Apocalyptic gospel: J. Louis Martyn on Galatians

Here's a short excerpt from my aforementioned AAR paper, entitled "Apocalyptic Gospel: J. Louis Martyn's Galatians Commentary as a Critique of Contemporary Theology". The paper focuses on Martyn's commentary on Galatians, and it has three sections: I. The Gospel against Religion; II. Gospel as God's Apocalypse; III. The Truth of the Gospel. This excerpt comes from section II:

Martyn’s Galatians commentary is thus best understood as a sort of speech-act reading of Paul: he emphasises not so much the content of the letter as the performative action of Paul’s address. Paul is doing something to the Galatians; he is proclaiming the gospel, and thus directly situating his Galatian hearers in the unsettling, liberating presence of God. In Paul’s announcement, ‘God himself steps on the scene, addressing the hearers directly’. Paul’s gospel ‘is the active power of God, because in it God himself comes on the scene, speaking his own word-event’. For this reason, Paul underscores the fact that his gospel did not come through any line of tradition; it came to him directly from God, as God’s own self-utterance, ‘the good event that God is causing to happen now’. In the same vein, Martyn suggests that Paul’s use of the word ‘amen!’ – both in the opening and close of the letter – is an attempt ‘to rob the Galatians of the lethal luxury of considering themselves observers.’ They stand before God, and are confronted not merely by Paul’s word, but by the very speech of God.

Martyn’s indebtedness to the Bultmannian tradition is often overlooked. But in this connection the deep Bultmannian undercurrent of his thought becomes evident. For Bultmann, as also for Käsemann (to whom the Galatians commentary is dedicated), Christ is risen into the proclaimed gospel; the risen life of Christ confronts the community only in the word-event. ‘The exalted Christ is present only in Christian proclamation’, as Käsemann says. Here, the content of the proclamation (the ‘what’) is less important than its sheer eventfulness (the ‘that’). The gospel is God’s own liberating act; it is not a subsequent report about the saving event, but it is part of the very fabric of that event. The gospel, we might say, belongs to the divine economy. The proclamation of Christ is part of Christ’s own identity. To put it in Barthian terms, the risen Christ is not only Lord, he is also the living contemporaneous witness to his own lordship.

All this has profound implications for the way Martyn understands the relation between present proclamation and God's apocalypse in Christ. Just as Bultmann refuses any disjunction between Christ’s past historicity (Historie) and present eventfulness (Geschichte), so Martyn insists that Paul has no interest in an ‘objective’ report about a Christ-event of the past. Nor does Paul try to bring out the present ‘relevance’ or ‘significance’ of that past event. The gospel is betrayed if one speaks about it ‘solely in terms of the once-upon-a-time’. Instead, Paul’s theme is ‘the activity of God then and now’; his one question is: ‘What was God doing in Jerusalem that is revealing as to what God is doing now in Galatia?’ Again, the contemporaneity of God’s action is not a mere application of an event that belongs essentially to the past. God is unceasingly active through the apocalypse of the gospel announcement: ‘for Paul, the history of the gospel is what it is because the God who acted in it is the God who is now acting in it’. The saving event happens in the word of the gospel. The proclamation of Christ’s ‘there and then’ is itself the mode of Christ’s redemptive presence ‘here and now’.

As Martyn also puts it in his book on History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, the incarnation of the Word is not an event ‘which transpired only in the past’: the drama of this event unfolds on two levels simultaneously, the level of the unique past and the contemporary level. More than that, Martyn insists that the occurrence of this event on both levels ‘is, to a large extent, the good news itself.’ Thus in his work on both Paul and John, Martyn foregrounds the church’s continuing gospel proclamation as part of the very fabric of the salvation-event, part of Christ’s own identity as the risen one.

NB: Although I won't be at AAR in person, someone sent me this photo from a recent paper I gave in Canberra. So now you've read the text and you've seen me presenting it: my work here is done.

