Jesus Christ and Mythology.

Jesus Christ and Mythology consists of two groups of lectures Bultmann gave at Yale and Vanderbilt in 1951, and since the lectures were aimed at intelligent students unaquanted with his work, they serve as an excellent introduction to Bultmann's theology. I had read a good deal about Bultmann's thought in other theology books, but this was the first of his actual works I read, and it was certainly worth reading. Bultmann's primary point is that God is not comprehended by thought, but by experience. Rationality is not the tool for approaching God; relational experience is. There are essentially two spheres of existence (derived from Kant); the rational, ordered external world which we understand via science, and the a-rational world including the supernatural (including God, "faith knowledge, etc.) which we understand via experience and faith. Jesus was indeed a historical person existing in the first sphere of existence, but he is the Jesus Christ of Christianity only in the second sphere, which has nothing to do with rationality. As Bultmann says, " The incomprehensibility of God lies not in the sphere of theorical thought but in the sphere of personal existence" (43 [note that I have the 1958 edition]). What does this have to do with mythology? The scriptural account of Jesus is clouded in mythology. The entire world-view of the ancient authors of the New Testament is now rejected as primitive by modern men, so we must go about the task of de-mythologizing (stripping the myth from reality) Jesus to discover who he truly was. This de-mythologizing is Bultmann's proposed hermeneutic method (45). But we are not doing this for knowledge of the first sphere. We want to "understand in a new way the concept of knowledge which as a rule does not mean theoretical, rational knowledge, but mystical intuition or vision, a mystical union with Christ" (48). Bultmann delves into existential philosophy to tie together this search for mystical truth with the search for self knowledge. He ends up concluding that "the question of God and the question of myself are identical" (53). We study history (in this case, we de-mythologize New Testament history) to "gain an understanding of the possibilities of human life and thereby of the possibilities of my own life. The ultimate reason for studying history is to become conscious of the possibilities of human existence" (53). Of course, since all of this is happenining in the non-objective, a-rational second sphere of existence, we have nothing even resembling certainty. We can literally have no rational reason whatsoever for believing what we do about what is going in the realm of faith, for the two spheres of existence are utterly divided. This also means that God cannot be acting in human history, for God is of the second sphere and human history (or natural history) is of the first sphere. Of course, Bultmann needs God to be acting in some way to justify even his extremely liberal version of Ch

This is an amazing book! It is an elegant reevaluation of whatis important in the Bible. Bultmann is an excellent New Testamentscholar, and he puts his knowledge to good use in this book. His use of existential philosophy is also very interesting. He really strips away a lot of the trappings of the Bible to get to the heart of its message. He is also a very good writer, and everything he says is very clearly conveyed. If you have any interest in Christian philosophy, I highly recommend this book.