Rudolf Bultmann on the necessity of “de-mythologizing” the message of the New Testament.
At least among “liberal” theologians, Rudolf Bultmann (1884-19760) was the most influential European theologian and scripture scholar in the 20th century. The excerpts from his writing given below explain some of the main premises of his “de-mythologizing” program: (1) that the main New Testament salvation story is clothed in mythological imagery that early Christians took for granted, but that is no longer credible for educated people in the modern world; (2) that there is nothing specifically “Christian” about this mythical world-picture; we should regard it as dispensable imagery in which the New Testament message is clothed, but which is inessential to the substance of its message, which it is our task to try to extract from New Testament writings and formulate in non-mythological language.
The excerpts from Bultmann’s writing included below are translated from his 1951 book Kerygma und Mythos (he first announced his “de-mythologizing” program in 1941). Here we see a very clear and forthright declaration that the early Christian “salvation myth” was clothed in mythical imagery can no longer be taken seriously by educated individuals in the modern world. His critics immediately recognized this as implying a fundamental dismissal of what most Christians probably regard as many essential Christian doctrines, at least in their literal understanding. (Bultmann’s more positive proposals about the substance of the Christian message divorced from this mythological imagery draw heavily from the thought of his existentialist philosopher-colleague Martin Heidegger, and I think are probably unintelligible to anyone who has not studied Heidegger).
The full essay excerpted below can be found in a Kindle edition as New Testament & Mythology (S. Ogden ed.), p. 60-157, in a section titled The Problem: Mythical World Picture and Mythical Salvation-Occurrence in the New Testament
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From R. Bultmann’s New Testament and Mythology
The world picture of the New Testament is a mythical world picture. The world is a three-story structure, with earth in the middle, heaven above it, and hell below it. Heaven is the dwelling place of God and of heavenly figures, the angels; the world below is hell, the place of torment.
But even the earth is not simply the scene of natural day-to-day occurrences, of foresight and work that reckon with order and regularity; rather, it, too, is a theater for the working of supernatural natural powers, God and his angels, Satan and his demons. These supernatural powers intervene in natural occurrences and in the thinking, willing, and acting of human beings; wonders are nothing unusual. Human beings are not their own masters; demons can possess them, and Satan can put bad ideas into their heads. But God, too, can direct their thinking and willing, send them heavenly visions, allow them to hear his commanding or comforting word, give them the supernatural power of his Spirit.
History does not run its own steady, lawful course but is moved and guided by supernatural powers. This age stands under the power of Satan, sin, and death (which are precisely ‘powers’). It is hastening toward its imminent end, which will take place in a cosmic catastrophe. It stands before the ‘woes’ of the last days, the coming of the heavenly judge, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment to salvation or damnation.
The Early Christian Salvation-Myth
The presentation of the salvation occurrence, which constitutes the real content of the New Testament proclamation, corresponds to this mythical world picture. The proclamation talks in mythological language: the last days are at hand; when the time had fully come’ God sent his Son. The Son, a preexistent divine being, appears on earth as a man (Gal. 4:4; Phil. 2:6ff.; 2 Cor. 8:9; John 1:14, etc.); his death on the cross, which he suffers as a sinner (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom 8:3), makes atonement for the sins of men (Rom. 3:23-26; 4:25; 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:14,19; John 1:29; 1 John 2:2, etc.). His resurrection is the beginning of the cosmic catastrophe through which the death brought into the world by Adam is annihilated (1 Cor. 15:21-22; Rom. 5:12ff.); the demonic powers of the world have lost their power (1 Cor. 2:6; Col. 2:15; Rev. 12:7ff., etc.). The risen one has been exalted to heaven at the right hand of God (Acts 1:6ff.; 2:33; Rom. 8:34, etc.); he has been made ‘Lord’ and ‘King’ (Phil. 2:9-11; 1 Cor.15:25). He will return on the clouds of heaven in order to complete the work of salvation; then will take place the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment (1 Cor. 15:23-24, 50ff., etc.); finally, sin, death, and all suffering will be done away (Rev. 21:4, etc.). And this will all happen at any moment; Paul supposes that he himself will live to experience this event (1 Thess. 4:15ff.; 1 Cor. 15:51-52; see also Mark 9:1). Anyone who belongs to Christ’s community is bound to the Lord by baptism and the Lord’s Supper and is certain of being raised to salvation provided he or she does not behave unworthily (Rom. 5:12ff.; 1 Cor. 15:21ff., 44bff.). Believers already have the ‘first fruits’ (Rom. 8:23) or the ‘guarantee’; 2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5), that is, the Spirit, which works in them, bearing witness that they are children of God (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6) and guaranteeing their resurrection (Rom. 8:11).
