Justified True Belief

(●) The New Testament scholar who told the church that the gospel had to be pried loose from a first-century picture of the universe, and who has been argued with ever since. + Imagine a pastor in 1941 preparing a sermon on the ascension, and stopping. He believes what he is about to say. He also knows, and his congregation knows, that there is no upper deck above the clouds for anyone to rise into. He can pretend the difficulty is not there, or he can decide that the story never meant what a modern person hears in it. Rudolf Bultmann built a career on refusing the first option, and half a century of theology went to arguing about the second. He was a Lutheran pastor’s son who taught New Testament at Marburg for thirty years, and he did two things that no student of the Gospels can now walk around. He wrote the book that taught scholars to ask how the small units of the Gospel tradition were shaped by the preaching of the earliest churches. And he wrote the essay that asked whether a person who uses a telephone can also believe in demons, and answered that the message of the New Testament has to be translated out of the picture-language it came wrapped in. He matters to Christian readers because the answers he gave are, at their sharpest point, answers the church has had to refuse. He denied that Jesus rose in the sense that a body left a tomb. And yet the man who denied it was no cheerful debunker: he preached from a Marburg pulpit through the war years, stood publicly against the Nazi exclusion of Jews from the church in 1933, and insisted to the end that God actually addresses people. Understanding why so serious a man ended where he did is worth more to a Christian than a caricature.

(●) 1884 AD: Born in an Oldenburg parsonage, the son of a pastor and the grandson of a missionary. + Rudolf Karl Bultmann was born on 20 August 1884 in Wiefelstede, a village in the grand duchy of Oldenburg in the north-west corner of Germany. His father, Arthur Bultmann, was an evangelical Lutheran pastor. His father’s father had been a missionary in Africa, of the Pietist stamp: warm, personal, given to talking about the state of a man’s soul. His mother was a pastor’s daughter. Sunday was the family business, and the boy grew up inside it. From 1895 to 1903 he attended the humanistic Gymnasium in Oldenburg, the sort of German secondary school that drilled boys in Greek and Latin for eight years and expected them to enjoy it. He did enjoy it. The habit of reading an ancient text closely, in its own language, never left him, and it is worth holding on to when his conclusions start to sound reckless: whatever else he was, he was a man who had spent his life with Greek open in front of him. His father’s own theology moved over the years from the Pietism of the older generation toward the liberal Protestantism then confident in the German universities, and the son went further down that road than the father. Liberal Protestantism is worth a sentence of its own, because nearly everything Bultmann later did was either an inheritance from it or a revolt against it. It was the movement that took the heart of Christianity to be its moral and religious content, the fatherhood of God and the worth of every human soul, and treated the miracles, the demons and the coming judgment as the thinking of an older age, packaging that a modern believer could set down without losing anything that mattered. So the household held three generations and three answers: a grandfather who asked after the state of a man’s soul, a father who had begun to wonder how much of the old furniture had to be carried, and a son who would decide in the end that the furniture was not the house. It is a small family story, and it is also the story of German Protestantism in one household.

