Contradiction and confusion in the latter Heidegger

Due to the place of Heidegger given both Bultmann and Fuchs were indebted to him, and their involvement in The New Hermeneutic, one should ponder carefully what Heidegger was saying.

In his book The New Hermeneutic VanTil relates the position of Heidegger:

Man must seek to understand himself as the loud-speaker for the silent toll of being. When he fulfills this role then he is truly man. This idea of man cannot be expressed directly in words taken from ordinary surface-phenomenal life. Neither science nor metaphysics comes within sight of such a view of man. What is needed is a vision of that which absolutely transcends everything that any man has ever said on the basis of empirical or conceptual thinking. It takes poets to give ordinary men such insights. Fortunately every man is at heart a poet. Deep down in his innermost self every man knows that his true authentic self is the free self as it participates in the noumenal, the noumenous, the wholly other. It is his participation in this truly transcendent being that makes him see that the poets are basically right when they, often with tortured verbiage, point all men to their true home which, in their forgetfulness of being, they have left behind. Seeing the vision that the poets see, men long to return to their original home. Hearing the words the poets speak they hear the words of love and understanding.

The words of man, the words of the phenomenal realm are inadequate, the words of science and metaphysics are inadequate, the only thing that comes close is the words of the poet so people will hear words of love and understanding. Yet the words of Heidegger, his philosophical ruminations are not the words of the poet, they are the conceptual words of ordinary surface phenomenal life. Why then take notice of what he says? His Philosophy hasn't laid bare participating in the noumena, the "wholly other" because his language is not the language of the poet.

Perhaps I have misunderstood his point, but Fuchs pushes this so that the God of the Bible devolves into "love". So that Fuchs can rewrite John 1:1 "in the beginning was the word and the word was with love and the word was love." But this evacuates the person of Jesus to merely one of "his" attributes and the God of Fuchs is not the God of the Bible or orthodoxy. Jesus as the second person of the Trinity is no longer the revelation of God but "love". And the questions remains as to what that love is as I may read into that concept from my own mere experiences of ordinary surface-phenomenal life.

in Christ,
Gary

Truth in a "whatever" World.

Here's a timely reminder from Bill Muehlenberg’s book review of John MacArthur's book 'The Truth War'
He says in part:
"Many evangelicals, especially those in the emerging church movement, have recently declared that doubt, uncertainty, mystery and questions are superior to certainty, belief, faith and conviction. This seems to stand in marked contrast to the affirmations of Scripture. Consider a remark made by John Stott some 40 years ago in Christ the Controversialist:
“In those things which are clearly revealed in Scripture, Christians should not be doubtful or apologetic. The corridors of the New Testament reverberate with dogmatic affirmations beginning ‘We know’, ‘We are sure’, ‘We are confident’. If you question this, read the First Epistle of John in which verbs meaning ‘to know’ occur about forty times. They strike a note of joyful assurance which is sadly missing from many parts of the church today and which needs to be recaptured.”
Today many church leaders are glorying in doubt and uncertainty, and are telling us that having firm convictions and strong beliefs is arrogant and somehow un-Christlike. But as MacArthur reminds us, “this is not authentic Christianity”. To refuse to embrace and defend the revealed truth of God “is a particularly stubborn and pernicious form of unbelief”."

Are we wanting to be authentic Christians? Then it means accepting what God's Word says about Truth, in face of those waving their finger about being in a postmodern culture.

We should imitate the Bereans of Acts 17.

In Christ
Gary

The importance of Wisdom

Over at Sam Norton's blog he has a little piece about atheism which he called Reasonable atheism (1): Of atheisms humourless and sophisticated. He speaks of two different types of atheism, one humourless and the other sophisticated. It stirred my thinking when he spoke about Hume's attitude in his Enquiry being intellectually crippling in that it fails to take in the wisdom tradition, a stance he labels asophic which I think is to say "against wisdom" or having "no wisdom". He calls it humorless because it's like having a sense of humor, you either get the joke or you don't.

My Ramblings ...
Ponder this for a moment. What do atheists and atheistic philosphers do with humor? How do they account for that? Surely one reason that some philosophers don't get it is because they treat all reality as if it's only epistemology!

That's a very important reminder for those doing Philosophy and Theology. You can get thrown by the so called power of epistemological arguments against knowledge and truth, even against the doctrines of the Christian faith as though this new or old philosophical "epistemology" has overturned the Christian faith. But they forget that with the Christian worldview, the Scriptures - there's also wisdom, all those wisdom passages that tell us about the practical aspect of life, that which involves living, not just those things which are theoretical or for the philosopher, the stuff to do with the mind, no matter how much that's important.

Think of Proverbs 12:25 "Anxiety in a man's heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad." Good words, helpful words to think on. But what does the atheist say about it? How can he who believes in no god account for the value of such advice in our world? Doesn't he care for his friend or family member who is weighed down with anxiety?

It is only when we know of the Creator who made man in His image for relationship, who blessed him and yet due to man's rebellion we find we are out of fellowship with God and each
other. Only in that context can such a thing as wisdom make sense.

Often times you will hear or read of the atheist rejecting the Christian and His belief because of the argument from evil. We however must ask him, what about love and humor and wisdom - these things also count in the world we live in. How will he account for any of that?

In Christ
Gary