By Harold W. Anderson, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div.
It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.
Rudolf Bultmann (1961), “New Testament and
Mythology,” p. 5
David Congdon is a contemporary theologian whose work is heavily influenced by Bultmann. His interpretation of Bultmann is not only interesting, but also one of the better ones avialable.
I remember the first time I read this statement taken from Bultmann’s earthshaking article written around 1941. It was a shocking statement. Bultmann is in effect saying that the New Testament world is out of sync with modern living, i.e., we cannot use modern electronics and still believe in things like spirits and miracles, which seems to render much of the New Testament moot. If what Bultmann spells out in his short essay is true, then what is left? What is there to believe in? Yet, at the same time Bultmann’s claims seem to resonate with those of us living in the 1970s when I first read his essay. The modern world did not seem to be dependent upon biblical “mythology” nor did technology seem to be consistent with the claims of the New Testament. The dilemma seemed to be this: Accept the world of science and deny the biblical world or accept the biblical world and reject the world of science, the biblical texts making seemingly absurd claims according to the workings of science. Indeed, everything I experienced seemed to be more consistent with science than it did the mythological world of the New Testament.
When I first read Bultmann’s work, I was an undergraduate preparing to work on an M.Div. (Master of Divinity), which was important if one wanted to become a minister. That was why this statement was so impactful. How can a minister teach and preach from the Bible when its veracity is called into question by the technology and science that even the Church depends upon for its day-to-day operations? There seems to be an integrity issue involved here. Did I tell people what they wanted to hear? Or did I tell them the things that my education had taught me about the mythological structure of the New Testament? And if I told them the latter, would they listen? Would they change their minds heeding what I had to say, or would they brand me a heretic?
Helmut Thielicke (1961), a contemporary of Bultmann, and in my mind one of the most brilliant pastoral theologians of our time, also raises the issue of integrity in his response to Bultmann’s essay. According to Thielicke, Bultmann’s challenge is the most serious one facing theologians. He claims that all theologians, pastors, and those working within the Church “draw distinction[s] between mythology and truth” (p. 140). The only difference is where we decide to draw the line, drawing it depending upon our school of thought. Thielicke writes,
The vagueness—nay, more, the downright insincerity–of much modern preaching may be gauged from the way we tend to draw the line between truth and mythology at different points, at one point in the study and another in the pulpit. We tend to be influenced by practical considerations. How much will the congregation stand? This leads to insincerity and is not a healthy sign (p. 140).
If the preaching of the Church, in other words, is to have any authority for modern people, then ministers and theologians must be honest about the truths they preach and teach. It is not just a matter of the mythological structure of the New Testament that casts aspersions upon the message of salvation preached by the Church. Ministers need to be honest; if they are not, their message should fall on deaf ears, for what they preach is a lie betraying the message of the one they profess to be at the heart of the Gospel…Jesus as the Christ.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
While I know many ministers who are committed to telling the truth even if uncomfortable, I fear that many other ministers, especially in those traditions that attribute the authority of truth to the subjectivity of experience, find it difficult to even imagine that such lines should be drawn. On the other hand, there are too many ministers, I also fear, that, in the course of their ministry, take the easy path and tell their congregants what they think they want to hear so that their bottom line will not be jeopardized. Failing even to comprehend Søren Kierkegaard’s (1974) pithy claim, “truth is subjectivity,” these minister’s listen to a subjective “voice” that they take for the word of God. Far from being God, however, this voice is actually their own inner voice that all too often draws upon self-indulging emotions to decide what is true through an eisegetic reading of the Bible. The result is an understanding of the “gospel” that can mean just about anything as long as the lessons they proclaim are aligned with their ideological ends. This gospel, then, is devoid of truth and it lacks dynamis, the authority attributed to the itinerant minister, Jesus, during his time on earth. How else could these paragons of subjectivity make the preposterous claims they make? The mythological structure of the biblical passages seemingly gives them permission to transform the Jesus who told the rich man to give all he has to the poor into a Jesus who is the purveyor of riches and greed. How else can they preach sermons that fly in the face of science by claiming that the earth is just a little more than 7,000 years old and that somehow God’s wrath is revealed through global warming? How else could this branch of Christianity continue to support a misogynistic, bigoted, narcissist who is a habitual liar and preaches a message of hate and vengeance? How else could these “Christians” believe the conspiracy theories spun off the “Big Lie” by this twice impeached president who now faces 91 felony charges? How else could Lance Wallnau (2016) proclaim that Trump is the new Cyrus, God’s new Messiah called to “make America Great again,” a claim he bases upon a very spurious reading of Isaiah 45? My answer is that the only way they do so is because they fail to draw a line between myth and truth, between a reasonable interpretation of Scripture and fantasy, which is aligned with their ideological ends.
