Background
Bultmann, Rudolf was born on August 20, 1884 in Wiefelstede, Oldenburg, Germany. His father was a Lutheran pastor.
Bultmann, Rudolf was born on August 20, 1884 in Wiefelstede, Oldenburg, Germany. His father was a Lutheran pastor.
He studied at the Gymnasium at Oldenburg and at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin before taking his doctorate at Marburg in 1910.
He taught at Marburg (1912-1916), Breslau (1916-1920), Giessen (1920-1921), and again, as professor of New Testament, Marburg (1921-1951). During the Third Reich period, Bultmann neither supported nor openly opposed the Nazi regime.
Bultmann was one of the founders, with Martin Dibelius (1883-1947), of the "Form Criticism" (Formgeschichte) of the New Testament. During the decades between the crucifixion of Jesus (c. a.d. 30) and the writing of the four Gospels (c. a.d. 65-100), sayings of Jesus and stories about him were handed down within the Christian community either by oral transmission or in documents now lost. The religious and social concerns of the early Christians presumably influenced this tradition. Bultmann's Form Criticism identified the small units (pericopes) of which the Gospels are composed, classified these units according to literary types, and then sought to explain each unit's life situation (Sitz im Leben) in the early Christian community's preaching, teaching, worship, and controversy. By going back to the stage of oral tradition, Bultmann hoped to recover the original kerygma (proclamation) of the primitive Church. The written Gospels, according to Bultmann, embodied the kerygma in a mythic framework congenial to the mentality of the first century. Accordingly, he sought to "demythologize" the Gospels: to distinguish between the essential proclamation and the myths that had become attached to it during the decades of oral transmission.
Most students of the Gospels accept Bultmann's thesis that the early Christian community shaped the tradition that eventually found expression in the Gospels. His more conservative critics were alarmed, however, by Bultmann's tendency to assume that the traditions underlying the New Testament were so completely the products of the community that we can learn little or nothing about the historical Jesus from the Gospels.
Bultmann was not only a Scripture scholar, but also an original theologian as well. His thought was strongly influenced both by Lutheran tradition and by the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, his colleague at Marburg in the 1920's. Bultmann sought to interpret the kerygma in terms that would be meaningful to 20th-century men and women. His demythologizing project was in a sense preparatory to this task. "Faith," he wrote in 1928, "does not mean to accept the proclamation of God's forgiving love and to be convinced of its truth in general, but rather to regulate one's life by it.... [it] means to let my concrete now be determined by the proclamation."
Bultmann continued to live at Marburg after retiring from his professorship. He died there July 30, 1976. His most important scholarly works are The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921), The Gospel of John: A Commentary (1941), and Theology of the New Testament (1948-1953).
The work of few twentieth-century theologians oas attracted comment from as wide a spectrum of theologians, and from as great a number of Philosophers as has that of Bultmann. Dismayed by Bultmann's existentialist approach to the Bible, the conservative theologian Robert L. Reymond declared that ‘Bultmann is only listening to a recording" of his own inner voice'. Helmut 1 hielicke opposed Bultmann’s anthropocentrism, and considered that he had mistakenly elevated the modern scientific worldview into the criterion or interpreting Scripture.
The Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner declared that Bultmann Was ‘the one theologian in the twentieth century who knew what was going on’. The existentialist Philosopher Jaspers lamented Bultmann’s selfconfinement to Heidegger, while Ronald Hepburn Pas raised pertinent queries from the standpoint °f British analytical philosophy. It has been claimed that Bultmann’s utilization of Heidegger cads to theological reductionism no less than did he dependence of some philosophers of an earlier generation upon post-Hegelian idealism.
Raised under liberal theology, Bultmann never rePudiated its concern for the application of the
best critical scholarship to the biblical texts.
But where the liberals went in earnest quest of the historical Jesus, Bultmann doubted whether much could be known about Jesus’s life and work. Where the demeanour of the liberals was frequently optimistic, Bultmann’s, though not pessimistic, was—not least as a German Confessing Christian of the 1930s—characterized by due appreciation of the tragic in human existence. Bultmann's qualifications of liberalism go hand in hand with his indebtedness to Heidegger, his Marburg colleague (1922-1928).
Heidegger’s insistence upon the givenness of our own existence, upon our fallenness and upon our sense of not being ‘at home’ in this world, together with his understanding of authentic existence as that which responds appropriately to our existential situation, seemed to Bultmann to provide the basis for a theology for the contemporary world.
This world was one in which older, supernaturalist. presuppositions had been vanquished by the modem scientific worldview, and the Bible had become a closed book to many because its thought-world seemed passé. Bultmann nevertheless believed that God addresses humanity in the Scriptures, but for his voice to be heard today the mythological husk must be removed. Hence Bultmann's programme of demythologization: the attempt to translate the ‘mythical’ language of the New Testament without remainder into existential terms.
The translation made, human beings in their fallenness are confronted by the living Word who calls them to new, authentic, life. Against those who argued that he was simply reiterating older theologies of self-consciousness in existentialist language, Bultmann argued that his concern was with selfunderstanding: we understand ourselves truly only in that encounter with God, the source of which is in God, not us.
The following are among points of discussion which have been raised from a variety of quarters by Bultmann’s work: (1) Given that Bultmann demythologizes so much, on what grounds does he stop short of demythologizing those kerygmatic claims which he deems vital for theology—something which Fritz Buri proceeded subsequently to do? (2) If we are encountered by God, does not this imply that God is ontologically distinct from the world? Why, then, should Bultmann be so wary of ontological claims concerning God, which need not land in the kind of objectification which he fears? (3) If we may properly speak of revelation only in respect of present encounters.
have we not bracketed a large number of assertions concerning God’s actions in themselves, which many Christians wish to make? (4) On Bultmann’s own terms, is not all talk of God’s acting in history mythological? Bultmann countered this suggestion by saying that such talk is analogical. However, it was then pointed out that this leaves us with post-demythologization statements of more than an existential kind, and this is not the result Bultmann originally sought.
(5) While Bultmann’s openness to philosophy is applauded by many, does not his existential approach require him to bypass such philosophically interesting questions as the logic of personal identity and post-mortem survival? 6) Bultmann believes that, whether accepted or rejected. Christ is the schatological event. But does he not come close to saying that Christ becomes incarnate only when received by an individual? Does not this appear to make the Incarnation a human work?.
K. Müller, H. Gunkel, A. von Harnack, A. Jülicher, J. Weiss, W. Herrmann and M. Heidegger.