Bultmann and Heidegger: new books

At the moment I’m reading the newly published correspondence between Bultmann and Heidegger: Rudolf Bultmann/Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel 1925-1975, edited by A. Grossmann and C. Landmesser (Mohr Siebeck 2009). This is an extremely fascinating series of letters in a handsomely produced volume, complete with several photos and facsimile images, together with a foreword by Eberhard Jüngel. As Jüngel notes, the half-century friendship between Heidegger and Bultmann is all the more remarkable for the fact that each of them remains solely committed to his own intellectual domain (Heidegger spoke of the “deadly animosity” between faith and philosophy), rejecting any notion of a “Mixophilosophicotheologia”. (I’m not entirely sure you needed to learn that word – but there it is.)

It was the large-hearted Michael Lattke who gave me a copy of this book, so I’m very grateful to him – and be sure to keep an eye out for Michael’s massive Hermeneia commentary on The Odes of Solomon, which will be released next month. (Some decades ago, Lattke also compiled the index-volume to Bultmann’s great essay collection, Glauben und Verstehen: a true labour of love! And thanks to him, I also have in my own library the meticulously annotated volumes of Glauben und Verstehen which he used to produce the index: a beautiful and invaluable resource.)

If you’re interested in Bultmann, you’ll also certainly want to get your hands on the definitive new biography by Konrad Hammann (Mohr Siebeck 2009), as well as William Dennison’s English-language study, The Young Bultmann: Context for His Understanding of God, 1884-1925 (Peter Lang 2008). I haven’t yet read Dennison’s book – anyone familiar with it? And for a close analysis of the relation between Bultmann and Heidegger, you can also check out Otto Pöggeler’s new book, which sounds very interesting: Philosophie und hermeneutische Theologie: Heidegger, Bultmann und die Folgen (Fink 2009).

Finally, I leave you with a charming photo of Heidegger and Bultmann: two friends burdened together by the immense lonely labours of thought. (The photo is taken from the correspondence volume.)

Update: Kim’s right, we need a caption contest here. A prize for the best caption!

Barth and Bultmann on St Paul

There’s some interesting work being done these days on the relation between Barth and Bultmann (including David’s dissertation, which I think has great promise). The latest issue of the Barth-studies journal, the Zeitschrift für dialektische Theologie, includes an article on the dispute between Barth and Bultmann over the correct exegesis of Romans 5 – whether Paul’s theme is “Christ and Adam” (Barth) or “Adam and Christ” (Bultmann): Christof Landmesser, “Christus und Adam oder Adam und Christus: Anmerkungen zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Karl Barth und Rudolf Bultmann im Anschluss an Röm 5,” ZDTh 23:2 (2007), 153-71.

Incidentally, this entire issue of ZDTh is devoted to Barth’s Römerbrief, so there’s some good stuff here, including articles by Georg Pfleiderer and Christian Link. The latter opens his article with the excellent statement (p. 135): “Evangelical theology is from its first beginnings a theology of the letter to the Romans. From this epistle it grew, and from this epistle it has renewed itself.”

Reconsidering Rudolf Bultmann

The new issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology includes my article on Bultmann: “Faith as Self-Understanding: Towards a Post-Barthian Appreciation of Rudolf Bultmann,” IJST 10:1 (2007), 21-35 (please email me if you’d like a copy). While Barthian theologians condemn Bultmann’s doctrine of faith for “reducing theology to anthropology,” I argue that Bultmann identifies faith with self-understanding precisely in order to maintain the distinctiveness of God’s reality. Here’s an excerpt:

“According to Bultmann, God and humanity are differentiated at the exact point of their togetherness (Miteinander) – namely, in the movement of faith which itself corresponds to the event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In other words, God is distinguished from humanity precisely as the gracious God, the God who addresses us and claims us in the gospel. This formulation – which of course comes very close to Barth’s understanding – poses critical questions not only to overtly ‘objectifying’ theologies, but also to an ostensibly ‘Barthian’ construal of the divine freedom as sheer isolated autonomy over against the world.”

On a more general note, I reckon this is a very good issue of the IJST. As Paul Nimmo notes in his editorial, all the articles in this issue have a thematic focus on re-thinking the doctrine of God. There are articles on Descartes’ understanding of divine infinity, Wolf Krötke’s doctrine of the divine attributes, and the trinitarian theologies of religion of S. Mark Heim and Gavin D’Costa.

