Myth, History, and the Resurrection in German Protestant Theology

Hege

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498242264
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The Christian faith stands or falls with the confession that Jesus Christ is risen. While that assertion itself is perhaps uncontroversial, precisely what this confession means has been a subject of profound significance and immense controversy for centuries. Central to this discussion is the role of myth and history in the biblical witness and in the church's theological engagement with the confession that Jesus Christ is risen. This book traces key trajectories of German Protestant discussions of myth, history, and the resurrection from its earliest critical analysis in the work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus and David Friedrich Strauss to contemporary appraisals by Eberhard Jungel and Ingolf Ulrich Dalferth. At the center of this discussion stands Rudolf Bultmann, whose work on the resurrection sparked fierce debates that left a lasting impact on Protestant theology in Germany and beyond. The questions raised by these theologians continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of the nature and status of biblical texts, the integrity and truth of the Christian confession, and the meaning and significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for Christian faith and life at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

chapter one

Some Introductory Remarks

The Christian faith stands or falls with the confession that Jesus is risen. Christianity traces its origin to the proclamation of the first disciples that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, and Christians throughout the history of the church have confessed the decisive significance of this act of God. And yet for at least the last several centuries, many people both inside and outside the church have wrestled with this claim that God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead. The fundamental confession of the Christian church is characterized by this apparent paradox: the crucified and dead Jesus is now the exalted, living Lord. The twentieth-century German New Testament theologian Willi Marxsen, writing in the 1960s, a period of intense controversy in the German Protestant churches concerning just this question, succinctly summarizes the issues that will occupy us in the following pages:

Jesus is risen.

At this point there is complete agreement. There is no Christian who would not be able to give his [sic] assent to this statement. Nor is there any theologian—irrespective of the camp or school to which he belongs—who would not agree with it. This is a point perhaps worth noting in our present situation, and this fact alone would recommend the sentence as a starting point.

The unity which may be found here is not to be underestimated, even though we must immediately add that it does not take us very far. Why not?

We could answer quickly enough by pointing out that there is a distinction between what we say and what we mean by what we say . . . [W]e are easily inclined to read our ideas into words, and to think that ours is the only correct way in which the words can be used. But it is important to realize that other people express other ideas in exactly the same words. This means that our language is not unambiguous . . . When two people say the same thing it by no means follows that they must therefore mean the same thing; and so the same expression can sometimes actually cover up a dissension. This very thing can in fact be illustrated by our example. Our generally accepted statement “Jesus is risen” is necessarily followed by the question “what does this mean?” We must go on to define, to explain what the various concepts signify. And then the disagreement quickly shows itself.1

The confession that Jesus is risen raises a number of questions. What is resurrection? Is it the return of a corpse to normal physical life? Is it a transformation into a new body? Is it a bodily event at all? What sources or evidence do we have for the resurrection of Jesus? How reliable are those sources? Is the resurrection a historical event? Or is it something else? Is it something that happened once upon a time in the distant and receding past? Or is it a present reality? Or is it both? It is the task of Christian theology to determine just what this claim means; the history of theology bears witness to a number of disagreements about the meaning of the confession that Jesus is risen, disagreements that have erupted in a number of controversies resulting from theologians’ efforts to name, interpret, confess, and respond faithfully to the resurrection of Jesus.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead has been a focal point of a number of controversies within theology, especially after the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, with the concurrent emergence of rationalism and secularism, the debate over the resurrection moved beyond the confines of an intramural Christian discussion to include a more diverse number of conversation partners, so that during this period the debate was fueled by developments in the academic study of history, myth, literature, and science, alongside internal theological developments.

The debate over the resurrection of Jesus assumed the form it took in the twentieth century largely due to the introduction of critical reflection on history and myth in the nineteenth century. During this century theologians applied the newly developed historical-critical method to the texts of the Bible, while historians of religions compared Christianity with other religious traditions. The conclusions drawn from these investigations placed Christianity in the context of a pluralistic religious environment, while the critical spirit of the age allowed scholars to question what had typically been accepted as incontrovertible fact for centuries before. The results of these inquiries occupied a range from reaffirmation of the church’s ancient teachings, on the one hand, all the way to complete rejection on the other. These investigations forced many Christian theologians to recognize that simply handing on uncritically what had always been believed, despite the introduction of new tools for scholarship and new cultural and intellectual assumptions, was no longer possible. In light of this realization, many Christian theologians assumed the task of reinterpreting the doctrines and suppositions of Christianity in an effort to make them intelligible in new and often challenging contexts.

In the twentieth century, as Christians came to terms with the death of “Christendom” and a rapidly changing North Atlantic world, theologians renewed their efforts at making the message of the New Testament intelligible and meaningful to contemporary women and men. One of these theologians, Rudolf Bultmann, developed a program of demythologizing in recognition that the message of the New Testament is expressed in the mythical world-picture of the first century and thus is no longer immediately intelligible to modern people who assume a predominately scientific world-picture. Bultmann believed that there is a truth in the message of the New Testament that is expressed in this mythical world-picture, but that the message has to be demythologized in order to reveal its deeper meaning, expressing something profoundly true and meaningful about human existence.

As anyone familiar with this period of theology already knows, Bultmann’s efforts did not meet with universal approval. More conservative theologians decried him as a heretic who had taken away their Lord, protesting that he had sacrificed the message of the New Testament on the altar of secular philosophy.2 Other, more progressive theologians argued that Bultmann did not go far enough, believing that he failed to follow his own method to its logical conclusion and insisted on attributing the resurrection of Jesus to an act of God, which, they suggested, also belonged to the mythical world-picture of the ancient world.3 Regardless of their conclusions, both sides of the debate recognized that Bultmann had exposed a sensitive nerve in Christian theology and acknowledged that his questions would not soon disappear.

