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Bultmann's Philosophical Troubles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

H. A. Nielsen
H. A. Nielsen
Affiliation:
University of Windsor
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Extract

These words were written by a preacher-theologian of grey hairs and very great learning: “‘In the fullness of time’ God sent forth his Son, a pre-existent divine Being, who appears on earth as a man. He dies the death of a sinner on the cross and makes atonement for the sins of men… What a primitive mythology it is, that a divine Being should become incarnate, and atone for the sins of men through his own blood” Since 1941, when those wartime words were written, Dr. Bultmann has checked his inclination to apply the term “myth” in wholesale fashion, but his demythologizing works continue to be widely quoted, and their claims can still produce annoyance in the reader and plain uncertainty over what to make of the term “myth”, with its unmistakable smell of something not wanted. In this paper I want first to look into Bultmann's use of that word, and then, by remembering some things from the history of philosophy, to replace that uncertainty if possible with a smile of recognition.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , March 1970 , pp. 635 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1970

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References

1 Bultmann, Rudolfet al., Kerygma and Myth, Vol. I, ed. Bartsch, H. W. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 2Google Scholar, 7. Quotations from this work, hereafter cited as KM, are from Bultmann's contributions unless otherwise indicated.

2 The notion of myth is under much firmer control in Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament, tr. Grobel, K. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1954–1955).Google Scholar

3 For a discussion of Gnostic motifs see Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament, Vol. I, pp. 164–183.

4 The date will stand up, even though the word “myth” according to one authority did not appear in biblical criticism before about 1830. Cf. Karl Barth, Protestant Thought from Rousseau to Ritschl, p. 381.

5 Bultmann, Rudolf, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 15Google Scholar.

6 For example Wolf, H., Kierkegaard and Bultmann (Minneapolis, 1965), pp. 88–89Google Scholar.

7 Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 54Google Scholar.

8 References are to Norman Kemp Smith's Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.

9 Helmut Gollwitzer, critical and suspicious though he is of so much in the existentialist schools of exegesis, permits himself to speak of “the closed nature of the continuity within history, which is the heuristic presupposition of modern science.” (The Existence of God as Confessed by Faith, tr. Leitch, J. W.; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965, p. 55.)Google Scholar In place of “presupposition”, wit h its hint of prescience concerning what can and cannot happen by way of discontinuities, it would be less misleading to speak of that continuity as a requirement laid down for finished historical tracts as well as those of natural science. Otherwise the requirement can all too easily transform itself into a super-law of nature in the best Kantian tradition. Readers of Wittgenstein, by the way, will have spotted the parallel between Kant's subliming of the logic of science and what he called “the subliming of logic” in Philosophical Investigations, (London, 1953) I, par. 89–107Google Scholar.

10 Kant speaks of the miraculous, for example, as “something whose occurrence, as under objective laws of experience, we ourselves can recognize to be impossible.” Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, tr. T. M. Greene and Hudson (Chicago, 1934), p. 182.

11 This is not meant to argue for a numinous “other kind” of experience, but merely to indicate the place of the concept of experience in the play of Kant's figurations.

12 Gollwitzer in several places complains of the ambiguities of “understanding” but has not to my knowledge unpacked them (op cit., pp. 32, 38, 118–122). He also notes a sign of uneasiness over the sometimes bullying use of that word in theology when he cites H. Thielecke's question-thesis: “Is the understandability of theological ideas not the sharpest objection to their theological character?” (Ibid., p. 141.) The same uneasiness seems to trouble Albert Schweitzer toward the end of his Quest of the Historical Jesus when he asks, “But why should what is incomprehensible to us be unhistorical?” (p. 305).

13 Gollwitzer sees later existentializings of the concept of God as variants of Kant's. German theology “bound itself ever anew … to (Kant's) strengths and weaknesses alike.” (Op. cit., p. 74.) On this point cf. Drummond, A. L., German Protestantism Since Luther (London, 1951), p. 245Google Scholar.