Bultmann on demythologizing

We have been reading Bultmann, and I am sorry Ben Myers, but we have all been quite disappointed. It just seems so, well, dated. Never mind - he puts this really good question to all of us: where do you demythologize? We all do it (he says), so where do you?

In many cases we demythologize unintentionally and unreflectively by taking the mythological statements of the Bible as pictures that have long since lost their originial mythical sense. This is done most easily, naturally, with poetic writings in the Bible like the Psalms, in which the mythological language may in many cases already have been intended poetically. In our daily life, also, we use pictures that stem from mythical thinking, as when we say. for example, that our heart prompts us to do this or that - a statement that no one understands any longer in its original mythological sense, But those of us who have to interpret scripture responsibily ought to be conscious of what we are doing and to remind ourselves that honesty at this point requires us to be radical.

More radical? I am not sure: certainly, more honest and more systematic perhaps. Perhaps, too, the problem lies in calling this process 'demythologization', which implies a certain discovery of the 'real' intentions of the author - intentions that he not have been aware of himself.

Bultmann and electric lights

Bultmann, in his programmatic essay of 1941 'New Testament and Mythology' declaims -

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unitelligible and impossible for our contemporaries.

He puts a fair challenge forward, though it sounds quite ridiculous to see the electric light as the sign of the enlightenment of modern man vis a vis the mythologies of the New Testament. He would say to us 'at least fundamentalists are consistent'! But the challenge is this: how do we account for the disjunction between our daily existence, where we operate without expectation of the miraculous and on the basis of the scientific world view, and our belief in the New Testament? Don't we all do some demythologising somewhere (unless you live on a mountain in Virginia and handle snakes)?

Bultmann's confidence in his own mastery of the past never seems to waver. He seems unaware that he is in effect re-mythologising the New Testament by casting it in terms of human existence and authenticity... Like Spong, he is remorselessly sceptical, except of his own scepticism. It is interesting, too, how he shares Spong's concern for apologetics/evangelism: that the modern person, busily switching his electric light bulb on and off, and listening to the wireless, despises the gospel as it is couched in mythological language.

Bultmann on demythologisation

Our reading group has begun reading a collection of Bultmann's essays edited by Schubert Ogden: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings. It seems to me Bultmann is a figure almost completely overlooked these days by NT scholars, but becoming more popular amongst theologians. When you read his John commentary for example you can see why this might be so: Bultmann was formidibly - even incredibly - learned as a philologist and historian, but his rearrangements of the NT text are often arbirtrary, even whimsical. However, his adaptation of the existentialism of Heidegger for interpretation of the NT is quite revelatory of the human and dramatic situations under scrutiny.

At the suggestion of the editor, we began with the last essay in the book, from 1961: 'On the Problem of Demythologizing'. Of course, as good postmoderns, our first observation was just how 'modernist' he is: the world-view of the natural sciences is the given as far as he is concerned, and means that we cannot except the 'myths' of the NT as anything but naive. The job of exegesis and theology is to decode the myths and express them in the idiom of contemporary thought: 'demythologization seeks to bring out myth's real intention to talk about out own authentic reality as human beings'. Of course, there is no hint from Bultmann that this might be a 'remythologization' in its turn! Bultmann's determination is to wrestle with the vary Kantian dilemma: since God is not a fact withing the world that can be objectively established but rather must be confessed, we can only talk about him if we at the same time talk about our own existence as affected by God's act. As he says:
The statement that God is Creator and Lord has its legitimate basis only in our existential self-understanding...
This on the face of it seems a curious claim: but the statement is a statement that is believed and confessed, after all, and preached, rather than one open to the inquiries of natural scientific methods.
The peculiar thing about Christain faith, however, is that it sees an utterly special act of God in a certain historiacl event, which as such can be objectively established. This is the appearance of Jesus Christ, who is seen to be the revelation of God that calls everyone to faith.
Not too much to complain about here.