Heideggerian Theologies

The Pathmarks of John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner

Hue Woodson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781532647758, 9781532647765
• eBook ISBN: 9781532647772
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

In light of Martin Heidegger's contextualized influence upon them, John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner engage in theologies that, in their respective tasks and scopes, venture into existential theology, following Heideggerian pathmarks toward the primordiality of being on the way to unconcealment, or "aletheia." By way of each pathmark, each existential theologian assumes a specific theological stance that utilizes a decidedly existential lens. While the former certainly grounds them fundamentally in a kind of theology, the latter, by way of Heideggerian influences, allows them to venture beyond any traditional theological framework with the use of philosophical suppositions and propositions. In an effort at explaining the relationship between humanity's "being" and God's "Being," each existential theologian examines what it means to be human, not strictly in terms of theology, but as it is tied inextricably to an understanding of the philosophy of existence: the concept of what being is.

CHAPTER 1

“Being” in Scripture and Macquarrie’s “λογος”

John Macquarrie’s existential theology is devoted to primordial being in scripture, which is expressed as “logos.” With a Heideggerian lens, Macquarrie conceptualizes being in scripture as λογος, or “word,”83 since, at a primordial level, it reveals άληθεια. The primordiality of λογος suggests, first and foremost, that λογος in an articulation of being—in other words, λογος is what being looks like when it is unhidden, or unconcealed. In order to address what λογος is at its primordial level, it is essential to confront what λογος is at an ontical level: scripture.84 In this regard, scripture adheres to the interrelationships between words and how, in the context of a sentence or a proposition, a string of words expresses a multiplicity of meaning. The extent to which any one sentence, statement, or proposition can be interpreted a variety of ways underscores the Heideggerian problem of language: a problem that is taken up by Macquarrie. The problem arises from the understanding that what is interpreted from any given sentence, statement, or proposition is not only the best approximation of what that sentence, statement, or proposition might mean to any given interpreter, but the best possible approach an interpreter can take to truly grappling with the λογος within. To be clear, especially if applying a Heideggerian understanding to language, it is a hermeneutical problem—it is a problem that strives for unhiddenness, when that unconcealment is surrounded by layers of concealment (‘ληθε’).

For Macquarrie, scripture is the ontical representation of λογος—the ontology of scripture hides and conceals λογος in a language that requires constant primordially-oriented interpretation.85 Through concealment (‘ληθε’) of λογος, any hermeneutical activity seeks to venture beyond the technical or grammatical layers of the way language works in order to get to the metaphysics of language.86 With Macquarrie’s Heideggerian lens, language, at its most primordial, contains λογος—furthermore, such a claim stands to suggest that scripture, or written language, is only ontical language. That is to say, the ontics of language is represented by scripture and, accordingly, making-meaning from scripture is an act that involves the roles of two horizons: a “fusion” between a horizon of the text and a horizon of the reader.87 Essentially, the goal of the meaning-making process—the hermeneutical act, or any active, existential engagement in the systematic interpretation of a text for the purposes of uncovering hidden meaning in it—is to excavate λογος as άληθεια from ontical scripture’s concealedness (‘ληθε’).

Macquarrie and Heidegger

Macquarrie was never a student of Heidegger’s at the University of Marburg, nor the University of Freiburg, nor did he ever hold a professorship at either university during Heidegger’s periods there—the two universities at which Heidegger held teaching positions during his career.88 Because of this, Macquarrie’s Heideggerian influence is not as direct or first-hand as Bultmann’s, Rahner’s, or Tillich’s. It is, in fact, a different kind of influence, which makes it instantly difficult to ascertain what exactly Macquarrie is influenced by and what meaning we precisely can make out of that influence itself when we speaking about a Macquarrie-Heidegger relationship—that is to say, if Macquarrie’s influence is not first-hand, as either a colleague or student of Heidegger’s, we must investigate the potency of Macquarrie’s second-hand Heideggerian influence. I do not mean to minimize the nature of that influence upon Macquarrie, but to be sure that we place that influence in its proper context. This is required, if we are interested in the Macquarrie-Heidegger relationship as such, and the lack of personal contact between the two.