Does this mean that the Bible, and especially the New Testament should be discarded as an antiquated document no longer helpful to faithful living? I don’t think so. But it does mean that we need to be honest about the stories and like Bultmann long ago attempted, make a distinction between the mythological structures of the Bible and scientific claims about the world in which we live. This is not to say that science always has it “right,” but it is to say that a helpful alliance between faith and science can be achieved without sacrificing the integrity of either. The basis of this alliance, I hold, is to cease treating the Bible as if it were a book of science and understanding the nature of faith as illuminated by the mythological structures of the biblical text. If we do this, perhaps we can gain a new appreciation of faith that deepens the almost myopic singularity of the empirical sciences by understanding how faith empowers reason and reason illumines faith. Truth and/or authority is no longer under the control of religion or science but results from the alliance between the two.
While I cannot speak from the place of the empirical sciences, I can get at this issue from the side of theology and its dependency upon the mythological structures of the biblical texts. Since the formalization of the Christian canon around 360 C.E., the Church has accepted the canon as the fundamental ground of its authority. In the biblical text, the Church has held, God’s plan of salvation is revealed. Put differently, the Bible is the singular document from which fideistic truth and ecclesiastical authority is derived. While this may sound as if it tidied things up a bit giving clarity to what can only be called an early history of theological and ecclesiastical chaos, it did not. The 39 books comprising the “Old Testament” and the 27 books of the New Testament were taken from literally 100s of texts rendering the remaining texts historical artifacts at best, or heretical documents at worse. But of the 66 that made it into the canon, their meaning has not been uniformly understood yielding a myriad of differing interpretations over things as fundamental as the nature of God, the significance of Jesus and the meaning of the sayings attributed to him as well as the texts about him. Are any of these interpretations more authoritative than others and if such a claim is made, how is it substantiated? Drawing upon a host of extra-biblical texts both religious and philosophical, theologians and church leaders developed different traditions, which were at odds with each other. Throughout the history of Europe, the Church developed a symbiotic relationship with the State until the two became one. The result of all this is that from the earliest days of its formation, the Church fragmented into warring factions, with very few of its leaders willing to compromise with anyone who thought or believed differently. Given this, a gospel of love and peace has unfortunately all too often ended in strife, hatred, and military conflict with any who think or believe differently. The conflictual nature of Church history has led theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg to conclude that without religion, “you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
To remedy this, biblical scholars especially within academia began to develop different methods of biblical interpretation in an effort ultimately to separate one’s subjectivity from a more objective reading of the biblical texts. The Bible, they claimed, was written by people located at a particular time in history and were therefore conditioned by the zeitgeist of their age. This was something that the biblical authors would have been hard pressed to free themselves of and therefore much of what we read in the Bible reflects their historical epoch and should be read accordingly. Like other books of antiquity, the biblical texts are most fully and objectively understood when emersed in their respective historical periods and interpreted according to the cultural biases of their time. Comparing these documents to other historical artifacts of the period, however, revealed one somewhat startling fact. The biblical texts are not histories in the modern sense of that term and must not be read as historical documents. Nor should they be read as scientific texts. Bultmann got at this by saying the biblical texts—far from being historical or scientific texts—were documents reflecting the mythologies of their time. But what does this mean? If we do not take the mythology of the biblical texts as authoritative, then what in the Bible is?
Commenting on Bultmann’s demythologizing project, Amos Wilder (1950) notes the following:
Mythological elements are an inseparable aspect of the message. Thus, the need not of elimination but interpretation of these elements became very pressing, especially since the new emphasis on the kerygma has threatened to revive an uncritical biblicism in some quarters (p. 114).
There are at least three important points to note in this quote. The first is the inseparability of myth from message, which means that all we have are the biblical texts and the language in which they are expressed. We cannot rewrite the texts. Rather, we learn how to read these texts to discern the message and not the myth. The second is to take note of what he calls “the kerygma,” the proclamation of the newly established Jesus movement, the substance of which is expressed in the mythological language of the New Testament. Finally, as I pointed out above, if left unacknowledged, the mythological structure of the biblical texts may lead popular acceptance to what I have called an overly subjective reading of the Bible, lending credence to just about any type of whacked out meaning one wishes to impose upon it. Since I briefly noted the last point, I wish to comment more fully upon the first two before returning to the “paragons of subjectivity.”
