ABSTRACT
Contemporary debates about onto-theology have their origin in the work of Martin Heidegger. Following in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl, this German phenomenologist’s critique of metaphysics set the stage for much of the Continental tradition of philosophy and theology in the latter half of the twentieth century. According to Heidegger, Western metaphysics, beginning with Plato and perhaps best exemplified in Hegel, has been a philosophy of being (ontology) conditioned by and grounded in a theology of Being. Simply stated, metaphysics has rested on the speculative theology of a Being thought of as both the perfect instance of a particular being and as the cause of all particular beings.1 This amounted to a failure to recognize the difference between Being and beings which in turn distorted both philosophy and theology in Heidegger’s mind. For philosophy, the theo-logic that shaped the concept of Being generated a metaphysical god that merely served as a self-legitimizing foundation for an array of metaphysical systems of thought. Furthermore, Being was fundamentally misunderstood and hypostatized in a manner that created and perpetuated dichotomies between the intelligible and sensible, thought and expression, reality and appearance, and being and becoming in such a way as to privilege the former terms at the expense of the latter. With respect to theology, the influence of metaphysics created an idolatrous image of God. This was a god that the metaphysician desired, but it was not the true God of faith that elicited genuine praise and thanksgiving.
