The following is Doug’s MDiv thesis submitted to and accepted by The Chicago Theological Seminary in 1973. It was written under the supervision of Profs. Theodore Jennings and Robin Scroggs.
The thesis was written over 40 years ago. It was my first formal foray into what I would call “descriptive” theology. It’s strength, if at all, is its profiling of Bultmann, Fuchs, and Ebeling against the deeper background of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology found in Being and Time. It’s weakness is that it engages theology as an exercise in making claims about/for God, which is to elevate finite humanity if not above then to a common level with God. I now would rein in my hubris to speak of our finite limits and of the transcendental conditions of possibility that make experience and understanding in the world possible in the first place to emphasize religion as humanity’s moral project in history as a species capable of intentionally exercising a creative freedom irreducible to natural causality.
Language and the New Hermeneutic: A Shift from Rudolf Bultmann Perceived from the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger by Douglas R. McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
