Bultmann forgets about Christ

Bultmann forgets about Christ. Rudolf Bultmann is probably the twentieth-century’s leading Protestant theologian, though some would give that title to Karl Barth. It hardly matters. The point is that Bultmann has been remarkably influential.

Perhaps his greatest influence has been on how to think about the kerygma (κήρυγμα), the message of the gospels. Bultmann is not subtle.

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modem medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. (New Testament and Myth, loc 107)

Miracle healings, walking on water, lots of bread and fish, heaven as up there—all that is part of the myth. How to distinguish the myth from the message without adopting Thomas Jefferson’s Deism, in which God becomes a distant watchmaker, someone who created the world, and has since stepped away? * How can kerygma still live?

Kerygma: the experience and the message

What remains is faith, and faith begins in wonder. Not in miracles, but in the experience of the sublime, “the beginning of terror that we are still just able to bear.” (Rilke) Kerygma is not just, or even primarily, about the message of the gospels. It is an encounter with God. Not with Christ, for Christ is a historical reality (Ladd, p 96). Kerygma is a pre-verbal encounter with the wholly other (Congdon, pp 23-24, 74). It can happen in an encounter with beauty, or in the experience of being alive after a close encounter with death. Boundary or limit experiences they are often called.

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The Resurrection

The Resurrection. Many liberal Protestants seem slightly embarrassed about the resurrection, as if it were part of the magical mystery world of the New Testament. Or at least this is what Wikipedia says. For most Christians, however, resurrection remains the central doctrine of Christianity (Evans, p 29). Believing in the resurrection is tantamount to being a Christian. I suppose I come closer to being a liberal Protestant, but the resurrection is more complicated than reflected by these two categories.

Resurrection in the time of Jesus

Among the elite at the time of Jesus, physical resurrection was abhorrent. The elite, mostly Sadducees, were Hellenistic (Greek) in their attitude toward the body: that it was the prison of the soul. Death meant the liberation of the soul from the body, as Socrates and Plato taught.

Among the less cultured Greeks, as well as the Philistines, belief in the resurrection of the body, today’s official belief among most Christians, was more common (Vermes, loc 612). During the years (forty of them) during which I taught Plato, I thought the Platonists were right. If there is an afterlife, the soul would be free of the burden, demands, and desires of the body. Physical resurrection seemed weird. But the more Christian theology I read, the more sense physical resurrection makes to me. Not as a statement of fact (I don’t know what the facts are), but as a statement about how humans are fundamentally embodied creatures. Life without the body would be less, not more, than it is on earth. Jürgen Moltmann’s argument is particularly persuasive.

Paul states the theological significance of resurrection

It is in Paul that the central theological significance of the resurrection was laid out. Many readers of the New Testament will be familiar with this passage.

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:14-19)

Evidence for the resurrection

The search for historical evidence of the resurrection seems misguided. The historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion is sound. However, it puzzles me that such a brilliant scholar as N. T. Wright could conclude that the evidence for the resurrection provided by two far from certain facts, the empty tomb, and the posthumous appearances of the risen Jesus, make the resurrection as historically certain as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, or the death of Augustus in 14 AD (p 710).

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Is Paul anti-Semitic? Does God play fair?

Paul’s letter to the Roman’s is difficult. One reason is because Paul seems uncomfortable with a couple of his own conclusions. But one thing is clear. It is the most sustained statement of Paul’s theology (Moo, loc 4011-4019). But what is that?

One theme concerns the relationship between Jews for Jesus and Gentiles for Jesus. The Jews came first, they remain God’s chosen people, but they remain stuck on the law. God is not concerned with the law. He is concerned with faith and justification.

Another theme is God’s wrath, as well as his caprice. How could God hate Esau before he was born (Romans 9:13)? (The Greek term used for hate is misei, and should not be rendered by a weaker verb. See Strongs 3404). What sense does that make?

A related theme is that it’s all up to God. We deserve nothing; whatever we get is due to the loving generosity of God.

What strikes me most is how Paul seems to struggle with the answers he comes up with, not always liking their implications, but with the result that his explanation is even more troubling.

Jews and Gentiles

For Paul, two things are striking about the Jews. They were and remain God’s chosen people. Abraham and the other patriarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures remain sacred to God (11:26). At the same time, Jews have taken a wrong turn. They zealously trust in the law, by which Paul means not only the Ten Commandments, but the purity codes spelled out in Leviticus and elsewhere.

Often times Paul is simply read as an argument for faith over works, but that’s too simple. By works Paul meant (as Luther meant) the works of the law. And faith is only revealed by the works of the spirit. Without the works of the law we would not know sin; but we are redeemed by faith. We need both; they are not exclusive.

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The Protestant Reformation was not all great

The Protestant Reformation was not all great. The Reformation (16^thand 17^th centuries), initiated by Martin Luther, is credited with the creation of the individual, and fostering the Enlightenment. This is the usual sketch, and its correct as far as it goes. I’m going to look at the good parts and the not so good parts. First, the good parts.*

The good parts of the Reformation

Many people know about Luther’s 95 theses, stuck on the church door in Wittenberg. In it he attacked the Catholic church’s practice of selling indulgences, which allowed the dead to get out of purgatory faster, a toll road for sinners. The practice was corrupt to the core. While his attack on the corrupt church helps explain Luther’s appeal, it is even more important to understand how Luther’s own religious experience lessened the fear that most people lived under five hundred years ago.

