New Testament and Mythology.
The
Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its
Re-interpretation
By Rudolf Bultmann
Part I: The Task of
Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation
A. The Problem
1. The Mythical View of the World and the
Mythical Event of Redemption
The cosmology of the New Testament is
essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three storied
structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld
beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings -- the angels. The
underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene
of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the
scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and
of Satan and his demons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in
the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by
no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take
possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God
may inspire his thought and guide his purposes. He may grant him heavenly
visions. He may allow him to hear his word of succor or demand. He may give him
the supernatural power of his Spirit. History does not follow a smooth unbroken
course; it is set in motion and controlled by these supernatural powers. This
æon is held in bondage by Satan, sin, and death (for "powers" is
precisely what they are), and hastens towards its end. That end will come very
soon, and will take the form of a cosmic catastrophe. It will be inaugurated by
the "woes" of the last time. Then the Judge will come from heaven,
the dead will rise, the last judgment will take place, and men will enter into
eternal salvation or damnation.
This then is the mythical view of the world
which the New Testament presupposes when it presents the event of redemption
which is the subject of its preaching. It proclaims in the language of mythology that
the last time has now come. "In the fullness of time" God sent forth
his Son, a pre-existent divine Being, who appears on earth as a man. (1 Gal. 4:4; Phil. 2:6ff.; 2 Cor. 8:9;
John 1:14, etc.) He dies the death of a sinner (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 8:3.) on the
cross and makes atonement for the sins of men. (3 Rom. 3:23-26; 4:25; 8:3; 2
Cor. 5:14, 19; John 1:29; 1 John 2:2, etc.) His resurrection marks the
beginning of the cosmic catastrophe. Death, the consequence of Adam’s sin, is
abolished, (I Cor. 15:21f;
Rom. 5:12ff.) and the demonic forces are deprived of their power. (I Cor. 2:6;
Col. 2:15; Rev. 12:7ff., etc.) The risen Christ is exalted to the right hand of
God in heaven (Acts 1:6f.;
2:33; Rom. 8:34, etc.) and made "Lord" and "King". (Phil.
2:9-11; I Cor. 15:25.) He will come again on the clouds of heaven to complete
the work of redemption, and the resurrection and judgment of men will follow.
(I Cor. 15:23f,
50ff, etc.) Sin, suffering and death will then be finally abolished. (Rev.
21:4, etc.) All this is to happen very soon; indeed, St. Paul thinks that he
himself will live to see it.(I Thess. 4:15ff.; I Cor. 15:5lf.; cf. Mark 9:1.)
All who belong to Christ’s Church and are
joined to the Lord by Baptism and the Eucharist are certain of resurrection to
salvation, (Rom. 5:12ff.; I Cor. 15:21ff., 44b, ff.) unless they forfeit it by
unworthy behavior. Christian believers already enjoy the first installment of
salvation, for the Spirit (Rom. 8:23, II Cor. 1:22; 5:5.) is at work within
them, bearing witness to their adoption as sons of God, (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6.)
and guaranteeing their final resurrection. (Rom. 8:11.).
2. The Mythological View of the World
Obsolete
All this is the language of mythology, and the
origin of the various themes can be easily traced in the contemporary mythology
of Jewish Apocalyptic and in the redemption myths of Gnosticism. To this extent
the kerygma is incredible to modern man, for he is convinced that the mythical
view of the world is obsolete. We are therefore bound to ask whether, when
we preach the Gospel today, we expect our converts to accept not only the
Gospel message, but also the mythical view of the world in which it is set. If
not, does the New Testament embody a truth which is quite independent of its
mythical setting? If it does, theology must undertake the task of stripping the
Kerygma from its mythical framework, of "demythologizing" it.
Can Christian preaching expect modern man to
accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both
senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing
specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply
the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because
no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition -- it is already
determined for him by his place in history. Of course such a view is not
absolutely unalterable, and the individual may even contribute to its change.
