Rudolf Bultmann

A Companion to His Theology

Congdon

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498273596
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Rudolf Bultmann is one of the most widely known but least read theologians of the twentieth century. He is famous as the one who "demythologized" the New Testament, but very few understand what he meant by this or how his hermeneutical program connects to the other areas of his theological project. Bultmann presents a unique challenge to readers, not only because of his radical theological inquiry but also because of the way his ideas are worked out over time, primarily through short, occasional writings that present complex issues in a disarmingly straightforward manner. In this introduction to his theology--the first of its kind in more than twenty years--David W. Congdon guides readers through ten central themes in Bultmann's theology, ranging from eschatology and dialectic to freedom and advent. By gaining an understanding of these themes, students of Bultmann will have the necessary tools to understand and profit from his writings. The result is not only an accessible guide for those encountering Bultmann for the first time but also a cohesive, systematic presentation of his thought for those wondering how his work might speak to our current context.

1

Eschatology

Introductions to Rudolf Bultmann, especially in English, tend to approach him by first looking at his hermeneutics, his form- and historical-critical scholarship, or his philosophical influences. They start, that is, with some aspect of epistemology (i.e., the study of knowledge, particularly the question of methodology). This is understandable, given how dominant the subject of epistemology is in modernity—especially in modern theology, as the traditional assumptions and sources of knowledge came under scrutiny—and how crucial it is for Bultmann’s own theological work. But as an introduction to Bultmann, as an orientation to the way he thinks and why, it is backwards.

Those who want to understand Bultmann must begin not at the philosophical-hermeneutical-epistemological beginning but at the theological end—that is to say, at the doctrine of the end, or eschatology. As a matter of biographical history, Bultmann happened to begin his theological studies at a time when eschatology was being rediscovered after centuries of dismissal and neglect. He entered his training at precisely the right moment: after the significance of eschatology was already recognized, but before it had been theologically integrated and developed. He was thus perfectly positioned to be a pioneer in the eschatological awakening of modern Christianity, which is exactly what he became.

In order to read Bultmann rightly, therefore, the first thing to realize is that he was essentially an eschatological theologian. The theme of eschatology was not merely a central topic of his historical and theological writings; it functioned as a norm and criterion that determined his thinking about every theological issue. Every other aspect of Bultmann’s theology derives from the fact that he was, from first to last, a theologian of the eschatological reality of God.

The Turn to Eschatology

In 1959 Rudolf Bultmann wrote a brief article for the Expository Times as part of a series on the books that were most important to a particular scholar’s thinking. Bultmann listed six books in roughly chronological order. The third book in the list was the second edition of Johannes Weiss’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (ET Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God). Regarding this book, Bultmann wrote: “Here my eyes were opened to the ‘eschatological’ character of the preaching of Jesus; that is, I saw that the Kingdom of God preached by Him was not a religious and ethical community located within, but a miraculous ‘eschatological’ entity.”1 To understand the development of Bultmann’s theology and hermeneutics, we will need to go back to Weiss and the revolution he initiated in biblical studies.

In early 1892, when the young Bultmann was only seven years old, the Marburg New Testament scholar Johannes Weiss published a short work on the preaching of Jesus about the kingdom of God, which he knew was going to upset a lot of people. The issue is that, at face value, the NT texts indicate that Jesus proclaimed (and his followers believed in) the literal, imminent arrival of a new divine kingdom upon earth within the disciples’ lifetime (cf. Matt 10:23). This kingdom, of course, never actually arrived as expected. The early church quickly found ways to reconcile their faith in Jesus as the messiah with this great disappointment. The most famous approach was to claim that “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years” (2 Pet 3:8). Having deferred the eschaton indefinitely, the church lost the eschatological consciousness of the early community and focused on itself, on its liturgy and doctrine, on its relation to the wider culture and the government. Ernst Käsemann calls this transition period “early catholicism.”2 Now that they were no longer expecting the imminent end of history, these early Christians could get on with the business of living in the world. The death of apocalyptic—understood here as the imminent expectation of the messiah’s coming—was not the death of eschatology as such, of course. The Christian community continued to believe in and await a future last judgment, along with the coming of God’s kingdom for all creation. But the decisive events where salvation was concerned were now all innerworldly; baptism into the church was now the entrance into the new age. Participating in the church replaced waiting for the kingdom.

