Harnack, Kähler, and Billing
Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930), who was referred to above as a disciple of Albrecht Ritschl, made his mark above all as a church historian, with primary emphasis on the history of dogma, he dominated this area in his own lifetime and mastered the vast field of patristics and exegetics as no one else has ever done. His best known work, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (I–III, 1886–90, several later editions; trans. History of Dogma, ed. Neil Buchanan; New York: Bussell & Bussell, 1958) was the mature fruit of his many-sided historical research.
In a famous lecture series held in Berlin in 1900, published later under the title Das Wesen des Christentums (trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, What Is Christianity? Toronto: Mc’Clelland, 1958), Harnack sought to present a summary of what he considered the essence of the Gospel. If Wilhelm Herrmann (see above, pp. 376–77) emphasized above all an inner, personal experience of Jesus, who becomes real to man through the proclamation of the Bible, Harnack put greater stress on Christianity as a historical phenomenon. The timeless element in its message, the real substance of the Christian faith, is the same as Jesus’ original teaching, which can be derived from a reading of the gospels. The process of extracting the doctrinal content of a given document was, to Harnack, a purely historical task, and he looked upon the gospels as being for the most part authentic texts. Harnack summarized the proclamation or Gospel of Jesus under the three following headings, each of which could be thought of as containing the entire Gospel:
Harnack’s concept of Christianity, like Herrmann’s, was characterized by a strong interest in apologetics. In a time when it seemed as though Christian dogma was being undermined by science, there were those who desired to set forth that which, independent of all scientific criticism, can be thought of as permanent and unchanging in the Christian message. The unusual thing was that Harnack’s historical interpretation of Christianity was refuted at many points by the very exegetical and patristic research which was done during the first decades of the 20th century.
Of what importance to the Christian faith is the history which the scientific study of the Bible has confided to us? This was one of the most burning questions confronting theology at the turn of the century. As we have already seen, Herrmann and Harnack, who were both disciples of Ritschl and members of the liberal school of thought, arrived at different answers. For Herrmann the ground of faith lay in the attitude of trust which comes into being when the picture of Jesus’ inner life is made real to a person through the words of the Bible. He therefore pointed from the historical to the timeless experience of a personal confrontation with Christ. For Harnack Christianity was above all a historical reality. Through the science of history one can find the Gospel, Jesus’ original proclamation, which, in its historical setting, is simultaneously a timeless truth, representing the ideal religion.
In the year 1892 Martin Kähler (professor in Halle, d. 1912) published a small book entitled Der sogenannte historische Jesus undder geschichtliche biblische Christus (trans. Carl E. Braaten, The so-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964). In this work Kähler approached the problem of faith and history in a way that presaged new trends in the field of theology. Kähler rejected the attempts of liberal theologians to construct a picture of the historical Jesus. Such efforts result in a falsification, inasmuch as the extant sources—above all, the gospels—were not designed to present a biography of Jesus in the modern sense of the term. They were rather intended to provide the foundation for the church’s proclamation of Christ. The purpose of the gospels was not to present a scholarly description of a person but to promote the proclamation that would establish the church and create faith. The Christ of faith is identical with the historical (geschichtlich) Christ to whom the Bible bears witness. Kaähler distinguished between historisch and geschichtlich in this context. By the former, he referred to that which the modern science of history incorporates into its supply of naked facts. The latter word, on the other hand, was employed with reference to the historical in its significance for humanity or for man in our time. According to Kähler, faith relates not only to the historical but also to something “beyond history,” i.e., to the eternal, which is decisive for man’s salvation and is revealed in the historical events to which the Bible bears witness.
Kähler’s book has retained its significance right up to the present time. His point of view was the portent of a number of theological tendencies which have since been asserted with great cogency. The exegetes of the so-called “form criticism” school, for example, took up the idea that the very nature of the Gospel was designed to serve its proclamation and was determined by the preaching about Christ which was current in the Christian community. This insight also gave shape to the basic idea of so-called “kerygmatic” theology, represented by Karl Barth and his many disciples.
There was an idealistic facet in Kähler’s thinking, for example his emphasis on that which is “beyond history.” In itself, this term could be interpreted as pointing exclusively to the transcendental, the eternal—that which lies “over” history. This is not the case, however. Kähler said that what is important for the Christian faith can be found precisely within the context of history, in the historical Christ of the Bible (totus Christus), and not merely in His inner life (as Herrmann claimed) or in certain timeless religious concepts contained in His preaching, as Harnack asserted.
The historical criticism of the Bible—which had begun long before this but did not become the dominant theological method until the end of the 19th century—might have seemed inimical to the Christian faith, insofar as this felt itself bound to a timeless and unchanging doctrine, given once and for all time in the Bible, and insofar as the Bible in its entirety was looked upon as containing pronouncements of an absolute kind. The solution of the problems raised by this new criticism of the Bible was a major concern for theologians active at the turn of the century. We have already noted how Martin Kähler sought to answer one of the questions involved by insisting that the so-called “historical” Jesus was a modem falsification. The actual, Biblical Christ is the Christ who is proclaimed abroad, who is living and present in the Christian congregation. The Christ in whom Christians believe and the Christ to whom the gospels bear witness is one and the same. A historical “critique” of the texts can never go back any further than to the original “testimonies to the faith,” and these must be looked upon as elements in the preaching of the first congregations.
Similar problems were also taken up by Einar Billing (professor at Uppsala, bishop of Västerâs, d. 1939), who clearly demonstrated that the Biblical revelation is linked up with historical facts, with God’s treatment of His people and with the life of Jesus, and not, as in the case of Greek wisdom, with a universal concept of knowledge. Even though the contrast between Greek thought and the Bible is not as fundamental or as significant as some have claimed, Billing’s discovery of what was later referred to as the “dynamic” concept of revelation in the Bible was of enduring value. This concept not only served to alter the way in which men look upon the Bible but also the manner in which the task of theology is understood. If our contact with the divine and eternal is brought about, according to the Bible, by God’s own involvement in history, and not via some timeless knowledge of eternal truths, then it follows that it cannot be the function of theology to present Christianity as a logically impeccable system; theology must in some way do justice to the historical and dynamic elements in the Biblical revelation.
Billing came to be a prominent figure in modem Swedish theology for other reasons as well. On the strength of a learned examination into Luther’s doctrine of the state (1900) he became the progenitor of modern Luther research in Sweden, a school which came to dominate Swedish theology in the 1920s and 1930s, even to a great extent in the systematic area. This “Luther renaissance,” as it is usually called, has made a significant contribution to Protestant theology in the 20th century. For Luther research has grown correspondingly on the continent as well, led by such church historians as Karl Holl and Heinrich Boehmer and by such systematicians as Carl Stange, Rudolf Hermann, and Paul Althaus.
In the discussion concerning the nature of the church, Billing developed (in a number of significant contributions) what he referred to as “the religiously motivated folk-church idea.” This idea was based on the territorial character of the Church of Sweden. All of Sweden is divided into parishes, and Billing asserted that such a system does much to give expression to the universality of the proclamation of grace. The church has the responsibility of preaching the Gospel to the entire nation. The religiously motivated folk church, said Billing, is not bound to the apparatus of a “state church”—and neither was his idea of the church based on the concept of a universal religiosity which is to form the foundation of the Christian proclamation. Billing’s ecclesiology was clearly directed against the free-church tendency with its concept of the church as an exclusive gathering of believers. The folk-church idea as set forth by Billing did not, however, clarify such matters as church discipline and the role of the Confessions as the basis of church fellowship.
The History of Religions School
When Adolf von Harnack gave his lectures on “What Is Christianity?” he asserted that a universally valid presentation of the Christian religion could be made on the basis of a purely historical examination of Jesus’ original message. Contemporaneous research in the exegetical field revealed another tendency, however, which appeared to contradict the presuppositions of Harnack and of liberal theology. This tendency emerged from certain theologians who were referred to as the history of religions (or comparative religions) school.
If one investigates the history of early Christianity by applying the historical method, one will find not a universal religion but a series of ideas and assumptions which are so alien to modern ways of thinking that they cannot be successfully transferred to our time and incorporated into our religious instruction.
Most of these foreign elements in early Christianity are of an eschatological and apocalyptic nature. Jesus and His disciples took these over from the Judaism of New Testament times. In a book on the kingdom of God concept in the preaching of Jesus (Die Predigt Jesu yore Reich Gottes, 1892), a young German scholar by the name of Johannes Weiss demonstrated, in a purely exegetical manner, that Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God envisioned a coming, eschatological reign of God, which was to become a reality at the imminent end of the present age.
This view represented a serious challenge to the liberal concept of the kingdom of God (as, e.g., in Ritschl; see above, pp. 374–76). The liberal school conceived of the kingdom of God as an entity in the present world, brought into reality by faith and increasingly manifested in the Christian community.
Johannes Weiss and his co-workers pointed out those Oriental and late-Jewish elements in early Christianity which are so foreign to the modern age. Interest in the historical context of religion then began, and Christianity came to be looked upon as a link in the development which resulted in part from ancient Oriental and in part from Hellenistic-Jewish religious history. But is it possible to accept this interpretation and yet insist that Christianity is a religion which is suited to the modem age and which satisfies modem religious needs? This became a real problem for the history of religions school. This school was sustained by a strong scholarly interest, and it helped to discredit many of the illusions which liberal theology entertained when it sought to adapt the Christian faith to modem thinking.
From a scholarly view the history of religions school was of great importance; it clarified the uniqueness of Christianity at many points. It was precisely against this background of a deepened study of the history of religions that it appeared particularly meaningful to investigate and describe Christianity in its historical uniqueness, without adapting it to modem rationalistic assumptions. The history of religions school did a great deal of valuable preliminary work in this area, even though it did not in itself reach any definite results of essential importance to the future. And a number of the men in this school finally ended up by espousing the concepts of liberal theology, especially when they were confronted with the task of presenting the actual message of Christianity.
