Beyond Bultmann

Reckoning a New Testament Theology

Bruce W. Longenecker, Mikeal C. Parsons, Bruce W. Longenecker, Mikeal C. Parsons

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781481300421
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Rudolf Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament has stood the test of time. At the very moment modernity was threatening to splinter New Testament studies into a myriad of isolated disciplines, Bultmann was somehow able to hold history, exegesis, and theology together. Theology of the New Testament was, and still is, the definitive theological statement of a high modernist critic. In it Bultmann was as relentless in his historical judgments as he was unapologetic in laying bare the New Testament's existential claims.

Beyond Bultmann puts Bultmann's classic Theology of the New Testament to a new test. Thirteen contemporary New Testament scholars subject Bultmann's Theology to a comprehensive new reading. This fresh, critical examination of Bultmann not only places his magisterial work in a new context but also reveals the enduring features of Bultmann's achievement. Beyond Bultmann demonstrates that Theology of the New Testament, far from being a relic in the museum of interpretation, still speaks today despite its flaws.

PART I

BULTMANN BY THE BOOK

Chapter 1

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

Samuel Byrskog

Bultmann’s Two Studies of the Historical Jesus

Rudolf Bultmann published two studies of the historical Jesus, namely, the book Jesus in 1926 and the first chapter of his Theology of the New Testament in 1953.¹ Both of them focus on Jesus’ message, not his person.

The Jesus book has four chapters. The first, “Der zeitgeschichtliche Rahmen des Auftretens Jesu” (“The Historical Context of the Ministry of Jesus”), examines Jewish religion, messianic movements, and John the Baptist. Central to Jewish religion was belief in election; this belief fed apocalyptic hopes and was, according to Bultmann, coupled with obedience, sometimes to the extent that scribal Judaism stressed obedience at the cost of apocalyptic. After being a disciple of John the Baptist, Jesus became known as a messianic prophet and was, like the Baptist, executed as such.

The second chapter, “Jesu Verkündigung: Das Kommen der Gottesherrschaft” (“Jesus’ Proclamation: The Coming of the Kingdom”), has sections on the call to salvation and repentance, on the kingdom of God, on universalism and individualism and dualism and pessimism, and on the future and the present time of decision. Bultmann stresses here the eschatological dimension of Jesus’ message and suggests that Jesus and his followers went to Jerusalem to welcome the kingdom. The future was at hand and forced people to decision. Jesus’ activity was a sign of its coming and his message a call for decision to make repentance. This salvation was mainly for the Jewish people of God.

The third chapter focuses on Jesus as teacher under the rubric “Jesu Verkündigung: Der Wille Gottes” (“Jesus’ Proclamation: The Will of God”). It discusses Jesus as rabbi, the authority that he attributed to Scripture, the Jewish ethic of obedience, Jesus’ demand for obedience, the possibility to comprehend that demand fully, ascetics and worldview, the love command, and the will of God and the coming of his kingdom. Although Jesus associated with people outside the scribal circles, he appeared as a Jewish rabbi, acknowledged the authority of Old Testament law, and affirmed genuine Jewish practices. His instruction differed from other Jewish teaching in that he did not assert the formal authority of the law and the obedience of each commandment but sought, like some rabbis, to restore its original intention and its central concern of true obedience to God’s will as it becomes evident for each person at the moment he or she stands before God in a situation of decision. Rather than insisting on ascetic behavior, Jesus taught the willingness to sacrifice in view of God’s demands. The love commandment, which Bultmann believed played a minor role in Jesus’ teaching, is the power to overcome one’s own will, not an ethical program. In its double form it makes real the bond between humans on the basis of their obedience to God. That obedience is related to the eschatological situation of God’s kingdom and expresses itself as readiness for the kingdom and acceptance of God’s demands at the moment of decision.

In the final chapter, “Jesu Verkündigung: Der ferne und der nahe Gott” (“Jesus’ Proclamation: The Remote and Near God”), Bultmann treats the Jewish concept of God, the eschatological future, God’s providence, theodicy, miracles, prayer, faith, God as father, the remoteness and nearness of God, and sin and forgiveness. Like other Jews, Jesus believed in God the Creator who is both remote and close (just as he is, in a paradoxical sense, the God of both the future and the present), and in him who cares for his people, regardless of the laws of nature and in the face of human suffering. This paradoxical belief became evident in Jesus’ conviction that miraculous events are linked to divine (or demonic) causality, and he himself performed miracles as a sign of the coming of God’s kingdom and the presence of the remote God in the world. This belief was also evident in the idea that prayer influences the almighty God. Jesus called his conviction about miracles and prayer “faith,” and he approached God, as did other Jews of his day, as father. According to Bultmann, the paradox of the remote and near God was manifest in Jesus’ teaching on divine forgiveness, because here the distant Creator forgoes his rightful claims on the things that belong to him and instead becomes existentially close to the person who recognizes and hears the call to decision based on these claims. Jesus brought this mystery to human beings, not through his death and resurrection, but through his word.

