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Saving God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2013
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Thomas Sheehan has made the “atheological” charge that “Christianity's original sin is to think it is about God,” but there is a different lesson to take if attention is paid to the metaphoric dimension of the ways Aquinas, Rahner, Heidegger and even Sheehan himself think and speak about God. If there is an original fault from which Christianity must be saved, it has as much to do with the conception of what is happening when Christianity thinks and speaks, as it does with the conception of what this speaking and thinking is about.
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1 “From Divinity to Infinity,” in The Once and Future Jesus, The Jesus Seminar (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2000), 27–44Google Scholar, at 28; a paper originally presented in 1999 at a conference sponsored by the Jesus Seminar.
2 Sheehan is a Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. An extensive bibliography of his work is available at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/sheehan/Sheehan.html.
3 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” Continental Philosophy Review 32/2 (2001): 1–20; see also: “Geschichtlichkeit/Ereignis/Kehre,” Existentia (Meletai Sophias) [Budapest] 11/3–4 (2001): 241–51; “Nihilism and Its Discontents,” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. Pettigrew, David and Raffoul, François (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 275–300Google Scholar; “Das Gewesen,” in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errance, and Desire, ed. Bablich, Babette (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 157–77Google Scholar; and for a particularly accessible overview of Sheehan's Heidegger: “Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976),” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig, Edward (New York: Routledge, 1998), IV: 307–23.Google Scholar
4 Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987). For reasons that will be elaborated here, however, I do not share his conclusion that Rahner's thought in the end carries too much theological baggage.
5 The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (New York: Random House, 1986; paperback edition: New York: Vintage, 1988) now available online at: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/thomas_sheehan/firstcoming/index.shtml. The bibliography cited in note 2 above includes his many essays in the New York Review of Books.
6 Godzieba, Anthony J., “Incarnation, Theory, and Catholic Bodies: What Should Post-Postmodern Catholic Theology Look Like,” unpublished manuscript of his presentation in the Constructive Theology and Contemporary Theory Group, Catholic Theological Society of America (Cincinnati), June 6, 2003.Google Scholar
7 “From Divinity to Infinity,” 43. I share this conviction that each of us has a set of presuppositions that guide our interpretations and that will influence future appropriations of Jesus' message. Sheehan's essay itself, read with his other writings in mind, provides a compelling case study for this thesis because the article discloses the degree to which his understanding of Heidegger's thought influences his account of Rahner's project and his interpretation of Jesus' message.
8 Ibid., 32.
9 Ibid., 33.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 34–35.
14 Ibid., 35.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 36–37.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 35.
20 Ibid., 37.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 38.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 39.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 40; the ellipsis is Sheehan's.
30 Caputo, John, “Undecidability and the Empty Tomb: Toward a Hermeneutics of Belief,” in his More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 225Google Scholar, a revision of an earlier essay: “Radical Hermeneutics and Religious Truth: The Case of Sheehan and Schillebeeckx,” in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Guerrière, Daniel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 146–72.Google Scholar
31 See “From Divinity to Infinity,” 29.
32 Ibid., 35.
33 Ibid., 40.
34 Barth, Karl, citing Feuerbach's conclusion to the 1848 Heidelberg lectures, notes this emphasis in “An Introductory Essay,” The Essence of Christianity, trans. Eliot, George (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), xi.Google Scholar
35 “From Divinity to Infinity,” 40.
36 Ibid., 40–41.
37 Ibid., 41.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 42.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Rahner, Karl, Geist in Welt, 1st ed. (Innsbruck: Rauch, 1939)Google Scholar; 2nd ed. expanded and reworked by Johannes B. Metz (Munich: Kösel, 1957). Corrected translation by Dych, William S.J., Spirit in the World (New York: Continuum, 1994)Google Scholar; CD Version (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). Hereafter: GW.
49 Karl Rahner, 310.
50 Ibid.
51 I argued for the same conclusion but toward a different end and without such detailed and insightful analysis in “Rahner and Heidegger: Being, Hearing and God,” Thomist 37 (1973): 455–88, and in my dissertation “Language, Thinking and God in Karl Rahner's Theology of the Word: A Critical Evaluation of Rahner's Perspective on the Problem of Religious Language,” Fordham University, 1978.
52 Karl Rahner, 281.
53 Ibid.
54 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” 7–8.
55 Karl Rahner, 281.
56 Ibid., 283.
57 Ibid., 282.
58 Ibid., 155.
59 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” 7.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Karl Rahner, 285.
