Being’, in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 40, construes ‘theology’ as ‘the creedal understanding of the world and of life’, which is a scien-
tific understanding—‘theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is absolutely different from philosophy’—
he says (41), even as he recognizes the need of ‘a more precise formulation.’ The influence of Husserl’s phe-
nomenological method is evident at this stage of Heidegger’s philosophical development given his ‘formal
definition of science’ (41): ‘science is the founding disclosure, for the sheer sake of disclosure, of a self-con-
tained region of beings, or of being. Every region of objects, according to its subject matter and the mode of
being of its objects, has its own mode of possible disclosure, evidence, founding, and its own conceptual
formation of the knowledge thus arising.’
14
Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, 3.
15
Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis about Being’, 43; Heidegger’s argument is: ‘Evidently, then, theology cannot
be the science of Christianity as something that has come about in world history, because it is a science that
itself belongs to the history of Christianity, is carried along by that history, and in turn influences that
history.’
16

4 Norman K. Swazo
scientifically when the subject matter is religious experience. For example, if one recog-
nizes a legitimate use of the concept ‘aesthēsis’—perception—in relation to the subject
matter of science, then one cannot merely assume the concept has the same legitimacy
in speaking of religious experience. Indeed, given the Aristotelian distinctions in use
(to which Heidegger refers us—‘three sorts’ of aestheta being idia, koina, and symbebe-
kota), one would have to consider whether religious experience involves ‘the manner of
[a believer’s] existing…in the world’ by way of ‘perceiving’ things.17 One must consider
whether this is so even as part of our historically informed prejudice in the philosophy
of religion given in the historical delimitations of Roman Catholic and Protestant theol-
ogies. ‘Thing’ here, of course, concerns first of all thing as phainomenon which, Heidegger
says, ‘means nothing other than a distinctive manner of an entity’s presence’,18 in which
case a phenomenology of religion (i.e., religion taken as phenomenon) would clarify the
distinctive manner of religion’s ‘presence.’19
But, there is an immediately pressing problem attaching to a philosophy of religion
that seeks clarity about religious experience: Such a philosophy can appropriate tradi-
tional conceptual categories—e.g., pragmata, chremata, poioumena, phusika, mathemata,
ousia20 —yet it is unclear that any one of these categories apprehends the phenomena of
religious life. Religious phenomena ‘present themselves’ but are thereafter stipulated
consequent to the prejudice attaching to a chosen philosophical category.21 They ‘have
presence’ in a way such as to engage either our perception (aesthēsis) or our understand-
ing (noēsis) or both; hence, a methodological distortion of the phenomena occurs. What
is important here, specifically with reference to an effort to sort out the tasks proper to
a phenomenology of religion, is that Heidegger permits appropriation of phainomena,
but without reference to (or even an encounter with) ‘these categories of the world.’ It
seems, then, that even a ‘physico-theological’ approach to religious phenomena (includ-
ing theological reasoning that informs a physico-theological proof of the existence of
God) would be inadequate to the phenomenological task Heidegger has in mind.22
Heidegger would have us be clear that any phenomenological encounter of ‘religious
experience’ is an encounter of ‘quite definite possibilities of our own existence.’23
Importantly, the task of phenomenological clarification presupposes that one’s
17
Ibid., 5. Here Heidegger informs us: ‘An [idion] is something accessible through one specific manner of
perceiving and only through that manner of perceiving’ and having the character of being ‘always true’ [aei
alethes]. By contrast, that which is koinon, ‘common’, points to ‘characteristic ways of being that are not fitted
to one specific manner of perceiving.’ And, by symbebekos Heidegger (following Aristotle) means ‘what is
regularly perceived…incidentally at hand’, the latter such that ‘deception is possible and even the rule.’
18
Ibid., 6.
19
Ibid.,
20
Ibid., 34.
21
To speak thus is to recall Heidegger’s method, what Kisiel calls ‘his formally indicative hermeneutics
of facticity’, such concepts being ‘reflexive categories’ by which one may ‘gain access to the pretheoretical,
preworldly “primal something” of our individual facticity.’ See Martin Heidegger, Becoming Heidegger: On
the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927, edited by Theodore J. Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 429.
22
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), A621/B649, put the point this
way: ‘For how can any experience ever be adequate to an idea? The peculiar nature of the latter consists just
in the fact that no experience can ever be equal to it. The transcendental idea of a necessary and all-sufficient
original being is so overwhelmingly great, so high above everything empirical, the latter being always con-
ditioned, that it leaves us at a loss, partly because we can never find in experience material sufficient to
satisfy such a concept, and partly because it is always in the sphere of the conditioned that we carry out our
search, seeking there ever vainly for the unconditioned—no law of any empirical synthesis giving us an
example of any such unconditioned or providing the least guidance in its pursuit.’
23

comportment is less that of ‘saying’ than it is one of ‘showing’. The task is not pursuit of
certitude and the requisite evidence proper to disputation (including here all appeal to
the authority of empirical principles operative in acts of sensuous perception). ‘Showing’
is attentive to an open encounter and clarification, even if such showing entails surren-
der of all previously governing conceptual prejudices.24 A phenomenological clarifica-
tion of religious life, then, must be prepared to surrender all previously governing
conceptual prejudices transmitted historically as this or that ‘philosophy’ of religion,
thus as ‘Christian’ philosophy.
Within the philosophy of religion we have a history of disputation on an assortment
of themes or ‘problems’. We can speak (as Heidegger does of Husserl’s engagement of
naturalism and historicism) of religious experience engaged by way of ‘thematic pre-
sentation’ or by way of ‘critique’, the latter presupposing some polemic. Thus, one may
advance the tasks of a phenomenological hermeneutics of religious life by way of the-
matic presentation or by way of a critical polemic. The latter, however, is inevitably al-
ready historically situated, e.g., in the context of Roman Catholic-Protestant schism and
disputation of both theme and method.25 A philosophy of religion may have the capac-
ity and authority to ‘lay down an objectively communicable, doctrinal content that is
binding for all times.’26 Such philosophy of religion achieves the status of ‘rigorous
science’ (consider here Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone; related reflec-
tions of post-Kantian thinkers such as Hegel, Fichte, and Kierkegaard; or even a ‘tran-
scendental phenomenological’ approach promised by Husserl’s own enterprise). It
seems, however, that we do not arrive in late modernity anywhere near such a status in
various philosophical investigations of religious experience. Where there is the as-
sumption or assertion of such a status in any extant work, Heidegger cautions:
Every problem that is well-known and discussed in public is not so much the sign
of a thoroughly well-grounded character as it is instead a prejudice of the most
dangerous sort, since the problems are as such apt to obscure matters insofar as the
problem hits upon the answer and depends upon what is asked. In the context of
the problem, what is interrogated is only interrogated as something traditionally
taken up to be interrogated and only interrogated in the regard in question, taken
up with the problem itself.27
It seems, then, that a phenomenological hermeneutics of religious life would proceed

without restricting itself to (or being guided by) the traditional ‘philosophical’ manner
of interrogation, i.e., ‘by means of specific concepts.’
For Heidegger, clearly, this includes the Husserlian method: it would not faithfully dis-
close religious life. The Husserlian call, zu den Sachen selbst, ‘means enabling what is
24
Burch, ‘The Existential Sources of Phenomenology,’ 259, reminds us of Heidegger’s engagement with
the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp, who ‘argued that phenomenology was in principle incapable of gaining im-
mediate intuitive access to experience, because 1) it relies on reflection that stills, reifies and therefore falsi-
fies the stream of lived experience, and 2) its descriptions rely on language, a system of symbols that must
artificially break up…’ Accordingly, Burch explains (following Kisiel) ‘that Heidegger saw these criticisms
as devastating for the phenomenological goal of clarifying the pretheoretical sources of meaning; thus, he
rejected phenomenology and developed the method of formal indication…’
25
For a discussion that engages the concern of Catholic theology to assure itself against the Heideggerian
critique, see Anthony Godzieba, ‘Prolegomena to a Catholic Theology of God Between Heidegger and
Postmodernity’, The Heythrop Journal, 40, no. 3 (1999): 319-39.
26
27
Ibid., 56-7.

6 Norman K. Swazo
interrogated to be encountered within [a] set of problems that is prefigured in a com-

pletely determined way.’28 For Heidegger, despite Husserl’s methodological breakthrough,
Husserl’s fundamental (i.e., ‘prefigured’) connection to both ‘Cartesian psychology’ and
‘Kantian epistemology’ gives to transcendental phenomenology a ‘fatal determination.’29
Whatever (presumptively) one takes religious experience to be, Heidegger does not accept
a call ‘to the things themselves’ if den Sachen here means entities ‘encountered as charac-
teristic of a possible region for science’, which, of course, presupposes a theoretical ap-
proach to the phenomena under examination, theoretical ‘knowing.’ If Heidegger is correct,
this approach to the phenomena of religious life leads to distortion [Verdrehen].30 Heidegger
claims: ‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remote-
ness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so character-
ized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its
character of possibly being certain.’31 Hence, within the onto-theo-logical tradition of
Western metaphysics, theology—as the science of God in quest of the certainty that be-
longs to knowing—already has its remoteness from the being taken to be the supreme
being among beings. The being of God is ‘interpreted ontologically by means of the an-
cient ontology’,32 i.e., by way of the formative concepts and categories.
For Heidegger, the term ‘phenomenology’ is quite different in meaning from expres-
sions such as ‘theology’ and the like.33 Phenomenology in Heidegger’s sense must move
beyond the onto-theo-logical construction of a theoretical ‘system.’34 Since Heidegger
had little of substance to say about theology in Being and Time or associated ‘problems’
that have occupied philosophers of religion, the early lectures of 1920-1921 on the phe-
nomenology of religious life allow us to consider how phenomenology may contribute
to a new task of inquiry.
Phenomenology of Religious Life