Bultmann’s methods and conclusions are certainly debatable, but Bultmann is most significant perhaps not in his conclusions but in the questions that he raised. A good question never disappears, and Bultmann raised probing and challenging questions. He sought to clarify the relationship between faith and history and he emphasized the importance of an existential encounter with the word of the gospel. He also recognized that there had been a fundamental and irreversible change in the operative world-pictures between the first and twentieth centuries (at least in the West), and he asked how something formulated within one conceptual framework of reality can be intelligible to people who share a completely different conceptual framework. Bultmann also recognized that, above all, theology is discourse about salvation by the God of Jesus Christ, and his theology exhibits this theocentric concern in both a christocentric and soteriological key. Therefore one of Bultmann’s most significant contributions was his insistence on the centrality of the word of the gospel, a word that confronts and addresses each person in their own situation and offers them the possibility of authentic existence.

Generations have passed since Bultmann wrestled with these questions, and yet theology continues to bear the mark of his influence. Theologians and biblical scholars have continued to wrestle with his program of demythologizing as questions of the relevance and power of the Christian gospel in our own time continue to confront us with their irresistible urgency. The resurrection of Jesus remains a burning question, as the continuing attention of biblical scholars, historians, theologians, as well as the sometimes contentious, sometimes fruitful dialogue between theology and science, remind us. Bultmann’s specter haunts the work of theology such that new generations will continue to wrestle with his questions and struggle with his conclusions.

The question remains for theology even today: what does it mean to speak theologically about the resurrection of Jesus? More specifically, how do the concepts of myth and history inform Christian understandings of the resurrection of Jesus?

This book is divided into three parts according to the chronological development of German Protestant engagement with these and related questions. The first part begins with a brief summary of the emergence of historical consciousness and history as an academic discipline (Wissenschaft) in the nineteenth century and beyond. Our guide in this section is Ernst Troeltsch, one of the most significant figures in the history of religions school in liberal theology at the turn of the twentieth century. The remainder of the first chapter considers two important rationalist and liberal critics of traditional modes of theologizing about the resurrection of Jesus. Hermann Samuel Reimarus and David Friedrich Strauss, each in their own way renowned and vilified for their work on these questions, will focus our attention on the topics of myth, history, and the resurrection, topics that also occupied Bultmann and his colleagues in the middle of the twentieth century.

The second part forms the heart of this study and features the work of Rudolf Bultmann on myth, history, and the resurrection of Jesus. The first chapter is a summary and analysis of Bultmann’s own constructive work and his framing of the questions and responses that would serve as the grist for succeeding generations of theologians and biblical scholars to work out their own approaches to the resurrection of Jesus, most often in dialogue with Bultmann and his legacy. The second chapter engages the debate between Bultmann and Karl Barth under the sign of “the whale and the elephant.” With the help of private correspondence between these two giants of twentieth-century theology, in addition to relevant publications by each, their debates on theological method and hermeneutics help to shed light on two divergent approaches to these enduring questions concerning the resurrection of Jesus.

The third and final section picks up the threads of these debates and follows them through the work of three important contemporary German Protestant theologians: Wolfhart Pannenberg, Eberhard Jüngel, and Ingolf Ulrich Dalferth. While Pannenberg has been well-known and generally highly regarded by at least two generations of American theologians, Jüngel and Dalferth are still not as familiar to American audiences as they rightly deserve to be. All three, in their own register, continue Bultmann’s work on the resurrection, but each brings unique questions and insights to bear on the topic, often leading to dramatically different conclusions that in significant ways mirror the differences between Bultmann and Barth, but in other, equally significant ways signal new trajectories that continue to this day.

1. Marxsen, Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, 14–15.

2. For example, the bishops of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany (VELKD) released a public statement to be read from the pulpit in each of their parishes on the Sunday before Advent, 1953. While not mentioning Bultmann by name, he is clearly the primary target of this statement. It reads, in part, “In recent years a new anxiety has arisen within the church, and with good reason. Some theologians in our universities, eager to find new ways to commend the message of the gospel to the modern world, have intended to ‘demythologize’ the New Testament, as they call it. In doing so, they are in danger of limiting parts of the New Testament or even of abandoning it altogether. They rightly perceive that the New Testament is couched in the language and thought forms of the age in which it was written. But we are bound to ask whether this movement is not leading to a denial of the facts to which scripture bears witness.” The statement goes on to defend the “purity of doctrine” expressed in the Apostles’ Creed, which will “strengthen and encourage us to live our lives amidst toil and tribulation.” Qtd. in Bartsch, Der gegenwärtige Stand der Entmythologisierungsdebatte, 1–2. ET: “Present State of the Debate.”

3. Schubert Ogden, an American student of Bultmann and one of the leading translators and interpreters of Bultmann’s work, offers just such a critique in his own work. See, for example, Christ without Myth.

Part I

Precursors to Bultmann

chapter two

History, Myth, and the Resurrection in Rationalist and Liberal Theology

I. History

The formal study of history as an academic discipline is a relatively recent development in the history of thought. The Greeks an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• A Note on Texts and Translations
• Chapter 1: Some Introductory Remarks
• Part I: Precursors to Bultmann
• Part II: Bultmann
• Part III: After Bultmann
• Bibliography