Kerygma and Myth 6: Helmut Thielicke, 'The Restatement of New Testament Theology'

Helmut Thielicke, 'The Restatement of New Testament Theology', in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. by Reginald H. Fuller, (London: S.P.C.K., 1972). pp. 138-174.

An online version here.

[It gets better. Thielicke is obviously a heavy-weight. He recognises the place of mythology in the authoritative text and refuses to countenance its rejection. He distinguishes between different forms of the mythological in the New Testament, and this is helpful.]

[His primary concern, similarly to Schniewind although understood and expressed in a more acute manner, is that Bultmann has lost the event of the resurrection: the object of faith. Rather than this being the foundation stone upon which faith rests, resurrection appears to be derived from faith. This reversal sounds similar to Schniewind as well. Thielicke believes this reversal is at the heart of Bultmann's appropriation of a secular philosophy. This has become primary and in determining the questions has determined the agenda.]

[Thielicke also addresses the validity of the idea of a 'self-subsistent finite universe'. What in science is a working hypothesis, the result of the abstraction of empirical evidence, has now become a piece of mythology in its own right. In fact, the mythology of the present age - particularly this mythology - is ill equipped to express some of the key doctrines of Christianity. In this respect, what now seem an outmoded mythology such as a three-tier universe - is actually better suited to expressing the concept of divine transcendence.]

Preliminary Observations

The Importance of Bultmann's Challenge for the Church

'As a matter of fact, we all draw the distinction between mythology and truth, but the point at which we draw it varies with our school of thought or our individual preferences. The vagueness -- nay more, the downright insincerity -- of much modern preaching may be gauged from the way we tend to draw the line between truth and mythology at different points, at one point in the study and at another in the pulpit. We tend to be influenced by practical considerations. How much will the congregation stand ? This leads to insincerity and is not a healthy sign. Perhaps this pragmatism affects the personal faith of the preacher: he stands helpless in face of mythology, and lacks the courage to draw the distinction as sharply as he should. However this may be, it is a fact that up to now the problem of mythology has never been a regular part of the curriculum of theological study. It will certainly have to be in the future.' (p. 140) [I wish.]

'Bultmann thinks he can get rid of the mythological language which conceals the truth by carefully extracting the Biblical message from its setting in a contemporary world view. To HBK such a procedure is impossible, since the mythological setting is due not to historical circumstances or to the contemporary world view but to the way man looks at things. We can no more abandon mythology than we can cease to think in terms of time and space. Thus Bultmann rejects, while HBK [the Memorandum of the Confessing Church of Hesse] accepts and affirms, the mythological elements in the Bible.'

A. The Consequence of Demythologizing: The Conversion of the Gospel into a Philosophy

I Bultmann's Task

[Bultmann is influenced by the History of Religions school and its historical relativism (p. 9, "At this point absolute clarity ... what their hearers are expected to accept and what they are not."] 'Yet the difference between them is equally obvious. That school tended at the outset to remove the kerygma as a kind of erratic boulder, and to plant it down in the general history of religion. Thus they deprived the kerygma of its distinctiveness. Bultmann, on the other hand, tries to avoid this threat to the kerygma, not by denying the influence of its environment, nor by a naïve dogmatism which the study of the History of Religions has rendered obsolete, but by penetrating through the temporary framework of mythology to the permanent truth behind it.' (p. 143)

II Earlier Restatements of the Kerygma now Outmoded

We cannot 'penetrate to the permanent truths' by simply removing myth.

Nor can we 'dissolve' the evangelical events into the symbol of an eternal idea, as in 'the older liberal theology'.

Bultmann wants to 'rescue the historicity of the gospel and so retain its character as kerygma'.

III Mythology to be Interpreted, not Eliminated

For Bultmann: 'The real purpose of myth (e.g. the creation stories) is not to give an account of what actually happened in the past, or what may happen in the future (e.g. another ice age), but to convey a particular understanding of human life.' (p. 145)

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo 'does not tell us how the world actually came into being, but seeks rather to convey the implications of the fact that we stand as responsible beings before God. It teaches us that God is the source of all our being. He calls us out of nothing, and stamps us with the insignia of his Fatherhood. We are not made out of some material alien to God which we can blame for our sins and failures. Further, there is no ground for refusing to recognize his absolute sovereignty. Beside him there are no other gods, and apart from him there can be no material world. To deny the doctrine of creation ex nihil is to limit God’s sovereignty, as happens in the various theories which make God himself part of the evolutionary process. Hence it will be seen that Bultmann is groping after a really important truth. The cosmological assumptions of myth are not literal truths: what we have to do is to discover the existential meaning behind them This meaning is valid for all time, for though world views change, human nature remains the same.' (p. 145)

'The truth then embodied in myth is not scientific, but anthropological, or better, existential. The question is, what particular understanding of man’s Being does the New Testament convey?'

