Overcoming Onto-Theology

Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith

Merold Westphal

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823221295
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Overcoming Onto-theology is a stunning collection of essays by Merold Westphal, one of America's leading continental philosophers of religion, in which Westphal carefully explores the nature and the structure of a postmodern Christian philosophy. Written with characteristic clarity and charm, Westphal offers masterful studies of Heidegger's early lectures on Paul and Augustine, the idea of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Derrida, and Nietzsche, all in the service of building his argument that postmodern thinking offers an indispensable tool for rethinking Christian faith. A must read for every student and professor of continental philosophy and the philosophy of religion, Overcoming Onto-theology is an invaluable collection that brings together in one place fourteen provocative and lucid essays by one of the most important thinkers working in American philosophy today.

1
Overcoming Onto-theology

We go to church in order to sing, and theology is secondary.

Kathleen Norris¹

NOT LONG AGO I participated in a conference on biblical hermeneutics. It asked about the relation between trust and suspicion for Christians reading the Bible. The keynote addresses by Walter Brueggemann and Phyllis Trible were brilliant. But for me the highlight of the conference was the workshop led by Ched Myers, whose radical reading of the gospel of Mark is one of the finest pieces of biblical interpretation I have ever read.² To be more precise, the highlight was the moment in the middle of the workshop when he had us sing.

He was developing the claim that biblical interpretation in the service of some relatively closed theological system (there are many) and biblical interpretation in the service of some species of historical criticism (there are many) are not as different as either side would like to think. Both are best understood in terms of the Marxian analysis of the fetishism of commodities, for they turn the text into an object to be mastered by the interpreter for the advantage of the interpreter, a source of theoretical treasure to be accumulated and owned. (Elsewhere I have described this as the King Midas theory of truth.)

In the middle of the argument, Myers stopped and said it was time to sing. But first we would have to clap, and soon all forty of us were clapping rhythmically. (If you know anything about Christians in the Reformed tradition, you know that we were participating in a performative refutation of Hume on miracles!) Then he began to sing:

O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.
O Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn.
Pharaoh’s army got drownded.
O Mary, don’t you weep.

The second time through we all joined in; then he would sing the verses, and each time we would join in again on the refrain.

I didn’t want the singing ever to end. But when it did, Myers invited us to reflect on the phenomenon of American slaves singing about the liberation of Jewish slaves three thousand years earlier, a story they had made their story, and he asked us who Mary might be. We realized right away that first and foremost she was the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross. Blissfully ignoring the realities of time’s arrow, the American slaves were seeking to comfort Mary with the song of the Exodus, reminding her, as it were, of her own song, the Magnificat. Our leader did not have to point out that by singing the old spiritual and reflecting on it we were making the story of Miriam and Moses our story too, opening ourselves to be seized once again by its message of hope (insofar as we are oppressed) and judgment (insofar as we are oppressors).

Almost immediately I thought of Heidegger’s critique of on to theology. He thinks it is bad theology because we “can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god [of philosophy]. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god” (ID p. 72). It seemed that as we joined the slaves in their song we had overcome onto-theology without even trying. For while we were not singing and dancing—that would be too much of a miracle to expect of Christians from the Reformed tradition—we were singing and clapping before the God who drownded Pharaoh’s army.

The onto-theological God enters the scene “only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines how the deity enters into it” (ID p. 56). The God to whom we were singing had entered the scene without the imprimatur of the learned, saying, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7–8). We should not be surprised to read that Miriam sang and danced with tambourines before this God who threw horse and rider into the sea without consulting ta meta ta physica or the Wissenschaft der Logik (Exodus 15:20–21).

Miriam and the American slaves did not need to overcome onto-theology. They were never tempted by it. The situation is more complex for us, even if (heaven help us) we are ready to sing and clap, if not quite to sing and dance, with them. We have immersed ourselves in traditions where onto-theology is at work, and we have listened as Heidegger has thematized and named a practice whose purest but by no means only forms are those of Aristotle and Hegel.³ Perhaps, however, we have not listened carefully enough. For Heidegger’s term is often bandied about in a manner not supported by the text.

It will be useful to recall how in the fifties, here in the United States, the term ‘communist’ came to mean “anything to the left of my right-wing position.” Then, in the sixties, and no doubt inevitably, ‘fascist’ came to mean “anything to the right of my left-wing position.” The United States Congress, it turned out, was made up wholly of communists who called themselves Democrats and of fascists who called themselves Republicans. The terms ‘communist’ and ‘fascist’ were not used to inform but to inflame, not to assist sober analysis but to avoid the hard work of analysis by resorting to name-calling.

The term ‘onto-theology’ is all too often used in this way. Without too close a look either at how Heidegger uses the term or at the specifics of the discourse to be discredited, ‘onto-theology’ becomes the abracadabra by which a triumphalist secularism makes the world immune to any God who resembles the personal Creator, Lawgiver, and Merciful Savior of Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim monotheism. The only religion that escapes the Lord High Executioners who speak as Heidegger’s prophets is religion that is pagan/polytheistic, pantheistic, or a/theistic (with or without the slash).