There’s also a provocative and important article by Adam Eitel: “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Karl Barth and the Historicization of God’s Being” (pp. 36-53). He explores the relation between Barth’s theology of resurrection and Hegel’s, and he argues that Barth “conceptualizes the resurrection as the historical fulfillment of God’s eternal being,” so that “God’s being is both eternally a being-for-resurrection and eternally a being-for-us.” I think this is a brilliant proposal – and I love the luminous concept of an eternal “being-for-resurrection.”

Rudolf Bultmann: Theologie als Kritik

Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie als Kritik: Ausgewählte Rezensionen und Forschungsberichte, ed. Matthias Dreher and Klaus W. Müller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 638 pp. (review copy courtesy of Mohr Siebeck)

Rudolf Bultmann was a great book-reviewer. But isn’t “great reviewer” an oxymoron? Isn’t the book review the most pedestrian and most insignificant of all literary genres (at least prior to the invention of blogs)? One can perhaps write a “fair” or “useful” review – but surely not a great one!

When we read Rudolf Bultmann’s reviews, however, we’re in the presence of true greatness. Engaging with new books was, for Bultmann, an important part of scholarly life. Between 1908 and 1969, he published over 250 reviews and reports on new research. And now Matthias Dreher and Klaus Müller have brought together 97 of these publications (written mainly in German, but occasionally in English) in a volume as important as it is massive.

As the editors point out, in these reviews we often glimpse Bultmann “on the way to one of his own great works” (p. xi). A striking example is his 1919 review of Martin Dibelius’ new book on form criticism. Grappling with Dibelius’ methodological proposal, Bultmann remarks rather offhandedly that he hopes to do more work on this topic soon (pp. 92-94). A prescient comment, since form criticism would remain a dominant theme throughout the rest of Bultmann’s career!

His reviews cross several disciplines – history of religions, Jesus and early Christianity, Paul and John, theology and church history, politics and ethics, philology and classical philosophy – but always we see Bultmann’s own gigantic intelligence at work. He is not only at the forefront of his own field, but his penetrating insight and systematic genius lead him to position and organise other fields as well.

For instance, in his 1926 report on current theological scholarship (pp. 156-66), he maps the fields of theology, Old Testament, New Testament, history of religions, and church history. Reading a synthetic account like this, one must realise that Bultmann is not merely perceiving the already-existing relations between the theological disciplines, but he is himself constructing those relations in a way that would prove determinative for generations of students and scholars. Bultmann, more than anyone else except Barth, was the architect of 20th-century theology – a thinker from whom modern theology received its fundamental form and structure, its questions and horizons.

Since Bultmann was at the centre of academic theology throughout his career, there are plenty of fascinating engagements here with major figures: dialectical theologians like Barth, Brunner and Thurneysen; biblical scholars like Bousset, Dodd, Gunkel, Jeremias, Kittel, Schlatter, Schweitzer and Weiss; church historians like Harnack and Holl; as well as other major scholars like Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Otto, and Max Weber.

Bultmann also engages with some of his own pupils. His review of Schubert Ogden’s famous Christ without Myth (1961) is especially important, since it highlights the fundamental gulf that separated Bultmann’s own theology from that of his radical “left-wing” pupils. Ogden insisted that Bultmann’s own demythologising programme was not consistent enough, and he called for a radical “dekerygmatising” of theology and a reduction of Jesus Christ to a mere “symbol” of authentic human existence. Against this proposal, Bultmann observes that the grace of God is never a philosophical “idea” but always “an act of God … in a historical event.” As such, God’s grace can only ever be “a stumbling block, a scandalon for rational thinking.” Thus Bultmann refuses Ogden’s proposal, and he observes that Ogden is in fact seeking to eliminate “the legitimate and necessary character of what the New Testament calls the stumbling block” (p. 506). General ideas and symbols are of no use; what I need is “a word which is addressed to me personally” (p. 507). As this critique of Ogden illustrates so vividly, Bultmann’s whole theology remained structured by the sheer irreducibility of the kerygma.

In sum, this is a book of exceptional importance, and it is an index not only of Bultmann’s own intellectual development but also of the development of the theological disciplines in Europe throughout the first half of the 20th century.