IV Myth as an Understanding of Human Life

'If the content of the New Testament message is, as Bultmann claims, an "understanding", the emphasis lies on the subjective element, the change in our self-consciousness which produces that understanding. This experience may in some way be connected with an event of revelation, and it may be necessary first to extract the distinctive Christian self-consciousness, but that does not make it any the less subjective.' (p. 146)

***'Such an outlook really leaves no room for an historical revelation in time, at least not in the sense of an intervention on the plane of reality, including reality external to man, and an intervention which changes that reality, as in miracle. Such an idea would be too mythological for Bultmann. The only event of revelation he can allow is one which brings to birth an understanding of human life such as man could never have produced for himself.' (p. 146)

'Consequently the event in the process of revelation is not an objective reality, it is simply a change in the subjective consciousness of man. When the prologue of the Fourth Gospels says "The Word became flesh" it means by "flesh" not the historical fact in the manger at Bethlehem but the acquisition of a new understanding of human life which has its origin in that point of history.' (p. 147)

V Historicity in Danger

'We get the impression -- and this will be confirmed in the ensuing argument -- that the event is a kind of inference deduced from the Christian or the existential understanding of human life.' (p. 147)

VI Revelation Disintegrated into Philosophy

'Wherever a non-Biblical principle derived from contemporary secular thought is applied to the interpretation of the Bible, the Bible’s facultas se ipsum interpretandi is violated, with fatal results. This is what happened in Kant’s philosophy, and again in theological idealism. It is happening with Bultmann too. By adopting Heidegger’s conception of understanding he is surrendering to the sovereignty of an intellectual world view, which deprives him of any feeling for the distinctiveness of the Bible. What, for instance, can he make of the phenomenon of prophecy on such an assumption, to say nothing of the resurrection ? This explains why the section dealing with the resurrection is so confused and bewildering.' (p. 149-50)

VII Bultmann's Defence against the Philosophizing of his Thought

This section addresses Bultmann's treatment of sin which he sees parallel in the Bible and existentialism.

'For Bultmann, then, the difference between the message of the New Testament and the theories of the philosophers lies not so much in their interpretation of Being as in the way of redemption they offer from a fallen state about whose nature they are more or less agreed. In philosophy that redemption is achieved by Socratic midwifery, in the New Testament by the act of Christ. This act of Christ conveys a new understanding of man’s being which it is beyond his own capacity to achieve. (Whether that understanding, once it has been granted, can stand on its own feet is, as we have seen, a different question.)' (p. 151)

The Futility of Philosophy as a Way of Redemption

'How would Bultmann answer the objection that the Christ event, regarded as an actual intervention on the plane of reality, is just as mythological as the rest of the kerygma? For this reality is, Bultmann maintains, a closed system determined by the laws of cause and effect, and any idea of an intervention ab extra necessarily implies a mythical world view which is no longer tenable.'

'Self-consciousness is the only sphere unaffected by the closed system of cause and effect, and therefore the only sphere which religion can claim as its own, and which is uncontaminated by mythology.'

[If this is what Bultmann is thinking, then this doesn't work. The final sphere is now getting thoroughly contaminated.]