The reason for this lack of the expected results lay perhaps above all in the fact that the picture which was given of the historical development of religion was to a large extent an invention, alien to the texts under examination. The stated purpose was not in keeping with Christianity’s own view of its original documents: the purpose was not to understand the distinctive nature of these texts but to use them as the basis for the construction of a history of the religion of Israel and of early Christianity. In this program lay both the strength and the weakness of the history of religions school.
Weiss’s discovery that the kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus was a future reality, waiting beyond this present age, was taken up and built upon by Albert Schweitzer (d. 1965) in a book entitled Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906; later editions were called Die Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung; trans. William Montgomery, The Quest of the Historical Jesus; New York: Macmillan, 1961). In this study Schweitzer interpreted Jesus’ entire career (and not merely some of His utterances) as being designed to achieve one purpose: to hasten the downfall of the present world order and thus call forth the kingdom of God.
When the expectations concerning the return of Jesus and the imminent breakthrough of the kingdom of God were not fulfilled, the content of the Christian message was gradually altered. All of the church’s doctrine, like the proclamation of the New Testament, must be understood in the light of this eschatological upheaval which was originally expected but then failed to appear.
Schweitzer’s thesis—referred to as the thesis of “consistent eschatology”—was built on an inadequate exegetical foundation and has subsequently been abandoned by scholars. But it aroused a lively discussion when first broached, and as a result it achieved major significance. Schweitzer emphasized as clearly as possible that Jesus’ purported original message was not something which could be applied in modern times; it belonged to an apocalyptic milieu which is alien to man today.
Schweitzer’s own understanding of Christianity as an existential religion had no relationship to the results of his own research into early Christianity. On the other hand, he selected a number of ideas out of German idealism and humanism and made the concept of “reverence for life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) the basis of his religious life.
Schweitzer was the most radical representative of the history of religions school, but there were many other prominent scholars who implemented its basic principles in their work. Among these were Hermann Gunkel (d.1932), who, among other things, made a significant contribution to the history of Old Testament literature in a commentary on Genesis (1901), and Wilhelm Bousset (d. 1920), who investigated the Christ concept of the ancient church, using the new history of religion as a point of departure. This was done in his book Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfäingen des Christentums bis auf Irenäus (1913).
The contributions made by the history of religions school in the area of Biblical research also inspired a strong new interest in universal religious history (Nathan Söderblom; Eduard Lehmann), as well as in the psychology of religion (cf. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, which came to be normative for modem empirical research in the field of religion).
A front-rank historian and philosopher of religion, who can also be considered a representative of the history of religions school, was Ernst Troeltsch (professor at Heidelberg and elsewhere, d. 1923). Troeltsch based his conclusions on a radical historical interpretation of Christianity. Christianity cannot be understood as the absolute religion, he said, but only as the historically highest form of the religion of personality development. Troeltsch wrestled with the problem of revelation and history. For him, this was a major question: How can one accept a consistent historical interpretation of Christianity and at the same time assert its salvatory power and its role in current preaching? Troeltsch sought to find a cultural synthesis and contemplated the concept of a natural religion. According to his view, all value judgments, religious as well as moral, are based on certain evident presuppositions in human reason (the religious a priori).
The significance of personal freedom and decision-making was clearly recognized by Troeltsch, but he could never solve the problem of relating this to the critical, empirically inductive view of history. In all of this, however, he anticipated later developments and pointed to tendencies which subsequently came forth with incomparable potency. This was true, for example, of the emphasis placed on Christianity as a proclaimed message which confronts the individual with the necessity of making a decision right here and now (dialectical theology), and also of the continued discussion concerning the justification of the historical interpretation of Christianity and its importance to theology.
The contributions made by the history of religions school to the sphere of systematic theology were of little value to the future and have been, for the most part, long since forgotten. But the methodology and the pure historical research of this group have proved to be of lasting significance.
Dialectical Theology
Immediately after the end of the first World War a commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Der Röerbrief, 1919, the Foreword, 1918) was published by a Swiss pastor by the name of Karl Barth (b. 1886, professor in Basel since 1935). In this book Barth lodged a sharp protest not only against contemporary theology but against the entire tradition which began to take shape with Schleiermacher and which anchored Christianity in human experience and looked upon faith as an element in the spiritual life of man. Der Römerbrief was also a protest against those schools which had transmuted theology into a science of religion and had held the historicocritical analysis of the Bible to be the only possible interpretation. Barth brought out a second edition a few years later (1922; the Foreword, 1921; sixth ed. trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Epistle to the Romans; Oxford University Press, 1933), and this completely revised version can be considered the beginning of the new school which subsequently came to be known as dialectical theology. The man who worked most intimately with Barth in this school was Eduard Thurneysen (b. 1888, pastor in Switzerland and later professor in Basel). Other kindred spirits were Emil Brunner, like Barth a Reformed theologian (professor in Zurich, d. 1966), and the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Gogarten(b. 1887, professor in Göttingen since 1935).
During the 1930s Barth and Brunner came to a parting of the ways, and Gogarten too came to have reservations about Barthian theology. From that point on it became impossible to refer to dialectical theology as a unified entity.
For our present purposes we shall direct our attention to a number of basic ideas treated in the Barthian literature. In addition to the previously mentioned Römerbrief, Barth’s enormous productivity has resulted in the publication of such significant works as Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 1925 (trans. Douglas Horton, The Word of God and the Word of Man; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957), a collection of propositions which throw considerable light on the early phases of dialectical theology; Christliche Dogmatik—Prolegomena, 1927 (the first, unfinished version of his dogmatics); Fides quaerens intellectum, 1931 (trans. Dan W. Robertson, Fides quaerens intellectum; New York: Meridian, 1962), a commentary on the theology of Anselm; Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1982 ff. (trans. Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark), the huge and as yet incomplete dogmatics, the 12th volume of which [Part IV, 3, 2] appeared in 1959.
Barth has also written on political questions. He was one of the leaders of the “confessing church” in Nazi Germany, and was ejected from that country in 1934. The so-called Barmen Declaration—which served the church as a confessional document in its struggle with Hitlerism—was based on Barth’s theology and was, to a large extent, the product of his pen. In subsequent years Barth has urged the church to reveal a greater spirit of openness vis-à-vis communism (Eine Schweizer Stimme, 1945).
In a notable contribution to the Baptism controversy (Die kirchliche Lehre von der Taufe, 1934; trans. The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism; Chicago: Alec R. Alienson, 1956) Barth, using the Reformed tradition as a point of departure, repudiated infant Baptism and recommended adult Baptism.
Dialectical theology was one of the results of the culture crisis which followed upon the conclusion of World War I; it involved, among other things, a violent reaction against the theology of the history of religions school. Barth did not reject the historicocritical interpretation of the Bible in itself, but he felt that it failed to accomplish its purpose because it occupied itself with peripheral concerns and ignored the real issues in the texts under consideration. As he made clear in Der Römerbrief, Barth intended to replace the mere philological and historical interpretation with a profounder “dialectical” exposition of the Biblical material itself. He found his examples primarily in the classical Christian tradition, as, for example, in Luther and Calvin. Barth’s interpretation of the Bible is not, however, a mere carbon copy of the Reformers’ work; the dialectic which he has found in the Bible is not, as in Luther, a contrast between God’s wrath and God’s grace, between the sin of man and the righteousness provided by God; it is rather a fundamental contrast between eternity and time, between God as God and man as man. “If I have a ‘system,’ it is that, to the highest possible degree, I keep my attention upon both the positive and negative significance of what Kierkegaard called ‘the infinite qualitative difference’ between time and eternity. ‘God is in heaven, and you are on earth.’ The relation of this God to this man, and the relation of this man to this God is for me both the theme of the Bible and the sum and substance of philosophy” (Der Römerbrief, Foreword to the second edition).
The application of this fundamental concept has, as a rule, resulted in the abnegation of the human, thereby making way for divine revelation, for the “wholly other,” which is revealed through God’s Word to those who in a spirit of humility are receptive to God’s acts and the message of the church.
Barth’s understanding of revelation—or the Word of God (which he treated in the first two volumes of his Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1932–38)—is conditioned from beginning to end by the contrast between time and eternity. This presupposition forms an element of idealism in Barth’s theology, which otherwise takes the form of a protest against the idealistic tradition. “Eternity” in this context does not suggest a prolongation of time, or eternity in the Biblical sense of a new age. As Barth uses it, the term rather refers to the purely transcendental, which has nothing in common with time and which therefore can be equally present in every age. The God-man relationship is conceived of as a direct parallel to the contrast between eternity and time.
God’s Word and God’s acts can never, therefore, be identified with human words or the historical events recorded in the Bible, but must rather be looked upon as purely transcendental. As far as theology is concerned, this suggests—among other things—that all so-called natural theology must be denied. The divine implies the negation of the human and can never be thought of as being implanted in human nature or even as having any point of contact with it. Furthermore, Barth came to look upon the Bible and the history of salvation as mere analogies to the transcendent Word and acts of God and as a witness (Zeugnis) to these. The preached and written Word—which alone spans the breach between God and man—does nothing more than to point (hinweisen) to the true divine revelation, viz., the Word of God in its absolute and transcendent sense.
In this we can see the basis for Barth’s use of the so-called dialectic method—by which one places different points of view in opposition to one another, in order that they might mutually cast light upon the matter in question. Barth insists that we are unable to clarify or give expression to the content of divine revelation by using direct statements, which would constitute a “dogmatic” approach. This can only be done, he believes, on the basis of a permanent confrontation of contrasting statements. In this way, one can achieve a balance between statements which affirm and statements which deny a given assertion. One thereby questions the answers and answers the questions. “There remains only … to relate both, positive and negative, to each other. To clarify the yes by the no and the no by the yes, without delaying more than a moment in a fixed yes or no; thus, for example, to speak of the glory of God in creation only to pass immediately to emphasizing God’s complete concealment from our eyes in nature, to speak of death and the transitory quality of this life only to remember the majesty of the wholly other life which meets us in that very death.” (Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, p. 172)
The idea that the proclamation, or the kerygma, forms the point of departure for theology is fundamental in Barth’s thinking, and many other modem theologians have borrowed this idea, including some who are otherwise far removed from the dialectical school.