But he can do so only when he is faced by a new set of facts so compelling as to
make his previous view of the world untenable. He has then no alternative but
to modify his view of the world or produce a new one. The discoveries of
Copernicus and the atomic theory are instances of this, and so was romanticism,
with its discovery that the human subject is richer and more complex than
enlightenment or idealism had allowed, and nationalism, with its new
realization of the importance of history and the tradition of peoples.
It may equally well happen that truths which a
shallow enlightenment had failed to perceive are later rediscovered in ancient
myths. Theologians are perfectly justified in asking whether this is not
exactly what has happened with the New Testament. At the same time it is
impossible to revive an obsolete view of the world by a mere fiat, and
certainly not a mythical view. For all our thinking today is shaped irrevocably
by modern science. A blind acceptance of the New Testament mythology would be
arbitrary, and to press for its acceptance as an article of faith would be to
reduce faith to works. Wilhelm Herrmann pointed this out, and one would have
thought that his demonstration was conclusive. It would involve a sacrifice of
the intellect which could have only one result-a curious form of schizophrenia
and insincerity. It would mean accepting a view of the world in our faith and
religion which we should deny in our everyday life. Modern thought as we have
inherited it brings with it criticism of the New Testament view of the
world.
Man’s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent
through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone
seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world-in fact, there is no one
who does. What meaning, for instance, can we attach to such phrases in the
creed as "descended into hell" or "ascended into heaven"?
We no longer believe in the three-storied universe which the creeds take for
granted. The only honest way of reciting the creeds is to strip the
mythological framework from the truth they enshrine-that is, assuming that they
contain any truth at all, which is just the question that theology has to ask.
No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a
local heaven. There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the
word. The same applies to hell in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath
our feet. And if this is so, the story of Christ’s descent into hell and of his
Ascension into heaven is done with. We can no longer look for the return of the
Son of Man on the clouds of heaven or hope that the faithful will meet him in
the air (I Thess. 4:15ff.).
Now that the forces and the laws of nature have
been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil.
We know that the stars are physical bodies whose motions are controlled by the
laws of the universe, and not demonic beings which enslave mankind to their
service. Any influence they may have over human life must be explicable in
terms of the ordinary laws of nature; it cannot in any way be attributed to
their malevolence. Sickness and the cure of disease are likewise attributable
to natural causation; they are not the result of demonic activity or of evil
spells. (It may of course be argued that there are people alive to-day whose
confidence in the traditional scientific view of the world has been shaken, and
others who are primitive enough to qualify for an age of mythical thought. And
there are also many varieties of superstition. But when belief in spirits and
miracles has degenerated into superstition, it has become something entirely
different from what it was when it was genuine faith. The various impressions
and speculations which influence credulous people here and there are of little
importance, nor does it matter to what extent cheap slogans have spread an
atmosphere inimical to science. What matters is the world view which men imbibe
from their environment, and it is science which determines that view of the
world through the school, the press, the wireless, the cinema, and all the
other fruits of technical progress.) The miracles of the New Testament
have ceased to be miraculous, and to defend their historicity by recourse to
nervous disorders or hypnotic effects only serves to underline the fact. And if
we are still left with certain physiological and psychological phenomena which
we can only assign to mysterious and enigmatic causes, we are still assigning
them to causes, and thus far are trying to make them scientifically
intelligible. Even occultism pretends to be a science.
It is impossible to use electric light and the
wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and
at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.
( Cp. the observations of Paul Schütz on the decay of mythical religion in the
East through the introduction of modern hygiene and medicine.) We may think we
can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the
Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.
The mythical eschatology is untenable for the simple reason
that the parousia of Christ never took place as the New Testament expected.
History did not come to an end, and, as every schoolboy knows, it will continue
to run its course. Even if we believe that the world as we know it will come to
an end in time, we expect the end to take the form of a natural catastrophe,
not of a mythical event such as the New Testament expects. And if we explain
the parousia in terms of modern scientific theory, we are applying criticism to
the New Testament, albeit unconsciously.
But natural science is not the only challenge
which the mythology of the New Testament has to face. There is the still more
serious challenge presented by modern man’s understanding of himself.
Modern man is confronted by a curious dilemma.