Many interpreters have taken Bultmann’s demythologizing project to be one that relies heavily upon modern science and hence, is unduly biased against the kerygma from the get-go. Such a bias, they claim, means that the message of the New Testament is distorted by reason (natural theology) and betrays the fideistic foundation of the early Church. However, as David Congdon (2017) points out, Bultmann’s work is as much a critique of modern science and its reductionistic methodology as it is biblical mythology. It is not a scientific project as much as it is an attempt to discern the meaning of faith within the myths of the biblical texts. Put differently, while Bultmann’s project is similar in spirit to science’s aim at objectivity, demythologizing aims not at empirical accuracy as much as it does “existential truth.” Let me explain.
Far from being a book of science, the biblical texts are narratives about faith expressed in the mythological language of the biblical world.
Far from being a book of science, the biblical texts are narratives about faith expressed in the mythological language of the biblical world. What is needed, then, is a hermeneutics that allows us to see through the mythological form to find the meaning of faith. Put differently, the pre-scientific language of biblical mythology needs to be understood in the framework of a scientific Weltanschauung. Weltanschauung is often translated “worldview,” but it is more comprehensive than that. It means “a comprehensive conception or view of the world and the place of humanity within it” (Wikipedia). As such it includes such fundamental notions as philosophy, religion, ethics and science/physics and the emotional tone that surrounds them. While it is fair to speak of differing worldviews, e.g., a religious, scientific, or political worldview, the broader meaning of the term denotes a common lens through which all of these are viewed. It is this lens, then, that is out of whack with biblical mythology. If biblical scholars are correct and faith is the essence of mythological language, understanding how faith works in a contemporary Weltanschauung is the task of demythologization. Drawing the line between myth and message, however, means that we do not dilute the power of faith when we robe it in our modern worldview rather than the mythology of the Bible. How is this done?
A comprehensive answer to this question evades the scope of this essay. However, it is important to note several things in this regard. First, faith—if properly demythologized—is not propositional. That is, faith is not a series of beliefs that we believe in so that the act of believing is faith (see my blog on faith, “Faith…But Faith in What?” – Harold’s Blog Spot (haroldsblogspot.com). While this may be “faith” for the more orthodox parts of Christianity, it is not in keeping with the mythologically clothed kerygma of the early Church. The faith of the kerygma has less to do with propositions and more to do with living, and the nature of this lifestyle as told in the stories about Jesus is as offensive then as it is now. Borrowing the mythological language of Paul, Paul believes that the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing (I Corinthians 1:18). While dressed in the mythological language of dualism that defined heaven and hell, the offense is not found in the eternal destination as much as it is the nature of faithful living, and this takes us to the very essence of the kerygma: love and forgiveness as divine power as opposed to hatred, violence, and revenge. It is impossible to separate love and forgiveness from faithful existence and the rejection of political, religious, and ideological forms of power is as offensive today as it was during the time of Jesus. Power, for Jesus, was martyrdom; it was not the ability to dominate others thereby assuring conformity, and its offense lies in the fact that Jesus, the embodiment of all that is divine, died. He was not a military leader who used military might to achieve divine ends. No, he was an itinerant preacher with a small group of followers who dreamed about how the world would be if love prevailed. Is this idealism? It would be if Jesus were preaching only ideals. He was not. Rather, far from being idealistic, Jesus focused his thoughts upon the everydayness of life. People were hungry and he fed them. They were sick and he practiced healing. If they were caught doing something wrong, he admonished them by encouraging them to do what was right. When he encountered anger and hatred, he countered with forgiveness and love. When tempted with worldly success and riches, he gave up all, dying a painful death on a cross because he refused to live inauthentically. This is faith, this is living, and it was this type of living—faithful living—that the kerygma heralded as the way followers of Jesus should live.
The offense takes place because contemporary people are taught to manage things differently. It is offensive because we too often are taught “might makes right.” It is offensive because kerygmatic faith does not define the faith of most Christians today. Too often the Church has become a “den of vipers,” to use the mythological language of Johannine texts, and reflects Jesus’ opposition more than it does Jesus and his followers. The divisiveness of so many that call themselves Christian today has no place in the kerygma…the preaching of the primitive Jesus movement. By demythologizing the biblical texts, its primitive message can penetrate the barriers we have erected to keep it out, i.e., dogmatic propositions that put an emphasis upon irrelevant ideals rather than living a faithful life; barriers draped in pseudo-scientific claims that reduce texts of faith to scientific falsehoods. Ironically, by demythologizing the biblical texts, the kerygma becomes a message that dismantles and demythologizes the modern myths of today, myths propagated by a propositional form of faith married to a political mythos of hatred and revenge. If one engages this divisive form of Christianity, they embrace hate, not love, and therefore rob the Church of its authority by embracing a lie (I John 4:20).
