Bultmann is known for his belief that the historical analysis of the New Testament is both futile and unnecessary, given that the earliestChristian literature showed little interest in specific locations.[12] Bultmann argued that all that matters is the "thatness," not the "whatness" of Jesus,[a] i.e. onlythat Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion matters, not what happened throughout his life.[13]
Bultmann relied ondemythologization, an approach interpreting themythological elements in the New Testament existentially. Bultmann contended that only faith in thekerygma, or proclamation, of the New Testament was necessary for Christian faith, not any particular facts regarding thehistorical Jesus.[14]
Bultmann became friends withMartin Heidegger who taught at Marburg for five years. Heidegger's views onexistentialism had an influence on Bultmann's thinking.[24] What arose from this friendship was a "sort of comradery" grounded on an active and open dialogue between Bultmann and Heidegger from 1923 to 1928.[25] However, Bultmann himself stated that his views could not simply be reduced to thinking in Heideggerian categories, in that "the New Testament is not a doctrine about our nature, about our authentic existence as human beings, but a proclamation of this liberating act of God."[26]
He was critical ofNazism from the beginning and his career between 1933 and 1941 was marked by a series of struggles with Nazis regarding their influence upon the universities and the Protestant Church. As a Lutheran who held that the Church could not expect the Nazi State to be Christian, he did not directly denounce itsantisemitism. But he objected to its claim to have authority over all aspects of German life including the universities and the Protestant church[27] and believed it was his responsibility to preach that it was unChristian, especially after Heidegger gave his pro-Nazi rectorial address in 1933.[28] He particularly rejected theAryan paragraph that disenfranchised all people racially Jewish from civic organizations and many professions including clergy, entailing defrocking any Christian clergy with Jewish ancestry.[29] He stated that the Aryan paragraph was "incompatible with the essence of the Christian church",[30] since the church made no distinction between Jew and Gentile. He joined theConfessing Church,[31] a Protestant movement in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi Reich Church.[32][33]
Bultmann received many honors during and after his career, including honorary doctorates from many universities and elections to honorary societies.[34] In 1974, the Federal Republic granted him the highest level of the Order of Merit.
Bultmann'sHistory of the Synoptic Tradition (1921) remains highly influential as a tool for biblical research, even among scholars[which?] who reject his analyses of the conventional rhetoricalpericopes (narrative units) which comprise thegospels, and the historically-oriented principles of "form criticism" of which Bultmann was the most influential exponent.
According to Bultmann's definition, "[t]he aim of form-criticism [sic] is to determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying or a parable. In the process we learn to distinguish secondary additions and forms, and these in turn lead to important results for the history of the tradition."[36]
In 1941 Bultmann appliedform criticism[b] to theGospel of John, in which he distinguished the presence of a lostSigns Gospel on which John—alone of the evangelists—depended. His monograph,Das Evangelium des Johannes, highly controversial at the time, became[when?] a milestone inresearch into the historical Jesus. The same year his lectureNew Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Message called on interpreters todemythologize the New Testament; in particular he argued for replacingsupernatural biblical interpretations with temporal and existential categorizations. His argument, in many ways, reflected a hermeneutical adaption of the existentialist thought of his colleague at the time, the philosopher Martin Heidegger - but also the hermeneutic procedures developed byHans Jonas, a student ofHeidegger and an exile fromNazi Germany.[38] This approach led Bultmann to reject doctrines such as thepre-existence of Christ.[39] Bultmann believed his endeavors in this regard would make accessible to modern audiences — already immersed in science and technology — the significance (or existential quality) of Jesus' teachings. Bultmann thus thought of his endeavor of "demythologizing the New Testament proclamation" as fundamentally anevangelism task, clarifying thekerygma, or gospel proclamation, by stripping it of elements of the first-century "mythical world picture" that had potential to alienate modern people from Christian faith:
It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially amythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.[40]