Heidegger signals the contour of a new inquiry by speaking of a phenomenology of
religious life, rather than appropriating the problematic of the philosophy of religion.
He proposes that we ‘consider concrete tendencies of the philosophy of religion in their
most typical representatives’ (of his day). For Heidegger’s purpose, Ernst Troeltsch is
‘the most significant representative.’ Troeltsch, Heidegger informs us, has a ‘reli-
gious-philosophical’ problematic informed by theology, psychology, philosophy of his-
tory, epistemology, and metaphysics. Troeltsch’s ‘goal’ is to work out ‘a scientifically
valid, essential determination of religion.’35 This goal presupposes that religion lacks
28
Ibid., 73.
29
Ibid., 208.
30
Ibid., 213 and 218. Heidegger here links distortion to intentionality, thus: ‘from the outset, existence
cannot be primarily taken in any sense at all through the phenomenon of intentionality’, given the latter’s
pursuit of certainty.
31
Ibid., 218-19.
32
Heidegger, Being and Time, 74.
33
Ibid., 58
34
Burch, “The Existential Sources,” 261, interprets Steven Crowell’s disagreement with Kisiel on
Heidegger’s formal indicative method. ‘Setting his sights on the ontological difference makes reflection in-
dispensable—for access to this difference presupposes the ability to move from a naïve encounter with
worldly entities to an explicit reflective grasp of the meaning-structures that make those entities intelligi-
ble.’ Thus, Heidegger’s method moves beyond Husserl by pointing to the task of ‘reflecting on the meaning
conditions that make such a life possible.’
35
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 13.

scientific validation. Given Heidegger’s divergence from Husserl’s method, we can an-
ticipate already that Heidegger finds this Troeltschian goal suspect because of its scien-
tific character.
The problem with Troeltsch’s approach is that it does not arise ‘from religion itself
qua religion’—‘From the outside religion is observed and integrated as an object. The phi-
losophy of religion itself is [i.e., is conceived as and engaged in its projects as] the science
of religion.’36 Heidegger is critical of the Troeltschian goal inasmuch as it moves ‘accord-
ing to a particular concept of philosophy’,37 rather than ‘according to religion itself.’
Relative to the latter, one should account for the fact that philosophical concepts ‘for-
mally indicate or signal’ in the direction of what is primal and other than by way of
thematization and objectification.38 Heidegger points to a possibility internal to reli-
gious experience. ‘One would like to see something new here offered…[i.e.,] religion…
no longer studied as an object, insofar as the primal phenomenon—faith in the exis-
tence of God—is treated.’39 Heidegger’s point cannot be gainsaid: the ‘primal phenome-
non’ of Christianity is faith in the existence of God. The new task for a phenomenological
hermeneutics of religious life concerns this faith, keeping in mind that ‘philosophical
concepts as formal indications or signals…[point] toward some original comportment,
yet as “a concrete task to be completed or performed…”’40
The philosophy of religion articulated as Christian theology, whether Roman Catholic
patristic tradition or later Protestant theology,41 of course, has a long history of rational-
ist efforts to arrive at ‘deductive certitude’ and empiricist attempts to garner ‘inductive
36
Ibid., 19; italics added.
37
Ibid., 20.
38
See Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method’, 780. For a discussion of the philosophical features of ‘thematiza-
tion’ in view of Heidegger’s method of formal indication in Being and Time and in his engagement of the
fundamental concepts of metaphysics, see Francisco de Lara, ‘El estatuto fenomenológico de la indicación
formal en Heidegger’, Filosofia Unisinos 13, no. 1 (January/April 2012): 15-29.
39
40
Citing Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method’, 782. That Heidegger identifies faith in the existence of God as
the primal phenomenon for phenomenological elucidation links to claims that he had (around age 29) ‘lost his
church faith,’ the reference here to the [Roman] Catholic faith, Heidegger and his wife thereafter thinking
of themselves ‘only as Protestants’, believing ‘in a personal God…but without any dogmatic ties and apart
from Protestant or Catholic orthodoxy.’ See Thomas Sheehan, ‘Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times’,
in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 70. See also Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs su seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus
Verlag, 1988), 108. The notice is informative given that Heidegger had been teaching ‘Catholic philosophy’ at
the University of Freiburg ‘since 1916.’ Sheehan cites Heidegger’s letter of 9 January 1919 in which Heidegger
explains: ‘Epistemological insights that pass over into the theory of historical knowledge have made the
system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me—but not Christianity and metaphysics, al-
though I take the latter in a new sense.’ Heidegger says this against the background of his ‘investigations
into the phenomenology of religion’ in relation to ‘the Middle Ages,’ these studies having contributed to his
transformed ‘basic standpoint’—which, clearly, he assures his reader, is to be distinguished from ‘the empty
polemics of an embittered apostate.’ Thus, Sheehan rightly judges, ‘Heidegger is announcing his break with
the system of dogmatic Catholicism,’ so that, once ‘liberated from ecclesiastical restrictions’ he may ‘continue
working to retrieve the meaning he has found latent in Christianity…’ It is in this sense that Kisiel under-
stands Heidegger to advance his ‘formally indicative hermeneutics of facticity’ as a method moving forward
(to examine and clarify the significance of ‘faith’) without being constrained by ‘systematic’ and ‘dogmatic’
thought. As Brian Gregor notes, ‘while a theologian like Rudolf Bultmann accepted [Heidegger’s] method-
ological maneuver, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not.’ See here Brian Gregor, ‘Formal Indication,
Philosophy, and Theology: Bonhoeffer’s Critique of Heidegger’, Faith and Philosophy 24, no. 2 (2007): 185-202,
at 185.
41
Timothy Stanley, ‘Heidegger on Luther on Paul’, 44, cites Heidegger’s remarks from a lecture ‘The
Problem of Sin in Luther (1924)’ thus: ‘What is evident from these remarks is how Luther’s orientation re-
garding sin is totally different vis-à-vis Scholasticism, and how he understands Scholasticism as a funda-
mental antithesis to faith.’

8 Norman K. Swazo
adequacy’ concerning the existence of God, thereby to secure a proper relation of faith
and understanding. These endeavors have relied upon the presumed, manifest, or
demonstrated capacity of the faculty of reason, the faculty of sensibility, or the two in
combination, all engaged in a theoretical comportment of ‘knowing.’42 Along with
Heidegger, we are of course aware of Kant’s critiques that challenged the excesses of
speculative metaphysics and sought to clarify the limits of human knowledge, includ-
ing the limits of religious knowledge.43 It is important that Kant (in contrast to the ratio-
nalist quest for certitude and the empiricist discomfort with the results of induction,
thus, e.g., Hume’s attention to ‘natural’ religion) left room for faith after delimiting the
boundaries of human knowledge—even as he also allowed for a meaningful engage-
ment of religion ‘within the limits of reason alone’. Nonetheless, what Heidegger seeks
is the possibility of what he calls a ‘non-cognitive’ manner of engaging the existence of
God. This means, contrary to the scientific approach taken by Troeltsch, one is not to
construe God as ‘a real object in connection with other real objects, insofar as [i.e., hav-
ing presupposed] reason is thought as a unity.’44 For Heidegger, neither religion (viewed
internally) nor God’s existence (conceived according to deductive or inductive proof) is
to be construed as an object of cognition, despite the concepts in use. We are reminded
here of Heidegger’s cautionary remarks regarding the use of philosophical concepts:
42
Stanley, “Heidegger on Luther on Paul,” 42, comments on Heidegger’s ‘The Idea of Philosophy and the
Problem of Worldview: War Emergency Semester 1919’, in Towards the Definition of Philosophy With a Transcript
of the Lecture Course ‘On the Nature of the University and Academic Study’ (New Brunswick: Athlone Press,
2000): ‘Even in this early reference, Heidegger juxtaposes Luther in an oppositional relationship to Descartes,
as religious consciousness opposes Cartesian epistemology.’ Stanley adds, ‘Christian theology therefore
would be conceived by Heidegger in terms of religious experience without metaphysics, and it is in this
direction which Heidegger wishes to take what he sees as Luther’s unfinished project’ (43).
43
See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Division (Transcendental Dialectic), Ch. III, The Ideal of Pure
Reason, 485 ff. Having identified the three possible efforts at formulating ‘proofs’ of the existence of God
(i.e., physico-theological, cosmological, and ontological), Kant went on to argue (A591/B619), ‘that reason is as
little able to make progress on the one path, the empirical, as on the other path, the transcendental, and it
stretches its wings in vain in thus attempting to soar above the world of sense by the mere power of specu-
lation.’ Clarifying the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments as they relate to possibilities of
knowledge, and arguing specifically that existence is not a predicate, Kant contends that (A601/B629):
‘Whatever, therefore, and however much, our concept of an object may contain, we must go outside it, if we
are to ascribe existence to the object. In the case of objects of the senses, this takes place through their con-
nection with some one of our perceptions, in accordance with empirical laws. But in dealing with objects of
pure thought, we have no means whatsoever of knowing their existence, since it would have to be known in
a completely a priori manner. Our consciousness of all existence (whether immediately through perception,
or mediately through inferences which connect something with perception) belongs exclusively to the unity
of experience; any [alleged] existence outside this field, while not indeed such as we can declare to be abso-
lutely impossible, is of the nature of an assumption which we can never be in a position to justify.’ Heidegger,
‘Kant’s Thesis’, 39, appreciated Kant’s thesis, commenting: ‘…in all Kant’s elucidations, i.e., in his fundamen-
tal philosophical position, his thesis everywhere shines through as the guiding idea, even when it does not
form the scaffolding expressly constructed for the architectonic of his work.’
44
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 20. Even Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (Second
Division, Ch. III, A578/B606), had already sought to clarify the sort of point Heidegger is making here. Kant
argued that, ‘The object of the ideal of reason, an object which is present to us only in and through reason
[italics added], is therefore entitled the primordial being (ens originarium). As it has nothing above it, it is also
entitled the highest being (ens summum); and as everything that is conditioned is subject to it, the being of all
beings (ens entium). These terms are not, however to be taken as signifying the objective relation of an actual object
to other things [italics added], but of an idea to concepts. We are left entirely without knowledge as to the exis-
tence of a being of such outstanding pre-eminence.’

