After a couple of years I finally finished reading through, David Congdon’s tome, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. It comes in at a total of 953 pp., including the end matter (the body of the book covers 856 pp.); so not a quick read. This post is not intended to be a comprehensive review or even a review at all. Instead this will simply be concluding impression as I move on past Bultmann and Congdon. If you are interested in reading my engagement with Congdon along the way, then go to my ‘David Congdon’ category, and you will find a multitude of posts engaging with the content of this book.

My basic impression of Bultmann’s theology and methodology is this: It is unnecessary to ‘demythologize’ the kerygma, rather we are in need of being demythologized by the Gospel. In other words, the weltbild or world-picture at the time of the writing of the New Testament, in particular, is not in need of being deconstructed in order to get at the pure kernel of the kerygmatic reality. This is the contention of Bultmann, and Congdon; viz. the Gospel should not be collapsed into its cultural world-picture, instead it needs to be ‘demythologized’ and translated, thus transpropiated into its now received weltbild in the 21^st century. Bultmann (and  Congdon) maintain that the kerygma is misunderstood when it is too closely wedded to its original historical milieu; i.e. under the literary, socio-historico-politico conditions present at the time. As such this mythology needs to be demythologized, deconstantinized in a way that allows the message and fresh reality of the Gospel to shine through in all its transcendent glory as that confronts us anew in our own existential existence in the present. It is only by the apperception of faith that the Gospel reality is known, and that is an apperception not contingent upon the mythos and cultural locatedness of the Gospel’s historical iteration in the first coming of Christ. To put it in Lessing’s terms: the Gospel’s reality and explication is not contingent upon the accidents of history, but through demythologizing its esse[ntial] reality can be known and forever experienced through the approach of the faith seeking heart.

Underneath Bultmann’s approach, as with any modern theologian of the time, is a serious commitment to the Kantian epistemology. As Congdon points out, Bultmann was doing his own project; but it is clear that Kant’s dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal remains an ever present voice. Further, there is, as with Barth, a significant allergy to natural theology in Bultmann’s way. But he goes to unnecessary lengths in an attempt to squash the possibility for natural theology to seep in and undercut the analogy of faith. It is unnecessary, in my view, to fear natural theology and metaphysics to the point that the theologian is led to renounce any sort of good basis in the protological norm of creation itself. This is what Bultmann attempts to do with his emphasis on the eschatological nature of his dialectical theology. That is, he wants all of Christian reality to breath and move from the eschatological reality of God to the point that all historical reality prior is gutted of any concrete meaning vis-à-vis the Gospel, who is the Christ. This is why Bultmann so emphasizes the faith in the kerygma, and deemphasizes things like the historical and concrete reality of the bodily resurrection of Christ. If the resurrection of Christ can be located in the normal or profane history of nature, then God has been subjugated to or made a predicate of nature. In order to get around this, Bultmann constructs a whole elaborate process of identifying myth, and a way for demything the husk which the myth represents. Which is to say: the Gospel or kerygmatic reality can never be contained by its natural reception. The fear for Bultmann (and Congdon) is that nature would lay hold of revelation, rather than revelation lay hold of nature. I understand and appreciate this fear, but it is unnecessary to go to the lengths that Bultmann does in order to escape this dilemma; Barth does much better in this complex by focusing on a Chalcedonian pattern for negotiating with revelation and nature in the hypostatic union of the Godman, Jesus Christ.

There are emphases and themes in Bultmann’s theology that I find helpful in regard to critique of natural theology, and a focus on the faith of Christ. But the lengths he goes to in order to undercut natural theology, driven by his modern commitment to an anti-metaphysical mode, leads him to hermeneutical positions that are too extreme; extreme to the point that they end up undercutting the Apostolic understanding of the Gospel as presented in the New Testament. And this is precisely to the point, Bultmann (and Congdon) maintain that the Apostolic times, should not be understood as the absolute form of the kerygmatic reality. So, Bultmann wants to extract the kerygmatic message from its original giveness and form in Second Temple Judaism, and translate it into its new forms in the 20^th, or now 21^st century (which remains an ongoing project). In this way, and this is a critique: the Gospel reality essentially becomes contingent on whatever cultural moment the receiver inhabits as they are confronted with the Gospel proclamation. Bultmann’s approach presents us with an extreme form of Gospel relativism by presuming that he has been able to penetrate the hull of the Gospel (its historical mythos), and find its essence to the point that there can no longer be anything normative about the forms within which the Gospel originally presented itself within (like in the ‘fullness of time’ as we find in Galatians 4). There is an ethical/moral implication to all of this that fits well with the suspicious hermeneutic of Post Modernity, but not does not sit well with the Gospel’s own self-understanding and sufficiency as that is presented in the Apostolic Deposit of the New Testament witness. As noted: the Apostle Paul believed that the Son of God in Jesus Christ came at just the right [fullness of] time wherein the Gospel reality could break-in and ‘turn the world upside down.’ The Apostle Paul, let alone Jesus himself, had no apparent self-understanding that the socio-cultural milieu within which Christ came was insufficient for bearing the weight of the Gospel hope. They never seemed inclined to deconstruct or demythologize the Old Testament canon through which the Christ event comes to make sense. They didn’t look for a kerygmatic essence abstract from its historical givenness.

I might share more impressions in days to come. But these are some initial ones. Congdon anticipates many of these push backs, but that does not mean his answers are sufficient or that they overcome such push back. One contemporary push back, among others that Congdon deals with, comes from Helmut Thielicke. Thielicke’s push back to Bultmann is similar to what I just sketched above. Congdon’s response, in my view, ends up being circular insofar that he simply privileges an anti-metaphysical anti-natural theological mode as a ‘just is’ the way things are (as if a basic given). But for my money, we want to examine the way that Jesus and the Apostles themselves engaged with the Old Testament witness. Did they attempt to demythologize its witness in the way that, Bultmann attempts to? Even if they only did that in an inchoate way, did they in fact engage in this sort of practice? Nein. But they were just human after all, and this is the response that Congdon would most likely push back with. With reference to Christ there is also a serious commitment to a kenoticism, and thus marginalization of Christ as simply human in regard to what he knew and how he operated. This would be the way Congdon and Bultmann might get around an appeal to Jesus’s approach to the Old Testament; they would just say: ‘yeah, Jesus himself was a product of his own mythological times, and an appeal to Him does nothing but confirm our modern need to demythologize even Jesus himself.’

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 20^th and 21^st 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.