Sure. In the study I am currently doing, Heidegger is portrayed as someone who believes that ultimately man himself is the starting point for understanding. God is unknowable, and therefore the best we can do is the best that man can do. Here is a passage from one of my study books: The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer:
Because he could not live with his existentialism, Heidegger as an older man moved his position. His new position rests on these points: (1) Something, Being, is there; (2) This something makes itself known; (3) Language is one with Being and makes Being known. We can never know rationally about what is there (brute fact), but language does reveal that something is there. Thus language is already itself an interpretation (a hermeneutic).
He postulates that there was long ago an era, before Aristotle (and before the entrance of rationality), when men spoke in Greek in such a way that the universe was speaking ideally. He then tries to transfer this to all of man's language - not the content of what is spoken, but simply the existence of language. In this way, the existence of language becomes for Heidegger the mysticism by which he tries to find relief from his previous existential dichotomy. It is semantic mysticism because it does not deal with content in language but simply language as such. Man speaking becomes the mouthpiece of the impersonal "What is" (Being). The impersonal and unknown Being speaks through the being who speaks (verbalizes) - that is, man.
This could be a quite correct view if there were any personality behind man to speak meaningfully to and through man. But because Heidegger is a rationalist and begins absolutely from himself, he cannot accept that a person behind man has spoken. So he is shut up to his particular form of semantic mysticism. The word language is a connotation word which seems to involve personality. The whole solution hangs on the connotation inherent in the one word language
At the end of his book What is Philosophy? he says that in our modern day this use of language is found particularly in the poet. So the conclusion of this view is that we are to listen to the poet. This does not mean we are to listen to the content of what the poet says, but to listen to the fact that there is a speaking which exists. That is all.
This is a good example of the (later) Heidegger that I am aware of. When I read this (and then throw in the Church here and there) I think "Kosta, Kosta, Kosta". :) In Heidegger, we have a gentleman who believes God is irrational and impersonal, who demands that everything be proved rationally by man's standards, who is not terribly concerned with the content of language (insert Bible), and who believes that mysticism is a good answer in many, many cases, even on important issues. I also see a few places in this passage where we could insert what I perceive as your view of the Church (the unknowable speaks through the hierarchy, etc.). I am simply saying that I have perceived a lot of this in your posting, but only somewhat so from Latin posters (and not really at all from MD). That's where my comment came from.
Just so we are all on the same sheet of music, Francis Schaeffer was a zealot of Evangelical and Reformed variety. He was a Presbyterian pastor and theologian pursuing a so-called presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics, a rather militant partisan agenda aimed at completely discrediting anything that is in any way opposed to Reformed postulates. He was the pioneer of the Christian Right. He and Hagee could probably be readily interchanged.
So, you are giving me the work of a Reformed "storm trooper" for consideration. There is no chance there that Schaeffer might have twisted and cherry-picked things just a wee bit, is there?
Be it as it may, even if Heidegger has some postulates that are similar to those of Orthoodxy (I seriously doubt it), it is because even Reformed theology has some as well! Even Buddhism, FK. Many religions contain the seeds (Greek: "sporoi") of truth. Being a Westerner (1889-1976), his philosophy could only have borrowed from ancient religions. Orthodoxy and Heideggerian philosophy are neither parallel, nor comparable nor equal. Orthodoxy precedes Heidegger by 2,000 years. And if there are any similarities between them, it is only because Heidergger took them from Orthodoxy (which I doubt), and Orthodoxy cannot be blamed for that! :)
Nothing Orthoodx leads one to consider Heidegger, nor does Heidegger in any way add to, fulfill, enhance or improve Orthodoxy. Heidegger was a Nazi. That, in and of itself, makes him alien to anything Orthodox. If anything, being Protestant would be much more conducive to such extremism than being Orthodox.
Your whole premise of knowable God is based on an a priori acceptance of the Bible as literally true. Your definition of "personal" differs form what I understand personal to be. Anything we assign to God is deficient and, by definition, incomplete—imperfect. Everything we assign to God is, by necessity, anthropomorphism. Look at the universe and ask yourself if you can even imagine the logic which made it! Just as we by necessity apply anthropomorphism to our pets, we are forced to do the same with God, because natures are not exchangeable. Most of our "understanding" of God is projecting human feelings and ideas onto that which is not human.
With Christ, such projection is unnecessary. We see a human being, we can relate to his pain and suffering, his doubts, his fears, passions in general. But we also know that he is God and that he is our image of God, an icon. Otherwise, "God" is a burning bush, a voice form the heaven, or a voice from within, a dream, a delusion or even our own insanity.
The Bible reminds us that God's thoughts and ways are not ours—just as our thoughts and ways are not those of our pets, or better yet, ants and flatworms. Bad things happen to good people, FK. Good things happen to bad people. When faced with such dilemmas, we simply resign ourselves to not knowing God and his ways. But when we try to push our views of God on others, then we claim that we know God personally and with certainty.
Orthodoxy is clear that God is Mystery revealed to us in fullness through Jesus Christ. That's the beginning and the end of Orthodox "heideggerianism." What's revealed in the Old Testament is not Christ. For, if Christ's revelation were clear and unambiguous in the Old Testament there would have been no need for the New Testament. There is no way for us to know Christ trough the Old Testament. We can only "see dimly" in some instances the foreshadowing of Christ in it.
But in order for us to know Christ, it is necessary to see him as one of us, as a human being. It is only through his humanity that we can have a personal relationship with him on a human level. We don't know divine Christ, the Word. He is ineffable God. But Jesus is the same Christ in his human nature and we can relate to him without anthropomorphisms.
Orthodoxy does not teach that invisible, ineffable, eternal Spirit we call God is in any way, shape or form comprehensible to us. It does teach that we know of him through human words and concepts in the anthropomorphism of the OT, which is precisely why most of the Old Testament was understood and interpreted by the Apostolic and Church Fathers as allegory (St. Barnabas talking the extreme position that everything in it is allegorical, Marcion [c 110 AD] taking everything in it literally, while Origen [c 180 AD] took the middle position saying that some things in the OT are literal while most are allegorical). No such allegorical interpretation is necessary in the Gospels.