Barth was himself a parish pastor when he made his debut as an author in the field of theology, and he feels that theology ought to serve the needs of the preaching function exclusively. Or, more specifically, he would say that the task of theology is to test and to guide the preaching function in a critical manner. This is above all the task of dogmatics, which Barth defines in the following words: “Dogmatics as a theological discipline is the scientific self-criticism of the Christian church concerning the content of its distinctive language about God.” (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, 1, 1)
Proclamation assumes a central position not only as the presupposition of theological activity but also because it serves as the point at which God’s Word confronts the listening congregation today. Thus it is that the divine-human encounter continues to take place, leading to decision and faith. Many modern theologians have combined this basic concept with existential philosophy, as, for example, in the Bultmann school. We hear a lot in our day about a “kerygmatic” theology, which is distinguished from a more historically oriented one and from the kind of theology which is content to provide a descriptive or critical analysis of the Christian tradition.
Barth’s concept of the Word of God leads us to his Christology. God’s Word, according to Barth, confronts man not only in the proclaimed message, but this points back to the written Word (the Bible), which provides the norms for preaching and the criterion against which preaching must be tested. Does this, then, mean that Scripture is the Word of God? Not in the direct sense, according to Barth—but Scripture, in its turn, refers to the “revealed” Word, viz., to the hidden God’s appearance in Christ. The Bible “bears witness” to the revelation which occurred with the coming of Christ. To “bear witness” (bezeugen) in this context means “to point in a definite direction beyond one’s self to something other” (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, 1, 14). The divine may not in any respect be put on the same level with anything temporal or human; the latter can therefore merely “point” to the former.
The chasm between God and man has been bridged over at one point, however, and that was in the Incarnation, which means that God’s eternal Word chose to assume human nature, and did so in Jesus Christ. This was an expression of God’s sovereign freedom, an act which occurred exclusively as a result of the exercise of divine freedom. Barth finds this illustrated in the Virgin Birth: the miracle of the Incarnation took place without any human cooperation.
The Christology which Barth develops from these premises occupies a central position in his dogmatics. Since no contact between the divine and human is possible apart from the Incarnation, the result is that all questions in the field of dogmatics are referred back to Christology. The relationship between God and man—the basic theme of theology (see above)—has been set forth in Christ in an exemplary manner. In Him we see reflected both God’s dealings with man and man’s obedience and elevation to the likeness of God. Creation has no significance other than to prefigure the act of God which was realized in Christ. Barth’s doctrine of the church, and his ethics as well, were also developed in accordance with his Christology; it is assumed that both serve to explicate the relationship between God and man which is illustrated in Christ’s person and work.
The manner in which Barth relates the teaching of predestination to his Christology is especially illuminating. Like the Reformed tradition to which he belongs, Barth accepts the concept of a double predestination. But the term “predestination” does not mean, according to Barth, that some men have been chosen to be saved and others to be lost; it refers, instead, to Christ, who at one and the same time represents God’s choice and rejection of man. The fate which befell Christ reflects an eternal inner-Trinitarian process by which God chose the Son, and in Him the human race, in that He rejected the Son and permitted Him to submit Himself to death in order that He might be raised up to eternal glory in and through the Resurrection. Predestination is therefore an eternal decision made by God, implying that men—all men—are admitted to salvation, while God Himself, in the form of the Son, takes damnation upon Himself.
This implies, according to Barth’s interpretation, that the New Testament report concerning Jesus of Nazareth is not in and by itself a message of salvation, but only a reference to—or an image of—something which took place in the eternal sphere as a process within the Godhead. Salvation is universal and, practically speaking, is conceived of as a transcendent occurrence to which the proclaimed Word can only be a witness (Zeugnis).
Barth looks upon the death and resurrection of Jesus as an analogy of an eternal process in which God rejects and chooses the Son. In the light of this interpretation, the earthly life of Jesus is, for the most part, relegated to a subordinate role. The rejection of Christ by God the Father is not made clear until the time of His death, whereas the Resurrection depicts His eternal election.
At the same time, that which occurred in the life of Christ serves as a paradigm for the salvation of all mankind. By gaining insight into eternal salvation, man comes to participate therein. This insight comes to man through the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, through the proclaimed Word.
Barth’s Christology finally results, therefore, in a kind of speculative doctrine of universal salvation. If one compares this concept with the variety of views held in the early history of Christianity, one discovers that Barth’s position is rather unusual: it contains both docetic and Nestorian tendencies. It is docetic insofar as it suggests that the Gospel message is but an illustration of an inner-Trinitarian event, exclusively divine in nature, and it is Nestorian insofar as the humanity of Christ is never identified with His divinity but is conceived of only as an analogy thereto. Or—to put it another way—the historical (the New Testament witness to Christ), which Barth takes very seriously in itself, is thought to have meaning only insofar as it gives expression to what Barth calls die Urgeschichte, i.e., the timeless event within the Godhead, the Father’s dealings with the Son.
The “Christocentric” facet of Barth’s theology involves the complete repudiation of every form of “natural” theology. As early as in his commentary on Romans, Barth attacked human religiosity (or natural religion), which is based solely on human experience and considers religion to be one aspect of this experience. All that is human must become as nothing in the presence of the divine Word, which comes “straight down from above” and thus invades human existence and confronts man with the need of making a decision.
When Emil Brunner asserted in Natur und Gnade (1934) that there must nevertheless be a point of contact in natural man for the proclaimed Word if man is to be influenced thereby, Barth responded with a categorical no. In a statement entitled Nein (1934) Barth dissociated himself not only from natural theology in its traditional form (the idea that man has a certain knowledge of God and also a natural insight concerning right and wrong) but also from Brunner’s concept of a “point of contact.” This controversy led Barth and Brunner to a parting of the ways. But Barth’s rejection of “natural theology” made a strong impact on contemporary theology anyway, even outside of the dialectical school. It was given expression, for example, in the Barmen Declaration of 1934.
When Barth began writing theology, he said that he was basing his work on ideas derived from Kierkegaard and Dostoevski, among others. In an earlier phase of his development he also related himself directly to contemporary existential philosophy, but he subsequently in Christliche Dogmatik (1927) dissociated himself from every type of philosophy. Just as the proclaimed Word is in itself able to awaken understanding in those who hear it, without assuming that there is some kind of a point of contact in the hearers, so, said Barth, ought one cultivate a theology of the Word without seeking for any contacts with philosophical doctrines and systems.
Barth’s doctrine of the Word and his Christology correspond to one another meticulously as one can tell from the structure of his ideas. God’s Word confronts us in Holy Scripture, but Scripture is not, in a real sense, God’s Word; it only witnesses thereto and points us to the eternal Word of God. By the same token, the Christ of history is neither God’s Son nor the Son of Man in the proper sense. He rather “illustrates,” and presents as by analogy, the deeds of the eternal Son of God and provides the pattern for man’s role vis-à-vis God. One can even go so far as to say that Christ—as a historical person—did not actually work out our salvation within the context of time, but that He only bears witness to (bezeugt) and proclaims the eternal salvation whose reality is found in God’s decree. (Cf. Regin Prenter in Studia theologica, XI, 1957, I ff.)
As a result of this, Barth’s view of salvation emphasizes knowledge: Christ’s death and resurrection have made known to man that eternal salvation which consists in that the Father first rejected and then elevated the Son. Those who recognize this have been reconciled to God. The history of salvation as recorded in the Bible is only a reflection of the eternal “history of salvation.” One learns to know the latter through the former, and it is thus, says Barth, that reconciliation takes place. Forgiveness of sin, justification, provides an analogy to and represents here in time that eternal salvation which alone forms the basis and the proper object of faith.
Paul Tillich
In the work of Paul Tillich (d. 1965) we find a theological system which is related to Barthianism in some respects but which is nevertheless structured in an entirely different way. Although born in Germany (where he taught at Frankfurt am Main and elsewhere), Tillich exerted his greatest influence in the United States (where he taught at Harvard and elsewhere).
Tillich proceeded on the basis of an older German philosophical tradition and combined this, in his eclectic system, with insight from existentialism and from Edmund Husserl and other philosophers. He was both a theologian and a philosopher of religion; the major problem dealt with in his books concerned the relationship between theology and philosophy, between revelation and empirical reality, as well as between theology and culture.
Ever since Kierkegaard’s concentrated attack on the Hegelian system, the philosophy of idealism and the type of thought that is based on actual human experience have come into focus as incompatible opposites. The uniqueness of Tillich’s work can be seen in that while he constructed his system in a strictly idealistic manner, he also incorporated into it an “existential analysis” by which he sought to utilize stimuli from existential thought. It must be said, however, that what Tillich has written about the human situation in relation to life’s ultimate questions (or about man’s “existence”) appears to be the exact counterpart of the content of his system. This would seem to suggest that the system is the dominant factor—that which determines the content of the existential analysis.
According to Tillich, that which forms our “ultimate concern” is the object of theology. In order to determine what this is, he employed the terminology of the old ontology: our ultimate concern is that which determines our “being or nonbeing.” God, who is “Being itself,” is the answer to man’s ultimate questions. Man’s own situation is alien in relation to actual reality. But inasmuch as God has entered into human existence, He gives man the possibility of discovering his destiny as the New Being, which is realized in Christ.
Tillich’s system is based, therefore, on a kind of ontology, which, it is assumed, provides the absolute answer to the questions which men raise as a result of their sense of alienation. The assumption that question and answer, system and existential analysis, are correlated one to the other is the essence of the methodological approach which Tillich applies above all.
