Although his work is also theologically important, it is as a giant among C20th New Testament scholars (his form-critical approach came to dominate the field in Germany) that Bultmann is best known. The son of a German Lutheran pastor, he studied at Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg before becoming Professor of New Testament at Marburg.

While he rejects as unreconstructable with any conclusiveness Jesus’ life, and particularly his consciousness (something central to faith according to one of his teachers, Wilhelm Herrmann), he follows Herrmann’s accent on faith’s defencelessness. Faith, as the unobjectifiable existential decision (or arguably, ‘leap’, since it is difficult to see how Bultmann avoids the feeling of arbitrariness) of obedience responding to the ever dynamic and always-to-be-renewed encounter with the "Wholly Other", cannot be secured or suggest that this Other is controllable. Bultmann’s distinction between Historie (scientific history reconstructing past-events) and Geschichte (history in its existential impact on contemporary life) is a way of underlining not only that a proper reading of (biblical) texts is to hear the speaking of their subject-matter (Sache), but also emphasising that revelation cannot be ‘contained’ or ‘possessed’ by any moment of history.

Liberal historical critics miss these theological determinations and attempt to secure revelation in historically testable conditions. In so doing they make the Wholly Other and the event of revelation into objects of human conceiving. This undermines God’s ‘subjectivity’, or unpossessable prevenient agency (albeit this is a ‘subjectivity’ mediated through the biblical texts).

Instead, historical criticism properly enables a discernment through the texts of what this confrontation is (or, perhaps better, who is encountered). Bultmann’s infamous ‘demythologisation’ is a way of, firstly, ‘de-objectifying’ the naïve theological conceptions by the biblical writers, and, secondly, asking what it is that they are trying to say mythologically. ‘Myth’, Bultmann argues in ‘Neues Testament und Mythologie’ (1941), is a common method of misleadingly describing transcendent forces in objective, quasi-scientific terms. So the New Testament is deeply infected with an outmoded first-century world view, and this is very different from the contemporary one which, for instance, assumes a closed causal continuum of events which is not repeatedly breached by supernatural agencies (the notion of miracle as an interruption of the world’s causal processes is altogether discounted by historical and scientific explanation). Bultmann identifies numerous New Testament myths – the three-tier universe as the arena for conflict between the forces of God and Satan; the Son of God’s coming from heaven and defeat of evil’s forces; Christ’s returning on the clouds as executor of God’s final judgement; the virgin birth; the bodily resurrection; and Christ’s ascension. To these he adds the dogmatic theories of the incarnation, atonement and Trinity.

Demythologising replaces these illusory theological objectifications by translating the biblical myths into a more appropriate contemporary theological idiom. Bultmann discovers this in existential, self-involving language – ‘faith’ in the cross can realise in human existence a new possibility of forgiveness, freedom and love. In theory, this way of reading of the bible by modern people is less the rejection of its Sache by contemporary contrasting worldviews, or even the negative task of husk-stripping in attempting to locate the kernel of the biblical message, as is often imagined – even modern perspectives and world views are challengeable. Rather, it is more the positively conceived discipline of asking concerning the message (the kerygma), and interpreting its expression and mispresentation by the various scripture writers. Nevertheless, it remains to be asked, however, whether Bultmann adequately deals with the question of the Sache’s own enculturation of expression, and whether he does resort in practice to precisely the negation of myth by a discovery of the biblical kernel.

Bultmann takes seriously the impact of various factors upon one’s reading (the preunderstanding brought to any reading) as well as upon the authors’ writing (the cultural and belief-systems). Consequently, any apologetic that imagines that God’s acts can be read off the world, off cultural products, or even off one’s experiences misses not only the eventfulness of grace but also the ambiguity of both the world and our readings of its ‘meaning’. Moreover, one’s set of preunderstandings, and the questions therein brought to bear on the text, must be malleable when encountered by those text’s Sache. Therefore, any apologetic that is not open to the interrogation and transformation of its method is mistaken.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. C. McDowell

Meldrum Lecturer in Systematic Theology, University of Edinburgh.

Published Hope in Barth's Eschatology: Interrogations and Transformations Beyond Tragedy (Aldershot and Burlington, 2000), and co-editor of the forthcoming Conversing With Barth (Aldershot and Burlington, 2003), as well as various articles on Barth (SJT, IJST, EQ, Themelios) and George Steiner (L&T).