The volume provides ample proof that Bultmann was indeed a “great” reviewer – a voracious reader, a meticulous scholar, and a fiercely independent thinker. If Christian theology today must indeed take the form of Kritik, then we could do far worse than to sit – at least for a season – at the feet of Marburg’s great Kritiker.

Rudolf Bultmann

In the shadows of high shelves you sat in heavy silence,
reading old Greek books and smiling
grimly.
You seemed so still, an unmoved mover
in your airless German office,
but you were poised on that fixed point
between the weight of other people’s centuries and the burden
of the moment.

Then at last with happy seriousness, like a child
playing with matches,
you took those legends, myths, pious certainties,
and placed them neatly on the floor, arranged them
by strict principles.
With cries of protest deafening your ears,
with fists pounding the door, you calmly
set them alight
and watched them burn, hoping
that from those ashes would spring
that fragile phoenix (so ancient and so new)
of faith in him who hides himself, but
tears time, splits graves, and strips
existence to the bone
when he pulls back the veil.

Christophe Chalamet: dialectical theologians

“It is strange to realize that we are so close to each other and yet speak such different languages” – with these words, Karl Barth summed up his relationship to his old friend and nemesis, Rudolf Bultmann.

The relationship between Barth and Bultmann is one of the most fascinating and most perplexing subplots in the story of modern theology. From these two thinkers sprung the two dominant schools of twentieth-century theology – and while they had originally viewed themselves as allies in a common cause, Barth and Bultmann came to regard each other with mutual hostility, aversion, and above all bewilderment. Given all this, it’s unfortunate that so few books have explored in detail the relationship between these two theological giants.

So it was a real joy to discover Christophe Chalamet’s impressive new study: Dialectical Theologians: Wilhelm Herrmann, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann (Zurich: TVZ, 2005) – and I’m grateful to TVZ for kindly sending me a review copy. In this book, Chalamet offers the most comprehensive exploration to date of the relationship between Barth and Bultmann.

Chalamet’s basic argument is that, in their early years, no one influenced Barth and Bultmann more decisively than their teacher at Marburg, Wilhelm Herrmann. It was here, as young students under Herrmann, that Barth and Bultmann found the basic insights that would lead to the development of their “dialectical theology.” From their earliest days as students, they were both struggling to do the same thing, to fight “against both the left and the right of the theological spectrum” (p. 13), against both “the liberal and orthodox schools” (p. 80).

From Herrmann, these two students learned that God can be spoken of only dialectically. We cannot speak of God with just one word. Instead, there must be at least two words, two opposing statements: thesis and antithesis, “the dogmatic and the critical, the Yes and the No, the unveiling and the veiling, objectivity and subjectivity” (p. 148). The point of such dialectics is not to find a neutralising synthesis or a “middle way” – rather, in the tension between thesis and antithesis, the theologian “leaves a space free in the middle and hopes that God himself will intervene, since only God can say his Word” (p. 148).

Drawing on such a dialectical method, Barth set out to be “more conservative than the conservatives and more liberal than the liberals” (p. 124). When he wrote his explosive commentary on Romans, very few people had the dialectical frame of mind necessary to understand it – but, as a good Herrmannian, Bultmann was one of the few theologians in Europe who appreciated what Barth was trying to do. For his part, under the influence of Herrmann, Bultmann was able to clarify his own theological programme as early as 1925 – and he would then “spend the rest of his life trying to unfold the consequences” of his Herrmannian heritage (p. 164).

It was precisely here, however, that the conflict between Barth and Bultmann had its roots. For, as early as 1925, Barth was bidding “a theological farewell to Herrmann” (p. 177). His crucial step was to reverse Herrmann’s dialectic of Law and Gospel – in Barth’s view, the Yes of the Gospel must precede the No of the Law. Bultmann, on the other hand, remained a faithful disciple of Herrmann (and a faithful Lutheran), and his whole theological programme was radically driven by the primacy of Law over Gospel, by a belief that “the No of [God’s] judgement … conceals the Yes of God’s grace” (p. 199).