'The resurrection, he says, is not just a subjective experience. "A vision is never purely subjective. It always has an objective basis [ ... ] What the disciples saw was the product of imagination in the sense that they projected what they saw into the world of space and sense. But that does not make what they saw imaginary. The faith evoked by the preaching of the gospel is no more subjective than a man’s love for his friend. It is directed towards an object, though an object which is not purely external to him, but which operates as a reality within him".' (p. 152)

'Faith has ceased to be dependent on the resurrection. Instead, the resurrection has become dependent on faith, the faith which springs from an encounter with Christ, or rather, with Jesus of Nazareth as he walked upon earth. The resurrection is no more than the pictorial symbol of an encounter, not an event in its own right.' (p. 153)

'We must not, however, overlook the element of justice in Bultmann’s case against a certain kind of dogmatic orthodoxy. Lessing had the same degree of justification in his controversy with Goeze, the Chief Pastor of Hamburg. Faith in the resurrection does not spring from the historical narratives of the resurrection, the empty tomb, etc. These narratives are by their very nature open to historical criticism, and even when their reliability has been established beyond all doubt, they can never provide an adequate basis for faith, for they are still relative. The resurrection is not just an event of the past; it must still be authenticated in the encounter with which Bultmann is so much concerned. The resurrection must always be the logical outcome of the earthly life of Jesus, of his power over sin, disease, and death, and of his uniqueness. The resurrection must always appear as a flash of light which illuminates a whole host of traits in the life and teaching of Jesus and gives them new meaning, so that apart from the resurrection they remain an unfathomable mystery and an ultimately meaningless fragment of history.' (p. 153-4)

[Great paragraph, especially the insight into the (non?-)relation of faith to historical criticism.]

'the encounter with which Bultmann is concerned does not cause faith in the resurrection: the resurrection is the cause of an encounter with Christ. It is only through the resurrection that we can say to him: "My Lord and my God." Just as the Old Testament can only be understood and can only become an encounter in the light of the fact of Christ, so too the life of Jesus makes sense only in the light of the resurrection, and only so can it become an encounter.' (p. 154)

'We see then that Bultmann has left himself defenseless. Having once surrendered the fact of the resurrection, he cannot recover it again. Faith is cabined and confined in the narrow limits of subjectivity and consciousness, and receives no external impact from history. Having begun in the Spirit, i.e. with a genuine concern with the kerygma, Bultmann threatens to end in the flesh (Gal. 3:3), i.e. in a "sarkic" philosophy.'

'We are left wondering why the event of Christ is not myth like everything else. Surely "logos sarx egeneto" implies an intervention in the closed system of reality?'

Tasks for Exegesis: Christmas, Good Friday, Easter Day, and Pentecost, as Events.

'The fundamental problem posed by demythologizing is, What elements in the New Testament revelation are temporary and what are eternal, what are "human" and what are "divine" ? Obviously it is imperative to know where exactly the line of demarcation lies at many points.' (p. 156)

[Not sure about this terminology. Better to say that it is all divine. The question is, which bits are myth and then, what do those bits mean!]

'Does not every attempt at demythologizing, seeking as it does to probe the dividing-line between the eternal and the temporary, the divine and the human, come up against a barrier which has been put there by God, and beyond which it dare not ask any more questions? This barrier is the mystery of the God-man. It is no accident that Bultmann regards this God-man as the product of a myth. For him therefore the barrier is non-existent. That means that in the last resort he does not really take seriously the assertion that the Logos sarx egeneto. The innermost point of Bultmann’s work appears to me to be a latent but irremediable "crisis" of the fact of Christ.' (p. 157)

B. The Permanent Problem of the Mythological Form of Speech and the Attempt to Solve it

I Mythology as a Form of Thought

'The question is then not whether the New Testament can be emancipated from mythology, but whether human thought can.' (p. 158)

'Whenever mythology is translated into scientific and rational terms there is an inevitable loss of meaning and consequent superficiality, which shows the inadequacy of the scientific approach to this kind of truth. And if such is the case, then Bultmann’s demand that we should replace the mythical view of the world by a scientific one falls to the ground.' (p. 159)

'To put it epigrammatically, myth is not the objectivizing of a spook-like experience, but the subjectivizing -- the intellectual appropriation -- of an objective event of salvation. Here we have the exact equivalent of Jeremias’s heavenly process. Myth therefore employs subjective means derived from the human imagination to describe a reality which utterly transcends consciousness, and which possesses an objective validity in its own right, quite apart from its effects on the disciples and witnesses.' (p. 160)

[Nice. :)]

'These narratives, for all their mythological coloring, do postulate a real event between God and Christ in a sphere beyond all subjectivity and by no means limited to a more or less spiritual process between God and the disciples.' (p. 160)

Important New Tasks in Connection with the Problem of Myth

(a) The Varieties of Myth

Thielicke distinguishes between 'pictorial explanations of certain facts in history' and 'straightforward historical narratives, which, though they appear to be mythical, are to be taken as literal history' - many of the miracles stories.

