Contending Heidegger

Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) inaugurated one of the most profound turns in twentieth-century thought: the retrieval of the question of Being after the exhaustion of metaphysics. Yet, as S. C. Sayles argues in Without Foundation: Contending Heidegger, that very retrieval conceals a deeper forgetting—the eclipse of Revelation by ontology, the substitution of the Word with Being. This paper offers a philosophical and theological analysis of Sayles’s Logos-centred reading of Heidegger, situating it within the Reformed tradition’s metaphysical and epistemological framework. Sayles contends that Heidegger’s history of Being represents not an emancipation from theology but an inverted form of it: “the grammar of faith without its God.” Against this, the Reformed vision restores the Creator–creature distinction, grounding all meaning in the divine Logos, the uncreated Word through whom all things exist. Through close engagement with Heidegger’s key texts—Being and Time, The Origin of the Work of Art, Letter on Humanism, and Unterwegs zur Sprache—and with Sayles’s critical theology, this study demonstrates how the crisis of Being is, in fact, the crisis of Revelation. The argument unfolds across seven sections: from Heidegger’s phenomenological genesis to his political and poetic turns, from the exile of the Logos to the doxological recovery of the Word. In dialogue with Augustine, Calvin, Van Til, and Henry, Sayles constructs a Logos-centred ontology in which revelation restores what philosophy remembers only as nostalgia. The conclusion affirms that the clearing of Being finds its true light only at the Cross, where silence becomes speech and the foundation once rejected is laid in Christ. ________________________________________