He may regard himself as pure nature, or as pure spirit. In the latter case he
distinguishes the essential part of his being from nature. In either case,
however, man is essentially a unity. He bears the sole responsibility for
his own feeling, thinking, and willing.(Cp. Gerhardt Kruger, Einsicht und
Leidenschaft, Das Wesen des platonischen Denkens, Frankfort, 1939, p. 11f.) He is not, as the New Testament
regards him, the victim, of a strange dichotomy which exposes him to the
interference of powers outside himself. If his exterior behavior and his
interior condition are in perfect harmony, it is something he has achieved
himself, and if other people think their interior unity is torn asunder by
demonic or divine interference, he calls it schizophrenia.
Although biology and psychology recognize that
man is a highly dependent being, that does not mean that he has been handed
over to powers outside of and distinct from himself. This dependence is
inseparable from human nature, and he needs only to understand it in order to
recover his self-mastery and organize his life on a rational basis. If he
regards himself as spirit, he knows that he is permanently conditioned by the
physical, bodily part of his being, but he distinguishes his true self from it,
and knows that he is independent and responsible for his mastery over nature.
In either case he finds what the New
Testament has to say about the "Spirit" and the sacraments utterly
strange and incomprehensible. Biological man cannot see how a supernatural
entity like the spirit can penetrate within the close texture of his natural
powers and set to work within him. Nor can the idealist understand how a spirit
working like a natural power can touch and influence his mind and spirit. Conscious
as he is of his own moral responsibility, he cannot conceive how baptism in
water can convey a mysterious something which is henceforth the agent of all
his decisions and actions. He cannot see how physical food can convey spiritual
strength, and how the unworthy receiving of the Eucharist can result in
physical sickness and death (I Cor. 11:30). The only possible explanation is
that it is due to suggestion. He cannot understand how anyone can be baptized
for the dead (I Cor. 15: 29).
We need not examine in detail the various forms
of modern Weltanschauung, whether idealist or naturalist. For the only
criticism of the New Testament which is theologically relevant is that which
arises necessarily out of the situation of modern man. The biological Weltanschauung
does not, for instance, arise necessarily out of the contemporary situation. We
are still free to adopt it or not as we choose. The only relevant question for
the theologian is the basic assumption on which the adoption of a biological as
of every other Weltanschauung rests, and that assumption is the view of
the world which has been molded by modern science and the modern conception of
human nature as a self-subsistent unity immune from the interference of
supernatural powers.
Again, the biblical doctrine that death is
the punishment of sin is equally abhorrent to naturalism and idealism,
since they both regard death as a simple and necessary process of nature. To
the naturalist death is no problem at all, and to the idealist it is a problem
for that very reason, for so far from arising out of man’s essential spiritual
being it actually destroys it. The idealist is faced with a paradox. On the one
hand man is a spiritual being, and therefore essentially different from plants
and animals, and on the other hand he is the prisoner of nature, whose birth,
life, and death are just the same as those of the animals. Death may present
him with a problem, but he cannot see how it can be a punishment for sin. Human
beings are subject to death even before they have committed any sin. And to
attribute human mortality to the fall of Adam is sheer nonsense, for guilt
implies personal responsibility, and the idea of original sin as an inherited
infection is sub-ethical, irrational, and absurd.
The same objections apply to the doctrine of
the atonement. How can the guilt of one man be expiated by the death of
another who is sinless -- if indeed one may speak of a sinless man at all? What
primitive notions of guilt and righteousness does this imply? And what
primitive idea of God? The rationale of sacrifice in general may of course
throw some light on the theory of the atonement, but even so, what a primitive
mythology it is, that a divine Being should become incarnate, and atone for the
sins of men through his own blood! Or again, one might adopt an analogy from
the law courts, and explain the death of Christ as a transaction between God
and man through which God’s claims on man were satisfied. But that would make
sin a juridical matter; it would be no more than an external transgression of a
commandment, and it would make nonsense of all our ethical standards. Moreover,
if the Christ who died such a death was the preexistent Son of God, what could
death mean for him? Obviously very little, if he knew that he would rise again
in three days!