‘The formal indication prevents any drifting off into blindly dogmatic fixations of the
categorial meaning for the intrinsic determinacies of a kind of object…’45
The task before us, then, is to ‘proceed from factical life’46 —or, said otherwise, ‘facti-
cal life existence [Lebensdasein].’47 Here, phenomenological explication may not convey
any ‘preconceived opinion into the problems.’48 Heidegger speaks instead of ‘concrete
religious phenomena’ to be explicated phenomenologically (in contrast to ‘dogmatic or
theological-exegetical interpretation’, ‘historical study’, or ‘religious meditation’).49
Simply stated: ‘The theological method [i.e., the ‘scientific’, ‘dogmatic’/‘systematic’
method] falls out of the framework of our study.’ In its place ‘a new way for theology’
opens up—but only with phenomenology. This is an important point. Abandoning the
‘cognitive’ attitude and quest of theology qua ‘scientific’ philosophy, one anticipates the
establishment of a theology on the basis of its grounding phenomena. Specifically,
given Heidegger’s own historically situated context of religious experience (given the ap-
proach Heidegger takes in this lecture), if we (along with him) ‘open an access to the
New Testament’ through, for example, an interpretation of the epistle of Paul to the
Galatians, then we may find ourselves ‘penetrat[ing] therewith into the grounding phe-
nomena of primordial Christian life.’50 The implication here, of course, is that New
Testament scripture (in contrast to ‘Christian philosophy’) is a legitimate source of
grounding phenomena.51
Let us assume that Heidegger initiates his engagement of the Greek text of Galatians
phenomenologically. That means he abandons the modernist perspective and commit-
ment to consciousness in its scientific, ‘objectified’ determination. But he accepts a no-
tion of ‘Christian consciousness’ [christlichen Bewußtsein] and allows that any and all
pertinent ‘concepts’ in use are warranted.52 Heidegger discerns a ‘fundamental com-
portment’ in the report transmitted by the apostle Paul, whose personal (thus, individ-
ual) ‘struggle for the “right evangelism”’ [richtige Evangelium] identifies what is essential
to religious experience: the ‘original Christianity’ [ursprüngliche Christentum]—note the
word ‘original’—‘should be grounded from out of itself, without regard for pre-given
forms of religion, such as the Jewish pharasetical.’53 The statement is telling of Heidegger’s
phenomenological hermeneutics. One may postulate that it is through Paul’s epistles
that Heidegger seeks access to the standpoint of faith, having found the standpoint of
Catholic philosophical theology qua onto-theo-logy questionable and inadequate to the
task of clarifying religious experience. That means also that neither Jewish religion (i.e.,
‘Judaism’) nor its specific manifestation in Pharisaism (such as determined the ‘to-
rah-observant’ comportment of ‘Saul the Pharisee’ prior to his conversion experience) is
45
Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method’, 782, citing here Heidegger’s Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu
Aristoteles, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, ed. Walter Bröcker and Kate Bröckwer-Oltmanns,
Gesamtausgabe 61 (1985): 198.
46
47
Ibid., 36.
48
Ibid., 38.
49
Ibid., 47.
50
Ibid., 47.
51
The more general question, of course, is whether the same is true for the grounding phenomena of
‘Jewish’ life, ‘Muslim’ life, ‘Hindu’ life, to name a few religions where faith in the existence of God (YHWH,
Allah, Brahma) is a manifest element of religious experience.
52
Ibid., 48.
53
Ibid.

10 Norman K. Swazo
a legitimate ground for the ‘springing forth’ of Christianity. The historically circum-
scribed struggle of the first century C.E. between Nazarenes (the ‘Jewish Christians’ of
Palestine, proponents of ‘Jewish Christianity’) and Christian ‘gentiles’ (from throughout
Western Asia Minor, proponents of ‘Gentile Christianity’) discloses an attempt of a
community of confessants to find precisely this original grounding. Yet, what is ‘origi-
nal’ and ‘grounding’ for Christianity is already distorted if there are appeals to the au-
thority of an antecedent ‘Jewish religion’ or an antecedent ‘pagan religion’ (including
any appeal to the authority of a syncretistic construction designed to accommodate the
imperatives of a universal evangelizing Christian ‘mission’).54
The proper religious position of Paul and any confessant Christian is to be ‘consti-
tuted’ (to use Heidegger’s word)—thus, Paul reports (Gal. 1:10)55 such an event as a
rupture ‘with every non-Christian view of life.’56 The Greek words express this: arti
—‘just now, this moment’, and eti—‘no longer, no more.’ Paul is no more a Pharisee, no
longer living his life to please men, and is now a slave to Christ. The authority of
Pharisaic Jewish religion is at this point rejected. But, the authority of ‘the Christ’ (ho
christos, ha mašíaḥ)—is nonetheless retained in this originally grounding moment of
recognition (i.e., not ‘cognition’). Here ‘recognition’ denotes a comportment uniquely
other than that of deferral to the historically transmitted authority of rabbinic tradition
(to which Saul/Paul as Pharisee earlier deferred). Thus, the grounding of original
Christianity is not first and foremost certitude in the existence of God but instead: (1)
the primordial phenomenon of faith, and (2) recognition of one who is ‘Christ’, ho christos
/ha mašíaḥ. Operative is not this or that rabbinic or theological disputation concerning
either the existence or nature of God, but instead the unique religious experience in life
such as Paul reports in his moment of ‘excitation.’ Heidegger emphasizes the point: Paul
‘has come to Christianity not through a historical tradition but through an original
experience [ursprüngliche Erfahrung]’, an experience that is a ‘rebirth’ (Wiedergeburt).57
Primordial Experience and Original Christianity

Despite the rejection of Pharisaic Judaism in Paul’s declaration in Galatians, Heidegger
recognizes lingering elements of Jewish religion in Paul’s remarks—for example, Paul’s
‘argumentation’ at 2:16, which Heidegger identifies as a ‘rabbinic-Jewish-theological’
54
For an historical assessment of the partition of ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’, see Daniel Boyarin, Border
Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), who ar-
gues that, ‘both Christian writers of the tendency that would ultimately be classified as orthodox and the
Rabbis are invested in the model of orthodoxy/heresy as their favored mode of self-definition’ in the second
and third centuries (26). Indeed, consistent with Heidegger’s attention to Troeltsch, Boyarin comments on
the earliest of rabbinic writings, the Mishna: ‘apparently edited at the beginning of the third century, and
the Tosefta, toward the middle of that century’, and hypothesizes that ‘it was the challenge of Gentile
Christianity, in the manner of Justin [Martyr], that led the Rabbis to begin to transform Judaism into a
Church (in a modified version of the Weberian [Troeltschian] sense) with its orthodoxy and its heresy, sup-
ported in large part by rules of faith, that is, practices of discourse expressed in both language and in action
that serve the bounds of who is in and who is out of the religious group’ (29).
55
I acknowledge here my debt to Jim Fodor, co-editor of Modern Theology, for checking and correcting
some errors in transliteration during the copy-edit process.
56
The Greek text of Gal. 1:10 reads: arti gar anthropous peithō e ton theon; e zetō anthropois areskein; ei eti an-
thropois ereskon, cristou doulos ouk an humen.
57
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 49. Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Method’, 79, writes: ‘What
matters…is the authenticity of the existence or belief and this is dependent respectively upon a ‘retrieval’
(Wiederholung) or ‘rebirth’ (Wiedergeburt).’

[rabbinisch-jüdisch-theologisch] position that claims justification by ‘the works of the law’

(ex ergōn nomou) rather than by ‘faith of Christ’ (pisteōs christou).58 Paul has his own
manner of disputation relative to the authority of transmitted tradition. Moreover, we
are to find in Paul his own dogma, e.g., at v. 19 a ‘concentrated form of the entire Pauline
dogmatic’, whereby (1) the fact that ‘Christ is identical with the law’ and (2) the fact that
‘Christ died’ together entail identifiable consequences for religious life, viz., an alterna-
tive practice that manifests ‘faith’ (such as Paul now takes up), even as it bears witness
to the death of the law (intending here nomos in the sense of torah).59
Accounting for Paul’s religious experience, then, Heidegger finds here an important
concept. The experience that determines Paul’s conversion is not a cognitive concept
(think here the theoretical epistemē). Instead, the concept ginoskein Heidegger explicates
as, ‘[to know] in the sense of love…The love of God to human beings is what is funda-
mental, not theoretical knowledge [theoretische Erkentniss].’60 Paul’s beginning here con-
trasts to a cognitively determined beginning that is, by either rabbinic or patristic
theological tradition, systematically transmitted and appropriated in virtue of its as-
serted authority. It manifests ‘an original explication from the sense of the religious life
itself’ [ist sie eine ursprüngliche Explikation aus dem Sinn des religiösen Lebens selbst]. Paul’s
text is phenomenologically interesting for Heidegger because of its unique point of ac-
cess to the primordial phenomenon of Christian faith.
The problem with the philosophy of religion and dogmatic theology—i.e., the cognitive
determinations given to Christian religion—is that this tradition of philosophical-religious
dogma is secondary to a primordial experience such as Paul reports. Explication of religious
experience, properly understood, has its place and authority antecedent to dogma. Such is
Heidegger’s insight. Hence, an explication of religious experience, such as Paul relates in
Galatians, cannot be taken up as the inaugural claim of a theological system. Heidegger in-
stead sees in this explication the broader implication for a phenomenology of religious life,
what is internal to religious consciousness: ‘remaining in this fundamental experience, one
must seek to understand the connection to it of all original religious phenomena.’61 Moving,
then, from this initial incursion into Paul’s explication in Galatians, Heidegger reminds us
that, ‘it is the tendency of phenomenological understanding to experience the object itself in
its originality.’62 Heidegger points (i.e., formally indicates) to the important distinction of ‘ob-
ject in its originality’ and the philosophical-religious ‘problem’ that is thematically engaged
and cognitively determined in its representation of the religious object. Heidegger signals
(formally indicates) a caution for the would-be phenomenologist of religion: the ‘history of
religion’ (including the history of Christian religion) may not provide the requisite ‘material’
for phenomenological understanding.
Heidegger considers the work of Adolf Harnack. If Harnack is our guide to this history,
we are informed that ‘Greek philosophy first dogmatized the Christian religion’. This
58
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 49; Heidegger here takes Paul’s argument to initiate an
‘original position’ that differentiates itself from a ‘characteristically rabbinical’ position according to which
‘[t]he life of the individual is a trial-process before God’ and against which Jesus turns ethically in the
Sermon on the Mount.’ Paul thus recognized this in distinguishing torah (as ‘law’) and ‘the law of Christ’
(nomos christou). As Heidegger states, ‘there is a struggle of the Jewish-Christian community for the law, the
law as that which makes the Jew a Jew’ (ibid., 51).
59
Gal. 2:19 reads, egō gar dia vomou nomō apethanon hina theō zēsō.—‘For I through the law am dead to the
law, that I might live unto God.’
60
61
Ibid., 51.
62
Ibid., 53.

