Jesus Christ and mythology part 2

I finished Bultmann's book today. The second half was not as offensive as the first half. In this section he describes his method of hermenuetics and defends against some potential complaints against his position.

He claims that to think about a supernatural being intervening in our world is to be a primitive person; and he wants to make the Bible easy to digest for non-primitive modern people.

"Of course, there are today some survivals and revivals of primitive thinking and superstition. But the preaching of the Church would make a disastrous mistake if it looked to such revivals and conformed to them. The nature of man is to be seen in modern literature, as, for instance, in the novels of Thomas Mann, Ernst Junger, Thomas Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Graham Greene and Albert Camus, or in the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, Jean Giraudoux, etc. Or let us think simply of the newspapers. Have you read anywhere in them that the political or social or economic events are preformed by supernatural powers such as God, angels, or demons? Such events are alwas ascribed to natural powers." (p.37)

Bultmann then describes how good hermenutics will be combined with existential philosophy. He takes an entire chapter to describe how we have to use what existential philosophy has taught us in our Bible interpreting.

In the final section, he brings up the following potential complaints that people may have when reading his book:
- Doesn't science change? Then how can science be a solid foundation for belief and Bible interpreting?
- Isn't this subjective arbitrariness?
- Isn't de-mythologizing just another way of saying rationalizing?
- Doesn't faith only have meaning if God truly exists outside our own ideas, and is able to act?

His answers to these objections are:
- Yes, science changes - but it's still the most reliable tool we have.
- No, because trusting in a supposed supernatural being would be true subjective arbitrariness ("Freedom of subjective arbitrariness believes itself to be secure precisely because it is not responsible to a transcendent power, because it believes itself to be master of the world through science and technology." p.42-43)
- No, because we are finding theoretical thoughts that we can agree with - we are just questioning God as a being with personal existance and ability to act.
 - He says that "to think of God is to think of our own personal experience" (p. 70) because God is something we create in our own souls. However, says Bultmann, God is still something outside of us - because He existed inside the souls of other people at other times too.

The whole book is pretty annoying and sacreligeous. He's a name-dropper and makes arguments based on what is "modern" or "reasonable". Funny that our modern culture today is completely different, (that book was written in the 50's) and yet people still make the same argument. I think that his goal in this book is to try and shame spiritual people for believing in the supernatural. He may as well just shout "That's so idiotic! What modern-day person could believe such a thing?!" We need to know how to make our stand in the face of such unreasoned peer pressure.

Jesus Christ and Mythology - by: Rudolf Bultmann

In this book, Bultmann tries to "demythologize" the story of Christ, and of His miracles. It's good to read; because it can stimulate critical thinking to be faced with such an opposing view. But it's also really hard to choke down.

Here's an early quote from his argument: "The whole conception of the world which is presupposed in the preaching of Jesus in the New Testament generally is mythological; i.e. the conception of the world as being structured in three stories, heaven, earth, hell; the conception of the intervention of supernatural powers in the course of events; and the conception of miracles, especially the conception of the intervention of supernatural powers in the inner life of the soul, the conception that men can be tempted and corrupted by the devil and possessed by evil spirits. This conception of the world we call mythological because it is different from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed by science." (p.15)

We see straight away that he's not interested in anything spiritual and personally applicable from the Bible. Out of everything he lists, he says "ESPECIALLY the conception of the intervention of supernatural powers in the inner life of the soul" Yikes.

He claims that while some Jewish mystics believed in an apocolyptic future Kingdom of God on earth; that Jesus never believed in such a thing. He credits the modern thought that Jesus was escatalogical to a scholar named Weiss; who wrote "The Preaching of Jesus about the Kiongdom of God" in 1892.

He then goes on to state how silly it would be to believe that God would become a human and forgive sins by dying on a cross. "Particularly the conception of the pre-existent Son of God who descended in human guise into the world to redeem mankind is part of the Gnostic doctrine of redemption, and nobody hesitates to call this doctrine mythological." (p.17) It is a doctrine that 1 Cor. 1 describes that most will see as "foolishness" or "a stumbling block".

However, look at his reasons against the teachings of the Bible - "It is different from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed by science", and "nobody hesitates to call this doctrine mythological" It's a pretty poor argument.

He then describes how to use the Bible, if one wants to read it and still be modern: "For modern man the mythological conception of the world, the conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and redemption, are over and done with. Is it possible to expect that we shall make a sacrifice of understanding, sacrificium intellectus, in order to accept what we cannot sincerely consider true - merely because such conceptions are suggested by the Bible? Or ought we to pass over those saying of the New Testament which contain such mythological conceptions and to select other sayings which are not such stumbling-blocks to modern man?" (p.17)  In other words, just read the parts of the Bible that don't offend your modern sensibilities, and skip the rest.

He then has some fun reinterpreting certain "crude" (his words) truths and transforming them into something really believable. For example, when Jesus said that he would come as a theif in the night, maybe that just means that we should just be open to what God's future may be for each of us. This section really made me feel like I was listening to a teenage girl at a beauty pageant. Who cares about hollow self-created platitudes if miracles and afterlife and redemption are not real?

Then I had enough for one day. So, I'm putting it down. But, I may finish it later in the week.