The resurrection of Jesus is just as
difficult for modern man, if it means an event whereby a living supernatural
power is released which can henceforth be appropriated through the sacraments.
To the biologist such language is meaningless, for he does not regard death as
a problem at all. The idealist would not object to the idea of a life immune
from death, but he could not believe that such a life is made available by the
resuscitation of a dead person. If that is the way God makes life available for
man, his action is inextricably involved in a nature miracle. Such a notion he
finds incomprehensible, for he can see God at work only in the reality of his
personal life and in his transformation. But, quite apart from the incredibility
of such a miracle, he cannot see how an event like this could be the act of
God, or how it could affect his own life.
Gnostic influence suggests that this Christ,
who died and rose again, was not a mere human being but a God-man. His death
and resurrection were not isolated facts which concerned him alone, but a
cosmic event in which we are all involved.(1 Rom. 5: 12ff.; 1 Cor. 15: 21ff.,
44b) It is only with effort that modern man can think himself back into such an
intellectual atmosphere, and even then he could never accept it himself,
because it regards man’s essential being as nature and redemption as a process
of nature. And as for the pre-existence of Christ, with its corollary of man’s
translation into a celestial realm of light, and the clothing of the human
personality in heavenly robes and a spiritual body -- all this is not only
irrational but utterly meaningless. Why should salvation take this particular
form? Why should this be the fulfillment of human life and the realization of
man’s true being?
B. The Task before Us
1. Not Selection or Subtraction
Does this drastic criticism of the New
Testament mythology mean the complete elimination of the kerygma?
Whatever else may be true, we cannot save the
kerygma by selecting some of its features and subtracting others, and thus
reduce the amount of mythology in it. For instance, it is impossible to dismiss
St. Paul’s teaching about the unworthy reception of Holy Communion or about
baptism for the dead, and yet cling to the belief that physical eating and
drinking can have a spiritual effect. If we accept one idea, we must
accept everything which the New Testament has to say about Baptism and Holy
Communion, and it is just this one idea which we cannot accept.
It may of course be argued that some features
of the New Testament mythology are given greater prominence than others: not
all of them appear with the same regularity in the various books. There is for
example only one occurrence of the legends of the Virgin birth and the
Ascension; St. Paul and St. John appear to be totally unaware of them. But,
even if we take them to be later accretions, it does not affect the mythical
character of the event of redemption as a whole. And if we once start
subtracting from the kerygma, where are we to draw the line? The mythical view
of the world must be accepted or rejected in its entirety.
At this point absolute clarity and ruthless
honesty are essential both for the academic theologian and for the parish
priest. It is a duty they owe to themselves, to the Church they serve, and to
those whom they seek to win for the Church. They must make it quite clear what
their hearers are expected to accept and what they are not. At all costs the
preacher must not leave his people in the dark about what he secretly
eliminates, nor must he be in the dark about it himself. In Karl Barth’s book
The Resurrection of the Dead the cosmic eschatology in the sense of
"chronologically final history" is eliminated in favor of what he
intends to be a non-mythological "ultimate history". He is able to
delude himself into thinking that this is exegesis of St. Paul and of the New
Testament generally only because he gets rid of everything mythological in I
Corinthians by subjecting it to an interpretation which does violence to its
meaning. But that is an impossible procedure.
If the truth of the New Testament proclamation
is to be preserved, the only way is to demythologize it. But our motive in so
doing must not be to make the New Testament relevant to the modern world at all
costs. The question is simply whether the New Testament message consists
exclusively of mythology, or whether it actually demands the elimination of
myth if it is to be understood as it is meant to be. This question is forced
upon us from two sides. First there is the nature of myth in general, and then
there is the New Testament itself.
2. The Nature of Myth
The real purpose of myth is not to present an
objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of
himself in the world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not
cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially.(Cp.
