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This study argues that the bond between 'secularization' and 'de-legitimation' is not only borne out in debates over grand historical narratives relating to the status of modernity, as argued by Hans Blumenberg, but in debates over the appraisal of specific modern philosophical programs as well. It does this by examining how the category of 'secularization' is used to delegitimize Martin Heidegger's thought, from both theological and secular perspectives, by two of his former students, Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith. By analysing their interpretation of Heidegger and their understanding of secularization, legitimacy, and the philosophy-theology relationship, this study sheds light on the intellectual projects of these three thinkers – master and two students – and demonstrates the application of secularization as a hermeneutical category of de-legitimization on the basis of 'insufficiency' – either insufficiently secular or insufficiently religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the subsection "Grammar of Eros (The Language of Love)" in section 2 of book 2 of The Star of Redemption , the beating heart of the work, Franz Rosenzweig offers a peculiar portrait of the event of revelation. What is presented is a dramatization of the encounter between the loving God and the beloved human soul, a developing scene consisting of a series of utterances and experiences, many of which appear unwarranted. Why does Rosenzweig present revelation in this manner? This article seeks to explain the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns in the dramatized "plot" through which Rosenzweig depicts revelation by demonstrating that it follows in its main features the prevalent Protestant understanding of revelation as encompassing not only divine self-disclosure but also the discovery of sin, confession, forgiveness of sin, reconciliation, attainment of selfhood, and redemption, and is framed according to the directives of the Lutheran foundational principle of "at once a sinner and justified (Simul Justus et Peccator). In so doing, it exhibits Rosenzweig's deep embeddedness in the Protestant theological discourse of his time and shows that The Star should be understood in light of the contemporary Protestant theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the fraught relationship between Martin Buber and Christian thought by critically analyzing and historically contextualizing his Two Types of Faith (1950). In this work Buber applies the distinction he puts forth between faith as relational trust ("faith in") and faith as intellectual ascent to propositional truth ("faith that") onto the early Israelite and Christian communities of faith. He also uses this distinction to criticize contemporary Protestant theology for continuing the Pauline notion of "faith that" rather than Jesus's Jewish "faith in." By examining the notion of faith developed by three central German Protestant theologians, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Emil Brunner, this essay demonstrates that Buber's claim cannot be squared with the main line of Protestant theology from 1870 onward to Buber's own time and that the entire discussion in Two Types of Faith can be understood as situated within the Protestant discourse he was admonishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys a number of prominent, recurring, and new directions in the growing scholarly discourse on the theme "Heidegger and Judaism" arranged under three headings. The first, the contrastive framing, encompasses cases in which the relationship between Heidegger and Judaism is perceived as antithetical. The second, the conjunctive framing, encompasses views claiming the existence of affinities and parallels between Heidegger and Judaism, grouped under three subheadings: "Heidegger and biblical thinking," "Heidegger and Kabbalah," and "Heidegger and the Jewish nation." The third, historical perspectives, uses the approach of intellectual history to explore visions of Judaism that are developed as part of engagements with Heidegger's philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption , and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig's vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on "the way," strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the link Hans Jonas drew between Martin Heidegger's philosophy and Gnosticism cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration his philosophical interpretation of modern science. It claims that Jonas saw Heideggerian existentialism not as a modern instantiation of Gnosticism but as a specific experiential reaction to the new cosmological outlook that emerged from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, which negated the conceptual world that made Gnosticism possible. Jonas's interpretation is "against the grain": by claiming that Heidegger's thought is a product of the reduction of nature to measurable, manipulable, and calculable extension governing the modern scientific mind, Jonas attributed to Heidegger the very flaws Heidegger critiqued in others. It is further claimed that Jonas's original contribution to Heidegger's reception history is not in proposing the link to Gnosticism but in reading him as the philosophical outcome of the instrumental reasoning of modern science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]