Word: bultmann
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...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...
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...
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...
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...