The Impossibility of Repristinating the Mythical World Picture.
(“Repristinate” is a literal rendering of a German word which in Bultmann refers to attempts by modern people (futile in his mind) to accept as true many elements of a mythological picture of the world taken for granted by early Christians, but which educated people today find incredible.
All of this is mythological talk, and the individual motifs may be easily traced to the contemporary mythology of Jewish apocalypticism and of the Gnostic myth of redemption. Insofar as it is mythological logical talk it is incredible to men and women today because for them the mythical world picture is a thing of the past.
Can Christian proclamation today expect men and women to acknowledge the mythical world picture as true? To do so would be both pointless and impossible. It would be pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture, which is simply the world picture of a time now past that was not yet formed by scientific thinking. It would be impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture by sheer resolve, since it is already given with one’s particular historical situation. Naturally, it is not unalterable, and even an individual can work to change it. But one can do so only insofar as, on the basis of certain facts that impress one as real, one perceives the impossibility of the prevailing world picture and either modifies it or develops a new one.
Thus, the world picture can be changed, for example, as a result of Nicolaus Copernicus’s discovery or as a result of atomic theory; or, again, because romanticism discovers that the human subject is richer and more complicated than the world view of the Enlightenment and of idealism allowed for, or, yet again, because there is a new consciousness of the significance of history and nationality.
It is entirely possible that in a past mythical world picture truths may be rediscovered that were lost during a period of enlightenment; and theology has every reason to ask whether this may be possible in the case of the world picture of the New Testament. But it is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work, as Wilhelm Herrmann made clear, one would have thought, once and for all. Any satisfaction of the demand would be a forced sacrificium intellectus, and any of us who would make it would be peculiarly split and untruthful. For we would affirm for our faith or religion a world picture that our life otherwise denied.
Criticism of the New Testament is simply a given with modern thinking as it has come to us through our history. Experience and control of the world have developed to such an extent through science and technology that no one can or does seriously maintain the New Testament world picture. What sense does it make to confess today ‘he descended into hell’ or ‘he ascended into heaven,’ if the confessor no longer shares the underlying mythical world picture of a three-story world? Such statements can be confessed honestly only if it is possible to divest their truth of the mythological representations in which it is expressed- provided there is such a truth, which is the very thing theology has to ask.
No mature person represents God as a being who exists above in heaven; in fact, for us there no longer is any ‘heaven’ in the old sense of the word. And just as certainly there is no hell, in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath the ground on which we stand. Thus, the stories of Christ’s descent and ascent are finished, and so is the expectation of the Son of man’s coming on the clouds of heaven and of the faithful’s being caught up to meet him in the air (1 Thess. 4:15ff.).
Also finished by knowledge of the forces and laws of nature is faith in spirits and demons. For us the stars are physical bodies whose motion is regulated by cosmic law; they are not demonic beings who can enslave men and women to serve them. If they have any influence ence on human life, it takes place in accordance with an intelligible order and is not due to their malevolence. Likewise, illnesses and their cures have natural causes and do not depend on the work of demons and on exorcising them.’ Thus, the wonders of the New Testament are also finished as wonders; anyone who seeks to salvage their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders, hypnotic influences, suggestion, and the like only confirms this. Even occultism pretends to be a science. 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 unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries. temporaries. Mythical eschatology is finished basically by the simple fact that Christ’s parousia did not take place immediately as the New Testament ment expected it to, but that world history continues and-as every competent judge is convinced-will continue. Anyone who is convinced that the familiar world will end in time pictures this end as the result of natural development, as a natural catastrophe, and not as the mythical occurrence that the New Testament talks about; and if one interprets this occurrence in terms of natural scientific theories, like the probationer in the parsonage at Ndddebo, one thereby criticizes the New Testament without knowing it. What is involved here, however, is not only the criticism that proceeds from the world picture of natural science, but also-and even more so-the criticism that grows out of our self-understanding as modern persons.
Interestingly enough, we moderns have the double possibility of understanding ourselves either completely as nature or as spirit as well as nature, in that we distinguish our true selves from nature. In either case, we understand ourselves as unified beings who ascribe their feeling, thinking, and willing to themselves. We do not understand stand ourselves to be as peculiarly divided as the New Testament represents us, so that alien powers can intervene in our inner life. We ascribe to ourselves an inner unity of states and actions, and we call any person who imagines this unity to be split by the intervention of divine or demonic powers a schizophrenic. Even if we understand ourselves as natural beings dependent to the highest degree, as in biology or psychoanalysis, we do not look upon our dependence as being given over to alien powers from which we distinguish ourselves. Rather, we look upon it as our true being, over which we are in turn able to take dominion by understanding, so that we can rationally organize our life.
