Jesus Christ and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann
Rudolf Bultmann's "Jesus Christ and Mythology" addresses the challenge of reconciling traditional Christian beliefs with modern scientific and historical understandings. In this work, Bultmann advocates for a process he terms "demythologizing," aiming to strip away the mythological elements of the New Testament that he believes are incompatible with contemporary thought. He argues that ancient cosmological narratives—such as supernatural interventions and apocalyptic events—should be interpreted as myths that reveal deeper truths about human existence rather than literal historical accounts.
Bultmann emphasizes that faith should not rely on outdated worldviews but instead must engage with the existential questions of modern life. He draws on existentialist philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger, to illuminate the human condition and the quest for authenticity. While he acknowledges the challenges of interpreting biblical texts in a secular age, he insists that the core message of the Gospel remains relevant, focusing on God's personal engagement with individuals through the Word.
Ultimately, Bultmann posits that genuine faith emerges from a relationship with God, who transcends both nature and human understanding. This relationship calls individuals to make meaningful choices in their lives, grounded in love for God and others. His approach has sparked significant debate within theological circles, reflecting ongoing tensions between faith and reason in the modern world.
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Jesus Christ and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann
First published: New York: Scribner, 1958
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Subgenre(s): Biblical studies; hermeneutics; theology
Core issue(s): Faith; freedom and free will; God; Lutherans and Lutheranism; myths; responsibility; self-knowledge; the Word
Overview
Rudolf Bultmann became the most influential New Testament critic of his generation, perhaps of the twentieth century. Jesus Christ and Mythology, a lecture series delivered across North America in the year of his retirement (1951), sums up his proposal for “demythologizing” the New Testament and replies to objections. Widely discussed for several decades, by the end of the century, Bultmann’s program found few remaining enthusiasts. Yet many continue to admire his boldness in wrestling with how to maintain Christian faith in the modern world.
Bultmann’s aim is to hold together two incompatible concepts: the indispensability of the message of Jesus Christ, with a Lutheran focus on justification by faith alone, and a thoroughgoing naturalism in science and history. He starts from the naturalistic worldview as a given. No one today, he asserts, can accept the outmoded thought forms in which the New Testament authors expressed themselves: a universe created by an act of God and destined for an apocalyptic end, a three-storied world in which demons from below interfere and angels from above intervene in human lives, and the descent of a heavenly redeemer to perform miracles, die an atoning death, rise from the dead, and ascend to heaven, whence he shall return as judge. All this is, to Bultmann, simply incredible. To ask contemporaries to embrace such notions as part of the good news would be to subject the Gospel to ridicule.
Rather than follow nineteenth century Christian liberals in regarding these ancient beliefs as a husk to be discarded while preserving the kernels of the fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of humankind, Bultmann considers them myths to interpret. A myth is a story that, though fictional as cosmology or history, illuminates the human situation. The temporal doctrines of “creation” and “consummation” and the spatial metaphor of “heaven” are crude ways of picturing the fact that human life derives its ultimate significance from without and cannot be its own point of orientation. Mortals, thrown into a finite world, are constantly tempted to define themselves by autonomous choices. God, though untraceable in the processes of empirical reality, remains the transcendent reservoir of meaning and so provides the inner raison d’être of events that the nexus of cause and effect can never plumb. Scientist or historian may describe people who love, but no external observer can appreciate what it is to love and be loved, apart from involvement in a loving relationship. So God addresses one personally in an encounter that the New Testament clothes in mythical language.
Objections have been raised that this method of interpretation subordinates truths of revelation to the judgment of reason rather than vice versa. Bultmann insists that the modern worldview is indeed the criterion for correcting the old, and presses the question of whether the Gospel need be bound to obsolete, or for that matter, to current theories concerning the world, for the Gospel is not about theoretical constructs of reality. Obliquely, it comes as a call from above that demands a yes or a no.
Another objection is that Bultmann’s positive construal of the demythologized content of the New Testament is too squarely based on one secular philosophy, the existentialist analysis of human beings in Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962). Bultmann’s rejoinder is to point out that the interpretation of a text proceeds from presuppositions, that his critics too bring philosophical pre-understandings to bear on their interpretive work, and that Christians can learn a good deal about the structure of existence from Heidegger. At the end of the day, the Gospel is by no means held hostage by, or reduced to, existentialism. For while Heidegger determined in what particulars authentic existence would consist, only God can grant a person to lay hold of it. The Gospel is instrumental in bringing about an actualization that philosophy can only contemplate abstractly.
