Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.3 -- Barth and Bultmann

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1. Last week, I mentioned that I would eventually get to Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). I decided that this week was actually a good time.

Bultmann was quite the boogie man in seminary, another person for me to mock. Certainly someone for Wang to mock. Why? Because he didn't think that the resurrection was historical.

Wang's arguments for the resurrection have blurred in my mind with Jimmy Dunn's, my Doktorvater. Dunn's book on the subject was The Evidence for Jesus. 

The historical argument for the resurrection hangs on two key points: 1) the empty tomb and 2) the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Both seem beyond reasonable doubt to me. That is to say, the body of Jesus was not to be found on Easter Sunday, and a lot of people were convinced that they had seen Jesus alive thereafter. 

A force multiplier for the second point is the fact that 1) they were not expecting a resurrection and 2) many were so convinced that they were willing to suffer and die for that belief.

A corroborating argument for the first -- one that I may have first heard from Wang -- is that the rumor in Matthew 28 that the disciples stole the body only makes sense if in fact there was no body to be found.

Bultmann did not believe that the resurrection really happened in history.

2. However, if God takes the heart into account, Bultmann was actually trying to save Christian faith in his own way. That is to say, his head told him that the "Jesus of history" was not the "Christ of faith." He believed, like Albert Schweitzer, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who died with great disappointment.

But Bultmann believed in the "Christ of faith" as he understood him. He believed that the resurrection was a metaphor or a parable for an existentialist choice. I'm sure that many of you are thinking, "What are you talking about?" Welcome to seminary.

Existentialism is a philosophical school that basically holds that we have to choose the meaning of life. For Kierkegaard, this is a leap of blind faith. It is a very personal choice. For 1950s existentialists like Sartre or Camus, life in itself is actually meaningless. But that's the glass is half empty way to look at it. The positive way to think of it is that we can pick any meaning we want.

Victor Frankl, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, put it this way, "A man can live with any how if he has a why." Your "why" could be any number of things as long as you truly and wholeheartedly believe in it.

3. For Bultmann, the resurrection was the ultimate symbol of finding meaning out of meaninglessness. It was a metaphor for meaning rising from the dead meaninglessness of existence. To be raised was to find authentic existence in the midst of a dead world.

You might remember me mentioning Hendrikus Boers at Emory beginning his sermons with, "Let me tell you a myth" before then preaching a perfectly wonderful sermon. Boers had studied under Bultmann at Marburg, and he was echoing him with this line. But "myth" for Bultmann was not the hamfisted myth of David Strauss. A myth for Bultmann and Boers was a meaning-expressing story, a story that expressed a fundamental truth or mystery of life.

So when Bultmann said that the resurrection was a myth, he was saying it was true in a symbolic way. To him, it was the consummate expression of humanity's search for meaning in a meaningless world.

If God ever looks at the hearts of people who's heads are wrong, then we may find a once confused Bultmann in heaven. During the Nazi regime, Bultmann -- like Bonhoeffer -- was part of the confessing church. (Bonhoeffer too was not exactly orthodox, by the way)

There is an unpleasant truth here. Unorthodox thinkers sometimes turn out to be more in tune with the heart of God than some conservative ones. I stayed in the home of Frau Else Michel when I was in Germany in 1995. Her husband, the great conservative Hebrews scholar Otto Michel, was initially in support of the Nazi cause. Only when it got to a certain point did he realize his error. He would spend the rest of his life after the war working toward reconciliation between Jews and Christians.

I wish my German had been better, but I did understand her when she mentioned that Bultmann had once stayed in their home. She smiled as she said with understatement, "Natürlich, er war ganz anders als wir" ("Of course, he was entirely different from us").

There is something about conservatism that regularly falls for the strong man. Kristin Kobes du Mez has at least captured some elements of the equation in Jesus and John Wayne. I suspect that part of the issue is taking some of the anthropomorphic elements of the Old Testament too literally. There is also perhaps some confusion of tradition with faith.

So, there is the paradox of two men. One was orthodox but initially fell for National Socialism. The other was a heretic but saw right through it. I believe this is a story that regularly repeats itself.

4. What convinced me to go ahead and write on Bultmann was the memory that my project for Wang was to evaluate Bultmann's History of the Synoptic Tradition. It was an overly ambitious project (as usual) and I did not succeed at working through it. It was too far beyond me at that time. (Too bad ChatGPT wasn't around -- I could have had it explain the book to me.)

I don't remember much from the book except I think that Bultmann argued that the Transfiguration might have originally have been a resurrection appearance story.

I would overestimate my abilities again in Dr. Wang's Romans 1-8 class. We were all supposed to pick a commentary and follow along as we worked through Romans. I picked Otto Kuss' Romans commentary in German.

What German did I know? Well, I had dabbled with it at home, checking out a German language record over a summer from the Broward County library. And I had taken Dr. O'Malley's German for Reading Knowledge course, which used Jannach as a textbook. Suffice it to say, I was grossly underprepared to read a German commentary on Romans.

It is mostly my fault, but I didn't get much out of that class. I believe David Smith might have also been in that class. One incident I do remember is when a former missionary at the end of class asked Dr. Wang about another possible way of reading a passage. Although he repeated himself more than once, Dr. Wang couldn't quite see what he was saying.

Finally, I think on the third pass at it, Dr. Wang said with a grin, "Oh, oh, oh, oh. I see what you're saying. I'll come back next time with three more reasons why I'm right." He was a good natured soul.

5. In my senior year, I took Steve Seamands' course on Karl Barth (1886-1968). I did not get Barth. I wanted to. I remember asking in class once, "So is Barth saying we have a God shaped vaccum waiting for God?" Dr. Seamands explained that that would be quite the opposite of Barth's approach.

Barth, like Bultmann, was part of neo-orthodoxy. Both, in their own ways, were trying to reinvigorate faith after critical German scholarship had more or less wittled it away. The Liberal Christianity before them had the ethic of Christianity without the orthodoxy.

Bultmann reasserted faith in a non-literal way. Barth did it by way of "dogmatics." To me, his system hung in mid-air without any support. Apologetics was anathema to him. He was in a sense an incredibly verbose fideist -- someone who holds that you just have to believe.

I was nevertheless intrigued by the early Barth of the 20s who focused on the otherness of God and the necessity to know God by analogy. This seemed to me a more humble version of Aquinas. Of course, Barth would then go on to write his immense multivolume Church Dogmatics.

I also would like Barth's emphasis that Jesus is the Word of God (John 1:14). This is of course both biblical and orthodox. The fundamentalism of my circles, however, ran the risk of seeing the Bible as more the word of God than Jesus himself. This may also be one of the reasons why conservatives sometimes lose focus. I have heard a conservative say to stay away from anyone who might say Jesus is the Word of God in comparison to the Bible.

Preaching, then, for Barth, was a third level word of God.

6. Barth was really cool in the 80s and even in the 2000s when I was teaching at IWU. We had a Monday reading group and one semester we read portions from the Dogmatics, with Chris Bounds to lead and others like Keith Drury and Steve Lennox along for the ride.

In the end, Barth didn't speak my language. I think faith should be able to cut the mustard of evidence and reason if it is legitimate. Barth strikes me as a very smart dodger. The post-liberals of that era strike me the same way. They gave up on the evidence game. Or they used Gadamer to cloud the truth in uncertainty. The subconscious goal in each case, it seems to me, is to shield faith from evaluation.

But if faith is true, it should be able to stand up to such scrutiny, it seems to me.