More than two decades later Bultmann addressed again the problem of the historical Jesus in the first chapter of his Theology. This time he did not call his study Jesus, not even within quotation marks as he occasionally did earlier, but “Die Verkündigung Jesu” (“The Proclamation of Jesus”), immediately indicating that he did not intend to discuss Jesus’ person.

Also, this time Bultmann divides his discussion into four sections, but with some differences in content and emphasis. After a few remarks about Jesus’ message as a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament and about the Synoptic Gospels as sources, presupposing the two-source hypothesis and building on his revised study of the history of the synoptic tradition,² he turns to what he labels “Die eschatologische Verkündigung” (“The Eschatological Proclamation”), leaving out a separate discussion of the Jewish background of Jesus’ message. This section is similar to the second chapter of his book Jesus, although much briefer. Bultmann stresses here the influence of Jewish apocalyptic hopes on the dominant concepts of Jesus’ proclamation of the impending, miraculous coming of God’s eschatological kingdom. Jesus’ words and deeds were signs of its dawning, and his entire activity was a call to decision for or against it, to the extent that his person, while not the object of faith, signified this call.

The second section is titled “Die Auslegung der Forderung Gottes” (“The Interpretation of the Demand of God”) and corresponds to the third chapter of his earlier book. Now somewhat more reserved regarding the notion that Jesus appeared as a Jewish rabbi, Bultmann emphasizes that Jesus’ interpretation of the demand of God was a protest against Jewish legalism—much like the Old Testament prophets reacted against formalized cultic worship but with the difference that Jesus reacted against formal obedience to the law and abolished cultic and ritual regulations in order to set human beings free for a true relationship to God. According to Bultmann, Jesus never denied the legitimacy of the Old Testament and Jewish practices. He differed from the scribes only in his interpretation of Scripture, leaving aside its cultic and ritual prescriptions and protesting against practices reflecting personal vanity and legalistic ritualism. The demand to love neighbor and God surpassed all other requirements and made human beings responsible to God. The unity of this ethical teaching and the message about God’s kingdom became evident in the notion of the fulfillment of God’s will in terms of readiness for the kingdom and as a condition for participation in salvation. For this reason Jesus’ message was, according to Bultmann, a cry to the Jewish people of woe and repentance.

The third section, “Der Gottesgedanke Jesu” (“Jesus’ Concept of God”), focuses on Jesus’ prophetic consciousness of living at the end time and also on the idea of God as the Creator who is at hand with judgment and forgiveness. Jesus believed (in distinction to the prophets) that this divine presence had to do with individuals to the extent that the relationship between God and humans was released from its ties to history (entgeschichtlicht) and that God and individuals were freed from the world (entweltlicht). This “dehistorization” and “desecularization” constituted the paradox that the God who is distant has come close to each person.

The final section, “Die Frage nach dem messianischen Selbstbewusstsein Jesu” (“The Issue of Jesus’ Self-Understanding”), has no counterpart in Bultmann’s earlier book. In that book Bultmann dealt, as we saw, with messianic movements and concluded that Jesus died as a messianic prophet.³ Now, in a chapter dealing with the message of Jesus, Bultmann enters into a debate about Jesus’ self-consciousness and makes a negative case, arguing that Jesus’ life and work were not messianic in the traditional sense, that Jesus did not reinterpret the traditional concept of the Messiah, and that he was not conscious of his destiny as the future Messiah or the Suffering Servant. William Wrede had conclusively shown, according to Bultmann, that the notion of the messianic secret was created at a time when early Christians no longer found Jesus’ unmessianic life conceivable.⁴

Scholarly Reactions

This brings us up to speed on the message of Jesus according to Bultmann. Although different, his two studies show a basic continuity that points to the core of his convictions about the historical Jesus.