12 Norman K. Swazo
history that begins in the third century C.E. and determines our efforts at understanding.63
Yet, precisely in deferring to Harnack one misses what is most important, but given in
Paul’s ‘primordial’ Christian experience. Ultimately, Heidegger will allow such a source—
‘all of its concepts and results’—only if it is ‘subjected to a phenomenological destruction
[Destruktion].’64 Heidegger distinguishes the task and result of phenomenological explica-
tion from that of rational demonstration. The latter presents a narrative common to the
philosophy of religion, in which ‘propositions’ are initially given with a view to being
‘proven afterwards.’ Nothing of the latter is determinant as method in Paul’s report.
A primordial religious experience has its own determinate character, calling forth
what Heidegger describes as ‘the enactment [Vollzug] of the observer.’65 Enactment con-
trasts to a philosophical-religious projection onto the religious experience. The latter is
framed (in the sense of fore-conception) as a problem for analysis, and accordingly,
given this or that pertinent ‘context’ (e.g., as in source criticism, literary criticism), osten-
sibly ‘objective’ understanding is achieved. But, attention to Paul’s epistle, to the report
of his excitation therein, provides access to a primordial religious phenomenon. Here
Heidegger states a critical point: ‘The letter is something other than empirical experi-
ence’ [empirische Erfahrung].66 A phenomenological explication of religious experience is
not an explication of empirical experience. ‘Enactment’ is here entirely the decisively
determining (formally indicating) concept, issuing from the encounter with a primor-
dial experience such as Paul reports in the epistle. Heidegger continues:
The enactment of the historical situation of the phenomenon is to be gained. To this

end: (a) the diversity of what may be encountered in the situation is to be character-
ized—and indeed in such a manner that nothing is to be decided about its actual
connections…(b) the ‘accentuating situation’ of the diversity is to be gained; (c) the
primary or ‘arch-ontic (reigning) sense’ of the accentuating situation is to be ascer-
tained; (d) from there to arrive at the phenomenal complex; and (e) from out of this
to posit the study of origin.67
Heidegger’s remarks are futural in their signification, moving beyond whatever may be
posited as something present-at-hand. By ‘diversity’ [Mannigfaltigkeit] Heidegger refers to
all that is to be discovered in Paul’s excitation: (a) apostolic proclamation; (b) the fact that
63
Ibid., 50; here Heidegger refers to Adolf Harnack’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 volumes, Freiburg/
Breisgau, 1886-90. I suggest that Heidegger’s later comment about the method of historical science applies in
one’s evaluation of a work such as Harnack’s. At 53 Heidegger asks a question that we can structure into an
argument (with his words) thus: Conditional premise—If the history of religion clarifies religiosity from out
of its religious environment, then one cannot accuse this history qua science of not reaching its object;
Supplemental premise—After all, this science interprets free of prejudices and preconceptions, only on the
basis of its material of sense that the contemporary sources offer, independently of all tendencies of the
present; Conclusion—Therefore, history of religion qua objective science reaches its object. Against this argu-
ment, which has ‘an appearance of justification’, Heidegger objects: ‘all objectivity of the science of history
and the object-historical understanding offer no guarantee so long as the guiding fore-conception is not
clarified.’ By ‘fore-conception’ Heidegger means ‘the tendencies that already motivate the formulation of the
problem’ (54). Further, ‘the “exactness of method” offers in itself no guarantee for correct understanding.
The methodical-scientific apparatus—critique of sources according to exact philological methods, etc.—can
be fully intact, and still the guiding fore-conception can miss the genuine object’ (54).
64
Ibid., 54.
65
Ibid., 57.
66
Ibid., 57.
67
Ibid., 58.

this is an epistle rather than a gospel; (c) the letter’s function in relation to the Galatian
community of confessants in the debate about works and faith; thus (d) our enacting im-
mersion into Paul’s ‘communal world’, etc. These are all ‘co-given’; there is ‘actual connec-
tion’ among the elements of the religious experience so presented. They are co-given in
and for this enactment that alone characterizes religious experience. Paul’s report, how-
ever, possesses an ‘archontic’ sense of excitation. For Heidegger this seems to be Paul’s
proclamation of his apostolic mission and that mission’s presupposition of conversion (i.e.,
Paul as slave of Christ rather than Saul as Pharisee). Our access to this religious experience,
if successful, illumines what is original to Christianity, viz., faith—but in a way necessarily
differentiated from philosophical-religious-historical ‘propositions’ about the Christian
origin (such as issued in ‘Hellenizing’ Christianity).
Heidegger is critical of philosophical-religious cognition that supplants or distorts
religious experience. ‘The dogma as detached content of doctrine in an objective, epis-
temological emphasis could never have been guiding for Christian religiosity. On the
contrary, the genesis of dogma can only be understood from out of the enactment of
Christian life experience.’68 ‘Enactment’ connotes what is ‘still in process’, up to and
including ‘a final deciding’ that is the ultimate manifestation of the Christian accep-
tance of a calling to God. The complex of enactment, moreover, is itself a manifest
dokimazein, i.e., a testing, on the basis of which (Heidegger informs us, following Paul’s
warning) ‘the knower first sees the great danger in store for the religious person: who-
ever does not accept the enactment cannot at all see the Antichrist who appears in the
semblance of the divine.’69 Central to the Christian religious experience is individual
submission to a testing whereby one is able to discern—as primordial experience
proper to authentic (ownmost, eigentlich) faith—the difference between that which is
semblance [pseudos] and that which stands in opposition to [antikeimenous] God.70
Paul’s situation of enactment, of course, has its Jewish environing-world as a conditio sine
qua non even as he initiates the movement from ‘Saul as Pharisee’ (Paul’s ‘self-world’) to
the ongoing conversion-enactment-becoming (ginesthai) that belongs to ‘Paul as “slave to
Christ”’ and would lead to his authentic self (eigentlich Selbst) as Christian. Paul’s emphasis
on faith as essential to the discernment of the divine advances what every Christian’s re-
ligious experience must find inescapably ‘true’, viz., that whatever one asserts about the
kingdom of God (hē basileia tou theou) true discernment must ‘know’ (eidētai) that ‘Jesus
himself is Messiah’ (ho christos, ha mašíaḥ). This is a proclamation that belongs to faith, not
a demonstrated proposition that belongs to theology. Heidegger points to an act of God in
contrast to the works of human beings: ‘For Paul: God alone acts in the sending of the Christ!
Thus: not the works of human beings, but rather grace.’71 The concept ‘messiah’ has its
historical context of signification in Jewish religion (i.e., rabbinic doctrine). But, one is to
have true discernment in an enactment of faith that is also at once a proclamation of faith
that every Christian inescapably undertakes precisely to be(come) Christian. Hence, it is
68
Ibid., 79.
69
Ibid., 80.
70
Matheson Russell, ‘Phenomenology and Theology: Situating Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion’,
Sophia 50 (2011): 641-55; at 646, interprets authenticity and Christian faith as ‘two alternative ways to be’,
‘discrete possibilities that cannot both be enacted at the same time.’ Heidegger’s ‘account of authentic exis-
tence in Being and Time…set[s] up in fundamental opposition to the comportment of faith.’ I disagree that they
are in opposition, for Heidegger speaks of faith as ‘the mortal enemy of the form of existence that is an essen-
tial part of philosophy…’ (Heidegger, Pathmarks, 53), which is not to say ‘authentic existence’.
71

14 Norman K. Swazo
insufficient merely to appropriate what ‘Jewish religion’ delivers over into the present as
authoritative ‘knowledge’ (whether ‘theoretical’ or ‘practical’, and including here compen-
dia of majority and minority opinions that authorize rabbinic judgment about ha mašíaḥ,
i.e., the halacha of rabbinic tradition). Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutic points
to a result: mere appropriation of transmitted tradition—e.g., about ha mašíaḥ—can itself
be part of what is antikeimenous, in opposition to God. Heidegger asserts: ‘The factical life
experience of the Christians is historically determined insofar as it always begins with the
proclamation [der Verkündgung].’72
Christian philosophy of religion errs if it does not recognize this origin: ‘Real philos-
ophy of religion arises not from preconceived concepts of philosophy and religion.
Rather the possibility of its philosophical understanding arises out of a certain religios-
ity’—i.e., ‘the Christian religiosity.’73 Hence, given the proclamation that ‘Jesus is mes-
siah’, Heidegger points to an important interpretive comportment. The proclamation is
appropriated against the demands of ‘Jewish religion’ in particular: ‘In late-Judaism: the
time of the Messiah still worldly, but worldly completion of the Old Testament “theoc-
racy.”’74 Is this sense of the messianic the motivation central to the Christian proclama-
tion that God has acted in sending Jesus (Yeshua) of Nazareth as messiah? The question
is hardly idle or merely speculative for Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics. It
points to the basic tension between Jewish religion and the Christian factical experi-
ence, involving both faith and recognition. Both sets of confessants [Jews, Nazarenes/
Christians] acknowledge the revelatory authority of God. The question points also most
essentially to the very concept of ‘God’, given rabbinic tradition’s (sometimes polemical)
insistence on strict monotheism in contrast to patristic tradition’s own insistence (some-
times polemical) on a Trinitarian concept of monotheism.
We might engage the question posed above in two ways, bearing in mind that first
and foremost phenomenological explication is essential, not historical analysis such as
given in the history of religion. Many scholars have contributed to the latter in the
Christian and Jewish domains of scholarship. One important record of that scholarship
is found in the proceedings of an international symposium held in October 1987 at
Princeton Theological Seminary.75 A second important scholarly source appeared five
72
Ibid., 83; italics mine.
73
Ibid., 89.
74
Ibid., 109.
75
See James Charlesworth, et, al, The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity: The First
Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992). I am grateful
to a reviewer of an earlier version of this paper for the observation that reference to this set of texts is per-
haps ‘unfair’ as material for critique of Heidegger’s discussion of Paul’s experience. Granted that point, and
without objection to that observation, I nonetheless persist in the remarks provided in the next section inso-
far as Heidegger expects ongoing explication (not to say ‘correction’) of whatever may be elucidated by his
method at the time. As Francisco de Lara puts it, ‘La indicación pretende asegurar un accesso adequado y,
por ende, evitar prejuicios que dirijan ya una mirada inadecuado al asunto en cuestion. Sin embargo, como
su propia determinación podría traer otros prejuicios y, además no es seguro que el primer acceso haya
hecho justicia del todo al fenómeno que se pretende tematizar, es necessario dejar abierta la posibilidad de
corregirse en ese sentido.’ Francisco de Lara, ‘El estatuto fenomenológico de la indicación formal en
Heidegger’, 26. (The [formal] indication intends to assure an adequate access, and, thus, avoid prejudices
that already direct an inadequate look at the matter in question. Notwithstanding, given that its proper
determination can bring other prejudices and, also, it is not sure that the first access has done justice to all
the phenomenon that it intends to thematize, it is necessary to keep open the possibility of being corrected
in that sense.) [my translation] Such is the case with Heidegger’s reference to the concept of ‘king messiah’,
in which case the prejudices that enter therein can be gainfully corrected, even as Heidegger himself would
likely see such explication as part of continuing an ‘open’ process of phenomenological clarification of reli-
gious consciousness without settling on dogmatic certainty.
years earlier.76 I consider a number of pertinent insights from these two sources insofar
as they bear upon Heidegger’s phenomenological approach. What matters is that we
seek access to what is primordial Christianity in any one of Paul’s epistles, in particular
in his epistle to the Galatians. Paul’s enactment is informative because of his manifest
conversion from one steeped in rabbinic tradition (as a Pharisee77) who then commits to
a calling in which his apostolic proclamation insists on excluding the religious author-
ity attaching to rabbinic doctrine. I take up these matters, in this order, in the next
section.
The International Symposium of October 1987 and the Neusner Edition

