Rudolf Bultmann

Life

Bultmann was born in Wiefelstede, in the Oldenburg region of northern Germany, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He studied theology at Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg. After teaching at Breslau and Giessen, he became professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg in 1921 and taught there until his retirement in 1951. During the Nazi era he is known to have sided with the Confessing Church, which opposed those churches that cooperated with state power. He died in Marburg in 1976.

Work and Contributions

• Form criticism: In 1921 he published The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Form criticism is a method that classifies the forms of the stories and sayings that circulated orally before the Gospels were written and investigates the situations in the early church in which they were used. Bultmann applied this method systematically to the study of the Gospels.
• Demythologization: In his 1941 lecture "New Testament and Mythology," he argued that the New Testament was written in "mythological" terms reflecting the worldview of the ancients, namely a three-storied universe of heaven, earth, and underworld, together with miracles. He did not propose discarding these expressions; rather, he maintained that the message they contain must be interpreted existentially. Existential interpretation focuses on how human beings understand their own existence and make decisions. This approach is known to have been strongly influenced by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, his colleague at Marburg.
• Kerygmatic theology: Bultmann held that the basis of faith lies not in reconstructing the historical Jesus but in the Christ who encounters believers today through the kerygma (the proclamation of the gospel) preached by the early church.
• His other works include The Gospel of John: A Commentary and Theology of the New Testament. Early in his career he was classed, together with Karl Barth, among the scholars of the dialectical theology movement, but the two later parted ways over interpretive method.

Influence on the Korean Church

Bultmann was introduced in Korea from the 1950s and 1960s onward through seminary lectures and translations. Theological circles relatively open to biblical criticism studied him as a major figure in modern New Testament scholarship. By contrast, conservative Presbyterian and evangelical circles that uphold biblical inerrancy have presented and criticized him as a leading representative of liberal theology. As a result, his name has at times served in the Korean church as a symbol of theological controversy over academic biblical criticism.

Assessment

Supporters credit him with opening a way for modern people to engage seriously with the message of the Bible and with greatly advancing the methodology of New Testament studies.

Criticism has come from several directions. Conservative theologians hold that demythologization effectively denies the historicity of the resurrection and of miracles, thereby undermining the core of the gospel. Barth and other theologians charged that his interpretation relied too heavily on existentialist philosophy. Some of his own students, such as Ernst Käsemann, revised their teacher's position by calling for a renewed quest for the historical Jesus.