As Chalamet persuasively argues, an understanding of the dialectical character of Bultmann’s theology allows us better to appreciate some of the most controversial aspects of Bultmann’s work – e.g. his Sachkritik, his polemic against the Jesus of history, his demythologising, and his existentialist exegesis. For instance, against the common objection that Bultmann made theology a servant of existentialist philosophy, Chalamet points out that Bultmann understood the philosophy-theology relationship dialectically. And while Bultmann’s “demythologising” has so often been caricatured and misunderstood, Chalamet highlights the fundamental dialectic at the basis of demythologising – a dialectic between scripture and Scripture, between human words and the Word of God.

In any case, as the years went by, Barth and Bultmann were increasingly aware of the great distance between them. By 1937, Bultmann was insisting that he no longer read Barth’s Dogmatics, since “it is too awful” (p. 262). And, in turn, Barth reacted with horror to Bultmann’s demythologising, and especially to his reliance on the philosophy of Heidegger.

Still, for all their differences, Barth and Bultmann remained “dialectical theologians.” In very different ways, they were both trying to speak about the God who is hidden in his revelation; following Herrmann, their different theological programmes remained oriented around the dialectic of “the revelation of God in its concealment” (p. 250). Thus both the deep affinity and the irreconcilable differences between Barth and Bultmann were due in great part to their different ways of appropriating and modifying the theology of their early teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann.

Christophe Chalamet’s book is a first-rate study of the two most important theological thinkers of the twentieth century. It’s by far the best book yet written on the relationship between Barth and Bultmann, and it’s also essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the origins and development of that extraordinary theological movement known as “dialectical theology.” If your library hasn’t yet got a copy of Dialectical Theologians, then ask them to make amends right away!

Bultmann anniversary

Yesterday, 30 July, was the anniversary of the death of Rudolf Bultmann. To mark the occasion, Jim West offers a list of Bultmann’s best books, as well as a series of posts about little-known aspects of Bultmann’s life and work. Did you know, for instance:

• that Bultmann was a pious churchgoer?
• that he wrote an early book on patristic exegesis?
• that he wrote fables (myths!) for his wife during their courtship?

I like Bultmann better than almost all other modern theologians; his face peers at me from the wall, right next to the face of his friend and nemesis, Karl Barth:

Do you believe in the devil?

I posted on this topic a while back, and you can now vote on it in Jim West’s poll.

Karl Barth once remarked that it is impossible to “believe in” the devil, since the devil deserves only an attitude of utter disbelief—we do not believe in him, but against him. Barth was right: if you want to “believe in” something, it’s much better to believe in God! And belief in God is itself also a denial and rejection of the powers of nothingness and of all the dark glory of their parasitic pseudo-existence.

Discussing Barth and Bultmann

Thanks for the various posts about my fictional piece on Barth and Bultmann. Over at Jared Coleman’s blog I’ve also posted some comments about Barth’s relationship to his beloved assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum.

Barth and Bultmann: an imagined conversation

[In an idle moment, I invented this fictional conversation between Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. They are in a German pub, along with Barth’s personal assistant, Lollo von Kirschbaum.]

They were sitting together, a woman and two men, at the big oak table by the fire. It was late, and the pub was quiet now except for the murmur of voices and the crackling of the fire. The woman was laughing, as the first man said, “No, Lollo, it’s true—Rudolf insists that he cannot understand me, and yet I have heard from the most reliable sources that he never reads any of my books.”

The second man snorted, and said: “So, you have spies among my students, Karl! It’s just as I expected. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you that it’s true: I have given up trying to read your endless Dogmatics.”

“Ha!” cried the first man. “You see, Lollo—just as I told you!”

The woman laughed again, and sipped her wine. “So, Herr Bultmann,” she said, “you cannot understand Karl’s books, and yet you do not read them. There’s a nice paradox for the ‘dialectical’ theologians.”

Bultmann chuckled and struck a match. He chewed on his pipe for a moment, and then said, “Well, Karl, if only you would take the time to explain your concepts to me, then I would have some basis for understanding you. As it stands, though, I can hardly comprehend a word you say—all this talk of reconciliation and resurrection and the history of Jesus! What does any of that mean? How can a person in today’s world make any sense of it?”

