Thoughts on Stewardship and Sorge

Stewardship is about care, and Heidegger showed us that Sorge (care) is the way in which Dasein exists. To be Dasein is to be a creature, and Sorge is the sine qua non of Dasein. This seemingly puts Sorge squarely in the order of creation.

Since the care of Dasein is an existential-ontological state tied to temporality, our creaturely stewardship in time is seemingly grounded in the temporality of care, and Dasein's "running ahead" (Vorlaufen) to the possibility of there being no more possibilities for it (death).

But for the Christian, care of the other cannot be simply one ontic possibility among others grounded in something more fundamental, the condition of our possibilities. It is commanded, after all, and the otherness of the command is constitutive of the creature in a way that an ontology making possible mere ontic possibilities is not. The problem is that transcendental subjectivity finally makes the Other merely a pole within the subject. But it is precisely because stewardship is not a possibility for Dasein that entails that the ex-stasis of its acts must be grounded in the Other. What is more Other than the Cross? Where better to encounter la differance upon which human existence ultimately and uneasily rests?

Christian "existence" is ex-static, grounded not in that which makes the everyday possible, but in that which reveals this ground as ungrounded. Revelation can never be a move within transcendental subjectivity nor of the Being within which such subjectivity hides and finds itself. It is the knife that pierces the veil, the veil constituted in the ease of our temporal exstasis, the veil finally blotting out the orthogonal. It is as if moving right or left with dispatch and profundity could move one up or down even a bit.

What if we took seriously the Otherness of God, an inescapable otherness of which the face holds no trace? What if existence itself is constituted upon an Abyss not synonymous with a Ground? What if to talk of this is not to domesticate it, that is, it is not to find a place for it in the Temple of the transcendental subject? What if we have mis-identified the non-being at the heart of our dis-ease?

Limits in theology do not work like in mathematics. We cannot get close to the former as we do the latter. Think a limit that is infinitely qualitatively different than anything most proximate to it. And so we have an analogy to God and Being.