Every stroke a tennis player plays is different, yet we perceive them as playing in a distinctive and unique way. It's what Heidegger called a certain 'how' of existing. It's ultimately always singular, and the double task of (a) getting it in view and (b) communicating it to others will inevitably be marked more often by failure than success!

Ultimately, we live in the face of an irresolvable mystery about our origin and, for that matter, about our end. And what Schleiermacher would have us do is (a) acknowledge that this is the case and (b) accept it as something positive, a point of departure for a life of trusting joy.

Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.

Of course, if one's reading Kierkegaard for personal interest that's fine - but it's sloppy scholarship just to cherry pick what suits one from a particular author, whether it's Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or whoever. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that even the more religious parts of the authorship can offer significant insights into the meaning of the human condition to those who can't then say that, e.g., they believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and their personal Saviour.

Sartre is one example of someone who does just this. Every text is, after all, a human document and whatever Kierkegaard thought about God was clearly a matter of human thought that can, in principle, be retrieved and interpreted by other human beings. A phenomenological approach to religion must, it seems to me, adopt the old adage: nothing human is alien to me.

Barth's approach tears up any possibility of dialogue between faith and unfaith or between theology and other human sciences. Theology just says what it says on the basis of scripture, and that's that.

One of the most violent attacks on the Church in the Soviet Union was under Kruschev when, during a period of economic and political liberalization, he attacked the Church to demonstrate to old Party members that he hadn't lost it.