When this happens, the Pascalian character of Heidegger’s critique is overlooked. It is not directed toward the God of the Bible or the Koran, before whom people do fall on their knees in awe, pray, sacrifice, sing, and dance. It is a critique of a metaphysical tradition that extends from Anaximander to Nietzsche and includes Aristotle and Hegel as high points (WM/1949).⁴ It is also a critique, by extension, not of theistic discourses as such, but of those that have sold their soul to philosophy’s project of rendering the whole of reality intelligible to human understanding. Their fault does not consist in affirming that there is a Highest Being who is the clue to the meaning of the whole of being. It consists in the chutzpa of permitting this God to enter the scene only in the service of their project, human mastery of the real.

As a restatement of the ancient question What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Heidegger’s critique is a reminder of how hard it is to sing “the Lord’s song in a foreign land” (Psalms 137:4), in this case that Greco-Germanic land to which Heidegger himself was to become so fatally enamored.⁵ As such it is an invitation and challenge to theology to be itself, to refuse to sell its birthright for a mess of philosophical pottage. Reminding the theologians of the Pauline question—“Has not God let the wisdom of this world become foolishness?”—Heidegger asks, “Will Christian theology make up its mind one day to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?” (WM/1949, p. 276; cf. IM p. 6, “From the standpoint of faith our question [of being] is ‘foolishness’.”). Perhaps this is why a couple years later Heidegger would write, “If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word Being would not occur in it. Faith does not need the thought of Being. When faith has recourse to this thought, it is no longer faith. This is what Luther understood.” And perhaps this is why Jean-Luc Marion has tried to think God without Being.⁶

It is thus a mistake, I believe, to identify the God of on to theology simply as “the omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God” or as “the God who divinely, eternally precontains all things in a mind so immense that all creation is but a supplemental imago dei, a simulacrum of the Infinite and Eternal, which means Infinitely and Eternally the Same, ” even with the further claim that this is an “excessively Eleatic idea of God which has overrun the biblical traditions ever since Philo Judaeus decided that Yahweh needed to square accounts with Greek Ontology, the result being that Greek ontology settled the hash of Yahweh and Elohim.”⁷

There is a lively and legitimate debate as to whether we should speak of God in this way. But, at least in the Christian traditions (I cannot speak for the Jewish and Muslim), the primary motivations for attributing omniscience, including foreknowledge, to God are biblical rather than philosophical, even if the vocabulary in which the matter gets discussed is, for better or worse, often Hellenic. Further, Kierkegaard is surely, with Heidegger, one of those who calls Jerusalem back to itself from Athens by contrasting the God of the philosophers with the God of living faith. But his Climacus presupposes the God just described as onto-theological when he says that reality is a system for God, though not for us human observers.⁸ In a similar manner, Climacus insists that God is capable of the philosophy of world history to which Hegel aspires, though we, including Hegel (as long as the latter has not become God), are not. There is a metanarrative; it’s just that we aren’t in on it.⁹ We may have access to aspects of it on a need to know basis, but that gives us far less than philosophy requires for its purposes; for its need to know is the absolute need posited by objectivity, while the believer’s need to know is the limited need posited by subjectivity.

Kierkegaard helps us to see that the onto-theological gesture consists not in positing a God who differs radically from us by satisfying the requirements of Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of World History, who sees the world synchronically as system and diachronically in terms of a grand metanarrative. It consists in positing such a God as an excuse for making the claim that we can occupy the divine perspective on the world, or at least peek over God’s shoulder. Spinoza let the cat out of the bag when he acknowledged that philosophy needs to see the world sub specie aetenitatis. There is all the difference in the world, the difference, say, between Kierkegaard and Hegel, or Pascal and Spinoza, between affirming that there is such a point of view and claiming that we (the intellectual elite, whether we call ourselves philosophers or theologians) can embody it. With Kierkegaard and Pascal one could fall on one’s knees in awe before such a God, but only so long as there is an infinite, qualitative difference between that God and ourselves. Perhaps onto-theology consists in the pride that refuses to accept the limits of human knowledge.