Rather than having personally encountered Heidegger’s thought, Macquarrie’s “encounter” with Heideggerian thought can be traced generally to the 1950s, during a time of philosophical resurgence for Heidegger. This is a different “Heidegger” from what Bultmann, Tillich, or even Rahner experienced in the 1920s and 1930s at Marburg and Freiburg, before end of World War II and the fall of the Third Reich in Germany. For Macquarrie, this “Heidegger” is overwhelmingly a post-World War II version of the thinker, which was rehabilitated by and through the existentialist work of Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980). A word or two on Sartre is necessary before contextualizing Macquarrie’s “Heidegger” any further. To be clear, it is Sartre’s development of “existentialism” and the explicit indebtedness of his thinking to Heidegger that brings Heidegger to not just the consciousness of France, but to the global stage. That is not to say that Heidegger was totally unknown before Sartre’s use of him, since Sein und Zeit, at the time of its publication in 1927, was an immensely significant book, both in and outside of Germany. Rather, Sartre can be best described—though this is only one of many possible arguments—as a vehicle through which Heidegger could be applied to existentialist concerns, even if we know, in hindsight, that Heidegger thoroughly disapproved of this. It is widely known that Sartre read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit while Sartre was a prisoner of war from 1940 to 1941. Through the influence of having read this work and becoming deeply influenced by it—and the Husserlian phenomenology within Heidegger’s work—Sartre would write and eventually publish L‘Être et le néant in 1943. In this origin story, Sartre has often been criticized for fundamentally misreading Sein und Zeit for the purposes of L‘Être et le néant, to the extent that his misinterpretation of Heidegger is erroneously carried forward more broadly into existentialism. What Sartre did for or did to Heidegger—depending on the perspective taken—is provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking about the meaning of being that was ultimately filtered falsely into Sartre’s attempt to tie existentialism to a brand of humanism in L‘existentialisme est un humanisme in 1946. Heidegger’s Brief über den Humanismus, written in December 1946 and published in 1947, directly confronts, challenges, and refutes Sartre’s reading of Sein und Zeit. Nevertheless, due to the popularity of Sartre’s work, the damage had, essentially, been done to Heidegger’s thought—. What arose, then, was a sort of divide between the “Heidegger” of existentialism and Sartre’s existentialism –though Macquarrie is aware of this divide between schools of existentialism, his Heideggerian influence is undoubtedly translated through Sartre, if we can remember that Macquarrie’s “Heidegger” is a representation of the thinker after Sartre.

Macquarrie’s “Heidegger,” as tempered as it is through Sartre and what can be best described as a “later Heidegger,” comes to Macquarrie shortly after the Heidegger-Sartre debate about existentialism. Strictly in terms of chronology, this is immensely important, because this historical context shapes what Macquarrie thinks about Heidegger, as much as it molds his determination of existentialism itself. There is a larger body of work for Macquarrie to judge Heidegger by the very early 1940s, to which we can trace Macquarrie’s entrance into the conversation about the importance of Heidegger. We do, indeed, see Macquarrie encountering a rehabilitated “Heidegger,” a “Heidegger” that could speak to the concerns of both philosophy and theology. The latter, of course, was what grounded Macquarrie’s contribution to the Makers of Contemporary Theology series with a slim volume on Heidegger in 1968. Starting here, not only do we see Macquarrie making a case for Heidegger’s importance to theology, but he is precisely concerned, more importantly, with justifying how Heidegger’s thought is generally important. In this work, Macquarrie immediately asserts in its short “Preface” that:

It may seem strange to include Martin Heidegger in a series of books dealing with “Makers of Contemporary Theology,” for Heidegger is no theologian but a philosopher, and he is often reckoned to be a thoroughly secular philosopher at that. Yet I think it would be true to say that one could hardly hope to advance very far in the understanding of contemporary theology without some knowledge of Heidegger’s thought.89

In admitting that “it may seem strange to include” the thought of Heidegger with theological reflection and discussion, we find that Macquarrie is aware of the audience with which he is speaking: the theologian. In these circles, as was evident during Heidegger’s time at Marburg, there was often ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface: The Heideggerian Pathmark
• Acknowledgments
• Prolegomena: Task and Method of Existential Theology
• Chapter 1: “Being” in Scripture and Macquarrie’s “λογος”
• Chapter 2: “Being” in Tradition and Bultmann’s “κηρυγμα”
• Chapter 3: “Being” in Reason and Tillich’s “καιρος”
• Chapter 4: “Being” in Experience and Rahner’s “χάρις”
• Postscript: “Pathmarks” into the Incomplete Being and Time
• Appendix A: “λόγος”
• Appendix B: “κηρυγμα”
• Appendix C: “καιρος”
• Appendix D: “χάρις”
• Bibliography