Interestingly, this harkens to one of my earlier statements. The hermeneutics of demythologization frees us from the tyranny of propositional belief that reduces theology to something it is not, while also freeing us from the reductionism of science and its quest for objectivity while striving to understand the world empirically. Whereas faithful living is unphased by scientific truths, the faithful practice of love and forgiveness can create a powerful environment in which to understand the truths science uncovers. This is also true of other schools of thought throughout academia. If love and forgiveness shape the values by which we practice science, politics, religious discourse, and academic investigation of all disciplines, what would these things look like? How would things change? Faith, as I have defined it here, evokes not a surface transformation, but a second order change with long lasting implications. It does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that disagreement is met with exploration and wrongdoing admonished with forgiveness and the words “go and sin no more” (John 8:11). When people fail, faithful living encourages them to try again. When they do wrong, faithful living surrounds them with forgiveness and guides them into a better way of living through love. This is not easy, and it takes effort and practice. It is, as Paul says, a process of redemption. But this process happens in the everydayness of life, energized by forgiveness that encourages us to try again while being more fully guided by love.
We discern the truths of the Jesus movement because we listen to the kerygma and not the mythological structures of the New Testament to which a scientific Weltanschauung is foreign. Dualism—so fundamental to biblical myth—divides the world into black and white, dos and don’ts, a mindset which when immersed in a contemporary Weltanschauung elicits a chaos reminiscent of the one the early Church embraced; a chaos created by a warring mindset, which betrays the kerygma of Jesus and his followers. For those who follow mythology rather than the lifestyle taught by Jesus (i.e., faith), war and conflict become the solution to their problems, while peace and love is a dream that never becomes a reality. In this case, faith gives way to a mythos of propositional thinking marked by transactionalism and the tit for tat of a zero-sum game. But if this can be demythologized—if subjected to the kerygma of the Jesus movement—then transactionalism is revealed as thought devoid of faith, propositional theology along with all of its dogmatic formulas are emptied of authority, and compassion for “the least of these”—those who are different from us—becomes “God’s voice,” not the egoism and greed of the purveyors of subjectivity. When demythologizing becomes our hermeneutics, the line drawn by the faithful is one that separates lies from faithful living, a process of redemption grounded in the “go and sin no more” guided by love and forgiveness. When people live by faith defined by the kerygma, such faithful living restores Jesus’ authority (dynamis) through the loving actions of those who draw the line between myth and kerygma.
Bultmann, it seems, was correct. If the Bible is to maintain a place in the lives of people today, it must be demythologized so that which is important stands apart from the myth of an ancient mindset, a myth that makes little sense in our contemporary Weltanschauung. The issue is not belief. The issue is faithful living where the spirit of Jesus and his followers becomes the spirit of our everyday life. We can, after all, use a computer like the one that I am using to write this essay and still love and forgive those around us. We can enjoy the value of our smart phones while being compassionate to those who do wrong and try to lovingly guide them to a path of righteousness. We can drive a car, even an electric one, and still acknowledge the stranger, the one in need of a ride. We can avail ourselves of the medical sciences for healing and still believe in the power of love. In all of this, we must use the sense that God’s image bestows upon us, the same sense that birthed our contemporary world. However, like Jesus whose faith we try to immolate, faith sometimes means putting our own needs aside that others might live. Sometimes that may cost us our life, but always it means death to the spirit of the paragons of subjectivity for whom faith is comprised of transactional loyalty, which is a failed attempt at power and riches and is a betrayal of a faithful lifestyle. I believe the Bible does play a role in the life of the faithful. If demythologized, it teaches how love transforms hate, how compassion transcends self-centeredness, and how peace rather than war defines a lifestyle of faith that Jesus taught all who follow him to live. “Go and sin no more” Jesus told those who wished to follow him. May we strive to do the same.
Works consulted:
All biblical references were taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
- Bultmann, R., (1961). New Testament and mythology. Kerygma and myth: A theological debate. Hans Werner Bartsch, editor, Reginald H. Fuller, translator. Harper & Row, Publishers.
Congdon, D. W. (2017). Demystifying the program of demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s theological hermeneutics. Harvard Theological Review, 110(1), 1-23.
- Kierkegaard, S. (1974). Kierkegaard’s concluding unscientific postscript. D.F. Swenson, W. Lowrie, translators. Princeton University Press.
- Thielicke, H. (1961). The restatement of New Testament mythology. Kerygma and myth: A theological debate. Hans Werner Bartsch, editor, Reginald H. Fuller, translator. Harper & Row, Publishers.
Wallnau, L. (2016). God’s chaos candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American unraveling. Killer Sheep Media, Incorporated.
- Wilder, A. N. (1950). Mythology and the New Testament: A Review of Kerygma und Mythos. Journal of Biblical Literature, 69(2), 113-127.