BULTMANN, RUDOLF

BULTMANN, RUDOLF (1884–1976), Christian theologian and New Testament scholar. Born in Wiefelstede, in what was then the grand duchy of Oldenburg, Bultmann was the son of a Lutheran pastor, himself the son of a missionary to Africa, and also the grandson on the maternal side of a pastor in Baden. He attended the humanistic Gymnasium in Oldenburg before studying theology in Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg. After receiving a scholarship to Marburg in 1907, he took his doctoral degree there in 1910 and qualified as university lecturer in 1912. He taught as instructor in Marburg until 1916, when he was appointed assistant professor in Breslau. In 1920 he was called to Giessen as full professor, only to return after one year to Marburg, where he taught as full professor until becoming professor emeritus in 1951, and where he continued to live until his death.

Bultmann's special field of competence as a theologian was the New Testament, and it is quite possible that he is the most influential scholar in this field in the twentieth century. His first major work, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921; The History of the Synoptic Tradition, 1963), established him as one of the cofounders of form criticism of the synoptic Gospels. Together with his book Jesus (1926; Jesus and the Word, 1934), it has been decisive for the ongoing quest of the historical Jesus as well as for subsequent critical study of the tradition redacted in the Gospels. Hardly less significant for research in the field are his studies of the Fourth Gospel, epitomized by the commentary that is perhaps his masterwork, Das Evangelium des Johannes (1941; The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 1971), and his interpretation of the theology of Paul, especially in his other major work, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (1948–1953; Theology of the New Testament, 1951, 1955). In any number of other respects as well, from the general problem of biblical hermeneutics to the special question of gnosticism and the New Testament, his work and the critical discussion of it continue to be determinative for serious study of the New Testament.

Yet it is not only or even primarily as a New Testament scholar that Bultmann is significant for theology and religious studies. In his own mind, certainly, he was, first and last, a Christian theologian, who did all of his historical work in service of the church and its witness, and it is in this capacity that he is now also widely regarded as one of the two or three Protestant theologians of the twentieth century whose impact on theology promises to be lasting. The warrants for this promise in his case are many, but two features of his thought in particular are basic to its significance.

First of all, Bultmann was distinctive among his contemporaries in clearly distinguishing and resourcefully addressing both of the essential tasks of Christian theology. Thus, as much as he agreed with Karl Barth that theology's first task is to interpret the Christian witness appropriately, in accordance with the normative witness to Jesus Christ attested by scripture, he differed from Barth in insisting that theology also has the task of interpreting this witness understandably, in terms that men and women today can understand and find credible. On the other hand, if his efforts to deal with this second, apologetic task brought him into close proximity to Paul Tillich, his deep concern with the first, dogmatic task gave his thought a very different character from the more speculative, unhistorical cast of Tillich's kind of philosophical theology.

The other equally fundamental feature of Bultmann's thought was his thoroughgoing interpretation of Christian faith, as of religion generally, in existentialist terms. In this respect, there is no question of the formative influence on his theology of the existentialist philosophy of the early Martin Heidegger, who was his close colleague in Marburg from 1923 to 1928. But if Heidegger provided the conceptuality for Bultmann's existentialist theology, he had already learned from the Lutheran pietism out of which he came and, above all, from his teacher Wilhelm Herrmann, that faith can be understood only as an existential phenomenon. Consequently, while he never doubted that faith does indeed have to do with the strictly ultimate reality called God, he was convinced that faith always has to do with this reality, not in its being in itself, but in its meaning for us, and hence as authorizing our own authentic existence.

The first of the four volumes of Bultmann's collected essays, Glauben und Verstehen (1933; Faith and Understanding, 1969), shows that the theology defined by these two basic features had already taken shape during the 1920s. But it is also clear from the three later volumes (1952, 1960, 1965; Eng. trans. of vol. 2, 1955) as well as from his other writings during the so-called demythologizing debate, all of which appeared in the series edited by H. W. Bartsch, Kerygma und Mythos (1948–1955; Kerygma and Myth, partial Eng. trans., 1953, 1962), that the same theology found its classic expression in 1941 in his programmatic essay "New Testament and Mythology," which provoked this famous debate. If Bultmann was insistent in this essay that theology has no alternative but to demythologize the New Testament, he was also clear that the demand for demythologizing is not merely apologetic but, as he later formulated it, is also "a demand of faith itself." And when he explained the demythologizing he called for positively, as a procedure for interpreting rather than for eliminating myth, it proved to be nothing other than thoroughgoing existentialist interpretation now applied to the mythological formulations of the New Testament.

Even today, Bultmann's theology remains the most controversial of the twentieth century, and it is still uncertain whether he will be reckoned among the fathers of the modern church or among its arch heretics. But there seems little question now that this is the level at which his work must be judged, and its impact already confirms that the history of theology, no less than the history of philosophy, is never quite the same after the shock of a great thinker.

Bibliography

Works by Bultmann in English in addition to those cited above include his Gifford Lectures, History and Eschatology (Edinburgh, 1957), and the selection of his shorter writings I edited and translated in Existence and Faith (New York, 1960). His most important contributions to the demythologizing debate are all available in my edition and translation of New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia, 1984). Among works on his theology, the volume edited by Charles W. Kegley, The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (New York, 1966), provides a useful orientation to the extensive critical discussion, while the best general introduction is Walter Schmithals's An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (London, 1968).

Schubert M. Ogden (1987)