Luther, Barth, and Movements of Theological Renewal (1918-1933)

Heinrich Assel, Bruce L. McCormack, Heinrich Assel, Bruce L. McCormack

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110612660
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Die Theologische Bibliothek Töpelmann bietet ein Forum für wissenschaftliche Arbeiten in Systematischer Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. Die Reihe steht allen Aspekten einer weit verstandenen Systematischen Theologie offen, insbesondere Forschungen zu Dogmatik, Ethik, allen Epochen der Theologiegeschichte und Religionsphilosophie sowie auch solchen Arbeiten, die bibelwissenschaftliche Perspektiven mit theologischen Fragen verbinden. Der Name der Reihe erinnert an das Erbe des einflussreichen Verlegers Alfred Töpelmann (1867-1954).

Part III: Disruption

Theologia paradoxa, theologia crucis

Heidegger’s Luther

Hent de Vries

1 Introduction

There is no doubt that Heidegger was an avid reader of Luther, to begin with the latter’s commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which effectively enabled him to break away from “the system of Catholicism” in which he had been groomed for a possible special chair in Freiburg im Breisgau. It is in an invited contribution to Rudolf Bultmann’s seminar, in February 1924, that we see Heidegger for the first time expound his thoughts on the concept of “sin” in Luther’s theology in the context of Genesis 3:8 – 10 and in terms of a modality or affect (affectus) of human existence (of factical life experience or Dasein, as he will early on say), which is characterized by its formal and general feature, that is to say, its tendency to “fall,” its aversio Dei, rather than by any ontic-empirical occurrence or mental event that would single it out in particular. In so doing, Heidegger thereby prepares a radical and relentless critique of the ecclesial and confessional, historical and liberal theology of his days, both in its Roman Catholic, Neoscholastic or Neo-Thomist and its Protestant, that is, Lutheran and Calvinist, variants. Natural theology or onto-theology and so-called Kulturprotestantismus suffer the same fate in his early and later “phenomenology of religion” for reasons that the present contribution will seek to spell out, with special emphasis on Heidegger’s early and later reading of Luther.

In apparent proximity to the early dialectical and later hermeneutic theology, Heidegger first introduces and then refines central elements of his idea of “destruction [Destruktion],” the procedure to take a “step back” into the very origins of Western metaphysics, whose all too naïve understanding of the privilege of “presence,” not to mention the “subject,” would have made us forget the primary “question” of the very “meaning of Being.” The latter is taken to convey that of Being “as such [als solches, kath’auto]” and of Being “in toto [als Ganzes, kath’olou],” thereby slipping all too easily into misunderstanding the latter two in terms of mere generality and of “the highest” (which is where metaphysics or, later, ontology touches upon theology or onto-theology). In taking to task this historical syndrome, Heidegger is influenced by the emerging reception, in his days, of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, just as he echoes a return to Augustine and, via him, Paul.¹ But the role played by Luther is equally, if not more, important in this very context.

In fact, both affectus and destructio (or, indirectly, annihilatio) are terms Heidegger borrows from Luther. Following a patient preparation in his lecture courses, correspondence, and manuscript drafts, the introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, opens with a scathing reminder of theology’s original task, invoking Luther explicitly. We will come to this. And the later introduction to his 1929 inaugural lecture, “What Is Metaphysics? [Was ist Metaphysik?],” has a Lutheran ring as well as it cites I Corinthians 1:20, even though it inscribes its fundamental theological question – and admitted madness – in a much longer and decidedly Greek tradition of thought in whose light its scandal is all the more visible (and should have remained that way)²: “Will Christian theology one day resolve [entschliesst] to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness [Torheit]?”³

The present contribution retraces the essential steps leading up to this position and reassesses the crucial stakes of Heidegger’s lifelong engagement with the early Luther, to begin with their different receptions of Aristotle’s thought and with special emphasis on their respective concepts of the theologia crucis (to be distinguished from the triumphalist and presentist theologia gloriam, characterized by the early Heidegger in terms of the “system of Catholicism,” the “system of dogmatics,” or, indeed, of “Christendom” and “Christlichkeit,” as Franz Overbeck conceived them).