The substance of Christian dogma is included in Tillich’s system, but its genuine character has in some way been lost in the process. It has been thoroughly reinterpreted and reduced to symbols which are used to illustrate man’s transition from a condition of alienation to the New Being. The fact that the union between God and man, between being and existence, is illustrated in the New Testament’s picture of Jesus of Nazareth is a coincidence. It could also be symbolized in another way. The historicity of Jesus’ earthly life, His death and resurrection, lack significance in the context of the system (cf. K. Hamilton, The System and the Gospel, 1963).
In a situation which has been colored both by the existentialism of Kierkegaard and by insight into Christianity’s historical basis, Tillich’s theological system may appear to be a dated remnant from an older idealistic tradition. But behind his confidence in a system of absolutes, and behind his metaphysical speculations, lies an apologetic interest—to present Christianity as the way out of the confusion of the present age, enabling men to experience a sense of wholeness, which, according to this same system, is the answer to man’s deepest needs.
Tillich has also sought, at the same time, to create a cultural synthesis, whereby humanism and Christianity could be brought together in complete harmony. In this respect his theology stands in sharp contrast to Barthianism. Tillich’s greatest theological work is his Systematic Theology (I and II, 1951 and 1957). A large part of his work was done in the field of the philosophy of religion.
Rudolph Bultmann; the Debate on Kerygma and History
An intensive theological debate was touched off in 1941 when the famous exegete Rudolph Bultmann (b. 1884, professor at Marburg) published a small volume entitled Neues Testament und Mythologie (which was one section of a larger work, Offenbarung und Heilsgeschehen). Numerous contributions were inserted into the discussion which followed, written by both theologians and scientists. The socalled Bultmann debate has involved a number of primary questions both in exegetical and systematic theology, and it constitutes one of the most important elements in the theological development of the postwar era.
In the above-named volume Bultmann asserted that the New Testament world view, together with its conception of demons and supernatural acts, of miracles, of the preexistence of Jesus, of the cataclysms of the last days, etc., is incompatible with modern man’s concept of reality. Bultmann refers to these elements in the New Testament as “mythological.” How shall these be interpreted? What ought the man with a modem education make of these? This is the problem as Bultmann sees it.
It is clear that in Bultmann’s view the mythological elements in the New Testament are not merely peripheral in nature—they also involve the essentials of the Christian faith. Because of this, it is not a satisfactory solution to do as liberal theology did, and merely eliminate the mythical in order to preserve the basic moral and religious ideas in the Bible. Neither can one make a sacrificium intellectus and accept the mythical as such, simply because it is found in the Bible. That would be repugnant to intellectual honesty and turn faith into a human achievement. Thus it was that Bultmann’s presentation resulted in a demand for the “demythologization” (Entmythologisierung) of the New Testament message. By using this term—which has so often elicited misunderstanding—Bultmann does not suggest that the mythological should be excised, but rather that it should be interpreted in accordance with its original purpose. When this is done, Bultmann says, the mythical element will fall of its own weight.
According to Bultmann, the demand for demythologizing is actually made by the myths themselves, inasmuch as they are not intended to describe external events or facts but rather to say something about human existence. They are to be interpreted anthropologically, not cosmologically—or, to use another of Bultmann’s own expressions, the demand for the correct understanding of the myths, by a process of demythologization, can be met only through an “existential interpretation.”
This implies that the message’s reference to the human situation, and its summons to man to reach a decision, is placed at the very center. Bultmann combines fundamental kerygmatic-theological concepts with points of view which he has deliberately extracted from contemporary existentialist philosophy, whose chief German spokesman, Martin Heidegger, was for a time Bultmann’s colleague at Marburg.
In this philosophy Bultmann finds a view of man which in essence agrees with the New Testament’s view. In his natural environment, man is subject to the powers of this world, to temporal interests, to the things he has at his disposal. His true destiny is to be found in release from this dependence, so that he can devote himself to the future without those feelings of anxiety which follow him as long as he is held captive by the temporal. This alteration in the human situation can take place through the message about Christ, who by His death represents the dying away from this world, becoming thereby the source of a new form of existence. The kerygma, the message of Christ’s death and triumph over death, offers the possibility of altering man’s existence; this is realized in the decision of faith, which is man’s answer to the appeal of the kerygma.
Such, in rough outline form, is the concept of human existence from which Bultmann proceeds. The existential interpretation is designed to describe the conditions of human existence and the possibilities which man has of altering his existence and becoming free. The goal is to provide man with a new understanding of himself (Selbstverständnis).
What Bultmann has intended to do thereby is to utilize the content of the Gospel by presenting it in a form which corresponds to modern man’s understanding of himself and his situation. As he sees it, the anthropology of existentialist philosophy not only represents the modern concept of reality; it also is in agreement with the New Testament’s own primary goal.
In some of his earlier works (e.g., Jesus, 1926) Bultmann—in harmony with the form criticism school—had emphasized that the gospels were not designed to provide a biography of Jesus but to present Jesus’ own message and that of the first Christian congregations. This attitude was in keeping with the basic concept of kerygmatic theology: it is through the proclaimed Word that man is confronted by the need for making a decision, and it is thus that he experiences the transition from unfaith to faith. The Word confronts man as a divine address, and not as so much factual information or as religious ideas.
Bultmann combines ideas from both form criticism and kerygmatic theology, and adds to them the anthropology of existentialist philosophy. It is against this background that he sets forth the demand for an existentialist interpretation of the New Testament.
Since 1941 Bultmann has further developed his theories and has provided a philosophical justification of his anthropology and his method of Bible interpretation (cf. Glauben und Verstehen, an anthology which presents Bultmann’s own theses in Vols. I–III, and Kerygma und Mythos [trans. Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans W. Bartsch; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961] I ff., which provides an ongoing documentation of the Bultmann debate).
It has already been made clear that Bultmann’s program stands in sharp contrast to that of liberal theology with its attempts to create a picture of the historical Jesus. In certain other ways, however, Bultmann stands rather near to the liberal tradition. That is true, for example, with respect to his use of the myth concept, which, in fact, remains unclear in his argumentation. This lack of clarity has colored the discussion of “demythologizing.” In the light of modern scholarship, “myth” denotes something which is unacceptable, and one cannot but wonder if this is a plausible basis for determining what makes for an adequate interpretation of Biblical texts.
An even more important facet of the Bultmann program is that which speaks of the existential interpretation. As many critics have pointed out, this approach rejects as unessential the gospels’ claim of factual information and eyewitness testimony. As far as Bultmann is concerned, the kerygma has a historical anchoring only insofar as it goes back to the person and message of Jesus. The substance of the kerygma, he feels, is independent of historical facts. The death and resurrection of Christ are of significance only in the sense that they symbolize the alteration of human existence which is offered as a possibility in the kerygma. Bultmann, by the way, acknowledges the Crucifixion as a historical event, but not the Resurrection. The statements concerning the Resurrection are merely expressive of the fact that so much significance was attached to the death of Christ by His faithful disciples, whose lives had undergone a decisive alteration.
Many of Bultmann’s own followers have in recent years dissociated themselves from these extreme conclusions and have more strongly emphasized the connection between the Jesus of history and the Christ of the kerygma. Bultmann himself, however, has retained the centrality of his existential interpretation, which implies that the question of the historicity of the individual events related in the gospels is not important. What is important is what the reports—be they mythical or factual—have to say about human existence, and the extent to which they can awaken man to making a decision.
Bultmann’s consistent utilization of ideas drawn from kerygmatic theology and existentialist philosophy has actualized as never before in the history of theology the question concerning the importance of historical evidence to the Christian faith. A large number of prominent contemporary theologians have devoted themselves to this problem, which has been treated on an exegetical basis as well as from the point of view of the history of philosophy.
One of the clearest and most basic alternatives to Bultmannism has been set forth by the Swiss exegete Oscar Cullmann (b. 1902, professor at Basel and Paris). Immediately following World War II Cullmann published a work entitled Christus und die Zeit, 1946 (trans. Floyd V. Filson, Christ and Time; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). This study was not directly involved in the ongoing debate; it rather examined, in a purely historical manner, the early Christian concept of time and set this against the Gnostic system of salvation. As it turned out, however, Cullmann’s conclusions were entirely opposed to the interpretation of the Bible recommended by the Bultmann school.
Cullmann demonstrated, among other things, that the Biblical description of the passing of time from Creation to Fulfillment (the history of salvation) presupposes a linear concept of time (in contrast to the cyclical scheme of the Gnostics) and that this view of history is basic to the New Testament. The unique event which is suggested or described in various ways is set forth as being decisive in the Gospel message. Those details which constitute the cardinal facts in the history of salvation also form the foundation for the salvation of mankind. According to the New Testament, the death and resurrection of Christ are at the very center of world history, which will reach fulfillment at the time of Christ’s second coming, when the world will be judged and the kingdom of God brought to completion.
This concept of time came into conflict with the Gnostic doctrine of salvation in the first centuries of Christian history. The Gnostic doctrine was set forth as a timeless message, in which reference was made not to past events as the basis of salvation but to certain general religious ideas, presented in mythological form.
In a later work, Heil als Geschichte (1965), Cullmann confronted the results of his research with Bultmann’s theology and examined more carefully the role played by historical facts in the faith and salvation of the individual according to the New Testament point of view. Cullmann’s major emphasis here is that the reference to historical facts which is included in the Christian confession does not suggest a disinterested objectivizing of the Christian faith; these facts are rather related to the certainty that they are of immediate relevance to the existence of individual men, inasmuch as faith implies that the destiny of individual lives is involved in the history of salvation as presented in the Bible. An “existential interpretation”—for which the reliability of historical evidence is of no significance and for which the history of salvation means nothing—is, on the other hand, synonymous with the transformation of Christianity into a Gnostic or idealistic system of salvation.
The present discussion of kerygma and history touches upon questions which are of vital importance for the entire interpretation of Christianity. As Cullmann has shown, this discussion at a number of points actualizes differences of opinion which were already current in New Testament times and which have recurred in different forms throughout the history of theology.
Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930), who was referred to above as a disciple of Albrecht Ritschl, made his mark above all as a church historian, with primary emphasis on the history of dogma, he dominated this area in his own lifetime and mastered the vast field of patristics and exegetics as no one else has ever done. His best known work, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (I–III, 1886–90, several later editions; trans. History of Dogma, ed. Neil Buchanan; New York: Bussell & Bussell, 1958) was the mature fruit of his many-sided historical research.
In a famous lecture series held in Berlin in 1900, published later under the title Das Wesen des Christentums (trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, What Is Christianity? Toronto: Mc’Clelland, 1958), Harnack sought to present a summary of what he considered the essence of the Gospel. If Wilhelm Herrmann (see above, pp. 376–77) emphasized above all an inner, personal experience of Jesus, who becomes real to man through the proclamation of the Bible, Harnack put greater stress on Christianity as a historical phenomenon. The timeless element in its message, the real substance of the Christian faith, is the same as Jesus’ original teaching, which can be derived from a reading of the gospels. The process of extracting the doctrinal content of a given document was, to Harnack, a purely historical task, and he looked upon the gospels as being for the most part authentic texts. Harnack summarized the proclamation or Gospel of Jesus under the three following headings, each of which could be thought of as containing the entire Gospel:
- The kingdom of God revealed as a present reality in the heart of man.
- God as Father, and man’s absolute value.
- The higher righteousness proclaimed by Jesus, i.e., the law of love.
Harnack’s concept of Christianity, like Herrmann’s, was characterized by a strong interest in apologetics. In a time when it seemed as though Christian dogma was being undermined by science, there were those who desired to set forth that which, independent of all scientific criticism, can be thought of as permanent and unchanging in the Christian message. The unusual thing was that Harnack’s historical interpretation of Christianity was refuted at many points by the very exegetical and patristic research which was done during the first decades of the 20th century.
Of what importance to the Christian faith is the history which the scientific study of the Bible has confided to us? This was one of the most burning questions confronting theology at the turn of the century. As we have already seen, Herrmann and Harnack, who were both disciples of Ritschl and members of the liberal school of thought, arrived at different answers. For Herrmann the ground of faith lay in the attitude of trust which comes into being when the picture of Jesus’ inner life is made real to a person through the words of the Bible. He therefore pointed from the historical to the timeless experience of a personal confrontation with Christ. For Harnack Christianity was above all a historical reality. Through the science of history one can find the Gospel, Jesus’ original proclamation, which, in its historical setting, is simultaneously a timeless truth, representing the ideal religion.
In the year 1892 Martin Kähler (professor in Halle, d. 1912) published a small book entitled Der sogenannte historische Jesus undder geschichtliche biblische Christus (trans. Carl E. Braaten, The so-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964). In this work Kähler approached the problem of faith and history in a way that presaged new trends in the field of theology. Kähler rejected the attempts of liberal theologians to construct a picture of the historical Jesus. Such efforts result in a falsification, inasmuch as the extant sources—above all, the gospels—were not designed to present a biography of Jesus in the modern sense of the term. They were rather intended to provide the foundation for the church’s proclamation of Christ. The purpose of the gospels was not to present a scholarly description of a person but to promote the proclamation that would establish the church and create faith. The Christ of faith is identical with the historical (geschichtlich) Christ to whom the Bible bears witness. Kaähler distinguished between historisch and geschichtlich in this context. By the former, he referred to that which the modern science of history incorporates into its supply of naked facts. The latter word, on the other hand, was employed with reference to the historical in its significance for humanity or for man in our time. According to Kähler, faith relates not only to the historical but also to something “beyond history,” i.e., to the eternal, which is decisive for man’s salvation and is revealed in the historical events to which the Bible bears witness.
Kähler’s book has retained its significance right up to the present time. His point of view was the portent of a number of theological tendencies which have since been asserted with great cogency. The exegetes of the so-called “form criticism” school, for example, took up the idea that the very nature of the Gospel was designed to serve its proclamation and was determined by the preaching about Christ which was current in the Christian community. This insight also gave shape to the basic idea of so-called “kerygmatic” theology, represented by Karl Barth and his many disciples.
There was an idealistic facet in Kähler’s thinking, for example his emphasis on that which is “beyond history.” In itself, this term could be interpreted as pointing exclusively to the transcendental, the eternal—that which lies “over” history. This is not the case, however. Kähler said that what is important for the Christian faith can be found precisely within the context of history, in the historical Christ of the Bible (totus Christus), and not merely in His inner life (as Herrmann claimed) or in certain timeless religious concepts contained in His preaching, as Harnack asserted.
The historical criticism of the Bible—which had begun long before this but did not become the dominant theological method until the end of the 19th century—might have seemed inimical to the Christian faith, insofar as this felt itself bound to a timeless and unchanging doctrine, given once and for all time in the Bible, and insofar as the Bible in its entirety was looked upon as containing pronouncements of an absolute kind. The solution of the problems raised by this new criticism of the Bible was a major concern for theologians active at the turn of the century. We have already noted how Martin Kähler sought to answer one of the questions involved by insisting that the so-called “historical” Jesus was a modem falsification. The actual, Biblical Christ is the Christ who is proclaimed abroad, who is living and present in the Christian congregation. The Christ in whom Christians believe and the Christ to whom the gospels bear witness is one and the same. A historical “critique” of the texts can never go back any further than to the original “testimonies to the faith,” and these must be looked upon as elements in the preaching of the first congregations.
Similar problems were also taken up by Einar Billing (professor at Uppsala, bishop of Västerâs, d. 1939), who clearly demonstrated that the Biblical revelation is linked up with historical facts, with God’s treatment of His people and with the life of Jesus, and not, as in the case of Greek wisdom, with a universal concept of knowledge. Even though the contrast between Greek thought and the Bible is not as fundamental or as significant as some have claimed, Billing’s discovery of what was later referred to as the “dynamic” concept of revelation in the Bible was of enduring value. This concept not only served to alter the way in which men look upon the Bible but also the manner in which the task of theology is understood. If our contact with the divine and eternal is brought about, according to the Bible, by God’s own involvement in history, and not via some timeless knowledge of eternal truths, then it follows that it cannot be the function of theology to present Christianity as a logically impeccable system; theology must in some way do justice to the historical and dynamic elements in the Biblical revelation.
Billing came to be a prominent figure in modem Swedish theology for other reasons as well. On the strength of a learned examination into Luther’s doctrine of the state (1900) he became the progenitor of modern Luther research in Sweden, a school which came to dominate Swedish theology in the 1920s and 1930s, even to a great extent in the systematic area. This “Luther renaissance,” as it is usually called, has made a significant contribution to Protestant theology in the 20th century. For Luther research has grown correspondingly on the continent as well, led by such church historians as Karl Holl and Heinrich Boehmer and by such systematicians as Carl Stange, Rudolf Hermann, and Paul Althaus.
In the discussion concerning the nature of the church, Billing developed (in a number of significant contributions) what he referred to as “the religiously motivated folk-church idea.” This idea was based on the territorial character of the Church of Sweden. All of Sweden is divided into parishes, and Billing asserted that such a system does much to give expression to the universality of the proclamation of grace. The church has the responsibility of preaching the Gospel to the entire nation. The religiously motivated folk church, said Billing, is not bound to the apparatus of a “state church”—and neither was his idea of the church based on the concept of a universal religiosity which is to form the foundation of the Christian proclamation. Billing’s ecclesiology was clearly directed against the free-church tendency with its concept of the church as an exclusive gathering of believers. The folk-church idea as set forth by Billing did not, however, clarify such matters as church discipline and the role of the Confessions as the basis of church fellowship.
The History of Religions School
When Adolf von Harnack gave his lectures on “What Is Christianity?” he asserted that a universally valid presentation of the Christian religion could be made on the basis of a purely historical examination of Jesus’ original message. Contemporaneous research in the exegetical field revealed another tendency, however, which appeared to contradict the presuppositions of Harnack and of liberal theology. This tendency emerged from certain theologians who were referred to as the history of religions (or comparative religions) school.
If one investigates the history of early Christianity by applying the historical method, one will find not a universal religion but a series of ideas and assumptions which are so alien to modern ways of thinking that they cannot be successfully transferred to our time and incorporated into our religious instruction.
Most of these foreign elements in early Christianity are of an eschatological and apocalyptic nature. Jesus and His disciples took these over from the Judaism of New Testament times. In a book on the kingdom of God concept in the preaching of Jesus (Die Predigt Jesu yore Reich Gottes, 1892), a young German scholar by the name of Johannes Weiss demonstrated, in a purely exegetical manner, that Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom of God envisioned a coming, eschatological reign of God, which was to become a reality at the imminent end of the present age.
This view represented a serious challenge to the liberal concept of the kingdom of God (as, e.g., in Ritschl; see above, pp. 374–76). The liberal school conceived of the kingdom of God as an entity in the present world, brought into reality by faith and increasingly manifested in the Christian community.
Johannes Weiss and his co-workers pointed out those Oriental and late-Jewish elements in early Christianity which are so foreign to the modern age. Interest in the historical context of religion then began, and Christianity came to be looked upon as a link in the development which resulted in part from ancient Oriental and in part from Hellenistic-Jewish religious history. But is it possible to accept this interpretation and yet insist that Christianity is a religion which is suited to the modem age and which satisfies modem religious needs? This became a real problem for the history of religions school. This school was sustained by a strong scholarly interest, and it helped to discredit many of the illusions which liberal theology entertained when it sought to adapt the Christian faith to modem thinking.
From a scholarly view the history of religions school was of great importance; it clarified the uniqueness of Christianity at many points. It was precisely against this background of a deepened study of the history of religions that it appeared particularly meaningful to investigate and describe Christianity in its historical uniqueness, without adapting it to modem rationalistic assumptions. The history of religions school did a great deal of valuable preliminary work in this area, even though it did not in itself reach any definite results of essential importance to the future. And a number of the men in this school finally ended up by espousing the concepts of liberal theology, especially when they were confronted with the task of presenting the actual message of Christianity.