A final group of objections cluster around Bultmann’s willingness to speak of God in action. If we are going to reinterpret biblical language in secular terms, why not demythologize God himself and have an atheistic Christianity, or plain atheism? Bultmann concedes that to speak of God at all is, in one sense, to employ myth, for the divine in itself is ineffable, never a proper object of rational thought or discourse. Yet human existence as a pattern of meaningful choices is pointless unless grounded in some independent framework of reference. By recognizing that language about God entails primarily our own existential possibilities, at least we can avoid that inept sort of mythology that makes God a reified entity belonging to the cosmic sphere. God may have no direct impact on the flux of nature or history, but the essence of what it is to be human—freedom from the past and openness to the future—functions only under a transcendence that meets us with a quite personal interest in our decisions. Does this reduce God to a purely psychological phenomenon? No, says Bultmann. When God comes to us through the Word about Jesus Christ, we are arrested by an absolute summons from outside of ourselves, even if we cannot capture it in propositions. Not only for our salvation but also for self-understanding, faith necessarily casts itself on the unworldly that we cannot control. Only in God do we find ourselves.
Christian Themes
God, according to Bultmann, is wholly other and beyond the world, makes no impact on the closed chain of causality in nature or history, and cannot be objectified in general statements or proven to exist by arguments. Yet God cares that an individual’s life choices be authentic and is the eternal one; a relationship with God is the interpersonal context within which decisions take on final significance. Faith is the gritty determination to live life out of a relationship with God, even though naturalism may be well on the way toward explaining everything in the world without recourse to the hypothesis of the divine.
Our salvation depends on God, not ourselves, Bultmann says. God’s saving work is grounded not on the historic atonement and vivification of Jesus, as traditional Christianity teaches, but on God’s unpredictable presence in the Word preached here and now. When God encounters us in the Word, he shatters our tendency to draw from our own resources and awakens us to an eternal dimension, in the light of which we see life from a transformed perspective.
According to Bultmann, freedom means that our decision in a given moment need not be imposed by society or by our own past choices, nor need it limit the choices we will make tomorrow, but is our spontaneous response to the heart of God who meets us at the crossroads of the present. God calls us to responsibility before him, that is, to love him and to love our neighbors in each concrete situation. In the matter of behaviors, the content of Christian ethics does not differ from the secular, by which Bultmann has in mind the moral expectations of post-Enlightenment Germanic civilization.
Sources for Further Study
Bartsch, Werner, ed. Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, by Rudolf Bultmann and Five Critics. Translated by Reginald H. Fuller. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Gives Bultmann’s seminal essay “New Testament and Mythology” (1941) and opinions of it by others, with replies by Bultmann.
Bockmuehl, Klaus. The Unreal God of Modern Theology: Bultmann, Barth, and the Theology of Atheism—A Call to Recovering the Truth of God’s Reality. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Helmers & Howard, 1988. A trenchant critique of Bultmann’s theology and its tendencies from the point of view of historic Christian orthodoxy.
Fergusson, David. Rudolf Bultmann. Outstanding Christian Thinkers series. 1992. Reprint. New York: Continuum, 2000. Includes a posthumous bibliography of Bultmann’s chief works, a survey of his background, and an appreciation of his legacy by an author sympathetic but not uncritical.
Kegley, Charles W., ed. The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Essays by leading New Testament scholars and theologians expounding and assessing key aspects of Bultmann’s contribution, with a bibliography of Bultmann’s publications to 1965.
Ladd, George Eldon. Rudolf Bultmann. IVP Series in Contemporary Christian Thought. Chicago: InterVarsity, 1964. A brief account of Bultmann’s career and the positions he took in history, theology, and philosophy, evaluated from a traditional (evangelical) Christian perspective.
Miller, Ed L., and Stanley Grenz. Fortress Introduction to Contemporary Theologies. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress, 1998. The chapter on Bultmann focuses on his theology in the context of other twentieth century theological thinkers.