When we engage the concept ‘Jewish religion’ we cannot take this to be univocal.
Contemporary scholarship holds that during the first century C.E. there were many
Judaisms and, thus, many messiahs (in the sense of a plurality of ways in which the
concept mašíaḥ was understood). In short, whatever one may today stipulate as ‘ortho-
dox’ Judaism, the concept of orthodoxy in Jewish religion is inapplicable in the histori-
cal time frame of first-century Christian experience. There is no governing orthodox
concept of messiah appropriated as such by the early Christian community. All of this
is yet in contention. The primordial Christian experience is clarified in a setting of di-
verse Jewish confessions and sets of practices, notwithstanding the dominant place of
rabbinic tradition via orally transmitted doctrines then extant.
One significant hermeneutic dilemma remains, i.e., the manner in which scholars
engage the problem of conceptual clarification in their sources. Howard Marshall
writes that some authors claim ‘that the messianic interpretation was part of the text—
the canonized meaning’, whereas others (such as the editor Charlesworth in the case of
the Princeton symposium) appear ‘to be saying that it was a separate tradition of inter-
pretation to be traced in post-biblical sources.’78 There is an additional interpretive
stance, viz., that whereas one (e.g. Charlesworth) may engage the problem by examin-
ing ‘only documents that actually contain the noun “Messiah” or “Christ”’, others (such
as Marshall) caution that such an approach ‘is in danger of confining attention to the
actual use of the term, whereas the concept may often be present without the use of the
term.’79 Marshall’s reminder cannot be gainsaid in clarifying the primordial Christian
experience in its relation to Jewish religion: ‘It has to be remembered that the amount of
literature which has survived is limited and much of it is linked to individual groups.
We are also dealing with a society in which oral teaching and tradition were highly
significant, and in the nature of things such teaching has not survived in any
76
See Jacob Neusner, W.S. Green, E. Frerichs, Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Another relevant source is I. Howard Marshall, ‘The
Messiah in the First Century: A Review Article’, Criswell Theological Review 7, no. 1, (1993): 67-83; at 76.
Marshall writes: ‘From the Introduction it becomes plain that the editor of this volume too has an axe to
grind, and a key question is whether the rest of the contributors belong to the same axe-grinding fraternity.
Charlesworth seeks to establish the existence of a consensus among the participants on a number of key
issues and refers to a plenary session at the conference which endeavored to formulate some agreed
positions.’
77
Recall here Acts 22:3, in which we are informed that Paul is ‘educated’ under Gamaliel, ‘according to
the law of the fathers…’ (pepaideumenos kata akribeian tou patrōou nomou).
78
Marshall, ‘The Messiah’, 79.
79
Ibid., 80; see also I. Howard Marshall, The Origins of New Testament Christology (Downers Grove: IL:
InterVarsity Press, 1976).

16 Norman K. Swazo
systematic kind of way.’80 Thus, references to such historical scholarship cannot link
readily to a philosophical-religious insistence of theological ‘system’—even when applied
to ‘rabbinic’ doctrine ostensibly explicating the cognitive determinants of that theology.
For present purposes I limit myself to several authors in these two collections. Alan F.
Segal’s essay, ‘Conversion and Messianism: Outline for a New Approach’, is relevant to
the phenomenological explication engaged here because Segal focuses on the theme of
‘conversion in Judaism and early Christianity’, relating to Paul’s enactment-conversion
that interests Heidegger.81 Shemaryahu Talmon’s essay, ‘The Concepts of Mās̆îaḥ and
Messianism in Early Judaism’, is important because its focus and conclusions link to
Heidegger’s reference to the concept ‘messiah’ relative to ‘late-Judaism’ and its emphasis
on completion of the promise of ‘Old Testament theocracy.’82 The latter points to what in
the literature is either a ‘restorative’ or ‘utopian/universalist’ understanding of the messi-
ah’s role in the life of the Jewish community. In the case of the Neusner edition, I consider
James Charlesworth’s essay, ‘From Jewish Messianology to Christian Christology: Some
Caveats and Perspectives’, and Jacob Neusner’s discussion in ‘Mishnah and Messiah.’
I begin by taking note of William Scott Green’s introductory observation in the
Neusner edition, for it nicely sets the parameters of the ongoing scholarly effort of his-
torical investigation:
That the messiah is a Jewish idea is a Western religious cliché. A broad academic and
popular consensus holds that the messiah, a term conventionally taken to designate
Israel’s eschatological redeemer, is a fundamental Judaic conception and that conflict-
ing opinions about the messiah’s appearance, identity, activity, and implications caused
the historical and religious division between Judaism and Christianity. It is standard
practice to classify Jewish messianism as national, ethnic, political, and material, and to
mark Christian messianism as universal, cosmopolitan, ethical, and spiritual.83
The remark allows us to situate Heidegger’s statement about the Jewish/rabbinic focus
on the messiah as yet ‘worldly’ and linked to an expected ‘completion’ of what Christians
refer to as Old Testament theocracy [i.e., the ‘promise-fulfillment motif’].84 While this
‘standard practice’ of classification has its set of historical arguments following from a
‘harmony’ of ‘suppositions’, it is easy to anticipate that one is dealing here with a false,
if not oversimplified, dichotomy of categories. Further, and more basic, the scholarly
focus on messianism, either Jewish or Christian, manifests a political/ideological turn
80
81
Alan F. Segal, ‘Conversion and Messianism: Outline for a New Approach’, in The Messiah: The First
Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, ed. James H. Charlesworth, et al. (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 1992), 296-340.
82
Shemaryahu Talmon, ‘The Concept of Māšîah and Messianism in Early Judaism,’ in The Messiah: The
First Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, ed. James H. Charlesworth, et al. (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 1992), 79-115.
83
William S. Green, ‘Introduction: Messiah in Judaism: Rethinking the Question’, in Judaisms and Their
Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, ed. J. Neusner, W.S. Green, E. Frerichs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 1.
84
Lawrence H. Schiffman, ‘The Concept of the Messiah in Second Temple and Rabbinic Literature’,
Review & Expositor 84, no. 2 (May 1987): 235-46; at 235, provides a corroborating interpretation: ‘It must be
firmly emphasized that Jewish messianism is this-worldly and expresses itself in concrete terms’, even as
there are admittedly ‘various views of messianism.’

