Here I want to address the anatomy of Rudolf Bultmann’s unbelief in the historicity and physical/literal/bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. So, I will share a lengthy quote from David Congdon on Bultmann’s thought, in this regard, and then provide my commentary latterly.
The political dimension of Bultmann’s hermeneutical program is only one aspect, albeit a crucial and often-overlooked one. Given its importance to Bultmann, we also need to address the question of natural science. The cultural world-pictures the kerygma traverses in its ongoing movement through history include, among other things, cosmological assumptions. In other words, a Weltbild involves presuppositions about not only the kind of God who acts in the world but also the kind of world in which God acts. Bultmann signals this at the very beginning of his Entmythologisierungsvortrag, where he presents as a key mark of the mythical Weltbild the idea that the world consists of “three stories,” with earth in the middle, heaven above, and the underworld below. It is at this same level of cultural Weltbild or “social imaginary” that Bultmann places the modern scientific method, within which we live. In contrast to the mythical Weltbild, “in this modern world-picture the link between cause and effect is fundamental.” Bultmann’s cultural context presupposes “a closed interdependent nexus [Wirkungs-zusammenhang] in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. Miracles, in the sense of publicly visible and objectifiable occurrences, belong to a foreign cultural context that no longer obtains in modernity. Deconstantinizing therefore entails the radical differentiation of the kerygma from the cosmological assumptions of the ancient world and the translation of the kerygma into new contexts operating under new cosmological-scientific norms.
As scandalous as it may sound, Bultmann’s rejection of all supernaturalism, including the literal interpretation of the resurrection as a physical occurrence, is actually in service of the missionary truth of the gospel. Gerhard Ebeling spells out the logic of Bultmann’s move in his own dogmatic inquiry into this issue. The traditional notion of resurrection makes use of “apocalyptic modes of thinking” and “apocalyptic conceptual elements” that belong to an “apocalyptic world-picture,” and “we cannot assume that the apocalyptic thought-forms are a world-picture we could readily make our own.” The notion of the resurrection of the dead “belongs to a world that has become strange [fremd] to us,” indeed, to “a world-picture that has become obsolete.” We need not get into the details of the debate over apocalyptic. The point here is simply that to make the traditional notion of resurrection a sine qua non of genuine Christian faith is to conflate the kerygma with an alien cultural thought-form and thus to replace “a liberating experience of faith” with “an oppressive law of faith.” Faith in Christ cannot be bound to antiquated or alien cosmologies, even if the translations of the kerygma into those alien contexts are entirely valid and remain a valuable witness for contemporary communities of faith. It is both possible and necessary for the church to carry out translations of the kerygma into a modern context in which the scientific norms of the day render impossible the ancient apocalyptic Weltbild, at least in its literal, mythological form, just as our context today renders impossible ancient cosmology, biology, and the like. We no longer accept antiquated accounts of the planetary system or human reproduction, for example, nor should we.[1]
What to say?
17 For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not with clever speech, lest the cross of Christ be emptied. 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,and the intelligence of the intelligent I will confound.”20 Where is the wise person? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. 22 For indeed, Jews ask for sign miracles and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a cause for stumbling, but to the Gentiles foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. –I Corinthians 1.17-25
12 Now if Christ is preached as raised up from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ has not been raised either. 14 But if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. 15 And also we are found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if after all, then, the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised either. 17 But if Christ has not been raised, your faith is empty; you are still in your sins. 18 And as a further result, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If we have put our hope in Christ in this life only, we are of all people most pitiable. –I Corinthians 15.12-19
There is no compelling reason to follow Bultmann’s line of reasoning. He is responding to his own German contextual problematics, and attempting to work within ad hoc conditions that the reality of Holy Scripture and the Holy Life of the Triune God know nothing about; except in condemnation at the cross of Christ.
Yet, Bultmann (and Congdon following) unfortunately presume that to ‘go back’ to an alien Weltbild or ‘world-picture’ is a move of intellectual sacrifice (sacrificium intellectus) that any modern person simply won’t commit themselves to. It is this sort of evolutionary progressive and linear understanding of historical intellectual development that Bultmann, Congdon et al have unnecessarily committed themselves to, and that has led them to think the 20th and 21st century thinkers simply can no longer abide by the strange and “antiquated” world of the ancients. But what is rather strange to me is the notion that just because there was a certain phenomenological understanding of the cosmos in “biblical times” that we must necessarily, according to Bultmann’s logic, throw the belief in the resurrection out with that cosmogony in toto. I am unclear why this is necessary. What if the cosmology and the “apocalyptical” view of the world in say Second Temple Judaism, and even more anciently, is more advanced than the modern understanding of the world? What if the modern understanding of the world is antiquated by the heavenly realities of God’s more advanced ways of working such that the “fullness of time” (cf. Gal 4) which He choose to advent within represents a more accurate way of understanding His ways than modern ways do?
Bultmann’s understanding of things is overly-simplistic and even naïve as it is captured by a sort of positivistic rationalism that is enslaved to the optics of the modern day. All one must do to undercut the whole of Bultmann’s project is reject his premise that the modern categories of thought are the canonically correct ones, and instead presume that the ones that Holy Scripture presumes upon are the correct ones. Further, it is just as easily possible for the kerygmatic reality of the Gospel to even fit into the modern categories, insofar as those are reified by the more primal apocalyptic realities that are revealed in and through the history and epistemic delimiting reality of the literal-physical resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ. In other words, even as modern people, it is possible to ‘filter’ modern intellectual developments in and through a Christ-conditioned lens that does not submit the reality of the biblical cosmology to the ambit of the modern immanentization of all things. Karl Barth, in contrast to Bultmann, represents a modern who does not fall prey to the sort of naïve approach that Bultmann ends up giving into. Barth works from what he calls a second naïveté, in regard to ‘critical scholarship.’ Yet, within this he does not give away the [Holy] Ghost when it comes to the miraculous workings of God; indeed he revels in them to a point that even bothers certain scholastics.
As a matter of historical and theological-intellectual understanding, reading about Bultmann’s theology (all 800pp of it!) is an interesting reading project. But it boggles the mind, when someone reads about his theology, why that someone would also feel compelled to simply sign onto Bultmann’s premises; at least if you are a biblically formed Christian. There is no compelling reason to accept the premise that the modern is the most advanced form of understanding how things are in the world. This represents a petitio principii that makes the critical thinker wonder why anyone would want to privilege this intellectual paradigm over the biblically given one; the latter paradigm is one that presents the bodily resurrection of Christ as the sine qua non of all that is real and powerful and hopeful in the world, of what makes Christianity stand or fall.
[1] David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 661-63.