(●) 1903 AD: He studied under the most celebrated liberal scholars in Germany, and took their questions as his own. + German students of that era moved from university to university collecting teachers the way a musician collects masters. Bultmann began at Tübingen in 1903, went on to Berlin, and settled at Marburg. At Berlin he heard Adolf von Harnack, the most famous church historian alive, and Hermann Gunkel, who had shown how the stories of Genesis carried the marks of oral telling long before anyone wrote them down. At Marburg he sat under Johannes Weiss, Adolf Jülicher, and Wilhelm Herrmann. Two of those men set the shape of his mind. Gunkel had asked of the Old Testament exactly the question Bultmann would later ask of the Gospels: what was this little unit of material for, and who used it, before it landed in a book? And Herrmann, the systematic theologian, taught that faith is not the acceptance of doctrines that historians certify but a personal encounter with God, so that faith which leans on historical proof has already stopped being faith. Bultmann never let go of that, and nearly everything strange in his later work grows from it. The apprenticeship ended the ordinary German way, with two theses. In 1910 he took his licentiate at Marburg under Weiss, the licentiate being the degree a theological faculty then awarded in place of a doctorate, and he wrote it on the style of Paul’s preaching and its likeness to the street-corner lecturing of the Cynic and Stoic philosophers. Anyone who has watched a market trader work a crowd, raising his own objections out loud and knocking them down before a customer can, has heard the pattern, and Paul does it constantly in Romans. Then in 1912 he qualified to teach with a study of the biblical interpretation of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochene bishop who died in 428. Antioch in Syria was home to the school that read Scripture for its plain historical sense, in contrast to the Alexandrian habit of hunting an allegory underneath every verse, so the young man’s second piece of work was on an ancient interpreter whose great question was what a text had actually said. With that behind him he began lecturing at Marburg as an unsalaried instructor paid directly by his students, which is an arrangement with a certain honesty about it: if nobody came, nobody paid.

(●) 1921 AD: He helped found form criticism with a book on how the Gospels were made, and took the Marburg chair he would hold for thirty years. + The war years had moved him around: an associate professorship at Breslau in 1916, then Giessen in 1920. In 1917 he married Helene Feldmann, and the couple had three daughters. Then, in 1921, two things happened that fixed the rest of his life. Marburg called him back as full professor of New Testament, a chair he held until 1951. And he published Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, translated much later as The History of the Synoptic Tradition. The synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark and Luke, which overlap closely enough to be laid out in parallel columns and read across, seen together, which is what the Greek word means. The book is not a page-turner. It is a sorting operation, a taxonomy of the Gospel material carried out with the patience of a man cataloguing beetles: sayings of Jesus grouped by the shape they take, controversy stories, miracle stories, legends, each type traced back to the setting in the life of the early church where it would have been used. He was not working alone and never pretended to be. Martin Dibelius had published a similar study two years earlier, and Karl Ludwig Schmidt had argued in 1919 that the geographical framework of Mark, the going up and the crossing over and the withdrawing to the other side, was the evangelist’s own stitching rather than a remembered itinerary. Between the three of them, Formgeschichte, form criticism, arrived. The name is worth unpacking, since it is his whole legacy in one word: the study of the Gospels as material that had a life before it was a book, told and retold in worship and teaching until each piece settled into a usable shape, and readable now for the marks that the telling left behind. What made Bultmann’s version the one everyone had to answer was its confidence about the sorting. Where Dibelius was cautious, Bultmann assigned material to layers with a firm hand, and the layer he trusted least was the one nearest to a life of Jesus. A century of argument about that confidence has not exhausted the book, which is still in print and still cited across Gospel scholarship, usually by people disagreeing with it.

(●) 1923 AD: Martin Heidegger came to Marburg, and gave him words for what he already believed about faith. + For five years, from 1923 to 1928, the philosopher Martin Heidegger taught at Marburg, and the two men ran seminars together and read each other’s drafts. Heidegger was writing Being and Time, published in 1927, and its vocabulary got into Bultmann’s bones. That vocabulary is worth learning, because without it his later essays read like fog. Heidegger’s subject was existence, meaning not the bare fact that you are here but the particular way a human being has to live. A stone is simply there. A person is never simply there: he is always deciding something, always leaning out ahead of himself into what has not happened yet (the exam in June, the move, the appointment on Thursday), and always able to duck the question of what his own life is finally for. A person who ducks it, drifting along in what one does and what one says, taking the job one takes and holding the opinions one holds because the crowd is carrying him, Heidegger called inauthentic. A person who faces his own death and his own decisions and takes his life as his own, he called authentic. Neither word is a compliment or an insult in Heidegger; they are descriptions of two ways of being a self. Bultmann heard in this a philosophical account of something he thought the New Testament was already saying. Paul writes about life according to the flesh and life according to the Spirit, about a man who boasts in what he has secured for himself and a man who lets go of it and lives out of God’s promise. Set that beside Heidegger, and the fit is close enough to be dangerous. Bultmann took the fit as a gift, and his critics have said ever since that he took a philosopher’s grid and pressed the New Testament into it. He answered that every reader comes to a text with some understanding of human life already in hand, and that the honest thing is to say which one.