of mind in the analysis, even when study of sources (biblical texts, extra- or post-biblical
literature, etc.) finds relevant uses of the keyword ‘messiah’—a term that ‘is all signifier
with no signified’, an expression ‘notable [in the foregoing setting of disputation] pri-
marily for its indeterminacy.’85 These ‘facts’ lead one to wonder ‘about the reasons for
conceiving “the messiah” as a fundamental and generative component of both Israelite
religion and early Judaism.’ One may wonder further why the concept of messiah, now
engaged via the Greek ‘ho christos’, is ‘fundamental and generative’ of primordial
Christian experience.
Alan Segal also contends that ‘Jewish life, as evidenced by the literature of the Second
Temple times, continued with little mention of a future Messiah’, and that only ‘a small
minority…were involved actively in messianic speculation.’86 Heidegger would have us
pay less attention to the contours and substance of this speculative behavior than to
events such as Paul’s excitation—i.e., the phenomenon of conversion. As one may antic-
ipate, Segal distinguishes Paul’s conversion from that of his Gentile confessants. Jewish
religion and the emergent Christianity experienced processes of proselytization as
modes of conversion, clearly; but this is a secondary mode of conversion in contrast to
that which Paul experienced directly. Nonetheless, Segal opines, ‘The early followers of
Jesus must be considered converts into a new, dynamic movement within Judaism.’87
That claim is notable in the context of Paul’s conversion from the strict confession of
Pharisaic religion. Segal sees in Paul’s language ‘a conversion process’ that is ‘an inter-
nal, psychological event’, that is compatible with ‘the social factors behind the conver-
sion.’ Paul looks upon pagan converts and asserts not that they know God but rather
that they have come ‘to be known by God’ (mallon de gnōsthentes hupo theou) (Gal. 4:9).
The principal performative act is that of God. Only subsequently is it an act of the pagan
convert (if and when manifest in an act of acceptance). Hence, Segal observes that the
applicable concepts here—epistrephein (turn about, turn around) and metanoia (repent,
turn around)—‘are never used [by Paul] to discuss his own entrance into the faith.’88
Segal’s language—at least from the perspective of phenomenological elucidation—be-
comes problematic at this point. He adopts ‘a single hypothesis: Paul’s theory of conver-
sion for Jew and Gentile comes from his own experience of transformation.’89
The source of Paul’s concepts, according to Segal, is the ‘language of transformation’
(morphosis; metamorphosis; symmorphosis) that is ‘a documentable part of Hellenistic spir-
ituality.’ Segal opines that ‘Paul is suggesting that everyone, not just Gentiles, needs a
psychic transformation to be part of the new community of believers.’90 One can quar-
rel with his preference for a term such as ‘psychic’ transformation. Segal’s commentary
nonetheless links to Heidegger’s reading of Galatians, as reflected in the following
statement: ‘the process is already begun in the lives of believers and only the lives of
believers, those who have faith.’ For all who would be Christian, faith is the essential
condition of Christian-ness. Here the supposed disputation between Paul and James
becomes all the more evident. Presumably, it is James’ position that ‘the teaching of
Jesus and his messianic mission can be added onto traditional Judaism with little extra
85
Green, ‘Introduction’, 4.
86
Segal, in Charlesworth, The Messiah, 296.
87
Ibid., 323.
88
Ibid., 324.
89
Ibid., 325; ‘hypothesis’ and ‘theory’ are here italicized to draw emphasis to the ‘scientific’ (historical)
approach being taken by Segal, which of course is already other than that of phenomenological clarification
as such.
90
Ibid., 325-6.

18 Norman K. Swazo
effort’; whereas for Paul ‘to be merely a Jew who has accepted Christ is not enough to be
a Christian. For Paul even a Jew must be transformed by faith.’91 Therefore, ‘Jew and
Gentile are equal for him if their faith is equal.’92 More important, Segal’s argument
links to the discussion below about the centrality of the concept of ho christos for Paul:
‘Paul believes that he himself has met the Christ, though he never met the man Jesus’93
Here we have recognition of a concept wholly essential to the phenomenon of conver-
sion and the focus of primordial faith.
Paul’s explicit attention to the concept ho christos in the context of radical conversion
stands in contrast to what Talmon identifies in the concept ‘messianism’—the latter
‘increasingly invested as Jewish thought develops with a credal and visionary dimen-
sion that transcends the original terrestrial signification of the term [mašíaḥ].’94 A sur-
vey of the examined Hebrew literature (‘the seminal Hebrew canon’ and the ‘literature
of the Qumran covenanters’), according to Talmon, does not deliver a concept ha mašíaḥ
related to the religious experience of conversion. Hence, a phenomenological clarifica-
tion of primordial Christian experience cannot merely appropriate the pre-rabbinic
concept of ha mašíaḥ as equivalent to that of ho christos. Talmon’s ‘first thesis’ corrobo-
rates Heidegger’s remarks about the meaning of the concept for Jewish religion: ‘Initially
the [mašíaḥ] idea is an intrinsically sociopolitical notion which must be assessed pri-
marily in the historical setting and the conceptual context of the biblical institution of
kingship.’95 Granted, we have diversity in post-biblical expressions of the idea, in part
‘inspired by different literary strata of the Hebrew Canon’, and resulting ‘from the par-
ticular interpretation or reformulation of the common heritage and from the distinctive
emphasis which this or that group put on this or the other aspect of the biblical [mašíaḥ-]
notion.’96 In contrast to a concept of ho christos issued from out of a primordial experi-
ence of conversion, the biblical concept of mašíaḥ, Talmon says, issues across a range of
‘progressive conceptualization’ that moves from ‘a topical rationalism rooted in histor-
ical experience’ to ‘a mystical utopianism which transcends all reality.’ Such are the
relevant insights we gain from the Princeton symposium.
Charlesworth and Neusner do not alter this basic assessment. Charlesworth claims
that it is difficult ‘to move from a first-century Jewish belief in the Messiah to a Christian
confession in Jesus’ messiahship.’97 Examining the Qumran scrolls, Charlesworth con-
cludes that ‘there is no clear development or consistent content’ even as there is no
‘unified view’ about the messiah.98 His review of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
includes the Psalm of Solomon, including the Greek recension of the text, in which we
find the phrase ‘kai basileus auton christos kurios’ (‘and their king (shall be) the messiah of
the Lord’).99 Identifying the ‘functions’ of this christos, Charlesworth asserts that this
figure ‘is totally subservient to God’, that he ‘appears only “in the time known” to God’,
and that he ‘acts only according to God’s will.’ Pertinent to the phenomenological
91
Ibid., 326-7.
92
Ibid., 329 (italics added).
93
Ibid., 330.
94
Talmon, in Charlesworth, The Messiah, 80.
95
Ibid., 81.
96
Ibid., 84.
97
Charlesworth, in Neusner, Judaisms, 225.
98
Ibid., 233.
99
Ibid., 235.

clarification is precisely this sort of attention to the primacy and agency of God in the
function of this messianic figure, even though Charlesworth concludes the
Pseudepigrapha provide us texts that remain ‘frustratingly ambiguous or
contradictory.’100
Neusner is strongly committed to the authority of rabbinic tradition and to Jewish
orthodoxy as a way of distinguishing the two ‘religions’. When one turns to a key rab-
binic text such as the Mishnah, Neusner finds a use of the concept mašíaḥ signifying
that ‘Messiahs were merely a species of priest, falling into one classification rather than
another.’101 This concept has for its context a document—‘the foundation-document of
the rabbinic canon’—that is a ‘corpus of normative statements we may, though with
some difficulty, classify as a law code or a school book of philosophical jurists.’ The
Mishnah emphasizes system, taxonomy, law, practices governed by ceremonial and
civil law, etc. Everything here, Neusner notes, points to the central rabbinic concern
with ‘works of the law’, viz., sanctification. Indeed, Neusner clarifies, ‘the Mishnah, and
the Mishnah alone, defines the original boundaries of the canon of Judaism as the rab-
binic system.’102 Everything here, then, is an authorization of rabbinic authority, the
installation of a tradition—in a word, all that is understood in the Greek paradōsis as
Paul would have understood the substance of the oral tradition, but ‘codified’ in the
multiple tractates forming this text. Whatever one says about the relation of the Hebrew
concept mašíaḥ and the Greek christos, Neusner would have us understand that ‘[i]n all
the Mishnah the Messiah does not stand at the forefront of the framers’ conscious-
ness.’103 More revealing, Neusner comments on the ideological and polemical purpose
of the Mishnah as a founding document in relation to a nascent and threatening
Christianity: ‘Accordingly, the Mishnah’s framers constructed a system of Judaism in
which the entire teleological dimension reached full exposure with scarcely a hint of a
need to invoke the person or functions of a Messianic figure of any kind.’104 The impli-
cation is clear: The rabbinic emphasis on sanctification and the works expected of a Jew
as Jew—without appeal to any intervention or authority of a Messiah—starkly contrasts
with the Christian experience of apokalupsis, i.e., the act of God in the very disclosure of
ho christos. For the Jew as Jew there is no primordial religious experience such as con-
version, thus no evidence of faith in Paul’s sense.
Paul’s Disclosure of ho christos in Galatians

I. Howard Marshall105 points to Alan Segal’s innovative method of using ‘Christian
documents to explore larger issues within the Jewish community.’ Segal’s justification
for this is that ‘rabbinic Judaism has left us documents of uncertain origins in oral tra-
dition from the third century and later, while the New Testament, while also having
oral roots, was in written form by the beginning of the second century.’ Segal con-
cludes: ‘The New Testament is hence much better evidence for the history of Judaism
than is rabbinic Judaism for the origins of Christianity.’106 This is a supporting state-
100
Ibid., 248.
101
Neusner, Judaisms, 266. One notes here the concept of ‘philosophical’ jurist.
102
Neusner, Judaisms, 268.
103
Ibid., 275.
104
Ibid.
105
Marshall cites from 299 of the edition.
106
Italics added.

20 Norman K. Swazo
ment from a reputable Jewish scholar to engage the New Testament, in particular the
epistles of Paul, for what first-century ‘Jewish religion’ may have understood about the
messiah, i.e., ho christos. Heidegger appreciates the primordial character of Galatians,
pointing to this text in pursuit of his phenomenological explication. Returning to this
text, we may bear in mind that some scholars (such as reviewed in the foregoing sec-
tion) understand ho christos to be ‘a proper name [or title] for Jesus of Nazareth.’107
Whether this is so for Paul in Galatians remains to be determined. Moreover, to the
extent Paul relates himself first and foremost to Jesus/Yeshua rather than to the phari-
saic context of his self-understanding, there is good reason to consider here (as some
scholars have pointed out) that ‘it was the creative effects of the career and teaching of
Jesus himself, as understood by his followers, which led to the prominence of messiah-
ship and the new understanding of it that arose in early Christianity.’108 These observa-
tions may inform one’s task here, though they do not govern as conceptual prejudices
operative in the task of phenomenological explication.
Paul begins his proclamation (Gal. 1:1) by asserting his apostolic authority in relation
to the grace (charis) that his recipients have received from ‘God the Father’ (theou patros)
and from ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ (kyriou Iēsou Christou). Here Jesus is acknowledged as
lord (kyriou) and messiah (christou). It is the function of this christos to ‘deliver us from
this present evil world [age], according to the will of God and our Father’. Thus, Jesus
acts not on his own inherent authority but according to the will (thelēma) of God (tou
theos), who is related to the Galatians (thus to all Christians) in the figure of ‘father’ (pa-
tros). Paul’s proclamation attests to this central datum of Christian experience (as stated
elsewhere, e.g., Col. 2:3, that ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is not merely the assertion of men but
the testimony of God, i.e., through the Spirit, pneuma, understood here as the equivalent
of the Hebrew, ruach ha kodesh, ‘the holy spirit’). Paul does not here rehearse or refer to
the authority of rabbinic doctrine. Rather, he appeals to the authority of God, attesting
to this disclosure as central to Christian faith. Further, insofar as Jesus acts from a com-
portment of grace, Paul clarifies that God’s will is operative here, the singularly free
and privileged act contrasted to any possible human performance of the law. The latter
is ever ‘un-free’, for works of the law are bound to and conditioned by the law.
Given the central place of Gal. 1:10 in Heidegger’s engagement, a Christian remains a
bonds-man who is transferred from the ‘binding’ authority of the law to the ‘binding’
authority of Iēsou Christou. Nothing here is ‘received from man’ (para anthropou), thus
not received under the authority of the rabbinic authorities of Jewish religion. Rather,
what is received is given ‘through a revelation of Jesus Christ’ (di’ apokalupseōs Iēsou
Christou: Gal. 1:12). Here the sense is that of a revelation that issues through the agency
of this Jesus (as ‘author’ and ‘instrument’) who is the Christ (ha mašíaḥ).109 This is a kind
of ‘knowledge’ gained other than through cognition or transmitted tradition. Uniquely,
it is given as an apo-kalupsis, i.e., an act that ‘un-covers’ or, as Heidegger would say,
107
108
Ibid., 81.
109
Heidegger, “Kant’s Thesis,” 43-4, had clarified a similar point in asserting: ‘We call faith Christian.
The essence of faith can formally be sketched as a way of existence of human Dasein that, according to its
own testimony—itself belonging to this way of existence—arises not from Dasein or spontaneously through
Dasein, but rather from that which is revealed in and with this way of existence, from what is believed. For
the “Christian” faith, that being which is primarily revealed to faith, and only to it, and which, as revelation,
first gives rise to faith, is Christ, the crucified God.’ The distinction from theoretical knowledge remains:
‘Thus faith understands itself only in believing. In any case, the believer does not come to know anything
about his specific existence, for instance, by way of a theoretical confirmation of his inner experiences’ (44).

