There was a time when the philosophy of Martin Heidegger was one of the primary reference points for theology. Both in works of protestant and catholic theology one could find the typical language of Heidegger's philosophy, and it seemed as if one had to use his concepts in order to be taken seriously. This time is long over now, and only post-modern theologians still refer to Heidegger and his philosophy when they try to explain the idea of an ‘absent God’. One could therefore ask the question whether Heidegger is still important for theology today or if he is just a prominent figure of 20th−century philosophy, without any meaning for the contemporary theologian's questions.
The Oxford theologian Judith Wolfe now tries to show in her work on Heidegger's eschatology that Heidegger still matters and that he can still be an eminent dialogue partner for christian theology, especially in his critical questions to theology. At the same time Heidegger remains one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century, without whom not only the development of philosophical thinking could not be understood, but whose constant debate with theological issues shows how essential his philosophy is for a better understanding of theology ‘s development in the last 100 years. Wolfe refers here mainly to the development of Heidegger himself, who, as generally known, started his philosophical development as a student in catholic theology in Freiburg, Germany and continued with his interests in theological questions even then when he changed his subject from theology to philosophy. Later he broke with the catholic system, in order, as he said, to embrace a protestant understanding of christian faith without ceasing to be interested in the debate with the tradition of theology's. Wolfe bases herself on recently published documents to ask when this break with the catholic faith actually happened.
The way of Heidegger nevertheless led eventually to an understanding of philosophy as an a-theistic analysis of the human existence, understood as ‘Da-Sein’. The human being, thrown into the world as ‘Da-Sein’ is oriented towards death, as the last frontier and the last determination of his existence: man is ‘Being-unto-Death’. Whether this last frontier of death is the absolute nothingness, which negates radically our human existence, or if this frontier is just the gate to a new life in God, as christian faith hopes, cannot be decided by philosophy, as Heidegger points out. What remains is therefore in Heidegger's philosophy an ‘Eschatology without Eschaton’, which means an eschatology without a positive designation of the ‘whereupon’ of human existence. Wolfe then tries to trace this development from Heidegger's devotion to catholicism to an a-theistic understanding of human existence in philosophy in his thinking, and she refers in her work mainly to recently published new sources, such as letters and lecture notes, which are supposed to shed a new light on the first turn in the philosophy of Heidegger. By doing this she is able to show how much the development of Heidegger is influenced by his debate with theological sources like Martin Luther, Sören Kierkegaard and Franz Overbeck.
Wolfe starts her account of Heidegger's way in philosophy by presenting the historical background of this development, especially his relations to Roman Catholicism in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, which was shaped by the conflict between Modernism and the enforcement of Neo-Scholasticism as the official theology and philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. Wolfe shows how Heidegger starts from a strictly anti-modernist standpoint in his early years, in order to get into a critical distance to the whole system of neo-scholastic philosophy later. It seems that it was the inadequacy of the scholastic method, understood as a timeless system of metaphysical concepts, which led Heidegger to the point of distancing himself from this system and which led him to the appreciation of protestant theology, which was much more open for his own questions than the closed system of Neo-Scholasticism. The period before Being and Time and the years shortly after its publication are therefore marked by Heidegger's debate with protestant theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and others.
Not only did protestant theologians respond to the challenge of Heidegger's philosophy, however, but also catholic theologians tried to develop a response to this challenge, like for instance Erich Przywara, Edith Stein, Romano Guardini and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Heidegger's focus on the question of ‘being’ allowed these catholic thinkers to relate Heidegger again to the catholic tradition of metaphysics, with the hope that his fundamental ontology could be used to establish again a primacy of being against Kant's epistemology. This might be the fundamental misunderstanding of catholic thinkers regarding Heidegger, which led eventually to the so-called ‘Catholic Heidegger school’ later in the 30s. But Judith Wolfe highlights especially the response of Edith Stein, who saw the deficits of Heidegger's philosophy and eschatology more clearly than others.
The greatest achievement of this book is for sure that Wolfe is able to show the historical background of Heidegger's development in a unique and comprehensive way and by doing this she makes it possible especially for English-speaking readers to gain access to this background, with its sources and various figures, which might be quite unknown to the English theological and philosophical world, because this background was so much shaped by early 20th-century theology and the German academic culture of the same time. As well as this more historical background, Judith Wolfe also shows how much Heidegger is influenced by theological questions and debates, when at the same time he is already on the way of distancing himself from christian faith.
It is this permanent debate with theological issues, which makes Heidegger a philosopher, whose thinking still matters for theology in general, and with his own approach to eschatology without eschaton, especially for theological questions concerning the ultimate future of man in the face of his inevitable death. Wolfe describes Heidegger here as a kind of critical corrective for every eschatology, which, as she puts it, on the one hand denies and ignores the temporal conditions of the human spirit, which leads to the God's eye view of the ‘philosophia perennis’ of catholic Neo-Scholasticism, or, what Wolfe calls, the divided eschatology of Lutheran eschatology on the other hand. But Wolfe does also show the deficits of Heidegger's approach, whose analysis of human existence unto death depends in its pathos on a desire of human beings to transcend the finitude of our existence. If this desire is part of our human condition of life, the simple denial of an object of this desire cannot be the last word of the phenomenological analysis of the human ‘Dasein’. With this conclusion, Judith Wolfe shows in this excellent work how Heidegger's critical thoughts can be fruitful for the further task of theological inquiries in eschatology, by providing an opening for the idea of a God, who will await us in the end to fulfil our restless desire.
