Abstract

The philosophy of Martin Heidegger has had a great impact on contemporary Protestant thought. One connection between the philosophy of Heidegger and contemporary Protestant thought that is emerging is the pairing of Heidegger's philosophy with the theology of Karl Barth. Though the possibility of such a correlation was given considerable attention in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, particularly by the Swiss theologian Heinrich Ott, such a position has not had much play--except in the past few years--in American theological circles. However, recently some contemporary American religious thinkers have suggested that such an interplay between the theology of Barth and the philosophy of Heidegger offers the most genuine possibilities for theology in the late-20th century. Specifically, it is an interplay of their respective theories of hermeneutics that is here most relevant. ;The project that I set for myself is to see just what such an interplay entails and to where such an interplay has led. I am concerned with showing the Barthian and Heideggerian hermeneutical origins of the hermeneutic dimension found in the American postmodern philosophical theology of Mark Taylor and John Caputo. Further, I show Heinrich Ott's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's developments of these original positions which issue in just such a postmodern philosophical theology