(●) 1933 AD: In the first summer of Nazi rule he told a lecture hall that the defamation of Jews was not the spirit of love. + Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. By spring the German universities were full of students in uniform, and on 12 April the national student body published its twelve theses against the un-German spirit, a proclamation that named the Jew as the most dangerous adversary of German writing and promised, in the same breath, "We want to abolish lies!" The campaign those theses opened ended a month later in the public burning of books. On 2 May 1933, opening his summer semester lectures at Marburg, Bultmann took that promise and turned it back on the people who had made it. The lecture was printed later that year and is known in English as "The Task of Theology in the Present Situation." He began by telling the students that he had made a point of never speaking about current politics from that desk, and that saying nothing at the opening of such a semester would be unnatural. Then came the sentence that mattered: "the defamation of the Jews that took place in the very demonstration that gave rise to this beautiful sentiment was not sustained by the spirit of love." Abolishing lies, he said, begins with the lies told about one’s neighbour. That September the Prussian church synod adopted the Aryan paragraph, a rule excluding anyone of Jewish descent from ordained ministry, and other regional churches moved to follow. Hans von Soden, the dean of the Marburg faculty, drew up its opinion against the rule with Bultmann on 20 September, arguing that the paragraph was incompatible with the nature of the Christian church, which knows no such distinction among the baptised (Galatians 3:28). He joined the Confessing Church, the wing of German Protestantism that refused to let the state redefine the gospel. Jewish students had long been at home in his lecture room: the philosopher Hannah Arendt and her friend Hans Jonas had both sat in his New Testament seminar in the twenties. He was not a martyr and never claimed to be one. He was a professor who said the necessary sentence out loud in the room where it cost something.

(●) 1941 AD: With Germany at war he published a commentary on John and the demythologizing lecture that set the century arguing. + Nineteen forty-one was the strangest publishing year of his life. Out came Das Evangelium des Johannes, his commentary on the Gospel of John, the fruit of two decades of lectures and still one of the most closely argued commentaries ever written on that book. And on 21 April, to a gathering of the Society for Evangelical Theology in Frankfurt, he read a paper called Neues Testament und Mythologie, "New Testament and Mythology." The paper proposed what he called Entmythologisierung, demythologizing. The word sounds like deletion, as though the plan were to go through the New Testament with a razor, and that is not what he meant at all. His claim was that the New Testament tells its message inside a picture of the world that nobody now lives in, a three-storey universe with heaven above, earth in the middle, and hell below, crossed by angels and demons, and that this picture cannot simply be asked of a modern reader as though it were part of the faith. But the answer is not to cut the mythical passages out, which is what the liberal theology of his teachers had effectively done. The answer is to interpret them, to ask what understanding of human life before God they were built to carry, and to say that. Wartime paper was scarce and travel was hard, so the argument moved slowly at first, in typescripts passed hand to hand among pastors, some of them at the front. Once the war ended it detonated. In 1948 the German replies filled a volume of their own, Kerygma und Mythos, with a second following four years later; by 1953 an English translation had reached Britain and America under the title Kerygma and Myth, and "demythologizing" had become a word ordinary churchgoers argued about.

