SEE THIS CURRENT BLOG SERIES LANDING PAGE ON DERRIDA’S AND HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH: Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger on The Philosophy of Death

Last time I noted the deep presence of Anxiety in Christianity that seems to inform Heidegger’s interpretation of the human condition in Being and Time, specifically Heidegger’s own self-understanding which would put him in the authorial tradition of Kierkegaard. I wrote:

For one thing, Christianity is the religion of anxiety par excellence.  Paul says if the dead are not raised we might as well be gluttons and drunks for tomorrow we dies.  But just as Jesus was wrong that the eschaton was imminent, and Paul wrongly thought it was in fact underway, the resurrected Jesus being the first fruits of the general resurrection harvest of souls for Paul:  The natural question is if Jesus and Paul were so wrong about so central a topic as the end times, what else were they wrong about?  And the different sources present different Jesuses, e.g., Luke-Acts does not teach substitutionary atonement.  The disciples are said to have believed because they saw (e.g., the Cana wine miracle), but the text says blessed are those who have not seen but still believe.  The tradition from Thomas to Luther encapsulated this with transitioning from truth as correctness to truth as certainty free from doubt, because the Christian anxiety from uncertainty had to be overcome as what had to be certain in the sense of freedom from doubt: was the salvation of the soul.

If we look more deeply into the intellectual anxiety of the Christian, we find many texts and letters about Jesus that are non-canonical, that don’t belong to the accepted sources about Jesus and early Christianity. Further, some of the biblical texts are rejected as pseudonymous or forgeries, and for example only 7 of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament (1 Thessalonians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon and Romans) are generally regarded as authentic. This is a huge problem for believers because they basically have to accept as true what the scholars think should be included in our evidence, even though conservative scholars and liberal scholars come to very different conclusions about what is to be accepted and what shouldn’t. For example, Heidegger applies historical criteria to argue the usually rejected 2 Thessalonians should be included. He writes:

There are those in the congregation who have understood Paul, who know what is crucial. If the Parousia depends upon how I live, then I am unable to maintain the faith and love that is demanded of me; then I approach despair. Those who think this way worry themselves in a real sense, under the sign of real concern as to whether or not they can execute the work of faith and of love, and whether or not they will hold out until the decisive day. But Paul does not help them; rather he makes their anguish still greater (II Thess. 1:5: [evidence of the righteous judgment]). Only Paul himself could have written this. The overburdened nature (plerophory) of expression in the second letter has an entirely particular motivation, and is a sign of its authenticity. (1920-1921/2010, p. 76)

The anxiety of the scholars having to trust their hermeneutic prowess echoes that of the average believer who has to hope they are siding with the right scholar, pastor, and denomination.

Moreover, I noted if you are not necessarily convinced that the dead are raised, the whole of your Pauline Christianity following 1 Corinthians 15 falls apart and Paul says life essentially becomes purposeless so you might as well become Gluttons and Drunks foe tomorrow we die:

• Faith and preaching would be vain or futile (kenos/mataia, vv. 14, 17).
• Believers would remain in their sins (v. 17).
• The dead in Christ would have perished (v. 18).
• Christians would be the most pitiable of all people, with hope limited to this life only (v. 19).
• His own sufferings (e.g., fighting “beasts at Ephesus”) would be pointless, leading to the hedonistic conclusion: “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (v. 32, echoing Isa. 22:13 or Epicurean ideas).

For example, we may not even have the concrete visual evidence of the risen Jesus from the pre-Pauline Corinthian Creed Paul points to because the word he uses for appearance is also used in Luke 3:6 (“all flesh shall ‘see’ the salvation of the Lord”) to denote not something visual but an experience, much like Paul notes Jesus was revealed “in Paul.” Paul states in Galatians 1:15-16 that God was pleased to “reveal his Son in me” (en emoi) to enable him to preach to the Gentiles. This indicates a profound, inward, and spiritual transformation or revelation during his conversion, rather than just an external vision, emphasizing an internal understanding of Christ. So claims of the risen Christ could have been a feeling, a glance of someone in the marketplace, or a sign like the Fatima mass sky miracle hallucination, or even just hearsay. My friend’s mother, for instance, is convinced she heard her dead husband in the house after he died, bereavement hallucinations and mass hysteria are not uncommon (if you suppose the disciples weren’t lying as many such movements died out with the death of their leaders).

Further textual anxiety emerged over the last 200 years with the quest for the historical Jesus. Who was the historical Jesus behind the Jesus of faith? We have a scholarly embarrassment of riches with various portraits of who Jesus was and little agreement about the events of his life.

There is further Christian anxiety as if God exists why would God make it so difficult to believe with all these textual loopholes, and such as with the problem of why would a loving God let little children die of cancer?