On March 2, 1964, Karl Barth met a group of theology students from Tubingen at the Bruderholz Restaurant for a lengthy conversation. The group consisted of forty Protestants and five Catholics. Their recorded conversation ranged across a wide spectrum of theological topics, including the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, the doctrine of analogy, the distinction between “noetic” and “ontic,” recent developments in Roman Catholicism, and the history of dialectical theology and the Confessing Church. At one point an unknown student raised the topic of Eberhard Jungel’s recent interpretation of Barth’sanalogia fidei.³ The student wished to know whether Jungel’s understanding accorded...

“EinBildhielt uns gefangen”—apictureheld us captive. So wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in §115 of hisPhilosophische Untersuchungen.³ When it comes to Rudolf Bultmann, a certain picture of his theology has held people captive for many years. I have called this picture the myth of the whale and the elephant. We have looked at two of the best attempts to overcome this picture, but these efforts, as important as they are, remain unsatisfactory and insufficient.

Bultmann spent most of his career freeing people from false pictures of God and the Christian faith. In order to do so he...

It is widely acknowledged that Barth inaugurated what we might call adialectical revolutionin modern theology. To call it a revolution does not mean it was wholly novel or that it was a complete break from the past. As others have argued—Christophe Chalamet most forcefully—many of the elements of dialectical theology were already established in the work of forebears such as Wilhelm Herrmann, Martin Kahler, Soren Kierkegaard, G. W. F. Hegel, and, of course, Martin Luther.² Certain ideas made prominent in dialectical theology, such as the distinction between Historie and Geschichte, are rooted in the German liberal...

Rudolf Bultmann was born into a family concerned with the question of mission. His paternal grandparents, Fritz and Elise Bultmann, were missionaries in the West African colony of Sierra Leone.⁴ His father, Arthur Kennedy Bultmann, was born in the mission field and later, while serving as a Lutheran pastor, wrote an article on mission in relation to modern theology in 1906.⁵ It was a concern that stayed with him throughout his life. In 1962 he wrote to a Lutheran missionary in New Guinea: “I appreciate it especially that you try to join theology and mission work.”⁶ Such a statement is...

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink criticizing Bultmann’s program of demythologizing on the grounds that it ignores the truths that myths, particularly those associated with Christian faith, are uniquely able to communicate. The truth of myth is played off against demythologizing as if the latter rejects mythsimpliciter. One often hears that demythologizing is merely the extrication of the kerygma from the shackles of myth on the assumption that Bultmann views everything associated with the label of myth as primitive falsehood. Many suppose that demythologizing carries out its hermeneutical procedure by shucking the husk of what is ancient or...

We have establishedwhywe need to read Bultmann with fresh eyes; the question now ishow. If Eberhard Jungel has provided us with the hermeneutical key for a new interpretation, this chapter offers a new conceptuality for carrying out this hermeneutical inquiry into Rudolf Bultmann’s program of demythologizing.

The key to a new perspective on demythologizing comes from the burgeoning field ofintercultural hermeneutics. The work in this field is the result of an interdisciplinary (and increasingly also interreligious) dialogue among scholars in the areas of missiology, cultural anthropology, and biblical studies. The issues and questions raised by scholars...

We come now to the climax of our study: the constructive reinterpretation of Bultmann’s program of demythologizing as the hermeneutic that fulfills the missionary origins of dialectical theology. This chapter will initiate the reinterpretation by looking at Bultmann’s criticism of myth. The final chapter will complete our analysis by examining the eschatological essence of existentialist interpretation.

In the conclusion to his 1952 essay, “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung,” Rudolf Bultmann argued that “radical demythologizing is the parallel to the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone without the works of the law. Or, rather, it is the consistent application of this...

We noted in the previous chapter Bultmann’s claim that radical demythologizing is “the consistent application [of the doctrine of justification by faith alone] to the field of knowledge.”² This application has both a negative and a positive dimension. Negatively it is criticism of objectifying thinking within theWeltbildof mythology, which I suggest we can restate ascriticism of constantinianism. Demythologizing is a critical epistemology in the sense that it subverts every attempt to interpret the kerygma in the form of aWeltanschauung. It is thus an antimythological and antimetaphysical—i.e., deconstantinizing—hermeneutic.

The present chapter will now develop the...