The reason for this lack of the expected results lay perhaps above all in the fact that the picture which was given of the historical development of religion was to a large extent an invention, alien to the texts under examination. The stated purpose was not in keeping with Christianity’s own view of its original documents: the purpose was not to understand the distinctive nature of these texts but to use them as the basis for the construction of a history of the religion of Israel and of early Christianity. In this program lay both the strength and the weakness of the history of religions school.
Weiss’s discovery that the kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus was a future reality, waiting beyond this present age, was taken up and built upon by Albert Schweitzer (d. 1965) in a book entitled Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906; later editions were called Die Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung; trans. William Montgomery, The Quest of the Historical Jesus; New York: Macmillan, 1961). In this study Schweitzer interpreted Jesus’ entire career (and not merely some of His utterances) as being designed to achieve one purpose: to hasten the downfall of the present world order and thus call forth the kingdom of God.
When the expectations concerning the return of Jesus and the imminent breakthrough of the kingdom of God were not fulfilled, the content of the Christian message was gradually altered. All of the church’s doctrine, like the proclamation of the New Testament, must be understood in the light of this eschatological upheaval which was originally expected but then failed to appear.
Schweitzer’s thesis—referred to as the thesis of “consistent eschatology”—was built on an inadequate exegetical foundation and has subsequently been abandoned by scholars. But it aroused a lively discussion when first broached, and as a result it achieved major significance. Schweitzer emphasized as clearly as possible that Jesus’ purported original message was not something which could be applied in modern times; it belonged to an apocalyptic milieu which is alien to man today.
Schweitzer’s own understanding of Christianity as an existential religion had no relationship to the results of his own research into early Christianity. On the other hand, he selected a number of ideas out of German idealism and humanism and made the concept of “reverence for life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) the basis of his religious life.
Schweitzer was the most radical representative of the history of religions school, but there were many other prominent scholars who implemented its basic principles in their work. Among these were Hermann Gunkel (d.1932), who, among other things, made a significant contribution to the history of Old Testament literature in a commentary on Genesis (1901), and Wilhelm Bousset (d. 1920), who investigated the Christ concept of the ancient church, using the new history of religion as a point of departure. This was done in his book Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfäingen des Christentums bis auf Irenäus (1913).
The contributions made by the history of religions school in the area of Biblical research also inspired a strong new interest in universal religious history (Nathan Söderblom; Eduard Lehmann), as well as in the psychology of religion (cf. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, which came to be normative for modem empirical research in the field of religion).
A front-rank historian and philosopher of religion, who can also be considered a representative of the history of religions school, was Ernst Troeltsch (professor at Heidelberg and elsewhere, d. 1923). Troeltsch based his conclusions on a radical historical interpretation of Christianity. Christianity cannot be understood as the absolute religion, he said, but only as the historically highest form of the religion of personality development. Troeltsch wrestled with the problem of revelation and history. For him, this was a major question: How can one accept a consistent historical interpretation of Christianity and at the same time assert its salvatory power and its role in current preaching? Troeltsch sought to find a cultural synthesis and contemplated the concept of a natural religion. According to his view, all value judgments, religious as well as moral, are based on certain evident presuppositions in human reason (the religious a priori).
The significance of personal freedom and decision-making was clearly recognized by Troeltsch, but he could never solve the problem of relating this to the critical, empirically inductive view of history. In all of this, however, he anticipated later developments and pointed to tendencies which subsequently came forth with incomparable potency. This was true, for example, of the emphasis placed on Christianity as a proclaimed message which confronts the individual with the necessity of making a decision right here and now (dialectical theology), and also of the continued discussion concerning the justification of the historical interpretation of Christianity and its importance to theology.
The contributions made by the history of religions school to the sphere of systematic theology were of little value to the future and have been, for the most part, long since forgotten. But the methodology and the pure historical research of this group have proved to be of lasting significance.
Dialectical Theology
Immediately after the end of the first World War a commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans (Der Röerbrief, 1919, the Foreword, 1918) was published by a Swiss pastor by the name of Karl Barth (b. 1886, professor in Basel since 1935). In this book Barth lodged a sharp protest not only against contemporary theology but against the entire tradition which began to take shape with Schleiermacher and which anchored Christianity in human experience and looked upon faith as an element in the spiritual life of man. Der Römerbrief was also a protest against those schools which had transmuted theology into a science of religion and had held the historicocritical analysis of the Bible to be the only possible interpretation. Barth brought out a second edition a few years later (1922; the Foreword, 1921; sixth ed. trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, Epistle to the Romans; Oxford University Press, 1933), and this completely revised version can be considered the beginning of the new school which subsequently came to be known as dialectical theology. The man who worked most intimately with Barth in this school was Eduard Thurneysen (b. 1888, pastor in Switzerland and later professor in Basel). Other kindred spirits were Emil Brunner, like Barth a Reformed theologian (professor in Zurich, d. 1966), and the Lutheran theologian Friedrich Gogarten(b. 1887, professor in Göttingen since 1935).
During the 1930s Barth and Brunner came to a parting of the ways, and Gogarten too came to have reservations about Barthian theology. From that point on it became impossible to refer to dialectical theology as a unified entity.
For our present purposes we shall direct our attention to a number of basic ideas treated in the Barthian literature. In addition to the previously mentioned Römerbrief, Barth’s enormous productivity has resulted in the publication of such significant works as Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, 1925 (trans. Douglas Horton, The Word of God and the Word of Man; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957), a collection of propositions which throw considerable light on the early phases of dialectical theology; Christliche Dogmatik—Prolegomena, 1927 (the first, unfinished version of his dogmatics); Fides quaerens intellectum, 1931 (trans. Dan W. Robertson, Fides quaerens intellectum; New York: Meridian, 1962), a commentary on the theology of Anselm; Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1982 ff. (trans. Church Dogmatics, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark), the huge and as yet incomplete dogmatics, the 12th volume of which [Part IV, 3, 2] appeared in 1959.
Barth has also written on political questions. He was one of the leaders of the “confessing church” in Nazi Germany, and was ejected from that country in 1934. The so-called Barmen Declaration—which served the church as a confessional document in its struggle with Hitlerism—was based on Barth’s theology and was, to a large extent, the product of his pen. In subsequent years Barth has urged the church to reveal a greater spirit of openness vis-à-vis communism (Eine Schweizer Stimme, 1945).
In a notable contribution to the Baptism controversy (Die kirchliche Lehre von der Taufe, 1934; trans. The Teaching of the Church Regarding Baptism; Chicago: Alec R. Alienson, 1956) Barth, using the Reformed tradition as a point of departure, repudiated infant Baptism and recommended adult Baptism.
Dialectical theology was one of the results of the culture crisis which followed upon the conclusion of World War I; it involved, among other things, a violent reaction against the theology of the history of religions school. Barth did not reject the historicocritical interpretation of the Bible in itself, but he felt that it failed to accomplish its purpose because it occupied itself with peripheral concerns and ignored the real issues in the texts under consideration. As he made clear in Der Römerbrief, Barth intended to replace the mere philological and historical interpretation with a profounder “dialectical” exposition of the Biblical material itself. He found his examples primarily in the classical Christian tradition, as, for example, in Luther and Calvin. Barth’s interpretation of the Bible is not, however, a mere carbon copy of the Reformers’ work; the dialectic which he has found in the Bible is not, as in Luther, a contrast between God’s wrath and God’s grace, between the sin of man and the righteousness provided by God; it is rather a fundamental contrast between eternity and time, between God as God and man as man. “If I have a ‘system,’ it is that, to the highest possible degree, I keep my attention upon both the positive and negative significance of what Kierkegaard called ‘the infinite qualitative difference’ between time and eternity. ‘God is in heaven, and you are on earth.’ The relation of this God to this man, and the relation of this man to this God is for me both the theme of the Bible and the sum and substance of philosophy” (Der Römerbrief, Foreword to the second edition).
The application of this fundamental concept has, as a rule, resulted in the abnegation of the human, thereby making way for divine revelation, for the “wholly other,” which is revealed through God’s Word to those who in a spirit of humility are receptive to God’s acts and the message of the church.
Barth’s understanding of revelation—or the Word of God (which he treated in the first two volumes of his Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1932–38)—is conditioned from beginning to end by the contrast between time and eternity. This presupposition forms an element of idealism in Barth’s theology, which otherwise takes the form of a protest against the idealistic tradition. “Eternity” in this context does not suggest a prolongation of time, or eternity in the Biblical sense of a new age. As Barth uses it, the term rather refers to the purely transcendental, which has nothing in common with time and which therefore can be equally present in every age. The God-man relationship is conceived of as a direct parallel to the contrast between eternity and time.
God’s Word and God’s acts can never, therefore, be identified with human words or the historical events recorded in the Bible, but must rather be looked upon as purely transcendental. As far as theology is concerned, this suggests—among other things—that all so-called natural theology must be denied. The divine implies the negation of the human and can never be thought of as being implanted in human nature or even as having any point of contact with it. Furthermore, Barth came to look upon the Bible and the history of salvation as mere analogies to the transcendent Word and acts of God and as a witness (Zeugnis) to these. The preached and written Word—which alone spans the breach between God and man—does nothing more than to point (hinweisen) to the true divine revelation, viz., the Word of God in its absolute and transcendent sense.
In this we can see the basis for Barth’s use of the so-called dialectic method—by which one places different points of view in opposition to one another, in order that they might mutually cast light upon the matter in question. Barth insists that we are unable to clarify or give expression to the content of divine revelation by using direct statements, which would constitute a “dogmatic” approach. This can only be done, he believes, on the basis of a permanent confrontation of contrasting statements. In this way, one can achieve a balance between statements which affirm and statements which deny a given assertion. One thereby questions the answers and answers the questions. “There remains only … to relate both, positive and negative, to each other. To clarify the yes by the no and the no by the yes, without delaying more than a moment in a fixed yes or no; thus, for example, to speak of the glory of God in creation only to pass immediately to emphasizing God’s complete concealment from our eyes in nature, to speak of death and the transitory quality of this life only to remember the majesty of the wholly other life which meets us in that very death.” (Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie, p. 172)
The idea that the proclamation, or the kerygma, forms the point of departure for theology is fundamental in Barth’s thinking, and many other modem theologians have borrowed this idea, including some who are otherwise far removed from the dialectical school.