(●) 1976 AD: He died at ninety-one, having lived long enough to watch his own students take him apart. + The last quarter-century of his life was a long public argument that he mostly enjoyed, and it kept him working and travelling well past the age when a German professor is expected to go quiet. His Theologie des Neuen Testaments, the summary of a lifetime’s teaching, came out in parts between 1948 and 1953. He retired from the Marburg chair in 1951 and then, instead of retiring, crossed the Atlantic to give the Shaffer Lectures at Yale and the Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt, lecturing in English to Americans for whom demythologizing was already a controversy before he arrived; those lectures were published in 1958 as Jesus Christ and Mythology. In 1955 Edinburgh had him for the Gifford Lectures, printed as History and Eschatology. Then his own doctoral students turned on the central point. In 1953 Ernst Käsemann stood up at a reunion of Bultmann’s former Marburg students and argued that a faith with no interest at all in the man Jesus was in danger of floating free of him altogether. Others followed, and the movement acquired a name, the new quest for the historical Jesus. Bultmann kept his silence for years and then answered them in 1960, unconvinced. Whatever else he was, he was not a man who bent. Helene died in 1973. Bultmann died in Marburg on 30 July 1976, at ninety-one, and was buried there. He had outlived Karl Barth by eight years, and he had outlived the confidence of the school he founded, which is a harder thing to outlive.

What He Taught

(T1) The Gospels are built from small units that the earliest churches used before anyone wrote a book. + Think of a family that has told the same handful of stories about a grandfather for thirty years: the one about the fire, the one about the letter, the line he always said at the table. Each story has hardened into a shape, because a shape is what makes a story tellable. When somebody finally writes them down, the shapes are still visible, and so is the reason each one was kept. That is the intuition behind form criticism, in German Formgeschichte, which means literally the history of the forms. Bultmann worked through the first three Gospels unit by unit and sorted them into kinds. There are pronouncement stories, where every sentence in the scene exists to set up a single saying at the end: a poor widow drops two small coins into the temple treasury while the rich are putting in far more, and the whole scene runs to one line about her having given more than all of them (Mark 12:41-44), so that nobody who ever retold it was in any doubt about which part was the point. There are controversy stories, with an opponent and a comeback. There are miracle stories, built on a recognisable pattern of need, act and astonishment. There are sayings that take the shape of proverbs, and several kinds besides. Each form, he argued, points to a use, and the uses are the ordinary business of a young church: teaching new converts, settling an argument with a synagogue, preaching. The technical phrase for that use is the Sitz im Leben, the setting in life, and the plainest way to hear it is as a question about a particular morning. Somebody kept this story. What did he need it for? Two things follow, and only the first is forced. The first is that the arrangement of the Gospels is largely the work of the evangelists, since material shaped for separate uses does not arrive with an itinerary attached. The second, which Bultmann drew and many who use his method do not, is that the community which shaped the units also generated a good deal of their content, so that a saying may tell you more about the church that treasured it than about the man it is credited to. That second step is where nearly every argument about him starts.

(Q) "The aim of form-criticism is to determine the original form of a piece of narrative, a dominical saying or a parable." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, Introduction (John Marsh translation). A dominical saying is simply a saying of the Lord, from the Latin dominus. Bultmann continues that in the process of finding the original form "we learn to distinguish secondary additions and forms, and these in turn lead to important results for the history of the tradition." The whole programme is in those two sentences: find the shape, strip the later growth, and read the history of the church off what is left (T1).

(T2) The message of Jesus can be recovered, but the man behind it cannot. + Bultmann’s little book Jesus of 1926 opens with one of the most quoted sentences in modern theology, and one of the most misread. He says we can now know almost nothing of the life and personality of Jesus. Readers have taken that as a confession that Jesus is a blur, and then noticed with some confusion that Bultmann spends the rest of the book telling them what Jesus taught. There is no contradiction, because the sentence is narrower than it looks. Life and personality means what a modern biography wants: the childhood, the inner development, the temperament, the moment he understood who he was. Bultmann held that the sources will not support any of that, and on this he is largely right; the Gospels are not written to answer those questions and refuse them at almost every turn. What he thought the sources do preserve is the preaching: the announcement that the reign of God is breaking in, the call to decide now, the sharpening of the law past all keeping. Where he goes further than the evidence requires is in the conclusion he draws next. For Bultmann it does not much matter that the biography is lost, because faith should never have been leaning on it. He inherited that from Wilhelm Herrmann, and he stated it more starkly than his teacher. A Christian who thinks the resurrection appearances were reported by named witnesses who could be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:3-8) will part company with him here, and it is worth noticing that the parting is over what faith is for, not over any point of Greek.

