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The Christian affirmation of finitude brings life to the point of an actual communion with Christ. The community with Christ consists in the everyday experience of death. ’39 The light of the Christian faith in the living God (1 Thess. ) overcomes the darkness of the fear of death (1 Thess. ) and with it also the destructive consequences of the facticity of death. Thus, death is the entry ticket into a lived community with Christ, and the earthly version of eternal life. It would go almost without saying that the Christian notion of a victory over death (1 Cor.

For Heidegger the external force of God in Jesus Christ falls out of the existential-ontological picture. The salvation of authenticity is for Heidegger, too, indeed a gift, but a gift of nothingness, and not of God, and thus, it appears to be a process of self-salvation. 69 Christian 38 Heidegger on Language and Death recognition of human fallenness is crucial. It happens in humility. It is here in this humble admission of guilt where and how the Bible speaks directly through the course of history into the present as if it spoke for the first time.

It sees in temporality the power of creating the eternal reality of the divine. Heidegger secularizes this recognition of ‘giftedness’ (ελαβες, 1 Cor. 4:7) into the state of Gelassenheit. Abandoned to the human condition Dasein is released – away from hubris to the modesty of simple being. The disposition of anxiety ‘opens a space for authenticity’ to heed ‘the call of conscience’ to come ‘to grips with its own facticity’. Herein lies the meaning of mortality. One’s own passing-away is not just an inevitability, but a possibility.