Word: bultmann
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...youth. Brought up as a Nazi atheist, he fought his way free of Hitlerian nihilism and underwent an intellectual conversion to Christianity. Pannenberg first won renown in the 1960s as a member of the "revelation as history" school in theology. He accused the pre-eminent Protestant thinkers, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Earth, of divorcing Christian faith from history and therefore from rational thought, by ultimately basing their theologies on subjective standards...
Pannenberg's dispute with the liberal Bultmann over the issue of Christ's resurrection, for example, won him a misleading fundamentalist image. No believer in biblical literalism, Pannenberg nevertheless thinks that Bultmann's evasion of the resurrection as a historical event is rationally untenable. As circumstantial evidence, he cites the early church's unshakable belief in it. Unless Christ actually rose from the grave, Pannenberg reasons, how can a historian plausibly account for the blazing fervor of the early Christians...
...attack incipient forms of Gnosticism. The traditional explanation is that Gnosticism matured after the birth of Christianity and became its archenemy, not only as a separate religion but also as a heretical wing within the early church. Yet some experts, among them Germany's New Testament Critic Rudolf Bultmann, are persuaded that Gnosticism was a full-fledged, working religion even before the arrival of Christ...
...What Bultmann sought was the "once for all" intersection of eternity and history that he called the "Christ event," which had clearly changed the lives of the first Christians. The Crucifixion, which Bultmann recognized as a fact, played a part in this encounter, but the event culminated in the Resurrection. This, Bultmann says, was not a historical occurrence but an existential one, a "coming to faith" by which the first Christians believed that Jesus was somehow victorious over death...
Instead of the liberals' lukewarm "Jesus of history," what Bultmann came to offer his followers was a "Christ of faith": a historically intangible but existentially forceful figure whose liberation of mankind is an ever-continuing act. This Christ can free human beings from the banalities and cruelties of history, but only in terms of their...