The Harrowing of Heaven

Bultmann’s proposal to translate the message of the New Testament into meaningful, existential categories is well known and highly influential. Where the primitive kerygma speaks of “the other world in terms of this world, the divine in terms of human life, the beyond in terms of this side” he writes, demythologizing is called for. Modernity, as he understands it, is the critical standard for biblical exegesis. The mythological way of looking at the world is obsolete, so that the kerygma is unintelligible to modern man. The theologian’s task is not the elimination of myth but its existential reinterpretation. Myths are to be handled anthropologically—as a primitive manner of speech about man’s own existence. The New Testament even presents the Christ-event in mythical terms. The resurrection, for example, is “a mythical event pure and simple” (Kerygma and Myth, I, 38).

Critics to the right and the left have seen the same fundamental difficulty. Both sides have felt that Bultmann tries unsuccessfully to serve two masters. On the one hand, he insists that the Christian faith be interpreted entirely in terms of man’s possibility for authentic existence and thus jeopardizes the finality of Jesus Christ; on the other hand, he goes on to insist that such a possibility exists only because of the historical Jesus. Whereas the critics of the right consider Bultmann to have betrayed the Gospel for the favors of a particular brand of modern philosophy, the critics of the left are alarmed at his reluctance to de-kerygmatize consistently and allow the last remnants of myth to disappear with the rest. Schubert M. Ogden in particular has laid bare Bultmann’s fundamental inconsistency (Christ Without Myth, Harper & Row, 1961, pp. 95–126).

Bultmann’s difficulties become severe at the question of God, for here, if anywhere, is an element in the early Christian proclamation that is supernaturalistic to the highest degree. The New Testament declares God to be the author of all reality who “works all things after the counsel of his own will.” The philosopher Kant had denied the possibility of any objective knowledge of God and claimed instead that God could be encountered in moral experience. Schleiermacher broadened the locus of revelation somewhat by defining it in terms of religious experience. But both men, the architects of modern theology and philosophy, insisted that God’s existence be confined to the limits of human consciousness. For Bultmann, too, God is Subject, never object, known only in the event of revelation which occurs in experience. But why should we use the honorific (not to say mythical) term God to describe a psychological event occurring in our hearts? Surely the atheist Feuerbach was clear-headed when he perceived that the subjectivity principle leads inexorably to the negation of transcendent reality itself. No doubt Bultmann prefers to live in an existential half-way house, but is the dwelling habitable?

Ogden, on his part, is under the impression that no such radical inconsistency exists in his own proposal. “The demand for demythologization that arises with necessity from the situation of modern man must be accepted without condition” (Christ Without Myth, p. 127). This principle drives him on to say: “Christian faith is to be interpreted exhaustively and without remainder as man’s original possibility of authentic existence as this is clarified and conceptualized by an appropriate philosophical analysis” (p. 146). Jesus Christ, therefore, is important, not for who he was or what he did, but for what he represents. The Christ-event is the decisive manifestation of divine love. Ogden’s Christology is a perfect example of liberal Christology since Schleiermacher. Significantly, however, Ogden stops short of God in his radical demythologizing. In their ongoing discussion, Macquarrie has noted this delimitation. If Ogden actually translated myth as Bultmann defines it into statements about human existence without remainder, the logical result would be the elimination of God as transcendent Other. He would be up for demythologizing along with demons and angels. (Studies in Christian Existentialism, McGill University, 1965, p. 163 f.). Ogden would have to join Van Buren’s program of theological reductionism. Yet Ogden’s own essay entitled “The Reality of God” establishes his unwillingness to do that (The Reality of God, Harper & Row, 1963).

One of the dangers, therefore, in following the program of existential analysis is the distinct possibility that the Gospel, including God, will be swallowed up altogether in existential philosophy. This possibility has become an actuality in the work of Herbert Braun, a disciple of Bultmann. This theologian carries the master’s proposal to its logical conclusion. He but radicalizes it one step further.

For Braun, the term God is only the name the New Testament employs in reference to the human experience of radical demand and radical grace in paradoxical unity. One cannot speak of the existence of God outside the limits of the existential life. Braun believes that by surrendering theism he can salvage the Gospel for modern man. “God” is something that “happens” in personal experience and depends upon it. Both God and Christ are mythological ciphers that contain a new way of understanding existence. In this, Braun has only proved himself a true disciple of Bultmann by carrying the proposal to demythologize through to its logical conclusions. While his conclusions may seem shocking, they are not surprising. The anthropological conquest of the Gospel, once begun, will press on relentlessly to consistency.

There is a profound lesson to be learned from this dismal spectacle. Dialectical theology, of which Bultmann is a more representative figure than the later Barth, has ended up where liberal theology began, in pure subjectivity. It was in a certain sense inevitable, because dialectical theology was attempting the impossible. This theology, arising as it did out of German liberalism, sought to unite two incompatible viewpoints: the secular or positivistic prejudice against divine revelation in actual history and language, with the biblical framework of miracle and prophecy. To glue these together it was necessary to become ambiguous at critical points. The logic of the situation called for either the elimination of all transcendent referents or a radical questioning of secularity itself. Bultmann was prepared to do neither of these, so he retreated into the fideistic circle of self-authenticating faith. The dialectical theologians kept talking about the “acts of God in history” but when pressed admitted that all they had reference to was the rise of faith in the hearts of those who believed in them. And despite the countless allusions to the “Word of God” they consistenly refused to identify it with any extant or accessible text. The result was a crisis of confidence in the kind of God-talk they were proposing.

The “death of God” school deserves considerable credit. At least these men perceived and declared what many more must have sensed and kept quiet, namely, that non-evangelical theology of the dialectical type has failed to explain the epistemological basis of its position. “Acts of God” that are only pseudo-events, and the “Word of God” that is nothing more than a contentless experience, are not going to be enough to challenge successfully modern secularity.

Dialectical theology has spawned godless philosophy because it denied the reality of revelational data outside the soul of man. Ironically, the theology that began in the role of liberalism’s implacable foe has found itself in the end exactly where liberalism began, in subjective religious experience! (Kenneth Hamilton, Revolt Against Heaven, is especially good here.) But Schleiermacher, the first to attempt a salvage operation on the New Testament that would preserve only what religious naturalism would not deny, had an advantage over Bultmann. For when the father of liberalism started with religious experience he could count on an almost universal religious sensibility. That was the spirit of his day and time. But Bultmann lives in the era that experiences the “absence of God” most keenly. Therefore, he can appeal to no such convenient point of contact. It is not difficult to see why a truly liberal theology today, one that was really modern, would have to be a “death of God” theology. But in either case, old liberalism or new, it is impossible to speak confidently of God on the basis of experience alone. At best it can rise only to empty mysticism—at worst, it can say nothing at all.

Evangelical theology has the only viable alternative. Because God has entered into the historical drama in Jesus Christ, materialism and positivism have been factually refuted. Meaningfulness has been won for the Christian truth-claim. Because God has published his Word in the words of Scripture, the crisis of content has been surmounted. God has disclosed himself in a public and verifiable manner, and communicated his purposes in the modality of human language. At this time when post-liberal theology is breaking up because of its internal weaknesses, it is imperative for evangelicals to speak forth their convictions with cogency and vigor. Theological leadership is up for grabs. The opportunity may not come again soon.

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