After a couple of years I finally finished reading through, David Congdon’s tome, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology. It comes in at a total of 953 pp., including the end matter (the body of the book covers 856 pp.); so not a quick read. This post is not intended to be a comprehensive review or even a review at all. Instead this will simply be concluding impression as I move on past Bultmann and Congdon. If you are interested in reading my engagement with Congdon along the way, then go to my ‘David Congdon’ category, and you will find a multitude of posts engaging with the content of this book.

My basic impression of Bultmann’s theology and methodology is this: It is unnecessary to ‘demythologize’ the kerygma, rather we are in need of being demythologized by the Gospel. In other words, the weltbild or world-picture at the time of the writing of the New Testament, in particular, is not in need of being deconstructed in order to get at the pure kernel of the kerygmatic reality. This is the contention of Bultmann, and Congdon; viz. the Gospel should not be collapsed into its cultural world-picture, instead it needs to be ‘demythologized’ and translated, thus transpropiated into its now received weltbild in the 21^st century. Bultmann (and  Congdon) maintain that the kerygma is misunderstood when it is too closely wedded to its original historical milieu; i.e. under the literary, socio-historico-politico conditions present at the time. As such this mythology needs to be demythologized, deconstantinized in a way that allows the message and fresh reality of the Gospel to shine through in all its transcendent glory as that confronts us anew in our own existential existence in the present. It is only by the apperception of faith that the Gospel reality is known, and that is an apperception not contingent upon the mythos and cultural locatedness of the Gospel’s historical iteration in the first coming of Christ. To put it in Lessing’s terms: the Gospel’s reality and explication is not contingent upon the accidents of history, but through demythologizing its esse[ntial] reality can be known and forever experienced through the approach of the faith seeking heart.

Underneath Bultmann’s approach, as with any modern theologian of the time, is a serious commitment to the Kantian epistemology. As Congdon points out, Bultmann was doing his own project; but it is clear that Kant’s dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal remains an ever present voice. Further, there is, as with Barth, a significant allergy to natural theology in Bultmann’s way. But he goes to unnecessary lengths in an attempt to squash the possibility for natural theology to seep in and undercut the analogy of faith. It is unnecessary, in my view, to fear natural theology and metaphysics to the point that the theologian is led to renounce any sort of good basis in the protological norm of creation itself. This is what Bultmann attempts to do with his emphasis on the eschatological nature of his dialectical theology. That is, he wants all of Christian reality to breath and move from the eschatological reality of God to the point that all historical reality prior is gutted of any concrete meaning vis-à-vis the Gospel, who is the Christ. This is why Bultmann so emphasizes the faith in the kerygma, and deemphasizes things like the historical and concrete reality of the bodily resurrection of Christ. If the resurrection of Christ can be located in the normal or profane history of nature, then God has been subjugated to or made a predicate of nature. In order to get around this, Bultmann constructs a whole elaborate process of identifying myth, and a way for demything the husk which the myth represents. Which is to say: the Gospel or kerygmatic reality can never be contained by its natural reception. The fear for Bultmann (and Congdon) is that nature would lay hold of revelation, rather than revelation lay hold of nature. I understand and appreciate this fear, but it is unnecessary to go to the lengths that Bultmann does in order to escape this dilemma; Barth does much better in this complex by focusing on a Chalcedonian pattern for negotiating with revelation and nature in the hypostatic union of the Godman, Jesus Christ.

There are emphases and themes in Bultmann’s theology that I find helpful in regard to critique of natural theology, and a focus on the faith of Christ. But the lengths he goes to in order to undercut natural theology, driven by his modern commitment to an anti-metaphysical mode, leads him to hermeneutical positions that are too extreme; extreme to the point that they end up undercutting the Apostolic understanding of the Gospel as presented in the New Testament. And this is precisely to the point, Bultmann (and Congdon) maintain that the Apostolic times, should not be understood as the absolute form of the kerygmatic reality. So, Bultmann wants to extract the kerygmatic message from its original giveness and form in Second Temple Judaism, and translate it into its new forms in the 20^th, or now 21^st century (which remains an ongoing project). In this way, and this is a critique: the Gospel reality essentially becomes contingent on whatever cultural moment the receiver inhabits as they are confronted with the Gospel proclamation. Bultmann’s approach presents us with an extreme form of Gospel relativism by presuming that he has been able to penetrate the hull of the Gospel (its historical mythos), and find its essence to the point that there can no longer be anything normative about the forms within which the Gospel originally presented itself within (like in the ‘fullness of time’ as we find in Galatians 4). There is an ethical/moral implication to all of this that fits well with the suspicious hermeneutic of Post Modernity, but not does not sit well with the Gospel’s own self-understanding and sufficiency as that is presented in the Apostolic Deposit of the New Testament witness. As noted: the Apostle Paul believed that the Son of God in Jesus Christ came at just the right [fullness of] time wherein the Gospel reality could break-in and ‘turn the world upside down.’ The Apostle Paul, let alone Jesus himself, had no apparent self-understanding that the socio-cultural milieu within which Christ came was insufficient for bearing the weight of the Gospel hope. They never seemed inclined to deconstruct or demythologize the Old Testament canon through which the Christ event comes to make sense. They didn’t look for a kerygmatic essence abstract from its historical givenness.

I might share more impressions in days to come. But these are some initial ones. Congdon anticipates many of these push backs, but that does not mean his answers are sufficient or that they overcome such push back. One contemporary push back, among others that Congdon deals with, comes from Helmut Thielicke. Thielicke’s push back to Bultmann is similar to what I just sketched above. Congdon’s response, in my view, ends up being circular insofar that he simply privileges an anti-metaphysical anti-natural theological mode as a ‘just is’ the way things are (as if a basic given). But for my money, we want to examine the way that Jesus and the Apostles themselves engaged with the Old Testament witness. Did they attempt to demythologize its witness in the way that, Bultmann attempts to? Even if they only did that in an inchoate way, did they in fact engage in this sort of practice? Nein. But they were just human after all, and this is the response that Congdon would most likely push back with. With reference to Christ there is also a serious commitment to a kenoticism, and thus marginalization of Christ as simply human in regard to what he knew and how he operated. This would be the way Congdon and Bultmann might get around an appeal to Jesus’s approach to the Old Testament; they would just say: ‘yeah, Jesus himself was a product of his own mythological times, and an appeal to Him does nothing but confirm our modern need to demythologize even Jesus himself.’