[130.1] GOD CANNOT BE CAPTURED BY BEING

Martin Heidegger, offering a warning as much ignored by over-confident atheists as by careless Christians. Emphases mine:

"Being and God are not identical and I would never attempt to think of the essence of God by means of Being. Some among you perhaps know that I come from theology, that I still guard an old love for it and that I am not without a certain understanding of it. If I were 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. ...One could not be more reserved than I before every attempt to employ Being to think theologically in what way God is God. Of Being, there is nothing here to expect. I believe that Being can never be thought as the ground and essence of God, but that nevertheless the experience of God and of [God's] manifestedness, to the extent that the latter can indeed meet [persons], flashes in the dimension of Being, which in no way signifies that Being might be regarded as a possible predicate for God. On this point one would have to establish completely new distinctions and delimitations."

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