Barth was himself a parish pastor when he made his debut as an author in the field of theology, and he feels that theology ought to serve the needs of the preaching function exclusively. Or, more specifically, he would say that the task of theology is to test and to guide the preaching function in a critical manner. This is above all the task of dogmatics, which Barth defines in the following words: “Dogmatics as a theological discipline is the scientific self-criticism of the Christian church concerning the content of its distinctive language about God.” (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, 1, 1)
Proclamation assumes a central position not only as the presupposition of theological activity but also because it serves as the point at which God’s Word confronts the listening congregation today. Thus it is that the divine-human encounter continues to take place, leading to decision and faith. Many modern theologians have combined this basic concept with existential philosophy, as, for example, in the Bultmann school. We hear a lot in our day about a “kerygmatic” theology, which is distinguished from a more historically oriented one and from the kind of theology which is content to provide a descriptive or critical analysis of the Christian tradition.
Barth’s concept of the Word of God leads us to his Christology. God’s Word, according to Barth, confronts man not only in the proclaimed message, but this points back to the written Word (the Bible), which provides the norms for preaching and the criterion against which preaching must be tested. Does this, then, mean that Scripture is the Word of God? Not in the direct sense, according to Barth—but Scripture, in its turn, refers to the “revealed” Word, viz., to the hidden God’s appearance in Christ. The Bible “bears witness” to the revelation which occurred with the coming of Christ. To “bear witness” (bezeugen) in this context means “to point in a definite direction beyond one’s self to something other” (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I, 1, 14). The divine may not in any respect be put on the same level with anything temporal or human; the latter can therefore merely “point” to the former.
The chasm between God and man has been bridged over at one point, however, and that was in the Incarnation, which means that God’s eternal Word chose to assume human nature, and did so in Jesus Christ. This was an expression of God’s sovereign freedom, an act which occurred exclusively as a result of the exercise of divine freedom. Barth finds this illustrated in the Virgin Birth: the miracle of the Incarnation took place without any human cooperation.
The Christology which Barth develops from these premises occupies a central position in his dogmatics. Since no contact between the divine and human is possible apart from the Incarnation, the result is that all questions in the field of dogmatics are referred back to Christology. The relationship between God and man—the basic theme of theology (see above)—has been set forth in Christ in an exemplary manner. In Him we see reflected both God’s dealings with man and man’s obedience and elevation to the likeness of God. Creation has no significance other than to prefigure the act of God which was realized in Christ. Barth’s doctrine of the church, and his ethics as well, were also developed in accordance with his Christology; it is assumed that both serve to explicate the relationship between God and man which is illustrated in Christ’s person and work.
The manner in which Barth relates the teaching of predestination to his Christology is especially illuminating. Like the Reformed tradition to which he belongs, Barth accepts the concept of a double predestination. But the term “predestination” does not mean, according to Barth, that some men have been chosen to be saved and others to be lost; it refers, instead, to Christ, who at one and the same time represents God’s choice and rejection of man. The fate which befell Christ reflects an eternal inner-Trinitarian process by which God chose the Son, and in Him the human race, in that He rejected the Son and permitted Him to submit Himself to death in order that He might be raised up to eternal glory in and through the Resurrection. Predestination is therefore an eternal decision made by God, implying that men—all men—are admitted to salvation, while God Himself, in the form of the Son, takes damnation upon Himself.
This implies, according to Barth’s interpretation, that the New Testament report concerning Jesus of Nazareth is not in and by itself a message of salvation, but only a reference to—or an image of—something which took place in the eternal sphere as a process within the Godhead. Salvation is universal and, practically speaking, is conceived of as a transcendent occurrence to which the proclaimed Word can only be a witness (Zeugnis).
Barth looks upon the death and resurrection of Jesus as an analogy of an eternal process in which God rejects and chooses the Son. In the light of this interpretation, the earthly life of Jesus is, for the most part, relegated to a subordinate role. The rejection of Christ by God the Father is not made clear until the time of His death, whereas the Resurrection depicts His eternal election.
At the same time, that which occurred in the life of Christ serves as a paradigm for the salvation of all mankind. By gaining insight into eternal salvation, man comes to participate therein. This insight comes to man through the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, through the proclaimed Word.
Barth’s Christology finally results, therefore, in a kind of speculative doctrine of universal salvation. If one compares this concept with the variety of views held in the early history of Christianity, one discovers that Barth’s position is rather unusual: it contains both docetic and Nestorian tendencies. It is docetic insofar as it suggests that the Gospel message is but an illustration of an inner-Trinitarian event, exclusively divine in nature, and it is Nestorian insofar as the humanity of Christ is never identified with His divinity but is conceived of only as an analogy thereto. Or—to put it another way—the historical (the New Testament witness to Christ), which Barth takes very seriously in itself, is thought to have meaning only insofar as it gives expression to what Barth calls die Urgeschichte, i.e., the timeless event within the Godhead, the Father’s dealings with the Son.
The “Christocentric” facet of Barth’s theology involves the complete repudiation of every form of “natural” theology. As early as in his commentary on Romans, Barth attacked human religiosity (or natural religion), which is based solely on human experience and considers religion to be one aspect of this experience. All that is human must become as nothing in the presence of the divine Word, which comes “straight down from above” and thus invades human existence and confronts man with the need of making a decision.
When Emil Brunner asserted in Natur und Gnade (1934) that there must nevertheless be a point of contact in natural man for the proclaimed Word if man is to be influenced thereby, Barth responded with a categorical no. In a statement entitled Nein (1934) Barth dissociated himself not only from natural theology in its traditional form (the idea that man has a certain knowledge of God and also a natural insight concerning right and wrong) but also from Brunner’s concept of a “point of contact.” This controversy led Barth and Brunner to a parting of the ways. But Barth’s rejection of “natural theology” made a strong impact on contemporary theology anyway, even outside of the dialectical school. It was given expression, for example, in the Barmen Declaration of 1934.
When Barth began writing theology, he said that he was basing his work on ideas derived from Kierkegaard and Dostoevski, among others. In an earlier phase of his development he also related himself directly to contemporary existential philosophy, but he subsequently in Christliche Dogmatik (1927) dissociated himself from every type of philosophy. Just as the proclaimed Word is in itself able to awaken understanding in those who hear it, without assuming that there is some kind of a point of contact in the hearers, so, said Barth, ought one cultivate a theology of the Word without seeking for any contacts with philosophical doctrines and systems.
Barth’s doctrine of the Word and his Christology correspond to one another meticulously as one can tell from the structure of his ideas. God’s Word confronts us in Holy Scripture, but Scripture is not, in a real sense, God’s Word; it only witnesses thereto and points us to the eternal Word of God. By the same token, the Christ of history is neither God’s Son nor the Son of Man in the proper sense. He rather “illustrates,” and presents as by analogy, the deeds of the eternal Son of God and provides the pattern for man’s role vis-à-vis God. One can even go so far as to say that Christ—as a historical person—did not actually work out our salvation within the context of time, but that He only bears witness to (bezeugt) and proclaims the eternal salvation whose reality is found in God’s decree. (Cf. Regin Prenter in Studia theologica, XI, 1957, I ff.)
As a result of this, Barth’s view of salvation emphasizes knowledge: Christ’s death and resurrection have made known to man that eternal salvation which consists in that the Father first rejected and then elevated the Son. Those who recognize this have been reconciled to God. The history of salvation as recorded in the Bible is only a reflection of the eternal “history of salvation.” One learns to know the latter through the former, and it is thus, says Barth, that reconciliation takes place. Forgiveness of sin, justification, provides an analogy to and represents here in time that eternal salvation which alone forms the basis and the proper object of faith.
Paul Tillich
In the work of Paul Tillich (d. 1965) we find a theological system which is related to Barthianism in some respects but which is nevertheless structured in an entirely different way. Although born in Germany (where he taught at Frankfurt am Main and elsewhere), Tillich exerted his greatest influence in the United States (where he taught at Harvard and elsewhere).
Tillich proceeded on the basis of an older German philosophical tradition and combined this, in his eclectic system, with insight from existentialism and from Edmund Husserl and other philosophers. He was both a theologian and a philosopher of religion; the major problem dealt with in his books concerned the relationship between theology and philosophy, between revelation and empirical reality, as well as between theology and culture.
Ever since Kierkegaard’s concentrated attack on the Hegelian system, the philosophy of idealism and the type of thought that is based on actual human experience have come into focus as incompatible opposites. The uniqueness of Tillich’s work can be seen in that while he constructed his system in a strictly idealistic manner, he also incorporated into it an “existential analysis” by which he sought to utilize stimuli from existential thought. It must be said, however, that what Tillich has written about the human situation in relation to life’s ultimate questions (or about man’s “existence”) appears to be the exact counterpart of the content of his system. This would seem to suggest that the system is the dominant factor—that which determines the content of the existential analysis.
According to Tillich, that which forms our “ultimate concern” is the object of theology. In order to determine what this is, he employed the terminology of the old ontology: our ultimate concern is that which determines our “being or nonbeing.” God, who is “Being itself,” is the answer to man’s ultimate questions. Man’s own situation is alien in relation to actual reality. But inasmuch as God has entered into human existence, He gives man the possibility of discovering his destiny as the New Being, which is realized in Christ.
Tillich’s system is based, therefore, on a kind of ontology, which, it is assumed, provides the absolute answer to the questions which men raise as a result of their sense of alienation. The assumption that question and answer, system and existential analysis, are correlated one to the other is the essence of the methodological approach which Tillich applies above all.