(Q) "I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources about Jesus do not exist." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, Introduction (Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress translation, 1934). The German original, Jesus, appeared in 1926. The sentence has been quoted against Bultmann more often than any other line he wrote, usually without the pages that follow it, in which he reconstructs the preaching of Jesus at length and with evident confidence (T2).

(T3) The New Testament tells its message inside a picture of the universe that no modern person actually inhabits. + Here is the observation that started the storm, and it begins as an observation rather than an argument. The world of the New Testament has three floors. Heaven is up, with God and the angels in it. The earth is the middle floor, where people live and where spirits and demons come and go, entering a man and being driven out. Hell is downstairs. Christ comes down, goes back up, and will come down again on the clouds. The language is spatial all the way through, and nobody reading it in the first century had any reason to take it as anything but a description of how things are laid out. Bultmann’s claim was that a person who has been to a hospital and switched on a radio no longer lives in that house, whatever he may say on Sunday, and that pretending otherwise makes faith a matter of holding two incompatible pictures in one head. He put it with a bluntness that has been thrown back at him for eighty years, and it should be admitted that as an argument it is thin: it reports what modern people find easy to believe rather than showing that anything is false. A reader is entitled to answer, as many have, that the availability of penicillin settles nothing about whether God raises the dead. What is harder to wave away is the smaller point buried inside the loud one. The New Testament does speak in the world-picture of its own century, as every human book must, and separating what is being said from the furniture it is said with is a real task that will not go away by being called liberal.

(Q) "It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," section A.2, "The Mythological View of the World Obsolete," in Kerygma and Myth, edited by Hans Werner Bartsch, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (1953). The wireless is the radio. The lecture was delivered in Frankfurt on 21 April 1941, and this sentence is the one that travelled: quoted in pulpits, in student essays, and in nearly every book written against him since (T3).

(T4) Myth is not to be deleted but translated, because what it carries is an understanding of human life before God. + This is the half of Bultmann that gets forgotten, and it is the half he cared about. Demythologizing, he insisted, is not the scissors work his teachers had done. Harnack’s generation had cut away the miracles and the apocalyptic, meaning the New Testament’s talk of an age about to end, a judgment coming, a Son of Man arriving on the clouds, and had kept a residue of ethical religion, the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul. Bultmann thought that programme had thrown out the message and kept the packaging, which is a startling thing to say about your own teachers and exactly what he meant. His own proposal was to read the mythical language for what it is doing. When the New Testament says that the powers of this age hold men in bondage, it is not offering a map of the invisible airspace; it is saying something about a person who cannot get free of himself. When it says the end is at hand, it is not fixing a date; it is putting a man under the pressure of a decision he cannot postpone. Read that way, Bultmann said, the mythical passages stop being embarrassments to be apologised for and become the sharpest things in the book. He called the method existential interpretation, meaning interpretation that asks what a text says about the way a human being exists, and he took the tools for it from Heidegger. The gain is real, and Christian readers who reject his conclusions have often kept the method. The cost is equally real. If the language about Christ coming in the flesh is finally about my self-understanding, then the question of whether anything happened has quietly been declared none of faith’s business, and there is no way back from that to an empty tomb.

(Q) "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." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," section B.2, "The Nature of Myth," in Kerygma and Myth, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (1953). A few lines later he gives the rule in one sentence: "Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially." Cosmologically means as a description of the cosmos, the physical universe; anthropologically means as a statement about the human being; existentially means as a statement about the way a particular person has to live (T4).

