Characteristics of Early Christian Life Experience
Translator: ZHUANG Zhenhua, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Shanxi Normal University
Abstract:
One year after the critical War Emergency Semester (1919), Martin Heidegger made use of the theme of early christian life experience and developed more detailedly some of his important concepts, such as facticity, temporality, self and the threefold world, which has shaped in advance respectively the thought about Being, time, Dasein and world in Being and Time (1927). But Heidegger’s analysis of early christian life experience serves not only as topic or instance, but also demonstrates an original methodology in the history of christian theological thought. This methodology takes life experience as principal axis, makes religious factical life experience incomparably close to proper self on the one hand, but falls not into pure egoism or gnosticism on the other hand. It keeps the holy grace and spirit more properly in transcendence, and makes them free of being swallowed by the theoretical subject. This way of analysis opened by Heidegger affected over a long period of time people’s interpretation of christian dogmas, and became a mighty trend of belief not to be ignored in contemporary Christianity through the application of theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann.
Keywords:
Martin Heidegger; Early Christianity; Life Experience; Temporality; Facticity
Full Text (International Version):
[Germany] Martin HEIDEGGERSCN JSCC.pdf
Full Text (Simplified Chinese Version):