If, on the other hand, we understand ourselves as spirits, we do indeed know that we are always conditioned by our physical bodies, but we distinguish our true selves from them and know ourselves to be independent and responsible for our dominion over nature. In both cases what the New Testament has to say about the ‘Spirit’ (pneuma) and the sacraments is absolutely alien and unintelligible to us. Those of us who understand ourselves in purely biological terms do not understand how a supernatural something or other like that could intervene in the closed context of natural forces and be effective in us. Those of us who are idealists do not understand how a pneuma that works like a natural force could affect and influence our spiritual attitude.
We know ourselves to be responsible for our own existence and do not understand how through water baptism a mysterious something or other could be communicated to us that would then become the subject of our intentions and actions. We do not understand that a meal is supposed to mediate a spiritual power to us and that an unworthy reception of the Lord’s Supper is to result in physical illness and death (1 Cor. 11:30), unless, of course, we have recourse to suggestion to explain it. We do not understand how anyone can permit him- or herself to be baptized on behalf of the dead (1 Cor. 15:29). There is no need to go into details about the special forms that the modern world view assumes in idealism and naturalism. For the only criticism of the New Testament that can be theologically relevant is that which arises necessarily out of our modern situation.
A biological world view, for example, is not necessary in the present situation, because its choice is a question of decision within this situation. The only question that is relevant for theology is what can justify the decision for a consistent biological world view, what is the common basis on which the question of decision can arise. But this is, in the first place, the world picture formed by modern natural science and, in the second place, our own self-understanding, according to which we each understand our self to be a closed inner unity that is not open to the interference of supernatural powers. It is also the case that neither naturalists nor idealists can understand stand death as the punishment for sin; for them death is a simple and necessary natural process. If it is no problem at all for naturalists, it is a problem for idealists precisely because it is a natural process. For, being natural, it does not grow out of my true, spiritual self but rather destroys my self. The problem is that human beings are spiritual selves who are different from plants and animals, and yet they, too, are caught in nature, in that they are born, grow up, and die like any animal. But we cannot understand this fact to be a punishment for our sin; for even prior to our having become guilty we were already subject to death. Nor can we understand that in consequence of the guilt of our ancestors we should be condemned to the death of a natural being, because we know of guilt only as a responsible act and therefore regard original sin, in the sense of a quasi-natural hereditary illness, as a submoral and impossible concept.
Just for this reason we also cannot understand the doctrine of substitutionary atonement through the death of Christ. How can my guilt be atoned for by the death of someone guiltless (assuming one may even speak of such)? What primitive concepts of guilt and righteousness lie behind any such notion? And what primitive concepts of God? If what is said about Christ’s atoning death is to be understood in terms of the idea of sacrifice, what kind of primitive mythology is it according to which a divine being who has become man atones with his blood for the sins of humanity? Or if it is to be understood in legal terms, so that in the transactions between God and human beings, God’s demands are satisfied by the death of Christ, then sin can only be understood juristically as outward transgression of a divine command, and ethical standards are simply excluded.
Moreover, if the Christ who suffered death was God’s Son, a preexistent divine being, what could it mean to him to assume death? Clearly, death does not mean very much to someone who knows that after three days he will rise again! likewise, we moderns cannot understand Jesus’ resurrection as an event whereby a power to live is released that we can now appropriate through the sacraments.
For those who think biologically such talk is utterly pointless, because the problem of death does not even arise. And while for idealists it is meaningful to speak of a life that is not subject to death, the possibility that such a life should be created by a dead person’s being brought back to physical life is unimaginable. If God creates life for human beings by any such means, God’s action is evidently tied up with natural occurrences in some completely unintelligible way.
We can see God’s act only in an occurrence that enters into the reality of our own true life, transforming us ourselves. But we cannot understand a miraculous natural event such as the resuscitation of a dead man–quite apart from its being generally incredible–as an act of God that is in this sense of concern to us.
As for the Gnostic scheme of ideas, it is only with great effort that we can even put ourselves into a way of thinking according to which the dead and risen Christ was not simply a man, but a God-man, whose dying and rising again were not an isolated fact occurring only to him as an individual person but rather a cosmic occurrence into which we all are drawn (Rom. 5:12ff.; 1 Cor. 15:21ff., 44b). We certainly cannot think this way ourselves because it represents the human self as nature and the salvation occurrence as a natural process. This is also to say that the idea of a preexistent heavenly Christ and the correlative idea of our own translation into a heavenly world of light, in which the self is supposed to receive heavenly garments and a pneumatic body, are not only rationally incredible but also say nothing to us. For we do not understand that our salvation, in which we would find the fulfillment of our life, our authenticity, should consist in such a condition.