‘un-conceals.’ There is a way of knowing belonging uniquely to this christos who

un-conceals. This christos (Iēsou Christou) does not appeal to either the authority of
cognition (as given in the philosophical concept of epistemē proper to noēsis) or of ‘the
law of Moses’ (as in rabbinic transmittal of written and oral law) or to philosophical
jurists. Rather, his is the uniquely performative act of apo-kalupsis.
Accordingly, he who is himself a Jew and raised according to ‘the law of Moses’ pro-
claims the ‘good news’ (to euangelion) of the kingdom of God (hē basileia tou theou) [e.g.,
Luke 16:16] but does not justify this proclamation through reference to a standard exter-
nal to the act of un-concealment.110 This is clear in the epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor.
2:11) where Paul asserts that ‘the things of God no man knows except the Spirit of God’
(houtōs kai ta tou theou oudeis egnōken ei mē to pneuma tou theou). What this Yeshua ‘knows’
he knows by way of the personal relation he has with God, a relation of the spirit (to
pneuma). Hence, gnōskō is an important word choice here if it is understood philosoph-
ically to contrast to oida, i.e., the knowing that one has through sense perception.
Likewise, Paul stands in personal relation to Yeshua as ho Christos, therefore having
neither need nor obligation to defer to any governing (e.g., Pharisaic/rabbinic) doctrine
about the messiah or about the mode in which a Jew/Christian may claim to ‘know’
such matters. One may conclude that what Paul proclaims is knowledge in the sense of
a manifest ‘un-cover-ing’, a primordial experience to which he is exposed wholly, and
only through the performative act that belongs in a singular way to ho Christos.
This is not to say that Paul refuses to acknowledge the validity of rabbinic doctrine
(implicitly referenced) when relevant to his apostolic mission, e.g., in his epistle to the
Romans (3:29) where he puts to his readers the following rhetorical question: ‘Do you
suppose God is the God of the Jews alone?...Certainly, of Gentiles also, if it be true
that God is one’ (hē Ioudaiōn ho theos monon; ouchi kai ethnōn; nai kai ethnōn, eiper eis ho
theos). But, for primordial Christian experience such appeals to rabbinic doctrine are
always secondary. Primary for Christian religious experience, because primordial, is
the apo-kalupsis that is ever unitary and unifying for both Jew and Gentile. If there is
but one God—note that one moves here logically from the conditional (‘if it be true…’)
to the assertoric (‘there is…’)—who authorizes this christos to un-conceal, so there is
but one Christos. His apo-kalupsis as an act of un-cover-ing is acknowledged as part of a
much larger and comprehensive historical pattern of divine revelation.
Paul is patently clear (Gal. 1:14): what he has received is wholly in contrast to his for-
mer manner of life in Judaism, wherein he was ‘exceedingly’ (huparxōn, ‘above’ others) a
zealot (zelōtēs) for ‘the traditions’ (paradōseōn) of his fathers (tōn patrikōn). Paul surrenders
his former ‘hyperarchontic’ authority to transmit and defend ‘jealously’ (thus the sense of
zelōtēs) the Jewish religion given in the traditions of the patriarchs. The Greek paradōsis is
significant here in the sense of what is bequeathed, inherited, transmitted ‘beside’ (para-)
some other thing—and in this case we must understand paradōsis in the strict sense of what
is beside what is primary for Jewish religion, viz., the law (torah). But, Paul is also clear that
Jewish religion is given in many traditions, hence the plural paradōseōn. The whole of this,
then, Paul surrenders as he accepts the apokalupsis given by the Christ. Thereby, and on that
110
Consider that Moses Maimonides writes in his introduction to the Mishnah, ‘God did not permit us
to learn from the prophets, only from the Rabbis who are men of logic and reason.’ He asserts this having
earlier provided an example: ‘If there are 1000 prophets, all of them of the stature of Elijah and Elisha, giving
a certain interpretation, and 1001 Rabbis giving the opposite interpretation, you shall ‘incline after the ma-
jority’ and the law is according to the 1001 Rabbis, not according to the 1000 venerable prophets.’ See here
Moses Maimonides, Introduction to the Mishnah (Jersualem: Me’aliyyot, 1992), 27-8.

22 Norman K. Swazo
authority alone, he takes up the mission of apostolic proclamation. The authority of these
many traditions necessarily yields before Paul’s primordial experience of apokalupsis.
This ‘un-covering’ act bequeaths its own ‘liberty’ (eleutherian) relative to the traditions
of the fathers (Gal. 2:4), even as Paul understands that he is Jew ‘by nature’—phusei Ioudaio
he says, with reference to himself and Peter/Cephas (Gal. 2:15), thus a Jew ‘according to
nature’ (kata phusis). A Jew, in short, though naturally a Jew, may experience conversion
that imparts liberty (eleutherian) despite the determinative power of nature. We are to un-
derstand that ‘being a Jew by birth’ is no longer controlling of Paul’s conduct. In contrast
to whatever justification (dikaioō) one may have thereby, i.e., consequent to the primordial
experience of apokalupsis, one’s liberty has its justification in the ongoing, living, faith that
is ek pisteōs christou. This justification is antithetical, even adverse, to the justification a
Jew normally seeks by works of law (ex ergōn nomou; Gal. 2:16). The ‘liberty’ the Christian
has enables a religious life ‘lived to[ward] God’ (theō zēsō; Gal. 2:19).
The sense of ho Christos in Paul’s apostolic proclamation has no reference to an au-
thoritative tradition but only to the apokalupsis that, as primordial experience, claims
him. It is this alone that informs any ongoing apostolic proclamation, no matter the fact
of his being a Jew by nature, or the fact of the authority he hitherto acknowledged in
the traditions of the fathers. Despite the results of historical scholarship with reference
to sources and cultural context such as those engaged in New Testament studies, a phe-
nomenological explication that gains access to Paul’s excitation leads us to understand
that the primordial Christian experience of ‘the Messiah’ is not to be situated in paradō-
sis, thus not in proto-rabbinic or rabbinic sources, and certainly not in any ‘projection’
onto early texts arising from methodological prejudices of later philosophico-religious
disputation in either Jewish or Christian theological dogmatics. Any properly engaged
post-modern, indeed post-traditional theology, would have to proceed accordingly.
Heidegger already understood this in his 1927/28 lecture. He identified the goal of
theology qua historical science to be ‘concrete Christian existence itself’ and ‘never a
valid system of theological propositions about general states of affairs within one re-
gion of being that is present at hand among others.’111 More important, given the pri-
mordial phenomena of Christian-ness, ‘the theological transparency and conceptual
interpretation of faith cannot found and secure faith in its legitimacy.’112 Although
Christian theology may have its ‘systematic’ aspect, says Heidegger, ‘It is systematic not
by constructing a system, but on the contrary by avoiding a system, in the sense that it
seeks solely to bring clearly to light the intrinsic συστημα of the Christian occurrence as
such, that is, to place the believer who understands conceptually into the history of
revelation.’113 Here ‘revelation’ is none other than what Paul—indeed any Christian as
Christian—experiences as apokalupsis, so that theology clarifies ‘the action of God [i.e.,
that which issues from, is initiated by God] on human beings who [engaged by this
disclosive act such as to accept it and respond to it] act in faith…’114
111
Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis’, 46.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid., 47.
114
Ibid., 48; text in brackets inserted to clarify the sense. Heidegger is careful to state: ‘God is in no way
the object of investigation in theology, as for example, animals are the theme of zoology’ even as theology
‘is not speculative knowledge of God.’ Heidegger points to the question of what guiding standards of evi-
dence are operative in asserting that ‘[i]n no case may we delimit the scientific character of theology by
using an other science as the guiding standard of evidence for its mode of proof or as the measure of rigor of
its conceptuality’ (Ibid., 49).