Bultmann saw theology in existential terms, and maintained that the New Testament was a radical text, worthy of understanding yet questioned in his time because of the prevailing Protestant conviction in a supernatural interpretation. In both the boasting oflegalists "who are faithful to the law" and the boasting of the philosophers "who are proud of their wisdom", Bultmann finds a "basic human attitude" of "highhandedness that tries to bring within our own power even the submission that we know to be our authentic being".[41] Standing against all human high-handedness is the New Testament, "which claims that we can in no way free ourselves from our factual fallenness in the world but are freed from it only by an act of God ... the salvation occurrence that is realized in Christ."[42] Bultmann remained convinced that the narratives of the life of Jesus offeredtheology instory form, teaching lessons in the familiar language ofmyth. They were not to be excluded, but given explanation so they could be understood for today. Bultmann thought faith should become a present-day reality. To Bultmann, the people of the world appeared to be always in disappointment and turmoil. Faith must be a determined vital act of will, not a culling and extolling of "ancient proofs". Bultmann said about salvation and eternity: "As from now on there are only believers and unbelievers, so there are also now only saved and lost, those who have life and those who are in death."[43]
"Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community"[44]
Concerning the relationship between body, soul, and Spirit, he affirmed amonistic point of view.[45]
Bultmann was an outstanding teacher, and he encouraged independence of mind among his students. The result was two major developments within the “Bultmann school.” In 1954Ernst Käsemann raised “the question of the historical Jesus” (i.e., the question of the significance of knowledge of thehistorical Jesus for Christian faith), and a number of Bultmann’s pupils developed a position independent of their teacher’s on the matter. ThenErnst Fuchs andGerhard Ebeling, building on Bultmann’s existentialist analysis, developed a method of interpreting the New Testament that emphasized the linguistic mode of human existence, giving birth to the so-callednew hermeneutic. Bultmann himself took part in these discussions along with his pupils for as long as his health permitted, later living quietly inMarburg, where he died in 1976.[35]
Posthumously, Bultmann’s approach to the New Testament has been subject to increasing criticism, which has led modern scholars to overcome his theorems.[46] According to the theologian and historian of ChristianityLarry Hurtado, Bultmann "approached the ancient Christian texts with a theological criterion, a particular formulation ofjustification by faith, which he used to judge whether the writings were valid or not."[47]John P. Meier believes that Bultmann had a "disconcerting way of solving problems with a few evasive sentences, his arguments do not hold up, despite having been handed down for generations."[48]Bart D. Ehrman, while agreeing with some of Bultmann's positions, underlines that "among our ranks there are no moreform critics that agree with the theories of Bultmann, the pioneer of this interpretation".[49] According to Werner H. Kelber, "Today it is no exaggeration to claim that a whole spectrum of main assumptions underlying Bultmann'sSynoptic Tradition must be considered suspect."[50]
Bultmann's skeptical approach to the New Testament has received criticism from conservative biblical scholars likeKlaus Berger andCraig Blomberg.[51][52] Form criticism, in particular, has been challenged in recent years byMartin Hengel,Richard Bauckham andBrant J. Pitre, who have reasserted the traditional theory that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses.[53][54][55]
——— (1941).Neues Testament und Mythologie. - German original
——— (1953).Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate. London: SPCK.OCLC878330612.[57] - (contains the essay "The New Testament and Mythology" with critical analyses and Bultmann's response)
——— (1954).Die Frage der Entmythologisierung. - German original
———;Jaspers, Karl (1958).Myth & Christianity: An Inquiry Into The Possibility Of Religion Without Myth. New York: Noonday Press.OCLC186641. - In this dialogue with philosopher Jaspers, Jaspers first makes the case that Christianity can not be understood apart from its mythical framework, and that myth is a necessary form of communication through symbol. Bultmann responds that modern scientific analysis of the text is required to separate the genuine from the miraculous claims, thereby revealing the true message.
——— (1957).History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (1954–55 Gifford Lectures). Edinburgh: University Press.ISBN978-0-85224-103-5.OCLC752549.{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
^"Form criticism" in this instance is a tenet ofHegelian dialectics of which Bultmann applied to theology. The dialectic of Form and Content is explained by Hegel using an example of a book: a book's Form (whether or not it was handwritten, or a hardback copy, etc.), can neither determine nor influence its inner Content, yet, at the same time, that Content requires a form to be read.[37]
^Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1969). Miller, Arthur V. (ed.).The Science of Logic. London: George Allen & Unwin. p. 3 § 989. Retrieved16 April 2019.
