Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)

A fascinating, easy to read little book (provided you care about what he's writing about). Bultmann's starting point is the fairly undeniable fact that Jesus, and early followers of Jesus, expected the world to end within their lifetimes. It didn't. What do you do about that? If you're a theologian like Bultmann, you'll accept that "the course of history has refuted mythology," but argue that there's something important underlying the mythology.

It's in his understanding of mythology that Bultmann starts to get into trouble, because he doesn't distinguish between hermeneutics (the idea that all interpretations have to begin from a series of assumptions or biases), and existentialism, the idea that Man is Confronted By His Existence as a Question and so on: from a later perspective, he can't see that there's a difference between early Heidegger and later Gadamer.

This matters because he wants to understand 'mythology' as, roughly, the historically bounded starting point for the understanding of God. Particularly for biblical texts, this reveals itself whenever writers try to give a physical form to transcendent ideas--God smote Billy with a giant oak and so on. Nobody believes that these things happened. So Bultmann's demythologizing approach to the bible makes sense. Most people don't believe that the world is about to end; to that degree, we cannot be Christians. But perhaps if you get rid of the historically untenable bits of biblical texts, you can find something worthwhile in Christianity nonetheless. The attractiveness of this view is fairly obvious, and I suspect that most religious people must make some use of it, if only to say that slaying Amelakites was okay for Ancient Hebrews, but not so much for us.

The problem here is that Bultmann insists that 'our' standpoint for interpreting religion *must be* modern, specifically, that it must be Heideggerian. This leads to much maundering about Existence and Being and Questions that might be useful for understanding how we approach hammers, but doesn't really match up with people's actual problems, viz., war, exploitation, bigotry and so on.

Luckily you can demythologize Bultmann himself: yes, readers must 'interpret' the bible. Yes, they must do this from a particular perspective. Yes, that perspective shouldn't be intellectually irresponsible. But none of that means we have to be existentialists* worried about how people keep seeking security, as if that were somehow a greater evil than those who keep trying to undermine peace.

Also, watching him try to explain how the doctrine of justification is completely different from seeking security is really funny.

But if, like me, you're interested in the bible, but not a fundamentalist, this little book will give you some ideas for explaining your interest to your more rabid atheist friends.

*: Ridiculously, Bultmannn combines his general existentialism with a Kantian understanding of the moral law. Consider my gob smacked.… (more)