Gerhardt Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft, esp. p. 17f., 56f.) Myth speaks of the power or the powers which man
supposes he experiences as the ground and limit of his world and of his own
activity and suffering. He describes these powers in terms derived from the
visible world, with its tangible objects and forces, and from human life, with
its feelings, motives, and potentialities. He may, for instance, explain the
origin of the world by speaking of a world egg or a world tree. Similarly he
may account for the present state and order of the world by speaking of a
primeval war between the gods. He speaks of the other world in terms of this
world, and of the gods in terms derived from human life. (Myth is here used in
the sense popularized by the ‘History of Religions’ school. Mythology is the
use of imagery to express the other worldly in terms of this world and the
divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side. For
instance, divine transcendence is expressed as spatial distance. It is a mode
of expression which makes it easy to understand the cultus as an action in
which material means are used to convey immaterial power. Myth is not used in
that modern sense, according to which it is practically equivalent to
ideology.)
Myth is an expression of man’s conviction that
the origin and purpose of the world in which he lives are to be sought not
within it but beyond it -- that is, beyond the realm of known and tangible
reality-and that this realm is perpetually dominated and menaced by those
mysterious powers which are its source and limit. Myth is also an expression of
man’s awareness that he is not lord of his own being. It expresses his sense of
dependence not only within the visible world, but more especially on those
forces which hold sway beyond the confines of the known. Finally, myth
expresses man’s belief that in this state of dependence he can be delivered
from the forces within the visible world.
Thus myth contains. elements which demand its
own criticism -namely, its imagery with its apparent claim to objective
validity. The real purpose of myth is to speak of a transcendent power which
controls the world and man, but that purpose is impeded and obscured by the
terms in which it is expressed.
Hence the importance of the New Testament
mythology lies not in its imagery but in the understanding of existence which
it enshrines. The real question is whether this understanding of existence is
true. Faith claims that it is, and faith ought not to be tied down to the
imagery of New Testament mythology.
3. The New Testament Itself
The New Testament itself invites this kind of
criticism. Not only are there rough edges in its mythology, but some of its
features are actually contradictory. For example, the death of Christ is
sometimes a sacrifice and sometimes a cosmic event. Sometimes his person is
interpreted as the-Messiah and sometimes as the Second Adam. The kenosis of the
pre-existent Son (Phil. 2: 6ff.) is incompatible with the miracle narratives as
proofs of his messianic claims. The Virgin birth is inconsistent with the
assertion of his pre-existence. The doctrine of the Creation is incompatible
with the conception of the "rulers of this world" ( Col. 2: 6ff.),
the "god of this world" (2 Cor. 4:4) and the "elements of this
world", Gal. 4: 3). It is impossible to square the belief that the law was
given by God with the theory that it comes from the angels (Gal. 3: 19f.).
But the principal demand for the criticism of
mythology comes from a curious contradiction which runs right through the New
Testament. Sometimes we are told that human life is determined by cosmic
forces, at others we are challenged to a decision. Side by side with the Pauline
indicative stands the Pauline imperative. In short, man is sometimes regarded
as a cosmic being, sometimes as an independent "I" for whom decision
is a matter of life or death. Incidentally, this explains why so many sayings
in the New Testament speak directly to modern man’s condition while others
remain enigmatic and obscure. Finally, attempts at demythologization are
sometimes made even within the New Testament itself. But more will be said on
this point later.
4. Previous Attempts at Demythologizing
How then is the mythology of the New Testament
to be reinterpreted? This is not the first time that theologians have
approached this task. Indeed, all we have said so far might have been said in
much the same way thirty or forty years ago, and it is a sign of the bankruptcy
of contemporary theology that it has been necessary to go all over the same
ground again. The reason for this is not far to seek. The liberal theologians
of the last century were working on the wrong lines. They threw away not only
the mythology but also the kerygma itself. Were they right? Is that the
treatment the New Testament itself required? That is the question we must face
today. The last twenty years have witnessed a movement away from criticism and
a return to a naïve acceptance of the kerygma. The danger both for theological
scholarship and for the Church is that this uncritical resuscitation of the New
Testament mythology may make the Gospel message unintelligible to the modern
world. We cannot dismiss the critical labors of earlier generations without
further ado. We must take them up and put them to constructive use. Failure to
do so will mean that the old battles between orthodoxy and liberalism will have
to be fought out all over again, that is assuming that there will be any Church
or any theologians to fight them at al! Perhaps we may put it schematically
like this: whereas the older liberals used criticism to eliminate the
mythology of the New Testament, our task to-day is to use criticism to interpret
it. Of course it may still be necessary to eliminate mythology here and there.
