Oscar Cullmann

Life

Cullmann was born in 1902 in Strasbourg, in the region of Alsace, which at the time belonged to the German Empire and became French territory after World War I. He studied at the Protestant Faculty of Theology of the University of Strasbourg and taught at the same university in the 1930s. In 1938 he moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland, and from the late 1940s he also taught in Paris. He died in 1999 in Chamonix, France.

Work and Contributions

• Theology of salvation history: In his major work Christ and Time (1946), he systematized the concept of salvation history (the view that God's work of saving humanity is accomplished in stages within history). He regarded the biblical conception of time as linear, in contrast to the cyclical time of Greek thought, and placed Jesus Christ at the center of that history.
• "Already and not yet": He explained that through Christ's cross and resurrection the decisive victory has "already" been won, but its consummation remains "not yet" until the Second Coming. His analogy comparing this to D-Day (the decisive battle) and V-E Day (the final victory) in World War II is well known. This framework profoundly influenced the understanding of eschatology and the kingdom of God.
• Other research: In The Christology of the New Testament (1957), he studied the titles given to Jesus in the New Testament. He also wrote Peter (1952). In Baptism in the New Testament (1948), he defended infant baptism against Karl Barth's critique of the practice. He also sparked controversy by arguing that the New Testament teaches the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul.
• Ecumenical activity: He attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer. Through works such as Unity through Diversity (1986), he advocated dialogue between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and he is regarded as a leading scholar of the ecumenical movement.

Influence on the Korean Church

His major works, including Christ and Time and The Christology of the New Testament, have been translated into Korean. His concept of salvation history and the expression "already and not yet" have been widely used in seminary lectures and sermons. However, redemptive-historical preaching and biblical theology within Korea's Reformed circles are generally understood to have been shaped more by Dutch and American Reformed scholars such as Geerhardus Vos and Herman Ridderbos than by Cullmann.

Assessment

Cullmann is regarded as a leading representative of the salvation-history school in twentieth-century New Testament scholarship. Against Rudolf Bultmann's demythologization (an approach that interprets the Bible's mythological expressions in terms of their existential meaning), he emphasized the historicity of salvation. Scholars in Bultmann's camp, by contrast, criticized him for binding faith too tightly to a historical scheme. The linguist and biblical scholar James Barr, in Biblical Words for Time (1962), challenged the method by which Cullmann derived a "Hebrew conception of time" from word studies. His critique of the immortality of the soul likewise drew objections that it conflicts with the traditional understanding of the afterlife.