Query, Re: Derrida, Habermas, and Theology

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Fri Feb 25 19:41:41 PST 2000


On Fri, 25 Feb 2000 kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:


> Really, Protestant? I always pegged it as more Catholic... for some
> reason I associate Heidegger more with the spirit of Aquinas (ontology
> and all that) than I do with Luther...

A little of both, I think. I remember hearing Rudolf Bultmann's daughter recall that a a child she was dandled on Heidegger's knee when he came to Marburg. She said her father -- perhaps the leading Protestant biblical scholar of the 20th century -- spoke of his friend, the Catholic (in background) Heidegger coming to teach at Protestant (in background) Marburg at the time of the publication of Sein und Zeit. There's a sense in which Bultmann built his theology by using a Heideggerian existentialist decision in place of a Lutheran justification by faith -- so Bultmann's existentialist theology remained Lutheran in outline.

--C. G. Estabrook



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