[This kind of nuance is necessary, I'm sure.]

(b) Translation into a Myth Compatible with the Modern World View?

[This is a strange paragraph, as he has already asserted that a Modern World View cannot contain the same information as the biblical one. Of course, there could be other Modern World Views ...]

(c) No Conclusive Answer Possible

[Hence, the above concerns are now addressed ...]

1. It is impossible to translate the Biblical mythology and its associated world view into the language of contemporary myth. In other words, it is impossible to substitute one mythological framework for another.

2. It is impossible to remove the mythology, as Bultmann tries to. In other words, it is impossible to substitute the world view of modern science for the Biblical mythology by what he calls "interpretation". This is because it involves the substitution of an abstract philosophy of existence for a kerygma rooted in history. We seem to be landed in what looks at first sight like an insoluble dilemma; some would call it a state of bankruptcy. There appears to be no way of modernizing Christianity or of making it relevant to the modern world: it is definitely out of date. This impasse is not to be evaded or made light of, so let us describe it as brutally as we can.

(d) The Theological Meaning of this Difficulty and the Task it presents

(a) 'The incarnation meant that Jesus entered into time and space, that he became our brother and comrade, (Phil. 2:7; Rom. 8:3) and in so doing exposed himself to the notitia of our capacity to apprehend him. This meant that he entered into the particular form in which our powers of apprehension express themselves -- i.e. by mythology.' (p. 165)

(ß) 'Mythological thought must be honored as the crib in which the Lord chose to lie. In this respect it is like the mind of man, which, no less than the body, is the temple of the Holy Ghost (l Cor. 6: 19), and which is called to think the thoughts of God’s revelation after him. Human reason is only a crib, fashioned from the same wood as the cross. Just as human reason may become a whore, so the mythological expression of the truth may become idolatry, and both may lead to the rejection of Christ. But this does not prove that either are not cribs for Christ, and indeed this paradox represents a fundamental theological insight.' (p. 167)

'May it not be that this temporal limitation is something more than an encumbrance upon the gospel to be swallowed as it stands? May it not be that it possesses a positive meaning within the kerygma? May we not go so far as to say that the contemporary myth of New Testament times, with its three-storied universe of heaven, earth, and hell, left open the door for the idea of transcendence? This is what made it peculiarly fitted to express the otherness of God and his intervention in salvation history. For this myth does not assume that the universe is a self-subsistent, finite entity, as does the secular myth. It is for this reason that the secular myth cannot become the vehicle of Biblical truth without disintegrating it.' (p. 169)

'It is simply untrue that, as even Bultmann appears to suppose, the idea of a self-subsistent, finite universe is accepted as axiomatic in the modern world. And therefore the modern world view is not necessarily in conflict with the old myth. That idea is no more than working hypothesis in the field of natural science. It is, for instance, necessary in physics to assume the law of the conservation of energy, and that assumption rests upon another -- viz., that nature is a closed reservoir of power. When we speak of the self-subsistent finitude of the secular myth we mean something very different from that working hypothesis which, since it is no more than a hypothesis, does at least theoretically leave open the door for the idea of transcendence. We are referring to the step from a working hypothesis as a handmaid of research to an affirmation of faith. This introduces an entirely new element, which completely transcends natural science, as can be seen, for instance, from the fact that the affirmations of natural science are intrinsically transsubjective in character -- that is to say, they are entirely independent of man’s subjective understanding of himself. It was to bring out this difference that the distinction was drawn between Weltbild and Weltanschauung, the former representing a trans-subjective, scientific fact, and the latter man’s subjective interpretation of himself, an interpretation which is quite independent of the Weltbild.' (169-70)

[And about time!]

'Every conceivable aspect of the reality of sin, which could be made explicit only in an infinite series of theses and experiences, is implicit in the symbolism of the myth of the Fall. It contains both universal history and individual biography; such a combination would be impossible in any form of non-mythological thought. The preacher’s task is to split up this combination into non-mythological language, and to place before his hearers whichever aspect is most relevant to their concrete situation.' (p. 173)