neilgodfrey wrote:
What smoke and mirrors do you see in Bultmann's work? Historicism? Again, you use terms that don't have the standard meanings I think you seem to think they do.
The ultimate irony in Bultmann’s existential proclamation of Christ as divine revelation is his sense that the proclamation of Christ can strip mythology away from a modern reading of the message of the Gospel, when in fact this proclamation is the most grand and intense myth in the world.
I have long had an interest in Bultmann because of his close links to Martin Heidegger, the subject of my Masters Thesis on ethics and ontology. Heidegger understood authenticity as free projection upon our possibilities in the openness of care. Bultmann took such ideas and framed them within the Christian proclamation (kerygma) to present a paradoxical use of myth to transcend myth. But in this paradox I found Bultmann confusing and wrong by comparison to other theologians whom I do like, especially Oscar Cullmann and Emil Brunner.
The core of Bultmann’s error is his confused understanding of myth, presenting the ancient paradigm as a false myth while failing to see that the story of Christ is itself mythical. In some respects Bultmann is a way-station on the path to mythicism, except that he makes comments like describing the Gospels as containing ‘a sober, factual account of a human life, Jesus of Nazareth’ (KM 44).
I agree with Bultmann’s intent to review theology through a scientific prism, but his idea that we should aspire to a demythologised Christian faith is just ridiculous. That is not faith at all, it is an abyss of despair. My view is that faith has to be grounded in reason, but that the big ideas of reason are the symbolic archetypes reflected in myth. Bultmann contradicts himself on this demythologisation agenda; he says he wants to do away with myth but then makes mythical comments like calling the event of Jesus Christ the revelation of the love of God. (KM33)
Christology presents the myth of Jesus Christ as the presence of eternity within time. This sense of divine presence was articulated into the historical story of the Gospels. My reading is that the original philosophical Gnostic intent was that the purpose of the incarnation story was to reveal a real connection between the shifting world of temporal appearance and the constant world of eternal reality. Bultmann’s demythology project fails to engage with this basic purpose of theology and religion. His scoffing at the pre-existence of Christ, an idea that is central to the eternal nature of the Logos as cosmic reason, again indicates a basic confusion in his Christology.
In seeing the New Testament as a proclamation of the liberating act of God, Bultmann sought to strip it of elements of the first-century mythical world picture that are in conflict with science. This seems worthy, except that the entirely mythical idea of Christian salvation retains central place in Bultmann’s acceptance that “we can in no way free ourselves from our factual fallenness in the world but are freed from it only by ... the salvation occurrence that is realized in Christ."
Demythologisation was grounded in Spinoza’s argument that any event in Scripture which is inconsistent with natural laws must be interpreted either as unreliable testimony or as a metaphorical or allegorical representation of a moral teaching. But Bultmann pursues this inconsistently with his idea of salvation by kerygma. His New Testament and Mythology rejects the "mythical world picture" of the New Testament cosmology as a description of the universe, but in this rejection Bultmann is in thrall to the progressive myth of the replacement of mythos by logos.
What is instead required is a deeper analysis of New Testament cosmology, to see how its symbols match with what the ancients could see, and with what we can now scientifically understand is true, in order to recognise the essential mythic function of astral cycles as informing the psychological mythic function of religion. This function of religion is imagining how we connect to ultimate reality. But demythology severs the connection between Christ and the Sun, when what is needed is a remythologised understanding of this natural ontology. Heidegger's definition of Logos as "the original connecting connectedness of Being" is helpful in understanding this 'rebinding' function of religion.
Bultmann held that the New Testament presents the world picture of a time now past which was not yet formed by scientific thinking, and which we cannot repristinate. I reject this view. We can re-form much of the ancient cosmology, seeing and knowing what of it is accurate, and how the accurate observation found its way into the Christ myth.
neilgodfrey wrote:
So if an author does not address a point from your perspective they are "terminally confused"? This smacks just a little of arrogance. Why not be able to accept different perspectives for what they are without presuming that anyone who does not see what you see is "confused" or worse.
Science advances. When people promote an obsolete idea, such as the Historical Jesus, they cannot shed light on the facts. Geologists do not listen to people who reject continental drift, and nor should theology support uncritical belief in the Historical Jesus of Nazareth.
My comments in this post draw on
Rudolf Bultmann's Theology - a critical interpretation by Robert C Roberts, and the following wikipedia pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Bultmann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demythology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerygma