Second of Two Parts
That existential theology uses the biblical concepts but beclouds them or even robs them of their actual content is most clearly seen in statements about the Resurrection. The seriousness of the present situation is shown by a comment made by Rudolf Augstein, publisher of Der Spiegel. It is difficult to say to what extent Augstein feels any personal responsibility toward the Christian faith; but he is firmly convinced that Christianity stands or falls on the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore he earnestly confronts Christendom with this question: “Do you believe that the crucified Christ was raised from the dead? Is your faith one that without the Resurrection, without belief in the Resurrection, would be an empty faith?”
“Modern” theology has refused to answer this question, or at best has given an evasive reply.
4. The Resurrection of Jesus.
Bultmann has said quite openly: “A corpse cannot come to life again and climb out of the grave.” It is quite possible to speak of a “resurrection” he says, but Jesus was not raised to a new life; rather, he rose into the kerygma. That is, there is no living Christ who is a divine Person; he is present only where the Word that testifies of him is proclaimed.
In an interview with an editor of Der Spiegel, Bultmann again stated clearly and unmistakably what he believes: The presence of (the non-resurrected) Jesus is not found, as Goethe would say, in his operation throughout the history of thought; “it occurs” only now and again in Christian proclamation and in faith. Belief in the Resurrection means only the belief “that death is not a sinking away into nothingness, but rather that God, who continually meets us from beyond, also meets us in our death.”
W. Marxsen makes a similar statement:
The talk about Jesus’ resurrection simply confirms that he lives on in the kerygma of the Church. According to the New Testament accounts, there were witnesses who insisted that they saw Jesus after his death. On the basis of this visual experience they came, after reflective interpretation, to the declaration that Jesus was raised by God. We today, however, are no longer in a position to speak so forthrightly of Jesus’ resurrection as one specific event.
This, says Marxsen, was possible only in an age influenced by the apocalyptic writings of later Judaism, “whose fantastic or even mythological ideas no longer have meaning for us.” The disciples, we are told, with their declaration of the Resurrection wanted to indicate only “that the cause of Jesus continues to expand after his death.” Since Jesus is present only in the kerygma of the Church, “the Christ event occurs in it, by always introducing the subject of Jesus anew.” According to this view, the Sprachereignis (speech-event) becomes the Heilsereignis (salvation-event). This means that the task of preaching is not to make the God-appointed fact of salvation the object of Christian proclamation; preaching cannot do this, since the resurrection of Christ was never a historical or even a redemptive event!
It is interesting, incidentally, to see how a number of existential theologians are trying to develop a new terminology. Expressions like Wortgeschehen (word-event), Sprachereignis (speech-event), zur Sprache bringen (to bring to expression) are formulations whose purpose is a Sprachtheologie (linguistic theology). This is supposed to show that theology can postulate no historical facts and need not presuppose them, since revelation occurs today in the proclaimed Word. And this means, as far as Jesus’ resurrection is concerned, that it is not a historical event, inasmuch as its factuality cannot be determined, and that therefore it cannot be made an object of faith. It is possible to believe only in the living, present Christ who comes in the proclaimed Word.
The tragedy is, however, that this Christ does not exist for the existential theologian who is schooled in higher criticism, since with Christ’s death everything has come to an end. The Sprachereignis (speech-event), therefore, has no redemptio-historical foundation. Consequently, this theology together with the proclamation that rests upon it is wholly untenable. It destroys the ground of salvation. Faith in the Risen One is possible only because God has raised Jesus from the dead and because I accept the message that is thus proclaimed to me.
According to “modern” theology, one can have no full assurance of Jesus’ resurrection, moreover, because the resurrection accounts transmitted to us and the stories of the appearances are not one and the same. In the informative interview reported in Der Spiegel, Bultmann reiterated his view that reports of a bodily resurrection of Jesus are but legends: they are “the legendary concretizing of the faith of the early Church in the Risen One, namely, that God exalted the Crucified One as Lord.” Notice that he says: This is what the Church believes; there is no actual act of God that is the foundation for this belief.
Marburg theologian Hans Grasz in the 1964 (second) edition of his book Ostergeschehen und Osterberichte (“Easter Events and Easter Reports”) has examined the texts given us in the New Testament and come to the following conclusion: “Even if one could peal off the legendary formulations and layers of growth one still could not produce a ‘kernel,’ of which it could be said that it portrays the occurrence and circumstances of the original events with any degree of uniformity and clarity.” A similar, if not as far-reaching, comment comes from Wolfhart Pannenberg, who has nothing to do with existentialism but who, in contrast, emphasizes the basic significance of the salvation verities. Pannenberg says: The resurrection appearances recorded in the Gospels that Paul does not mention (1 Cor. 15) are so legendary in character that one can scarcely find in them even one grain of historicity.
But surely the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection must have had some kind of meaning! Bultmann considers it to be the fact that through the certainty given them that “Jesus lives!” there was unlocked to the disciples the significance of the Cross. The disciples recognized that Jesus’ death on the Cross was no human death; it was, rather, God’s judgment upon the world, which as such deprives death of its power.
But how did they gain this awareness, if there was no redeeming event for them? One is supposed to be able, it seems, to speak of Jesus’ resurrection even if it never occurred! This is especially apparent in the case of Grasz. He begins a statement with these words: “Jesus arose and appeared to the disciples,” but then continues, “but of this neither the camera nor the sound recorder noted anything.” We refer again to W. Marxsen, who says: “If I wanted to express this [that is, that the non-resurrected Jesus is present in the proclamation of the Church] in the older kind of terminology and if I knew the limits of this way of expressing it, then I could say today: ‘He lives, he did not remain dead. He is risen.’ ”
In this statement by Marxsen one can see how ministers are enjoined to use the New Testament concepts but to associate them with entirely different ideas. This becomes then, however, a deliberate misleading of the Church; in other words, it is “another gospel.” A man who is greatly concerned about the Church’s proclamation has said, quite rightly: “When I sit in the pew I must hear not only what the preacher says but also what he does not say.” This comment pinpoints the situation we encounter today.
Clearly the denial of Jesus’ resurrection has very far-reaching consequences. Having made this denial, one can no longer talk about the return of Christ. Teaching about the last things falls away. Hope for the fulfillment of redemption becomes meaningless. If Christ was not raised, then neither shall we be raised. This is already evident by the fact that in “modern” theology the concept of “eschatology” has largely lost its original meaning and has been given new meaning.
What we have discussed in this section can be summarized in Künneth’s affirmation at the great Dortmund assembly: As to what happened Easter morning, there can be only one answer according to existential theology—absolutely nothing. But if nothing happened, then the “subjective experiences” of the disciples, which they said were appearances of the resurrected Lord, have no importance either. Yet the resurrection of Jesus, as Künneth stated, is the fundumentum Christianum, the centrum Christianum. The Church of Christ must say with the Apostle Paul: “But now is Christ raised from the dead by the glorious power of God.”
5. Faith.
It is very important to examine “modern” theology’s concept of faith and to inquire how far it agrees with that of the New Testament.
One does not do justice to Christian faith if, like E. Fuchs and others, he understands it to be Glauben wie Jesus (faith like that of Jesus). Then Jesus becomes merely a model, but not the object, of faith, for faith in this view deals only with God. Apostolic teaching requires faith in the one God and in Jesus Christ, through whom God brought salvation to the world. No one can be saved who does not have this faith.
“Modern” theology repudiates an intellectual concept of faith that is satisfied with accepting certain statements of faith as true and that makes acknowledgment of salvation facts an absolute prerequisite for the full realization of faith. No doubt its polemic has a grain of truth in it, insofar as it is directed against a false understanding of faith. But it also offers an incorrect account of faith and the facts of salvation.
The New Testament proceeds on the principle that faith comes through preaching (Rom. 10:17). That is, faith can come about only where the message of salvation, the content of which centers about the great acts of God, has previously been proclaimed. Certainly the kerygma comes to man first of all as a gift of divine grace. But this always occurs in such a way that there is an underlying presentation of the facts of salvation. “Be ye reconciled to God” follows affirmation of the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself (2 Cor. 5:17–19), a fact that is declared through preaching. The message of the Cross reveals itself as the beneficient saving power of God (1 Cor. 1:18); it is accepted by faith and experienced as a living reality of salvation. By the Holy Spirit’s working, it becomes assurance of salvation. But if preaching precedes faith, then the believer also knows what he believes. This is no mere intellectual assent but rather an inner surrender to the divine truth revealed in Jesus Christ. The idea of assuming it to be true is foreign to the New Testament.
The messages of the Resurrection and the Cross are very closely related, for without the witness of the risen Christ the preaching of the Cross is empty; it completely loses its meaning (1 Cor. 15:14).
This all means that the salvation message can be properly given only if one begins with the facts of redemption and proclaims the crucified and risen Christ, the exalted One living at God’s right hand. In other words, the salvation message is essentially more than simply a call for decision or for proper understanding of the self. The apostolic kerygma is filled with redemption history; it has a specific content that cannot be suppressed. If this concept is suppressed, then the Word easily becomes a mysterious mystical or even “mythological” mass of something or other. It becomes emptied of meaning; for the kerygma cannot itself be the salvation-event. Actually, we have news of the salvation wrought by God in Christ; and this, if accepted in obedient faith, gives the believer access to the fullness of divine redemptive reality and grants him an awareness of salvation that is deepened through constant instruction in the Word of truth and is brought to ever-richer unfolding.
Therefore, it cannot be said that faith is a matter only of accepting certain dogmatic statements any more than it can be said that faith is independent of them. Concerning the inner relation between proclamation and faith Paul said clearly in First Corinthians 15:1–5:
I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures; and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve.
In verse 11 the Apostle closes the section with the words: “So we preach and so ye believed.”
Karl Barth is completely right when he says that faith is bound to its “object” (God, Christ, salvation in Christ). It is a process wrought by the Holy Ghost. One believes with the heart what is proclaimed in the salvation message, and testifies with the mouth the great truths of salvation (Rom. 10:9). Bultmann is abbreviating the New Testament teaching of faith, therefore, when he states that faith is “acknowledgment of God’s judgment upon man” and “subjection to God’s judgment.” Faith, much rather, gives us access to salvation and a knowledge of the Son of God.
One more brief observation. “Modern” theology often speaks about the decision to which the proclaimed Word brings us. By this is not always—in fact, is not usually—meant decision for Christ and full surrender of life to him. Frey is right when he states in his Die Frage nach Jesus Christ heute (The Question Concerning Jesus Today) that one stands at the place of summons and appeal by Christ, “at the place, one might say, of awakening just outside the doors of conversion and rebirth.” Preaching must not only present a call to decision, important as this is; it must also declare all the fullness of redemption found in Christ.
6. Holy Scripture.
We have tried to show that “modern” theology does indeed use several basic New Testament concepts but that it empties them and then fills them with a content that misses their original meaning. Thus the basic principles of faith are shaken or totally shattered. A thought structure remains that hangs in mid-air and has no saving power whatever. The ultimate result is finally a godless and Christless “Christianity” that barely exists on just a few words of Christ that have survived the fire of historical criticism and have been found “genuine.”
In his newest publication, Das Neue Testament als Buch der Kirche (“The New Testament as the Book of the Church”), W. Marxsen states that we are to consider the New Testament as the oldest Predigtband des Christentums (collected sermons of Christendom) preserved to us. The statement put forward by representatives of kerygma-theology, therefore, that in the Gospels we are dealing not with absolutely reliable historical reports but with witnesses of the faith of the post-Easter church, is made to encompass the entire New Testament.
Behind it all, in the final analysis, is the question about Sitz im Leben (the situation in the Church out of which the New Testament writings arose) that is of determinative significance for the Formgeschichte method founded by Bultmann and Dibelius. These scholars are concerned with acknowledging the forces that shaped the tradition concerning Jesus. Dibelius has tried to show that the preachers, teachers, and narrators of early Christianity put together the material as it now appears in the Gospels. Marxsen considers the preaching of the apostles to be the Sitz im Leben. The New Testament, therefore, is not a record of revelation but rather a collection of kerygmatic testimonies, quite diverse, of the first proclaimers of the redemption message. Marxsen has expressed what he means by this more specifically in his treatise Der Streit um die Bibel (“The Battle Over the Bible”). Here we read: What is written in the New Testament is “not God’s Word in and of itself.” “It is always God’s Word only for specific persons. For this reason we can say only that the New Testament writers wrote with the claim of speaking God’s Word for their readers but not for us.” This means that the New Testament has no absolute, once-for-all, valid revelational character.
The question of how the New Testament can become God’s Word for us Marxsen answers as follows: We must “put an ear to” the manifold and changeable aspects of the history of the Word of God in New Testament times and “must express the old Sache [matter] in words that we say and understand today, so that the Word reaches us and in our time and surroundings.” The use of the word Sache is just another example of the typically neutral manner of speaking in “modern” theology! By it is meant—and one dare not be deceived by this—not the entire fullness of the Gospel, but rather the demythologized, existentially interpreted kerygma, in which only what is relevant to the present world and existence can come to expression. Marxsen himself cites as example the Virgin Birth, which he says is a Hellenistic concept incorporated later into the New Testament, a concept that was never intended to describe a real even if mystical occurrence but in fact only showed “that in Jesus there was a meeting with God.”
Marxsen is certainly one of the most radical representatives of “modern” theology, but he can formulate his views so cleverly and impressively that they penetrate the thinking of many people. Let us state his basic thesis once more: The New Testament is not plainly God’s Word; rather, it first becomes God’s Word for us when—stripped of all the ballast of contemporaneous history—it is presented to us anew. In Marxsen, then, we have not only a recasting but also a corruption of a biblical concept.
The result of this view of the New Testament can be shown by a concrete example. Manfred Mezger, Professor of practical theology at Mainz, rejects the return of Christ and the following end-time events, and reduces the Christian hope for the future to the one statement: “Jesus lives—and I with him” (Radius 1966, 2). The deadly thing about all this is that this comment topples every foundation of the faith, for according to Mezger, there is neither any resurrected, living Christ, nor any expectation of a resurrection for us. Here a man latches onto biblical terminology to make a statement that proves absolutely nothing because it dangles in mid-air. To what extent Mezger depreciates the matter of last things is seen by the following: “It wouldn’t hurt if the church had less wild and exaggerated chatter about last things (Rev. 16–20) for it proves nothing, absolutely nothing.” “Rhetoric concerning some prescribed future that can be easily mouthed with unsupportable declarations suggests a solid body of content by its thunder of judgment and whisper of blessedness, but is actually as insubstantial as water. One is supposed to rejoice in something like this? No thanks!” That is sheer cynicism!
Mezger shows his monstrous presumption when he says that it was the radical turnabout in theology and faith (that is, the shift to a “modern” theology that looks away from the “security of mythological ideas”) that led to “pure faith”; this is faith, says Mezger, that has freed itself from “miracles” and “ancient concepts held to be true” that we can no longer realize today. It is this “pure” faith, and nothing else, that we are asked to proclaim. This, in other words, is the practical significance of the new interpretation of the Bible!
Summary
We can compress all we have said into just one sentence, a sentence found in Carlo Büchner’s excellent recently published work concerning the “No Other Gospel” movement. Büchner says of “modern” theology: “It does not use other words to say the same thing but uses the same words to say something different.” His incisive analysis continues:
What is involved is really “another Gospel” in the sense of Galatians 1:6, 7 even if the motives of the former situation differ from those of today.
The present theological tendencies which undermine the fundamentals of the faith use a biblical vocabulary that makes the cause and content of teaching almost impenetrable to the theologically untrained person, so that not until quite some time has elapsed, and when it is too late, is it recognized what spirit has been at work in a church. The greatest danger of all is that the central salvation affirmations, the basis of Christian faith and spiritual life, are attacked.
Künneth views the same problems as Büchner but evaluates things even more sharply:
What is fatal and disturbing about the theological situation is that the same words and ideas are used on every hand, but with completely different meaning. One would think that intellectual honesty—so often espoused today—must surely admit that a theology which has elevated the call for a “new self-awareness” to a general theme and through the absolutized method of its “existential interpretation” tries to impose an existentialist theological meaning upon all Scripture has forsaken the very foundation of apostolic witness. The traditional Christian terminology remains untouched but the “Sache” has become something quite different [Sonntagsblatt, 1966, 52]
In an exemplary concise and precise manner, Büchner has brought together the affirmations of the various strains of existential theology, insofar as they are detrimental, by saying:
The virgin birth falls away, the Christmas story becomes but a legend, Jesus had no messianic consciousness, he knew nothing of his resurrection and coming again, his death he did not understand as a death of reconciliation, his atoning work through his suffering is primitive mythology, his death on the cross has no redemptive meaning for us, Jesus never performed miracles, he was only truly man but not truly God, the Last Supper was not instituted by him, he did not rise bodily. Concerning the living God it is said: He is not the Father of Jesus Christ, he does not exist beyond our world in a metaphysical realm, there is no personal God and there is no God in personal relationship. Of the Holy Ghost it is said that he is but a construct, of Luke, for example; in other words, there is no Holy Ghost.
This delineation could be continued and amplified. The result of these views is a colossal loss of substance, a depreciation of salvation principles. From what remains and is existentially interpreted issues an adulteration of the Gospel, for existential interpretation, in its demythologized form, does not express what the “mythological” texts really mean. There can no longer be any talk of a “scientific” exegesis.
We can only pray God to preserve his Church from false teaching and maintain it in the truth, so that his Word will be proclaimed in the full authority of the Holy Ghost.
Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”