It’s difficult for most of us to grasp Luther’s sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God (Marty, loc 105). Of course, it was not just Luther’s dread, but almost all who believed in the Christian God, which means almost everybody. People trembled at the thought that when they died, Jesus would judge them, sending some to heaven and others to the fiery flames of Hell, including many who led exemplary lives, but had less than exemplary thoughts. That includes most of us. Since God knows our every thought, as well as sees our every act, there is no escape.

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Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read

Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong: one of the best books on religion I’ve read.

Karen Armstrong was a nun for seven years. She left the convent, partly because its discipline was harsh and inhuman, but primarily because she was unable to pray, and never even came close to the complete self-surrender which was the only path to God (p 9).

She had begun Oxford University in England while still a nun. She did well, but soon realized that she had no ideas of her own. On the contrary, she had been trained not to have them. A clever woman, she could put together the ideas of others, even use one criticize another, but that’s as far as she could go. This reminds me so much of graduate school, where I spent almost ten years of my life (I was a slow learner). At least in the social science and humanities, students are trained to put the ideas of others together in new ways, but rarely encouraged to think on their own.

While at Oxford, she began to experience panic attacks during which she would hallucinate, the world seeming to melt and fragment, faces around her dripping like wax (p 141). Years of psychoanalysis were useless, and eventually she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. Proper medication stopped the seizures and the hallucinations. But the experience of the hallucinations stayed with her.

It is as though a comforting veil of illusion had been ripped away and you see the world without form, without significance, purposeless, blind, trivial, spiteful, and ugly to the core. (p 55)

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Why the Bible is subtler than Homer or Plato

Why the Bible is subtler than Homer or Plato. I taught ancient political theory for 38 years. More than any single thing I learned, what remains is the insight (hardly mine alone) that Western civilization is the conjunction of Athens and Jerusalem. The way we think even today is a combination of the rationality of the Greeks with the transcendent vision of The Bible.

Now this isn’t quite right, for Plato certainly had a transcendent vision of what he called the forms (eidos). The forms exist in a world beyond time and space; they represent standards of perfection in almost everything and every virtue. Plato has been called a pagan saint, and it’s easy to see why. It was not difficult to Christianize Plato.

On the other hand, there are fundamental differences between the Platonic and Judaeo-Christian worlds. The most important difference is their table of the virtues. For Plato, and the ancient Greeks in general, wisdom, courage, self-discipline, and justice are the highest virtues. Lacking are the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity (caritas). Charity is the unselfish love of others, especially those in need. Plato wrote for fellow aristocrats. The Judeao-Christian tradition speaks for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Today the stranger is likely to be an immigrant, refugee, or displaced person.

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Genesis: the snake had a point

Genesis: the snake had a point. There is more than one way to read Genesis. One is to read it as an account by God dictated to Moses. That seems unlikely, but it’s a view widely held among the very religious. Certain problems, like the earth being created in 7 days, are dealt with by transforming days in eons. Some small amount of metaphor allowed.

Another way is to focus on the structure of Genesis, the way in which it combines different sources and traditions, edited, sometimes clumsily, to tell an epic myth of origins. A myth that’s at its heart is true, not to history, but to human nature. I agree with the second way, but I think one learns much by the first approach for what it says about man and God. I am going to take seriously an author who employs it. “Take seriously” means worthy of criticism.

Garden of Eden. The snake had a point.

The story of the Garden of Eden is familiar. God creates Adam and Eve, telling them they can eat the fruit from any tree, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the sneaky snake comes along, tells them that if they eat from this tree they can become like God, knowing good and evil. So, Eve takes a bite, and offers the fruit to Adam. He takes a bite, and an angry God kicks them out of Eden, telling them that they and their descendants will have to work hard for a living, and women will bear their children in pain and travail (Genesis 2-3).*

Recently I reread Genesis, and it seems to me that the snake had a point. Adam and Eve became fully human only by defying God and eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Good and evil, says Bruce Waltke, are intended to encompass all moral knowledge,

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Leszek Kolakowski, socialist and Christian

Leszek Kolakowski, socialist and Christian. Kolakowski was a polish intellectual who died in 2009. He is most well-known for his critical analysis of Marxism, but he was hardly a Western liberal. His political position, and only his political position, could be compared to that of Bernie Sanders. In other words, he was a democratic socialist. When Poland was a satellite of the Soviet Union, Kolakowski was effectively exiled, spending the next forty years at prestigious universities in the West. Even, or especially in exile, he was a leading thinker of the Solidarity movement.

In the later decades of his life, Kolakowski became less interested in politics, and more in religion. It is his religious views that I focus on. If he had a thesis, it would be that without absolute values to guide us, we shall remain lost. Nihilism, politics, “spirituality,” and trivial pursuits will prevail. Absolute values are found only in God.

The five basic values of Christianity

The core truths of Christianity are that God exists and we are wretched. By wretched Kolakowski doesn’t mean miserable all the time, or without happiness. He means that we must die, we know we must die, and while we live we are perpetually vulnerable to events beyond our control.

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