Christianity & Myth

In the ancient German town of Marburg, in a hillside villa overlooking the lazy River Lahn, lives a storm center of European Protestantism. Rudolf Karl Bultmann, 72, napping in his book-crammed study or limping through his grounds with his wife and daughter, does not look like an intellectual tornado. But in Germany, where ideas are apt to detonate like buzz bombs, sending shock waves through university faculties, student cafes and editorial rooms, the ideas of Rudolf Bultmann have set off a major furor.

In U.S. seminaries Lutheran Rudolf Bultmann is best known as one of the founders of "form criticism," the widely accepted method of analyzing the Bible in terms of the forms--homilies, didactic methods, storytelling devices--used by those who wrote down and compiled the Gospels. But in 1941 Professor Bultmann, then in the chair of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg (he retired five years ago), published a magazine article that since then has grown into continental theology's biggest controversy and coined its fightingest word.

Hell in the Cellar. The word is Entmythologisieren, translated into English as "demythologization." This, says Bultmann, is what the New Testament needs if it is to mean anything real to laymen of today. For to modern man, he argues, the world of the Gospels seems as different from our world as Mars. The New Testament universe is a snug house with hell in the cellar and heaven upstairs. Angels from above and demons from below are constantly busy on the ground floor, and the end of everything is momentarily expected, with the graves giving up their dead for judgment and the Messiah streaming clouds of glory in the sky.

This, says Bultmann, is the language of mythology, meaningful in New Testament times and derived mainly from Greek Gnosticism and Jewish apocalypticism. To expect moderns to accept it as true is both senseless and impossible--senseless "because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such . . . the cosmology of a pre-scientific age"; and impossible, because "no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition--it is already determined for him by his place in history." No one believes any more in a local heaven or a local hell. "And if this is so, we can no longer accept the story of Christ's descent into hell or his ascension into heaven as literally true. We can no longer look for the return of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven or hope that the faithful will meet him in the air."

What, then, is left of Christianity? The saving act of God, answers Bultmann, which is what the New Testament really represents, and for which he uses the theologian's Greek word, kerygma. The problem is to free the kerygma from its encrustation of myth so that modern man can grasp it.

At first look, demythologization seems to be nothing but a continuation of "liberal" Christianity's old effort to reduce the Gospel to a palatable compound of clean living and the golden rule, minus the miraculous and the theological. But Bultmann's thinking goes far deeper than this. Instead of eliminating the mythological entirely, Bultmann would have man re-experience it in terms of his own religious life. For Bultmann relies on the existential element in Christianity, which makes personal experience the measure of a man's religion. Says he: "The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man's understanding of himself in the world in which he lives." The question is not whether the myth is true but whether the understanding is true. "Faith claims that it is, and faith ought not to be tied down to the imagery of New Testament mythology."

Right & Left. Bultmann's opposition hits him literally right and left. The leading councils of German Protestantism--the Evangelical and Evangelical-Lutheran churches--have generally rejected his approach. Pietists are horrified. "The Bible is at stake!" cried one pamphlet, which branded Bultmann an out-and-out heretic. What Bultmann calls mythology is part and parcel of the Christian faith, argue his conservative opponents. Without it man can say nothing about God at all, but can only follow the negative path of the mystic. Karl Earth, who set off many a theological land mine himself between the world wars, maintains that Bultmann backtracks completely from the Christ-centered theology of the Reformation--reducing Christ to a mere element in man's search for salvation, rather than the focus and object of the Christian's whole humble attention. Instead of setting his own conditions for receiving the Gospel, says Barth, man must approach it with a willingness to listen, a struggle to understand.

While the conservatives attack Bultmann for going too far, the existentialist philosophers, e.g., Switzerland's Fritz Buri, attack him for not going far enough. The kerygma--God's revelation in Christ--is a myth too, says Buri; Bultmann should recognize the whole New Testament as nothing but a symbolic way of expressing the existential experience. Philosopher Karl Jaspers criticizes Bultmann's emphasis on modern man's scientific viewpoint. People in New Testament times, he says, were not much different from people today or any other time--prone to crass materialism on the one hand and willingness to believe the absurd on the other.

Christianity's Openness. To both left-and right-wing criticism Bultmann is most vulnerable in the arbitrary line he draws between what is mythical and what is not --i.e., the act of God. The anti-Bultmann view, that man's proper business is not to adapt the Gospel to his mode of thinking but to adapt his thinking to the Gospel, recommends itself to a wider range of Christians, from Billy Graham to Reinhold Niebuhr. Instead of demythologizing the New Testament, they say, man should remythologize himself.

Just published in the U.S. is a new Bultmann book: Primitive Christianity (Living Age; $1.25). Readers will find in it Bultmann the historian rather than Bultmann the revolutionary; lucidly and briefly he takes them through the Old Testament background, 1st century Judaism, the Greek influences on the early church. But in the last section of the book, dealing directly with primitive Christianity, demythologization is seen at work. Again and again Bultmann attributes to Gnostic influences what orthodox interpreters assign to essential Christian teaching. The problem of the future and the end of the world, which has come in for so much theological attention of late, seems to Bultmann to be swallowed up in the Christian present.

"In the last analysis," he writes, "the future can never, as in Gnosticism, be conceived in fantastic cosmic terms, despite all the apocalyptic imagery which has found its way into the New Testament. It can only be understood in the light of God's grace as the permanent futurity of God which is always there before man arrives, wherever it be, even in the darkness of death. Paul can certainly speak of a glory which is ready to be revealed for us, of the eternal 'weight of glory' which awaits us. But at the same time he speaks of faith, hope and love as things which will not cease . . . In other words . . . the openness of Christian existence is never-ending."

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