63 Ibid., 286; see also 142–46, 152.
64 Ibid., 285–88.
65 Ibid., 287.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” 17.
69 Karl Rahner, 289.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 299.
72 Ibid., 114, where Sheehan explains that Heidegger asked “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?” which could be translated as “Why are there beings at all and not rather Non-being?” Rahner's quotation in French (there is no copy of an original in German) asks “Pourquoi y a-t-il de l'être au lieu du pur néant?” (Why is there being rather than pure nothingness?) which by conflating Seiendes with Sein, and Heidegger's “Nichts” with “pure nothingness” ironically approximates Heidegger's position.
73 Ibid. The major works of the period, of course, are GW and Hörer des Wortes, first edition (Munich: Kosel, 1941), second edition reworked by Johannes B. Metz (Munich: Kösel, 1963); Hearer of the Word, translation of the first edition by Donceel, Joseph, edited by Tallon, Andrew (New York: Continuum, 1994)Google Scholar; CD Version (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). This translation is much more reliable than the earlier one by Richards, Michael: Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).Google Scholar
74 Ibid., 115–16.
75 Ibid., 309.
76 Ibid., quoting Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury, 1978), 60.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 312.
79 Ibid., 313.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 311.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 313.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid.
89 Foundations of Christian Faith, 68; quoted in Karl Rahner, 314.
90 Karl Rahner, 314.
91 Ibid.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid., quoting Foundations of Christian Faith, 32.
94 Ibid., 315.
95 Ibid.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid., 316.
99 Ibid., 315–16.
100 Ibid., 316.
101 Ibid., 316–17.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid., 317.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 See Gerhart, Mary and Russell, Allan Melvin, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (New York: Continuum, 2001).
108 See also my “Reframing the Fields,” Zygon 39/1 (March 2004): 49–62.
109 New Maps for Old, 12.
110 Ibid., 41–42.
111 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” 19.
112 New Maps for Old, 42.
113 “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research,” 17.
114 This entails agreement with Sheehan that there is little ground for hoping that one field of meanings can be explained in terms of the other in a manner which would be acceptable to both Thomists and Heideggerians. No attempt to do so has been successful yet. And on both Sheehan's accounting and mine, although for very different reasons, there is no need for this. The strongest case against this claim is argued by Kangas, William, “In the Proximity of Guilt and Danger: Karl Rahner As Heidegger's Other,” Philosophy Today 44/3 (2000): 259–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While Kangas' interpretation of Rahner and Heidegger is in large measure persuasive, he does not take adequately into account the metaphoric character of Rahner's moving “within the space which Heidegger's thinking opened up” (264). If one takes seriously the difference in questions from the very start, Rahners identification of the experience of God with Heideggers experience of alētheia is a more fragile interpretive move than Kangas presumes. As a consequence, the infrastructure and implications of the metaphysical field of meanings in Rahner's thought are more radically transformed, or at least put in question, than Kangas acknowledges. Kangas is definitely right, however, in pointing to the difference in Rahner's and Heidegger's accounts of the experience of the “other” as crucial to understanding why Rahner finds warrant to hazard the identification of the experience of transcendence with the experience of God. A retrieval of Rahner for the contemporary context requires a more robust explanation of the metaphoric and fragile interpretive character of this move, and more comprehensive accounts of the experiences of intersubjectivity and ethical and religious responsibility in which it is rooted. For more on the latter see the reference to Fiorenza, note 120 below.
115 Karl Rahner, 313.
116 For further analysis of the metaphoric character of Rahner's, thought see my “Analogy and Metaphoric Process,” Theological Studies 62/3 (2001): 571–96Google Scholar; and “The Clash of Christological Symbols: A Case for Metaphoric Realism,” in Christology: Memory, Inquiry, Practice, ed. Clifford, Anne M. and Godzieba, Anthony (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 62–86.Google Scholar
117 For an overview of the metaphoric thrust of Burrell's theory of analogy see my “Analogy and Metaphoric Process.” Sokolowski's analysis of the logical entailments of what he calls the “Christian distinction” in effect is an effort to map the shifts in fields of meanings forced by the metaphoric affirmation of God as creator. See his The God of Faith & Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982) and Eucharist Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994).
118 Alison, James, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1996).Google Scholar It is an interesting question whether the hypothesis of a metaphoric thrust could also be affirmed in the parables and sayings of Jesus as reconstructed by the Jesus Seminar.
119 Although Sheehan's focus on “being” and “otherness” gestures at two important indicators of the meaning of transcendence, Francis Schussler Fiorenza more helpfully locates its meaning as a fragile interpretive implication of the experience of intersubjectivity and ethical religious responsibility; that is the site where we will find the pre-philosophical and pre-theological roots of the deeper claim to which Christian theology responds. See Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, “Being, Subjectivity, Otherness: The Idols of God,” in Questioning God, ed. Caputo, John D., Dooley, Mark, and Scanlon, Michael J. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 341–69.Google Scholar
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