(T5) Easter is the rise of faith in the disciples, and the risen Christ is met in preaching and nowhere else. + Everything else in Bultmann converges on this, and this is where the church has had to say no. Bultmann held that the cross is a fact of history: a man was executed outside Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, and about that the historian can speak. The resurrection, he said, is a different kind of claim altogether. What historical inquiry can establish is that the first disciples came to believe that Jesus was alive; that they came to believe it is the Easter event. To ask for more, for a body that walked out of a tomb, is on his account to ask for something no historian could ever certify and, worse, to want a proof that would make faith unnecessary. So the resurrection becomes the arrival of the preaching, the kerygma, a Greek word simply meaning the thing proclaimed, the announcement a herald makes. Christ is risen into the preaching, and the person who hears it and lets go of his own securities is met by God there. Two comments are owed him before the disagreement. He was not saying the disciples lied, and he was not saying nothing happened; he was saying that what happened is not the sort of thing history handles. And his stress on the present address of God, the word that comes to you now and asks for a decision, is genuinely biblical (Romans 10:17), which is why preachers who reject his conclusions still find his sermons hard to put down. But the New Testament will not let the two be separated. Paul does not preach an Easter faith that arose; he lists witnesses, some of them still alive and available for questioning, and he says in as many words that if Christ has not been raised the preaching is empty (1 Corinthians 15:14). The risen Christ in Luke asks to be touched (Luke 24:39). What Bultmann called an unnecessary prop the apostles called the foundation.

(Q) "The resurrection itself is not an event of past history. All that historical criticism can establish is the fact that the first disciples came to believe in the resurrection." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," the section headed "The Resurrection," in Kerygma and Myth, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (1953). In the same section he writes, of the demand that the resurrection be verified as an occurrence in the world: "An historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable!" The exclamation mark is his (T5).

(Q) "He meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else." + Source: Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," the section headed "The Resurrection," in Kerygma and Myth, translated by Reginald H. Fuller (1953). The sentence before it reads, "Christ meets us in the preaching as one crucified and risen." The sentence is the hinge of his whole theology and the exact point of the quarrel. Christians agree wholeheartedly that Christ meets us in preaching; the four words that follow are the ones the church cannot say.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His tools outlived his conclusions, and are now used by scholars who argue against him. + A carpenter’s plane does not care what the carpenter believes, and form criticism turned out to be that kind of instrument. Once Bultmann had shown that the Gospel material circulated as small shaped units before it was collected, the question of how those units travelled became everyone’s question, including the question of people who thought his answers wrong at every turn. The English-speaking response came quickly, and its opening move was a question Bultmann had not dwelt on: where were the eyewitnesses while all this shaping was going on? Vincent Taylor worked through the same material in 1933 and concluded that they had not conveniently died out. "If the Form-Critics are right, the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection," he wrote in The Formation of the Gospel Tradition, and the joke has teeth in it: a congregation free to invent stories about a man is a congregation with nobody sitting in the back row who was actually there. Others came at it from other angles. C. H. Dodd argued that a primitive outline of the ministry underlay Mark rather than being invented by him. Joachim Jeremias turned the method around and used it to work back toward the words of Jesus in his own Aramaic, and thought he had reached them. Later, Birger Gerhardsson set the Gospel tradition beside the disciplined memorisation of the rabbinic schools, where a pupil was expected to carry his master’s words the way a musician carries a score, and Martin Hengel and Richard Bauckham pressed the case that named individuals stood behind the traditions rather than an anonymous community. None of that would have taken the shape it did without the book of 1921. The state of Gospel scholarship for a century has been, in large part, a long argument with a man whose method everyone borrowed.

