Demythologizing

The restatement of mythology is a requirement of faith itself. For faith needs to be emancipated from its association with every worldview expressed in objective terms, whether it be a mythical or a scientific one…it has tried to project God and his acts into the sphere of objective reality.

R. Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, 210.

Demythologizing

Demythologizing is the radical application of the doctrine of justification by faith to the sphere of knowledge and thought. Like the doctrine of justification, de-mythologizing destroys every longing for security. There is no difference between security based on good works and security built on objectifying knowledge. The man who desires to believe in God must know that he has nothing at his disposal on which to build his faith, that he is, so to speak, in a vacuum.

R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribners, 1958), 84.

Existential Hermeneutics

Here is perhaps the heart of existentialism. All effort to seek the meaning of one’s life in this world, whether by money, or relationships, or accomplishments, or tradition, or anything else that one can have, is inauthentic existence, and doomed to death. Only when one looks to one’s future possibility, to what one can be, and continually decides to act on the basis of that future possibility, does one live authentically. This, says Bultmann, is love. Love seeks nothing for itself, but always denies one’s self, not seeking one’s own security, but in faith choosing insecurity, the insecurity of faith in what is not phenomenally experienced.

Dan McCartney and Charles Clayton, Let the Reader Understand (Bridgepoint, 1994), 107.

Rudolph Bultmann

In all such factual knowledge or knowledge of principles the world is presumed to have the character of something objective, passive, accessible to simple observation. That is, the world is conceived in conformity with the Greek understanding of being…In such a conception of the world as an objective entity, man himself is regarded as an object (as a fragment of the cosmos); his self-understanding is achieved along with the understanding of the world (and vice versa)…But the existence of man does not have the character of an objective entity but is historic existence; where it is recognized that man in his history can become a new person and consequently can also newly understand himself; where, therefore, it is recognized that the being of man is potentiality to be. That potentiality to be is always at risk; its possibilities are grasped each time by man in resolve, in decision. An understanding of these possibilities of man’s existence here and now would obviously be a new understanding each time, since a historical situation with its character of possibility is not understood if it is conceived as a “case” illustrating a general law. The historical situation cannot possibly be “seen” in the Greek sense as an objective fact; it can only be heard as a summons.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 187.

Rudolph Bultmann

All historical phenomena which are subject to this kind of historical investigation are only relative entities, entities which exist only within an immense inter-related complex. Nothing which stands within this inter-relationship can clam absolute value. Even the historical Jesus is a phenomenon among other phenomena, not an absolute entity.

R. Bultmann, Faith and Understanding, ed. R. Funk and L.P. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 31.

Check the Context

Apocalypse Now

I discovered this lovely poster on the outside of an Adventist Church in Bartlesville, OK.