“So you think my books are meaningless?” Barth replied, leaning across the table to refill Bultmann’s glass. “Or should I say: mythological?”

“Well, naturally it remains to be seen whether you speak in the language of myth. And I don’t need to insist right now that you do speak like that. But the important point is that you speak without reflection. You use words and concepts without first clarifying what they mean. And that is why—” he paused as a log snapped and turned in the fireplace “—and that is why I simply cannot understand you.”

Barth sipped his wine, his eyebrows arched playfully above the black-rimmed glasses. “All this talk about ‘concepts’ and ‘understanding,’ Rudolf! So serious, you German theologians! You want me to explain everything before I begin to speak—but I, on the other hand, feel perfectly content just to speak.”

Bultmann furrowed his brow and breathed a long stream of smoke. “Ah, yes, you are happy simply to speak! And so you think you can merely adopt the language and concepts of the New Testament, as though nothing could be plainer. But you forget all about the gulf that separates our world today from the world of the New Testament. The people who read your Dogmatics are no longer living in the first century, Karl. So how are they to understand you when you use concepts that no longer have any clear meaning? How are they to understand you unless you first interpret these concepts? To be more precise, how can the message of the New Testament be communicated without first being translated?” He tapped his pipe sharply against the ashtray to underline each syllable of the final word.

“Oho! So it’s interpretation that we need, is it?” Barth leaned toward his friend and reached for his own pipe. “The way I see it, this is nothing but natural theology all over again—” (Lollo was filling their glasses) “—yes, just like Emil and his comical ‘point of contact,’ just like Gogarten and his all-too-serious ‘orders of creation.’”

Bultmann grunted in protest. “Frankly, I don’t see what natural theology has to do with any of this.”

But Barth waved his pipe excitedly and continued. “You think there’s a gulf between modern people and the message of the Bible. You think that, in spite of God’s revelation, this gulf remains. It’s not only God who crosses this gulf—but we must also do our part to cross it. We must also ‘interpret’ revelation. We must also make revelation understandable. In a word, we ourselves must make revelation possible through all our hand-wringing hermeneutical endeavours. You see, my friend: natural theology!” He thumped the table and took a triumphant mouthful of wine. Lollo was leaning towards him in silent approval.

“You can characterise hermeneutics as natural theology,” Bultmann retorted, “only because you remain unaware of your own hermeneutical presuppositions. Everyone interprets, Karl—even you! But whether you do so reflectively and with discipline is another question entirely.”

Barth shook his head. “Another question? Well, there are good questions and bad questions. Some questions I try to answer; but others—reflectively and with discipline!—I avoid at all cost. And I myself think that the hermeneutical question happens to be a very bad one. So I choose—” he pointed his finger at the ceiling “—to ignore it.”

Bultmann threw up his hands in exasperation. “What are you proposing, then? A dogmatic repristination of a mythical worldview? A repetition of the words and phrases of the Bible?”

“No, no, no,” Barth said so loudly that his glasses slipped from the bridge of his nose. “Dear Rudolf, you make so much of the gulf between modern people and an ancient revelation. But don’t you see? In principle, the gulf would be the same even if revelation had taken place only yesterday. There would still be a gulf between the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here and now.’ The fact that revelation just happens to have occurred nineteen hundred years ago is, for me, of no special importance.” He leaned close towards Bultmann, peering up at him over the black rims of his glasses. “Here’s what I think, Rudolf: I think there’s no gap whatsoever between the ‘there and then’ and the ‘here and now.’ It belongs to the very nature of revelation to include within itself our own ‘here and now.’ Jesus Christ has already risen! He already lives and acts! There’s no gulf for us to cross in order to reach him—he reaches us already through his own living actuality! His history already includes our own little histories. His story is already—not accidentally, but essentially!—our story.”

Bultmann was smoothing his broad moustache with his thumb and forefinger. He raised a sceptical eyebrow, and remarked, “All these words, Karl: history, story, revelation, resurrection. What is one to make of such words when you so steadfastly refuse to interpret them?”