Everything changed in modernity. Skepticism regarding the nonempirical and the general loss of credence in religious authority created space to question the assumptions regarding eschatology and the afterlife. The speculative hope in a paradisiacal reign at the permanently-deferred end of history could not withstand the Kantian criticism of metaphysics. Immanuel Kant’s exclusion of the unintuitable and supratemporal from the realm of reason rendered the traditional doctrine of eschatology no longer credible as an article of belief. For these and other reasons, theologians searched for ways of understanding the biblical language of the kingdom that did not require appeal to the supernatural and the metaphysical. They did not have to search far. There was already a long-standing orthodox tradition of identifying the kingdom of God with the church on earth, based on passages like the “keys of the kingdom” (Matt 16:19). And there was certainly a robust moral tradition inherited from medieval theology. It was easy enough for modern liberal theologians to conclude that talk of God’s kingdom in the Bible was actually a metaphorical way of speaking about an idealistic innerhistorical moral community. To belong to the kingdom of God, according to the liberal view, was to adhere to various universal religious and ethical truths. Friedrich Schleiermacher paved the way for this view, but it was Albrecht Ritschl who systematized it.

Weiss was explicitly critical of the liberal position, but this placed him in an uncomfortable position, given that Ritschl was his father-in-law. While Weiss delayed the publication of his book until 1892 to avoid personally upsetting Ritschl, he explicitly addressed his book to those who held Ritschl’s views, which included himself. Weiss exposed the liberal position as an illegitimate imposition of a Kantian framework upon the biblical text. The early Christian community did not use this language symbolically. They genuinely believed in the imminent arrival of God’s messianic reign within their lifetimes. To be sure, Weiss considered such a notion delusional, and so he posed the fundamental challenge for future theologians: to translate the content of the New Testament into the context of the contemporary world. Or as Weiss put it, theologians today must “issue the old coinage at a new rate of exchange.”3 I will return to this hermeneutical challenge later, when I discuss Bultmann’s program of demythologizing. For now all we need to see is that Weiss set the stage for later scholars, who came along and developed his insight into the eschatological nature of the early Christian gospel.

Bultmann began his theological studies in 1903 at Tübingen University. He then went to Berlin in 1904 before arriving, in 1905, at Marburg University, the goal and climax of his education. There he came under the influence of Adolf Jülicher, Paul Natorp, Wilhelm Herrmann, and, especially, Weiss. By this point, the latter’s thesis regarding the eschatological orientation of Jesus was widely accepted. The following year, in 1906, Albert Schweitzer published his groundbreaking Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, later translated as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer’s work not only radicalized Weiss’s thesis about Jesus’ preaching, but it had the additional effect of bringing the quest for the historical Jesus to a screeching halt.4

Bultmann was thus trained within a context that recognized the thoroughly eschatological nature of early Christianity but had no idea what to do with this insight theologically. In the lectures he gave in 1951 at Yale University and Vanderbilt University,5 published as Jesus Christ and Mythology in 1958, Bultmann recalls the “epoch-making” significance of Weiss: “Weiss showed that the Kingdom of God is not immanent in the world and does not grow as part of the world’s history, but is rather eschatological; i.e., the Kingdom of God transcends the historical order. It will come into being not through the moral endeavour of man, but solely through the supernatural action of God.”6 Bultmann then recounts the words of his professor in Berlin, Julius Kaftan, who said that “if Johannes Weiss is right and the conception of the Kingdom of God is an eschatological one, then it is impossible to make use of this conception in dogmatics.”7 One person who agreed with Kaftan was Wilhelm Herrmann, the much beloved professor of both Bultmann and Karl Barth. When faced with the truth of Weiss’s presentation of early Christian eschatology, Herrmann retreated from talking of God’s kingdom and focused instead on “the personal experience of revelation.”8 Or rather he reinterpreted the language of the kingdom to refer to the “inner li...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Eschatology
• Chapter 2: Dialectic
• Chapter 3: Nonobjectifiability
• Chapter 4: Self-Understanding
• Chapter 5: Kerygma
• Chapter 6: History
• Chapter 7: Myth
• Chapter 8: Hermeneutics
• Chapter 9: Freedom
• Chapter 10: Advent
• Further Reading
• Bibliography