Conclusion
The early Heidegger deliberately distinguishes between ‘philosophy of religion’ and
‘phenomenology of religious life’, privileging the latter in the service of a future theol-
ogy no longer moved by a concern for cognition and its theoretical correlate of system-
atic thought. His phenomenological explication of Paul’s apostolic proclamation,
especially in the epistle to the Galatians, exemplifies his attention to religious life. In
view of that explication (albeit not in any exhaustive way) Christian (as distinct from
Jewish) concepts such as apokalupsis and ho christos are important insofar as they artic-
ulate, as formally indicative concepts, the founding and binding character of Christian
religious life. Understood in this way, Heidegger’s lectures provide us with a lucid ex-
ample of his post-Husserlian, non-transcendental, phenomenological approach to
Christian ‘religious life’ distinguished from the philosophico-religious cognition that
he finds dominant in both Roman Catholic and Protestant systematic theology.115
Properly understood, Heidegger’s lectures116 provide us with ample inspiration to pur-
sue such a phenomenological analysis in thinking beyond traditional approaches to the
philosophy of religion.117 Thereby, we find ourselves ‘becoming free from the last
shackles of acquired positions—constant new progress toward the real origins …’118
But, of course, that raises the question whether ‘existentialist’ theologies such as
that of Rudolf Bultmann (Heidegger’s colleague while at Marburg) and, by exten-
sion, that of John Macquarrie, achieve what Heidegger deems essential. Bultmann
found Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics meaningful in clarifying con-
cepts for (Christian/New Testament) theology.119 Following Heidegger’s ‘turn’ to the
phenomenology of religious life, however, we must conclude that Bultmann’s theo-
logical approach does not gain access to what Heidegger takes to be phenomenolog-
ically central to Christian religious experience. That extended argument cannot be
115
Even so there is, according to Frank Schalow, an uneasiness about Heidegger’s ‘methodological athe-
ism’ in Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomginton, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1927/1988). ‘The adherence to this radical freedom as a monument to our finite
natures (transcendence) suggests an increasingly more distanced stance toward the import of religious ex-
perience.’ Frank Schalow, Heidegger and the Quest for the Sacred: From Thought to the Sanctuary of Faith
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 38. Schalow, of course, finds in Heidegger a movement
from a ‘neutral profile toward faith [that] epitomizes his attitude toward religion at the close of the 1920s’ to
one of ‘nascent religiosity in a richer manner in the 1930s by re-examining the roots of freedom, that is, in-
sofar as it includes a possible relation to the Divine.’ By contrast, Enno Popkes, evaluates Heidegger’s phe-
nomenology of religious life rather differently. ‘Modern reflections on hermeneutics and methodology of
the discipline of New Testament Studies…can only receive an indirect impulse from these early studies of
Heidegger.’ Enno Edzard Popkes, ‘Phänomenologie früchristlichen Lebens: Exegetische Anmerkungen zu
Heidegger’s Auslegung paulischer Briefe’, Kerygma und Dogma 52, no. 3 (2006): 263-86.
116
The editors of Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and
Claudies Strube, rightly offer the reader a cautionary reminder that, ‘[t]he manuscript of the lecture course
is lost’(255). In other words, the editors are working with ‘five sets of notations, which allow for the approx-
imate reconstruction of the train of thought and articulation of the lecture course.’ These literary artifacts
include ‘stenographical notes…immediately transcribed after each lecture.’ Thus ‘[i]n regard to authenticity,
the text, prepared in this manner, cannot be compared to editions based on original manuscripts.’ Ibid., 256.
117
John Reynolds Williams, Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Religion (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1977) misses the point of Heidegger’s distinction between ‘the philosophy of religion’ and
‘the phenomenology of religious life.’ For a more systematic account, see Schalow, Heidegger and the Quest for
the Sacred.
118
Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 259; the editors cite this passage from a letter dated to
1 May 1919.
119
For a good summary overview, see John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of
Heidegger and Bultmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1955).

24 Norman K. Swazo
made here, since it depends on extensively analyzing Bultmann’s claims about the
justification of belief, i.e., solely on the basis of the Christian revelation or by way of
cognition (natural reason), but also precisely how dependent Bultmann is on
Heidegger’s so-called ‘existentialist ontology’.120 Heidegger’s focus on Paul’s conver-
sion experience resonates with Bultmann’s attention to revelation as ‘religious en-
counter’. As Joseph Cahill contends, ‘Bultmann holds that nature reveals and
conceals God’s presence’, ‘because God cannot be the proper object of objectivizing
thought’ – evidence that ‘Bultmann is clear in denying this type of natural revela-
tion.’121 Thus, Bultmann’s (a) recognition of nature as revealing and concealing and
(b) his rejection of objectivizing thought accord with Heidegger’s focus on primor-
dial faith and the significance of apokalupsis for Christian religious life. Hence, again
as Cahill aptly observes, ‘Operating from systematic premises, namely, the Kantian
separation of faith and knowledge and the Lutheran dichotomy between corruptive
works of the intellect and an absolute faith, one dismisses the conciliar foundations
and reverts to scriptural categories as the only legitimate understanding of revela-
tion. This, with the Heideggerian refinements, is Bultmann’s position.’122 My analy-
sis, as distinct from Cahill’s and others, emphasizes Heidegger’s attention to
phenomenological clarification rather than to epistemological categories. This is
where Heidegger’s phenomenological approach advances over Bultmann’s theolog-
ical approach, yet at the same time deferring to both Kant and Luther for systematic
insights as he addresses personalist features of the religious encounter.123
Beyond such systematic considerations of modern theology, one of the tasks of a con-
tinuing phenomenology of Christian religious life is to take up Heidegger’s ‘concept’ of
unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), i.e., alētheia, as the principal ‘ontological concept’
upon which to explicate theologically or demonstrate rationally the Christian concept
of apokalupsis.124 One can say, at least provisionally, that alētheia ‘indicates the ontologi-
cal character of that region of being’ in which the concept of apokalupsis ‘as a concept of
[Christian] existence must necessarily maintain itself’, so that it might be allowed ‘to
120
See here David W. Congdon, ‘Is Bultmann a Heideggerian Theologian?’ Scottish Journal of Theology 70,
no. 1 (February 2017): 19-38. Also see Gareth Jones, ‘Phenomenology and Theology: A Note on Heidegger
and Bultmann,’ Modern Theology 5, no. 2 (January 1989): 161-79. Congdon seems to think that Heidegger’s
philosophy is a ‘dead-end’ for theology, Bultmann’s philosophy thus to be similarly evaluated, except that
Congdon rejects the view of some critics who denominate Bultmann a Heideggerian theologian.
121
Joseph Cahill, ‘Notes: The Scope of Demythologizing,’ Theological Studies 28, no. 1 (1962): 79-92, with
reference to John Macquarrie’s The Scope of Demythologizing: Bultmann and his Critics (New York, NY: Harper
& Row, 1960), at 82.
122
Ibid., 88.
123
Gareth Jones, Bultmann: Towards a Critical Theology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 166, however, ar-
gues that ‘both Heidegger and Bultmann understand the task of theology in relation to the task of philoso-
phy as phenomenology and vice versa.’
124
I say this having in mind Peter C. Hodgson, ‘Heidegger, Revelation, and the Word of God’, Journal of
Religion 49, no. 3 (1969): 228-62, who sought to ‘examine the extent to which theology can make use of the
phenomenological analysis’ of Heidegger, with a view to ‘theological appropriation of Heidegger’s funda-
mental ontology’ – specifically whether Heidegger’s analysis ‘can serve as a philosophical framework for a
theological understanding of revelation.’ In short, Hodgson investigates whether Heidegger’s work might
serve ‘as a formal basis for a theological understanding of the word of God.’

arise out of, and to present itself within, the specific existential dimension of faith
thereby indicated.’125 In this way, theology qua phenomenology of Christian religious
life may continue to do justice to what Heidegger finds ever pertinent: namely, the ‘cre-
dal source of the disclosure of theological concepts’, i.e., the primacy of faith over cog-
nition. In the end, Heidegger concedes, ‘only a religious person can understand religious
life, for if it were otherwise, he would have no genuine reality.’126 That said, we still have
here a ‘difficulty’ to be overcome by way of phenomenological clarification, precisely
inasmuch as the ‘phenomenological primordial understanding is so little prejudiced…
that it carries within itself the possibilities of entering into the different worlds and
forms of experience.’127 For the early Heidegger, that includes religious life.
The later Heidegger, however, undoubtedly moves away from both systematic the-
ology and existential phenomenology, in which case any appropriation of Heidegger’s
thought in a religious context would have to confront his ‘turn’ (Kehre) to a concept
of divinity that is no longer Jewish/Christian. To restate Heidegger’s central insight:
theology’s task is to think a more ‘primordial’ interpretation of the human way to be
towards the divine, a task it can fulfill (a) only on the ground of the meaning of faith
and (b) if it remains within that meaning rather than within a system of dogma. This
hermeneutic comportment discloses a knowledge of the divine that is one of recogni-
tion of the divine encounter in religious life, such as was evident in Paul’s conversion,
rather than the cognition (epistemē) of theoretical insight that installs a historical tra-
dition of systematic theology. In the end, the question that remains for theologians
following Heidegger’s phenomenology of Christian religious life is whether such a phe-
nomenology can move reasonably beyond the ‘scientific’ methodological commitments
Heidegger categorizes as ihre dogmatische Systematik (‘its system of dogma’).
125
Heidegger, ‘Kant’s Thesis’, 52. This statement, of course, presupposes only that the Heidegger of ‘On
the Essence of Ground’, Basic Writings (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1993), 253, stated: ‘Through the
ontological interpretation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world no decision, whether positive or negative, is made
concerning a possible being toward God. It is, however, the case that through an illumination of transcen-
dence we first achieve an adequate concept of Dasein, with respect to which it can now be asked how the rela-
tionship of Dasein to God is ontologically ordered.’
126
127
Ibid.

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Modern Theology 00:﻿00 Month 2018 DOI: 10.1111/moth.

Heidegger and Luther’s Insight

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It seems, then, that a phenomenological hermeneutics of religious life would proceed

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interrogated to be encountered within [a] set of problems that is prefigured in a com-

Phenomenology of Religious Life

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Primordial Experience and Original Christianity

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[rabbinisch-jüdisch-theologisch] position that claims justification by ‘the works of the law’

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The enactment of the historical situation of the phenomenon is to be gained. To this

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The International Symposium of October 1987 and the Neusner Edition

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Paul’s Disclosure of ho christos in Galatians

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‘un-conceals.’ There is a way of knowing belonging uniquely to this christos who

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© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2018 DOI: 10.1111/moth.