But Barth ignored the question and pressed on. “In other words, all that needs to be said is that revelation is Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ is not only God for humanity—he’s also the human being for God. He’s not only the Word from God to us—he’s also our human response to this Word. You see, there can never be a gap between revelation and humanity—for Jesus Christ is himself the reconciliation between God and humanity. And so he is the end of every so-called ‘gulf’—yes, the end of Lessing’s ugly ditch!”

Bultmann frowned deeply at his pipe, which had gone out again. “Do you know what I think you’re really trying to do?” he said after a long silence. “I think you’re trying to bypass all the advancements of historical criticism. I think you’re trying to carry on as though the nineteenth century had never happened. But beware!” he said darkly. “Beware that in throwing off the legacy of the nineteenth century you do not find yourself in the world of the sixteenth century, in the world of—” and he shuddered visibly as he said the word “—orthodoxy.”

But Barth was only laughing. He glanced across the table and said, “Well you know, Lollo, if I did have to choose between the historicism of the nineteenth century and the orthodoxy of the sixteenth...”

Lollo smiled—not at him, but at Bultmann—and said, “What do you think, Herr Bultmann? Another bottle of wine?”

They signalled for the waitress, who approached them yawning and dishevelled with a chewed pencil stub behind her ear. When they asked for another bottle, she mumbled assent and scribbled something in her notebook. With the empty bottle in her hand she made her way back to the bar, scratching her head with the pencil before returning it to its perch above her ear. It was late, and the pub was nearly empty. All she could hear was the laughter and excited chatter of the three old friends beside the fire.

Prayer as the justification of God-talk

I’m thinking of writing an article about prayer as the justification of human speech about God. I’ve been deeply impressed by the way this concept has been articulated among some of Bultmann’s followers (e.g. Heinrich Ott, Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard Jüngel)—the hermeneutical problem of speech about God is resolved into the givenness and the demand of prayer as speech to God. So if anyone has any reading suggestions relating to this topic, I’d be most grateful.

In the meantime, here’s a quote from Jüngel that sums up this whole approach:

“Who then is God, that we must speak of him? God is he whom we must thank. To be more precise: God is he whom we cannot thank enough” (Jüngel, “Gott—als Wort unserer Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sache, p. 103).

Barth, Bultmann and Dei Verbum

The latest article in the excellent online journal JCTR is out now: Daniel Gallagher, “The Obedience of Faith: Barth, Bultmann and Dei Verbum,” Journal for Christian Theological Research 10 (2006), 39-63. The article offers a very reliable account of Barth’s and Bultmann’s views of faith, although it doesn’t offer much explicit analysis of Dei Verbum. Here’s the abstract:

The Catholic formulation of “faith” as expressed in Dei Verbum owes much to the influence of Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. Dei Verbum offers the Pauline phrase “obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5 and 16:26) as constitutive for understanding the relationship between the believer and the God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. This essay examines the obediential dynamic of faith as developed in the exegetical, theological, and ethical work of Barth and Bultmann, demonstrating how the biblical and personalist dimensions of faith implicit in paragraph 5 of Dei Verbum, to a large degree, find their inspiration in the ideas of Barth and Bultmann.

The kingdom of God

“The future Kingdom of God, then, is not something which is to come in the course of time, so that to advance its coming one can do something in particular.... Rather, the Kingdom of God is a power which, although it is entirely future, wholly determines the present.”

—Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1934), p. 44.

Hearing the word

“The word of God never becomes our property. The test of whether we have heard it aright is whether we are prepared always to hear it anew, to ask for it in every decision in life; whether we are prepared to let it intervene in the moment of decision.”

—Rudolf Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings (New York: Meridian, 1960), p. 169.

Resurrection controversy

Mike Bird has written a very nice response to my critique of his post on the resurrection. I suppose I’ll have to agree with him now, after all the flattering things he says about me!

In any case, flattery aside, Mike seems to express himself in a more balanced way in this response. He points out that the New Testament does not define the resurrection in any narrow way, but it only offers certain “boundaries” within which differing interpretations are possible. This is exactly how I see it too—there is no occasion for theological relativism, since the New Testament witnesses themselves (without defining resurrection in any narrow way) set the boundaries for how “resurrection” should be understood.