(†) His own students reopened the question of the historical Jesus that he had closed. + In 1953 the Marburg alumni held a reunion, and Ernst Käsemann, who had taken his doctorate under Bultmann, read a paper on the problem of the historical Jesus. His worry was not that of a conservative. It was that a preaching with no anchor in the man who was crucified turns into a myth of the very kind Bultmann had set out to demythologize, and that the New Testament writers themselves plainly cared that the Lord they proclaimed was the Jesus of Nazareth who had eaten with tax collectors. The paper opened what came to be called the new quest for the historical Jesus, the historical Jesus meaning the man as ordinary historical inquiry can reach him, working from the sources the way one would work on any other figure of the first century. Günther Bornkamm, another Bultmann student, published Jesus von Nazareth in 1956, the first serious life of Jesus to come out of that school, and it sold in the hundreds of thousands. Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling pushed in the same direction from the side of language. Bultmann waited, and in 1960 published an essay on the relation of the earliest Christian preaching to the historical Jesus which conceded almost nothing. The family quarrel matters for a reason beyond gossip. The people best placed to know what his method could and could not carry decided, within his lifetime and against his wishes, that it had cut the message loose from the man. That verdict came from inside the house.

(†) Barth called their conversation a whale meeting an elephant, and C. S. Lewis simply doubted his ear for texts. + Karl Barth and Bultmann had been allies in the 1920s, when both were in revolt against the liberalism they had been taught. They drifted, and in 1952 Barth wrote a small book with the honest title Rudolf Bultmann: An Attempt to Understand Him. That Christmas he wrote to Bultmann himself that the two of them were like a whale and an elephant meeting with boundless astonishment on some oceanic shore, each unable to make himself understood by the other. Barth’s objection, underneath the affection, was that Bultmann had made theology into a description of human self-understanding, so that the subject of the sentence had quietly changed from God to man. The English-language objection came from a professor of medieval literature with no theological post at all. In a lecture at Westcott House in Cambridge in May 1959, published later as "Fern-seed and Elephants," C. S. Lewis took Bultmann’s work as a case study in what he considered bad literary judgement. Lewis had spent his life reading legends, romances and myths, and he said flatly that the Gospels do not read like any of them: they read like reportage or like a kind of realistic narrative that nobody in the ancient world knew how to write. His verdict on the critics was that they claimed to see fern-seed and could not see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight. Neither man refuted Bultmann on his own ground, and neither was trying to. Between them they named the two costs that his readers keep coming back to: a theology that talks about God by talking about man, and a reading of the Gospels that never quite asks what sort of writing they are.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a closed universe assumed rather than argued, and an Easter with nothing outside the preacher. + He earns this row himself. These are positions he held and defended in print, not things later readers did with his books. - The closed universe is a premise, not a finding. In his essay asking whether exegesis without presuppositions is possible (exegesis being the patient working out of what a text actually says, sentence by sentence, as opposed to reading one’s own convictions back into it), Bultmann states that historical method assumes history to be a closed continuum of cause and effect which cannot be broken into by supernatural powers, so that there is no miracle in that sense. Everything else follows from it, and it is never defended. A miracle claim examined by a method that has ruled miracles out in advance will always come back a myth, and the reader has learned nothing about the world, only about the method. - An Easter located inside the disciples cannot bear what the apostles put on it. Paul does not appeal to a faith that arose; he names witnesses and invites the Corinthians to ask them (1 Corinthians 15:3-8), and he draws the consequence himself: "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). Peter’s letter puts the same distinction Bultmann collapsed in exactly the terms he used: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). - Existential interpretation swallows the event. A message about how I may understand myself can be true whether or not anything happened in Judea. That is precisely its attraction, and precisely the problem: the New Testament stakes everything on something having happened, and Luke says he wrote so that his reader might have certainty about it (Luke 1:1-4). - The argument from the wireless is not an argument. That modern people find spirits hard to believe in is a fact about modern people. Whether God raised Jesus is a question about God, and no inventory of household appliances settles it. The honest thing is to say what he was right about too, because the church learned from him. The Gospels really did come to us through the preaching of the earliest churches, and the shapes of that preaching are visible in them. God really does address people now, and a faith that was only assent to a report about the past would be a thin thing. Bultmann held both of those with his whole weight, and then let go of the one fact that holds them up.