The debates over whether there is indeed such a divine knower and whether such ideas are appropriate to a particular religious tradition can continue unabated. (They are likely to do so with or without our permission.) The critique of onto-theology has little if anything to contribute to them. For it is directed not at what we say about God but at how we say it, to what purpose, in the service of what project. It might seem as if any affirmation of God as Creator, a necessary condition, I should think, of any authentic Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith, is an onto-theological gesture; for it implies that the whole of being is ultimately to be understood, insofar as we can understand it, with reference to the Highest Being. But the believer might speak as follows:

In affirming God as Creator I am affirming that there is an explanation of the whole of being and I am pointing in the direction of that explanation; but I am not giving it, for I do not possess it. To do that I would have to know just who God is, and just how and why God brings beings into being out of nothing. But both God’s being and God’s creative action remain deeply mysterious to me. They are answers that come loaded with new questions, reminding me in Heideggerian language that unconcealment is always shadowed by concealment, or in Pauline language that I only see “through a glass, darkly” (or “in a mirror, dimly,” I Cor. 13:12). My affirmation of God as Creator is not onto-theological because it is not in the service of the philosophical project of rendering the whole of being intelligible to human understanding, a project I have ample religious reasons to repudiate.¹⁰

Not only might the believer speak this way. With or without help from Pseudo-Dionysius, theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth have spoken this way. All of them have insisted, with or without help from Rudolf Otto, that the God of the Bible and of their theologies is Wholly Other in an epistemic sense as being the mysterium. I must confess, with all the contrition I can muster up (which, I confess, is not much), that I get too much fun out of reminding my Thomist and Calvinist friends of these themes in their masters and suggesting that the latter are Kantian anti-realists, insisting that our knowledge of God is not an instance of the adequatio rei et intellectus. For they strongly insist that as human our knowledge of God suffers from qualitative and not merely quantitative limitations and that we do not know God as God knows God, as God most truly is, as unmediated presence to the intellect. But if they are Kantian anti-realists, they are not onto-theologians. They are trying to make the best sense they can of their faith, but they have not bought into the project of making the whole of reality intelligible to human understanding with help from the Highest Being. Far from grudgingly conceding the epistemic transcendence of God to Dionysius and Otto, they go out of their way to insist upon it as being of the highest religious significance. They agree with the twentieth-century psalmist who sings, “I cannot worship what I comprehend.”¹¹

In developing this argument I have appealed to the distinction Climacus makes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript between the what and the how of our theological affirmations.¹² Does this work for Heidegger as well? I will try to show that it does, that when he protests against letting God enter the scene only on philosophy’s terms, it is the how rather than the what of theological assertion that is his target.

For Jewish, Christian, and Muslim monotheism, God is the Creator. This means that God is not created. The devout child, brought up in one of these traditions, knows how not to look for an answer to the question And who created God? The child will not say that God is an uncaused cause or is causa sui, though after a couple of courses in philosophy she might come to think that such language expresses quite nicely what she has believed from childhood. When Heidegger praises “the godless thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui” by suggesting that it is “thus perhaps closer to the divine God… more open to Him that onto-theo-logic would like to admit” (ID p. 72), is he telling our young believer that she must give up her faith in God as Creator? I think not. I think he is warning her that the language she is about to adopt for expressing that faith is dangerous, that it comes from a land foreign to that faith, and that in its native habitat it is part of a project antithetical to that faith. Appropriation of some sort may be unavoidable, but it is always dangerous.

We could begin to make this point by noting that Heidegger has no special resources for showing that there is no loving, personal Creator, and that he does not appeal to such traditional attempts to show this as the argument from evil in the world or a positivistic interpretation of the natural sciences. But it is not necessary to do this because Heidegger is quite emphatic that this is not what he is up to: “For the onto-theological character of metaphysics has become questionable for thinking, not because of any kind of atheism, but from the experience of a thinking which has discerned in onto-theo-logy the still unthought unity of the essential nature of metaphysics” (ID p. 55). While insisting that the biblical words “ln the beginning God created heaven and earth” are not an answer to the philosophical question of being, Heidegger notes that this does not settle the ontic question of their truth or falsity (IM p. 6).

Further, in the Letter on Humanism, he writes, “With the existential determination of the essence of man, therefore, nothing is decided about the ‘existence of God’ or his ‘non-being’.… Thus it is not only rash but also an error in procedure to maintain that the interpretation of the essence of man from the relation of his essence to the truth of Being is atheism.” He then quotes a passage from Vom Wesen des Grundes: “Through the ontological interpretation of Dasein as being-in-the-world no decision, whether positive or negative, is made concerning a possible being toward God.” After rejecting the hasty conclusion that philosophy doesn’t decide for or against the existence of God because it is “stalled in indifference, ” he insists that he is only trying “to think into the dimension in which alone that question can be asked.… Only from the truth of Being can the essence of the holy be thought. Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify” (LH pp. 2...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 Overcoming Onto-theology
• 2 Heidegger’s “Theologische” Jugendschriften
• 3 Hermeneutics As Epistemology
• 4 Appropriating Postmodernism
• 5 Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution
• 6 Totality and Finitude in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics
• 7 Positive Postmodernism As Radical Hermeneutics
• 8 Father Adam and His Feuding Sons: An Interpretation of the Hermeneutical Turn in Continental Philosophy
• 9 Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory: An Essay on Appropriation
• 10 Laughing at Hegel
• 11 Derrida As Natural Law Theorist
• 12 Faith As the Overcoming of Ontological Xenophobia
• 13 Divine Excess: The God Who Comes After
• 14 Nietzsche As a Theological Resource
• INDEX
• Footnotes