So I suppose Mike and I would simply disagree about where these boundaries lie. Certainly I would want to place people like Bultmann, Schillebeeckx and Borg within the boundaries (regardless of whether I agree with them), since in cases like these the issue is not whether “God raised Jesus from the dead,” but only the precise way in which this event should be interpreted.

For more discussion of this controversial topic, and for some attempts to adjudicate between Mike and me, see also the posts by Sean du Toit, Richard Hall, Denny Burk, Aaron Ghiloni and Ron Short.

And thanks especially to all those who contributed such marvellous comments in response to my earlier post. I found this discussion remarkably helpful, and it has given me a lot to think about. Has any other blog out there ever been graced with such brilliant and amiable readers?

Barth and Bultmann

“Neither Barth nor Bultmann can be understood apart from an awareness of their close affinities and mutual sympathies throughout each decade of their lives.”

—Frank Jehle, Ever against the Stream: The Politics of Karl Barth, 1906–1968 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 14.

Karl Barth and the Enlightenment

Many scholars have explored Karl Barth’s relationship to the Enlightenment. Barth’s admirers (e.g. T. F. Torrance) have often argued that he entirely repudiated the Enlightenment, while some of his critics (e.g. Bultmann) have argued that Barth simply retreated behind the Enlightenment, back into the theology of Protestant orthodoxy.

But one of the most interesting and most provocative essays on Barth’s relationship to the Enlightenment takes a different approach: the essay is Trutz Rendtorff, “Radikale Autonomie Gottes: Zum Verständnis der Theologie Karl Barths und ihre Folgen,” in Theorie des Christentums (Gütersloh, 1972), pp. 161-81.

Rendtorff argues that Barth built on the Enlightenment’s ideas about human autonomy, but directed these ideas towards God in order to develop a new emphasis on the autonomy of God. Thus, according to Rendtorff, Barth neither rejected the Enlightenment nor retreated behind it, but instead he ushered in “a new Enlightenment”—an Enlightenment whose focus was the “radical autonomy of God.”

Barth, Bultmann and Tillich: a theology joke

Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich are taking a break together, fishing on Lake Geneva. They are having a lovely time, smoking their pipes and chatting idly. It’s hot and they are getting thirsty. So Barth stands up, steps out of the boat, and walks across the water to the shore, where he gets some beers and then returns to the boat. But the drinks don’t last long. So Barth says to Tillich: “Your turn, Paul.” Tillich gets up, steps out of the boat, walks across the water, and fetches some more beers. It is really hot now, and the drinks are soon finished. Bultmann is beginning to sweat profusely, so finally Barth tells him: “Come on, Rudolf, it’s your turn now.” With a slight tremor in his knees, Bultmann gets up, steps out of the boat—and sinks like a stone. Fortunately he manages to swim to the surface; he drags himself back into the boat and sulks at the far end. Tillich turns to Barth and says: “Do you think we should have told him where the stepping stones are?” Barth looks at him in astonishment and replies: “What stones?”

Hat tip to Maggi Dawn.

Bultmann on the resurrection: criticisms

A couple of days ago I posted an appreciation of Rudolf Bultmann’s view of the resurrection. Some very insightful criticisms were posted in the comments, and I want to add my own general criticisms here as well. I think Bultmann’s interpretation of the resurrection is immensely valuable and important—but I don’t think we should appropriate Bultmann’s view uncritically.

I outlined three main contributions of Bultmann’s view; and in each case I would also raise a specific criticism:

1. I agree with Bultmann that Jesus’ death and resurrection should be correlated—but, unlike Bultmann, I would also want to say that Jesus’ death temporally precedes his resurrection.

2. I agree with Bultmann that the resurrection is an eschatological event—but, unlike Bultmann, I would also say that this event is eschatological precisely as something that happened to the “body” (whatever that might mean) of one particular historical man.

3. I agree with Bultmann that faith and resurrection should be correlated—but I would also want to insist that this is a correlation from the direction (so to speak) of the resurrection, so that the resurrection precedes and constitutes faith.

These three criticisms by no means undermine Bultmann’s contribution. They simply indicate the need to move beyond Bultmann—and we cannot go beyond him until we have first gone through him.