As Hans-Georg Gadamer noted, in Heidegger’s 1922 “theologische Jugendschrift,” also known as the “Natorp-Bericht” and recently published under the title Phänomenologische Interpretation zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation) (Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle [Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation]), we see the author still very much in search of “an adequate interpretation and anthropological understanding of Christian consciousness.”⁴ What Heidegger aimed at, Gadamer continues, was to justify

why one must once again resort to Aristotle if one wants to really understand the Christian history of the West in its productive possibilities and to clarify our own situation in our present. The aim was to give Aristotle’s anthropology, notably as it can be found in his rhetoric and ethics, a voice out of the understanding of life in the present moment. One reads with respect the intimate knowledge of the history of dogma in the Middle Ages, which the young researcher Heidegger had, and how he in the footsteps of Luther, via Augustine and Neoplatonism, followed the path back to Paul and the gospel of John so as to elucidate his own questions in life in returning to Aristotle.⁵

Presumably, it was Heidegger’s early motivation, in sync with some of the Protestant and notably dialectical theologians of his days, to highlight a quest for self-transparency and self-understanding against the backdrop, not of self-presence, but of “‘reaching-out’ with regard to something [das ‘Aus-sein’ – auf Etwas].”⁶ In the range of ontological possibilities that Aristotle characterized on an spectrum stretching from sophia to phronesis or theoretical and practical wisdom, this would lead Heidegger eventually to an analysis of a certain ethos as opposed to its “habituation [Gewohnheit],” which he eventually associated with Dasein’s tendency toward so-called “fallenness,” which is a falling away and flight from what he would come to describe in terms of proper existence.⁷ And in fallenness, “occultation [Verdunkelung]” and “distortion [Verstellung]” take preeminence over the perspicuity of the “illumination [Erhellung]” of the self by the self.⁸ It is against this thing-like quality of presentness qua present-at-handness, of the occurring and objects, that Heidegger launches a defying gesture, inspired in this by Luther’s dismissal of the “theology of glory [theologia gloriae].”

It is, Gadamer continues, in the Aristotelian physics that Heidegger finds the “true middle” of his conception as the latter discipline’s theme is “being qua movement” – more precisely, “that which is or exists in the how of its movement [das Seiende im Wie seines Bewegtseins]” – as distinguished from the immobility of Platonic-Pythagorian “ideality,”⁹ which necessarily falls short of expressing the flux and enactment of our existence (and, Heidegger leaves no doubt, of our Dasein alone). On this reading, Aristotle is read against Aristotle or, at least, against the Aristotle of Neoscholasticism and Neothomism, including its Protestant analogues. Behind the appropriation of Aristotle in the early Heidegger there lies, Gadamer concludes, “the eschatological aspect of the Christian gospel and the unique temporal character of the moment [Augenblick].”¹⁰

These questions that guided Heidegger early on, I would suggest, have lost nothing of their relevance in the later work, nor for us, here and now. Their premises and implications are delineated nowhere more clearly than in the lecture “Phänomenologie und Theologie [Phenomenology and Theology]” likewise from 1927. The latter can be seen as an appendix to the Being and Time and has often rightly been treated as an integral part of its project and this not least because of its far more explicit discussion of the principle and procedure of “formal indication [formale Anzeige],” which organizes the magnum opus and which I have treated elsewhere in the context of Heidegger’s destruction of onto-theology.¹¹ I will not return to this here. Of equal or even greater importance is the motif that Heidegger espouses in the contemporaneous lecture and throughout some of the lecture courses, namely that of the theologia crucis. It is on this particular motif and its underlying – I am tempted to say, near-Lutheran – motivation that the following pages will dwell.

2 Lutheran Sensibilities

Numerous scholars, most recently Judith Wolfe, in her lucid Heidegger’s Eschatology and its compagnon volume Heidegger and Theology, have spoken of Heidegger’s “Lutheran sensibilities.”¹² Speaking in the first person, the early Heidegger claims:

The one who has accompanied me in my investigations was the young Luther and my model was Aristotle, who was despised by the first. Several impulses came from Kierkegaard and in my eyes, it is Husserl who implanted them.¹³

If we bracket the question of Kierkegaardian “impulses” as well as that of the Husserlian phenomenological gaze, then what is striking is Heidegger’s invocation of the “young” Luther who “accompanied” him perhaps even more so than that philosophical “model,” which for a long tradition ranging from the Middle Ages and Scholasticism up to Neo-Scholasticism and Neo-Thomismen, including Husserl’s teacher Franz Brentano, would, indeed, be Aristotle. It seems implied here that the la...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction Luther Renaissance and Dialectical Theology – A tour d’horizon 1906 – 1935
• Part I: Anticipations
• Part II: Parallel Movements
• Part III: Disruption
• Contributors
• Index of names