^Kelber, W. H. (1997).The Oral and Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 8.
Broadhead, Edwin K. (2011). "Implicit Christology and the Historical Jesus". In Holmén, Tom;Porter, Stanley E. (eds.).Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Vol. 2. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. pp. 1169–1182.ISBN978-90-04-17092-6.
——— (1991). "Jesus and the Eschatological Kingdom". In Johnson, Roger A. (ed.).Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press. pp. 91–102.ISBN978-0-8006-3402-5.
——— (2004). "New Testament and Mythology: The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of Its Re-Interpretation". In Evans, Craig A. (ed.).The Historical Jesus: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies. Volume I: The History of the Quest: Classical Studies and Critical Questions. London: Routledge. pp. 323–358.ISBN978-0-415-32751-0.
Busse, Roger S. (2014).To Be Near the Fire: Demonic Possession, Risk Analysis, and Jesus' War on Satan. Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications.ISBN978-1-62564-811-2.
Congdon, David W. (2015a).Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books.ISBN978-1-62564-748-1.
——— (2015b).The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann's Dialectical Theology. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press.ISBN978-1-4514-8792-3.
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Dorrien, Gary (2003).The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press.ISBN978-0-664-22355-7.
Ericksen, Robert (2012).Complicity in the Holocaust : churches and universities in Nazi Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-1-107-01591-3.
Hobbs, Edward C., ed. (1985).Bultmann, Retrospect and Prospect: The Centenary Symposium at Wellesley. Fortress Press.ISBN978-0-8006-7075-7.
Hammann, Konrad (2013).Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography. Salem, Oregon: Polebridge Press.ISBN978-1-59815-118-3.
Jensen, Alexander S. (2014).Divine Providence and Human Agency: Trinity, Creation and Freedom. Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing.ISBN978-1-4094-3530-3.
Markschies, Christoph (2014). "Individuality in Some Gnostic Authors, with a Few Remarks on the Interpretation of Ptolemy'sEpistula ad Florum". In Torrance, Alexis; Zachhuber, Johannes (eds.).Individuality in Late Antiquity. Abingdon, England: Routledge (published 2016). pp. 11–28.ISBN978-1-315-58841-4.
McKnight, Scot (2005). "Jesus: Who Was He?: Introduction". InDunn, James D. G.;McKnight, Scot (eds.).The Historical Jesus in Recent Research. Sources for Biblical and Theological Study. Vol. 10. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. pp. 271–274.ISBN978-1-57506-100-9.
Meier, Holger (2011).Rudolf Bultmann und sein hermeneutischer Ansatz der Entmythologisierung als existentiale Interpretation [Rudopf Bultmann and His Hermeneutic Approach to De-Mythologization as Existential Interpretation] (in German). Munich: GRIN Verlag.ISBN978-3-656-09464-7.[self-published source]
Mournet, Terence C. (2005).Oral Tradition and Literary Dependency: Variability and Stability in the Synoptic Tradition and Q. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament. Vol. 195. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck.ISBN978-3-16-148454-4.ISSN0340-9570.{{cite book}}:|journal= ignored (help)
Pagliarino, Guido (2018) [2015].Diavolo e Demòni (un approccio storico) (in Italian). Tektime.ISBN978-88-7304-437-6.
Raupp, Werner (2003).Bultmann. Rudolf (Karl): Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Vol. 21. Nordhausen: Bautz. pp. 174–233.ISBN3-88309-110-3. - (with compact introduction and detailed bibliography)
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Watson, Duane F.; Hauser, Alan J. (1994).Rhetorical Criticism of the Bible: A Comprehensive Bibliography with Notes on History and Method. Biblical Interpretation Series. Vol. 4. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.ISBN978-90-04-09903-6.ISSN0928-0731.
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Bultmann, Rudolf (1958) [1934].Jesus and the Word. Translated bySmith, Louise Pettibone; Lantero, Erminie Huntress. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Archived fromthe original on 2 March 2007. Retrieved3 April 2018 – via Religion Online.
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