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The author raises the question whether religion — conceived of as referring to revelation, that is: a manifestation in experience of something which transcends experience — can become a phenomenon and if phenomenology can apply to the objects of religion.It seems that it can because of the fact that phenomenology — at least according to Heidegger — is philosophy of the possible, and acknowledges that phenomena do not generally manifest themselves. On the other hand, there is the danger that revelation is reduced to presence. The author stresses that the phenomenological doctrines of reduction and constitution impede the possibility of a revelation as such; that the God who reveals Himself is not a phenomenon related to a horizon of conditions; and that Husserl — at least in his Cartesianische Meditationen — demonstrates phenomenology's inability to justify knowledge of the other as such.In the concluding section the author suggests that theology might be able to take phenomenology beyond its own boundaries by stressing the problem of the self-constitution of the all-constituting ego, and by showing how donation can saturate the horizon instead of being determined by it.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-1464-8_17

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