His proposals have been widely discussed, endorsed, and rejected, sometimes in direct exchange with him, sometimes indirectly. To some extent the debate concerns how we evaluate the synoptic tradition. Bultmann had studied it thoroughly and partly built on his previous results.⁵ If those results are challenged, a different picture of the historical Jesus may emerge.⁶ It is, for instance, curious that while Bultmann in his work on the historical Jesus and elsewhere paid much attention to human existence as experienced from the perspective of individuals, in his study of the synoptic tradition he stressed the creative force of the community and neglected to account for what eyewitnesses and other individuals experienced in their direct or indirect encounter with Jesus. Generally speaking, his form-critical program has today lost its grip, and new ways of handling the synoptic tradition and assessing the historicity of the Jesus tradition are emerging.⁷

Rather than rehearsing the debate regarding the so-called second quest of the historical Jesus, I will select a few aspects of that debate to indicate some reactions to Bultmann’s account of Jesus’ message in contemporary scholarship. One basic feature that has been largely endorsed is his idea of the eschatological and prophetic character of Jesus’ message. Bultmann combined a view of Jesus that regarded him as both prophet and teacher (putting primary emphasis on the former) and synthesized two aspects of him that had been held separate and formed the basis of controversy in Jesus research at the beginning of the last century. Today’s scholarship does not contest the eschatological dimension of Jesus’ message.⁸

Another major aspect of his study has been rejected, however—namely, his sketch of Jewish legalism and Jesus’ stance toward it. Although Bultmann was cautious to place Jesus within the tradition of the Old Testament prophets and regarded him as fully Jewish, never giving in to attempts to distance him from his Jewishness,⁹ he imposed a development on ancient Israelite religion that implied that it moved toward an increasing legalism, and he distanced the core of Jesus’ innovative message from typical Jewish beliefs and practices. Bultmann’s views were not unusual at the time, but they have been decisively questioned through the appreciation of the covenantal ramifications of common Judaism, which places the observance of the law within a context of God’s merciful election, as well as of the pluralism of Jewish piety and practices, including the complex ethnic character of lower Galilee.¹⁰

Other ideas in Bultmann’s account recur in modified forms. His argument that Jesus proclaimed a call for decision has lost its existential dimension, and scholars avoid his terminology for the individual’s response to the eschatological situation. Yet the notion of repentance is still central. Although many recognize that the sources do not abound in references to repentance,¹¹ and that the accounts in the double tradition that do mention it deal with the repentance of towns rather than individuals (Matt 11:21/Luke 10:13; Matt 12:41/ Luke 11:32), they also realize that several parables illustrate how Jesus called fellow Jews to return to the Lord. Just as scholars hold on to the view that Jesus required national and individual repentance in view of the impending kingdom, Bultmann was convinced that he called people to decision for or against it.

Bultmann’s early conviction that Jesus was a rabbi is today expressed with caution, because we have realized that the term “rabbi” and its equivalents in the Gospels cannot refer back to a trained Torah teacher before 70 C.E.¹² Yet Greek didactic designations are applied to Jesus and his activity in the Gospels and make it reasonable to believe that he appeared as a Torah teacher without formal education. The pertinent question concerns what kind of Torah teacher he was. Bultmann’s focus on the love command as the only real requirement before God is now questioned in view of Jesus’ thorough Jewishness, which would have required appreciation of the Torah in its entirety.¹³ Most scholars agree, however, that it was Jesus’ own teaching that resulted in the importance attached to the love command in the Jesus tradition and earliest Christianity.

The proposal that Jesus was never the object of faith is today taken for granted. Scholars recognize with Bultmann that the faith that Jesus asked for was trust in his miraculous powers and in God. To that effect, Jesus is mostly seen as the medium of God’s power to those who have confidence in God. However, although Bultmann refrained from making Jesus’ person central for the coming of the kingdom, he did regard him as an “eschatological phenomenon” and thus implicitly admitted that he claimed an eschatological empowering for his mission. Bultmann’s position on this question has today been modified by scholars who consider it likely that Jesus regarded his own person as more instrumental for the coming of the kingdom.

In particular, two aspects of Bultmann’s study suggest a greater appreciation for Jesus’ person than he admitted—namely, his discussion of God as father and (somewhat paradoxically) Jesus’ non-messianic claims and references to another Son of Man. Bultmann’s argument that Jesus thought of God as a loving and caring father has received clearer contours. It is not without reason that Jesus’ practice of addressing God as abba has been seen as one of the clear results of modern scholarship.¹⁴ We might differ in our understanding of its implications, but the term abba seems to have suggested a special relationship to God and sense of authority to proclaim his kingdom.

It might be possible even to propose...