Bultmann, Rudolf(1884–1976)
Rudolf Bultmann, the biblical historian and theologian, was born in Wiefelsted, Oldenburg, Germany. He studied at Marburg, Tübingen, and Berlin and taught first at Marburg and then at Breslau and Giessen. In 1921 he became professor of New Testament studies at Marburg, where he remained until his retirement in 1951.
Bultmann's work and the controversies it has generated are of undoubted importance for the philosophy of religion. His ventures in "demythologizing" the New Testament and in reinterpreting its content "existentially" have raised (and have tried to answer) crucial questions about the logical status of religious language and the nature of Christian belief.
Christian Faith
Bultmann's thought was inspired by his keen sense of the remoteness and unacceptability of the thought forms of New Testament Christianity to most people of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We do not and cannot see our world as a theater of conflict between supernatural powers, the demonic seeking to possess and destroy us, and God intervening to secure our salvation. Moreover, miracle stories lie at the very heart of New Testament belief: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Thus, the critical question is: Must a man, in order to be a Christian, commit himself simultaneously to two mutually incompatible world pictures—that of twenty-first-century science and that of first-century prescientific speculation? According to Bultmann, to attempt this is to make Christian belief unnecessarily difficult.
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