The religious elephant in Heidegger’s phenomenological room

Abstract

In his lectures on the Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920–21), Martin Heidegger offers a phenomenological reading of Paul’s Galatian and Thessalonian letters, seeing these as themselves proclaiming the phenomenological attitude. Curiously, however, Heidegger’s analysis of Thessalonian facticity appears to separate the factical status of Thessalonian ‘having-become’ from that of its faith content. This article sees that decision as itself displaying elements of theorization, and abandonment of the phenomenological aim of allowing experience to show itself out of itself. More, Heidegger’s approach misses an opportunity to notice the ‘in Christ’ as constitutive of a structural ‘incursion of an absolute other’ that sustains the phenomenological approach, saving it from falling into its theorizing other, the scientific worldview.