The substance of Christian dogma is included in Tillich’s system, but its genuine character has in some way been lost in the process. It has been thoroughly reinterpreted and reduced to symbols which are used to illustrate man’s transition from a condition of alienation to the New Being. The fact that the union between God and man, between being and existence, is illustrated in the New Testament’s picture of Jesus of Nazareth is a coincidence. It could also be symbolized in another way. The historicity of Jesus’ earthly life, His death and resurrection, lack significance in the context of the system (cf. K. Hamilton, The System and the Gospel, 1963).
In a situation which has been colored both by the existentialism of Kierkegaard and by insight into Christianity’s historical basis, Tillich’s theological system may appear to be a dated remnant from an older idealistic tradition. But behind his confidence in a system of absolutes, and behind his metaphysical speculations, lies an apologetic interest—to present Christianity as the way out of the confusion of the present age, enabling men to experience a sense of wholeness, which, according to this same system, is the answer to man’s deepest needs.
Tillich has also sought, at the same time, to create a cultural synthesis, whereby humanism and Christianity could be brought together in complete harmony. In this respect his theology stands in sharp contrast to Barthianism. Tillich’s greatest theological work is his Systematic Theology (I and II, 1951 and 1957). A large part of his work was done in the field of the philosophy of religion.
Rudolph Bultmann; the Debate on Kerygma and History
An intensive theological debate was touched off in 1941 when the famous exegete Rudolph Bultmann (b. 1884, professor at Marburg) published a small volume entitled Neues Testament und Mythologie (which was one section of a larger work, Offenbarung und Heilsgeschehen). Numerous contributions were inserted into the discussion which followed, written by both theologians and scientists. The socalled Bultmann debate has involved a number of primary questions both in exegetical and systematic theology, and it constitutes one of the most important elements in the theological development of the postwar era.
In the above-named volume Bultmann asserted that the New Testament world view, together with its conception of demons and supernatural acts, of miracles, of the preexistence of Jesus, of the cataclysms of the last days, etc., is incompatible with modern man’s concept of reality. Bultmann refers to these elements in the New Testament as “mythological.” How shall these be interpreted? What ought the man with a modem education make of these? This is the problem as Bultmann sees it.
It is clear that in Bultmann’s view the mythological elements in the New Testament are not merely peripheral in nature—they also involve the essentials of the Christian faith. Because of this, it is not a satisfactory solution to do as liberal theology did, and merely eliminate the mythical in order to preserve the basic moral and religious ideas in the Bible. Neither can one make a sacrificium intellectus and accept the mythical as such, simply because it is found in the Bible. That would be repugnant to intellectual honesty and turn faith into a human achievement. Thus it was that Bultmann’s presentation resulted in a demand for the “demythologization” (Entmythologisierung) of the New Testament message. By using this term—which has so often elicited misunderstanding—Bultmann does not suggest that the mythological should be excised, but rather that it should be interpreted in accordance with its original purpose. When this is done, Bultmann says, the mythical element will fall of its own weight.
According to Bultmann, the demand for demythologizing is actually made by the myths themselves, inasmuch as they are not intended to describe external events or facts but rather to say something about human existence. They are to be interpreted anthropologically, not cosmologically—or, to use another of Bultmann’s own expressions, the demand for the correct understanding of the myths, by a process of demythologization, can be met only through an “existential interpretation.”
This implies that the message’s reference to the human situation, and its summons to man to reach a decision, is placed at the very center. Bultmann combines fundamental kerygmatic-theological concepts with points of view which he has deliberately extracted from contemporary existentialist philosophy, whose chief German spokesman, Martin Heidegger, was for a time Bultmann’s colleague at Marburg.
In this philosophy Bultmann finds a view of man which in essence agrees with the New Testament’s view. In his natural environment, man is subject to the powers of this world, to temporal interests, to the things he has at his disposal. His true destiny is to be found in release from this dependence, so that he can devote himself to the future without those feelings of anxiety which follow him as long as he is held captive by the temporal. This alteration in the human situation can take place through the message about Christ, who by His death represents the dying away from this world, becoming thereby the source of a new form of existence. The kerygma, the message of Christ’s death and triumph over death, offers the possibility of altering man’s existence; this is realized in the decision of faith, which is man’s answer to the appeal of the kerygma.
Such, in rough outline form, is the concept of human existence from which Bultmann proceeds. The existential interpretation is designed to describe the conditions of human existence and the possibilities which man has of altering his existence and becoming free. The goal is to provide man with a new understanding of himself (Selbstverständnis).
What Bultmann has intended to do thereby is to utilize the content of the Gospel by presenting it in a form which corresponds to modern man’s understanding of himself and his situation. As he sees it, the anthropology of existentialist philosophy not only represents the modern concept of reality; it also is in agreement with the New Testament’s own primary goal.
In some of his earlier works (e.g., Jesus, 1926) Bultmann—in harmony with the form criticism school—had emphasized that the gospels were not designed to provide a biography of Jesus but to present Jesus’ own message and that of the first Christian congregations. This attitude was in keeping with the basic concept of kerygmatic theology: it is through the proclaimed Word that man is confronted by the need for making a decision, and it is thus that he experiences the transition from unfaith to faith. The Word confronts man as a divine address, and not as so much factual information or as religious ideas.
Bultmann combines ideas from both form criticism and kerygmatic theology, and adds to them the anthropology of existentialist philosophy. It is against this background that he sets forth the demand for an existentialist interpretation of the New Testament.
Since 1941 Bultmann has further developed his theories and has provided a philosophical justification of his anthropology and his method of Bible interpretation (cf. Glauben und Verstehen, an anthology which presents Bultmann’s own theses in Vols. I–III, and Kerygma und Mythos [trans. Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans W. Bartsch; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961] I ff., which provides an ongoing documentation of the Bultmann debate).
It has already been made clear that Bultmann’s program stands in sharp contrast to that of liberal theology with its attempts to create a picture of the historical Jesus. In certain other ways, however, Bultmann stands rather near to the liberal tradition. That is true, for example, with respect to his use of the myth concept, which, in fact, remains unclear in his argumentation. This lack of clarity has colored the discussion of “demythologizing.” In the light of modern scholarship, “myth” denotes something which is unacceptable, and one cannot but wonder if this is a plausible basis for determining what makes for an adequate interpretation of Biblical texts.
An even more important facet of the Bultmann program is that which speaks of the existential interpretation. As many critics have pointed out, this approach rejects as unessential the gospels’ claim of factual information and eyewitness testimony. As far as Bultmann is concerned, the kerygma has a historical anchoring only insofar as it goes back to the person and message of Jesus. The substance of the kerygma, he feels, is independent of historical facts. The death and resurrection of Christ are of significance only in the sense that they symbolize the alteration of human existence which is offered as a possibility in the kerygma. Bultmann, by the way, acknowledges the Crucifixion as a historical event, but not the Resurrection. The statements concerning the Resurrection are merely expressive of the fact that so much significance was attached to the death of Christ by His faithful disciples, whose lives had undergone a decisive alteration.
Many of Bultmann’s own followers have in recent years dissociated themselves from these extreme conclusions and have more strongly emphasized the connection between the Jesus of history and the Christ of the kerygma. Bultmann himself, however, has retained the centrality of his existential interpretation, which implies that the question of the historicity of the individual events related in the gospels is not important. What is important is what the reports—be they mythical or factual—have to say about human existence, and the extent to which they can awaken man to making a decision.
Bultmann’s consistent utilization of ideas drawn from kerygmatic theology and existentialist philosophy has actualized as never before in the history of theology the question concerning the importance of historical evidence to the Christian faith. A large number of prominent contemporary theologians have devoted themselves to this problem, which has been treated on an exegetical basis as well as from the point of view of the history of philosophy.
One of the clearest and most basic alternatives to Bultmannism has been set forth by the Swiss exegete Oscar Cullmann (b. 1902, professor at Basel and Paris). Immediately following World War II Cullmann published a work entitled Christus und die Zeit, 1946 (trans. Floyd V. Filson, Christ and Time; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964). This study was not directly involved in the ongoing debate; it rather examined, in a purely historical manner, the early Christian concept of time and set this against the Gnostic system of salvation. As it turned out, however, Cullmann’s conclusions were entirely opposed to the interpretation of the Bible recommended by the Bultmann school.
Cullmann demonstrated, among other things, that the Biblical description of the passing of time from Creation to Fulfillment (the history of salvation) presupposes a linear concept of time (in contrast to the cyclical scheme of the Gnostics) and that this view of history is basic to the New Testament. The unique event which is suggested or described in various ways is set forth as being decisive in the Gospel message. Those details which constitute the cardinal facts in the history of salvation also form the foundation for the salvation of mankind. According to the New Testament, the death and resurrection of Christ are at the very center of world history, which will reach fulfillment at the time of Christ’s second coming, when the world will be judged and the kingdom of God brought to completion.
This concept of time came into conflict with the Gnostic doctrine of salvation in the first centuries of Christian history. The Gnostic doctrine was set forth as a timeless message, in which reference was made not to past events as the basis of salvation but to certain general religious ideas, presented in mythological form.
In a later work, Heil als Geschichte (1965), Cullmann confronted the results of his research with Bultmann’s theology and examined more carefully the role played by historical facts in the faith and salvation of the individual according to the New Testament point of view. Cullmann’s major emphasis here is that the reference to historical facts which is included in the Christian confession does not suggest a disinterested objectivizing of the Christian faith; these facts are rather related to the certainty that they are of immediate relevance to the existence of individual men, inasmuch as faith implies that the destiny of individual lives is involved in the history of salvation as presented in the Bible. An “existential interpretation”—for which the reliability of historical evidence is of no significance and for which the history of salvation means nothing—is, on the other hand, synonymous with the transformation of Christianity into a Gnostic or idealistic system of salvation.
The present discussion of kerygma and history touches upon questions which are of vital importance for the entire interpretation of Christianity. As Cullmann has shown, this discussion at a number of points actualizes differences of opinion which were already current in New Testament times and which have recurred in different forms throughout the history of theology.
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