But the criterion adopted must be taken not from modern thought, but from the
understanding of human existence which the New Testament itself enshrines. (As
an illustration of this critical re-interpretation of myth cf. Hans
Jonas, Augustine und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, 1930 , pp.
66-76.)
To begin with, let us review some of these
earlier attempts at demythologizing. We need only mention briefly the
allegorical interpretation of the New Testament which has dogged the Church
throughout its history. This method spiritualizes the mythical events so that
they become symbols of processes going on in the soul. This is certainly the
most comfortable way of avoiding the critical question. The literal meaning is
allowed to stand and is dispensed with only for the individual believer, who
can escape into the realm of the soul.
It was characteristic of the older liberal
theologians that they regarded mythology as relative and temporary. Hence they
thought they could safely eliminate it altogether, and retain only the broad,
basic principles of religion and ethics. They distinguished between what they
took to be the essence of religion and the temporary garb which it assumed.
Listen to what Harnack has to say about the essence of Jesus’ preaching of the
Kingdom of God and its coming: "The kingdom has a triple meaning. Firstly,
it is something supernatural, a gift from above, not a product of ordinary
life. Secondly, it is a purely religious blessing, the inner link with the
living God; thirdly, it is the most important experience that a man can have,
that on which everything else depends; it permeates and dominates his whole
existence, because sin is forgiven and misery banished." Note how
completely the mythology is eliminated: "The kingdom of God comes by
coming to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it.’’(What
is Christianity? Williams and Norgate, 1904, pp. 63-4 and 57.
It will be noticed how Harnack reduces the
kerygma to a few basic principles of religion and ethics. Unfortunately this
means that the kerygma has ceased to be kerygma: it is no longer the
proclamation of the decisive act of God in Christ. For the liberals the great
truths of religion and ethics are timeless and eternal, though it is only
within human history that they are realized, and only in concrete historical
processes that they are given clear expression. But the apprehension and
acceptance of these principles does not depend on the knowledge and acceptance
of the age in which they first took shape, or of the historical persons who
first discovered them. We are all capable of verifying them in our own
experience at whatever period we happen to live. History may be of academic
interest, but never of paramount importance for religion.
But the New Testament speaks of an event
through which God has wrought man’s redemption. For it, Jesus is not primarily
the teacher, who certainly had extremely important things to say and will
always be honored for saying them, but whose person in the last analysis is
immaterial for those who have assimilated his teaching. On the contrary, his
person is just what the New Testament proclaims as the decisive event of
redemption. It speaks of this person in mythological terms, but does this mean
that we can reject the kerygma altogether on the ground that it is nothing more
than mythology?
That is the question.
Next came the History of Religions school. Its
representatives were the first to discover the extent to which the New
Testament is permeated by mythology. The importance of the New Testament, they
saw, lay not in its teaching about religion and ethics but in its actual
religion and piety; in comparison with that all the dogma it contains, and
therefore all the mythological imagery with its apparent objectivity, was of
secondary importance or completely negligible. The essence of the New Testament
lay in the religious life it portrayed; its high-watermark was the experience
of mystical union with Christ, in whom God took symbolic form.
These critics grasped one important truth.
Christian faith is not the same as religious idealism; the Christian life does
not consist in developing the individual personality, in the improvement of
society, or in making the world a better place. The Christian life means a
turning away from the world, a detachment from it. But the critics of the
History of Religions school failed to see that in the New Testament this
detachment is essentially eschatological and not mystical. Religion for them
was an expression of the human yearning to rise above the world and transcend
it: it was the discovery of a supramundane sphere where the soul could detach
itself from all earthly care and find its rest. Hence the supreme manifestation
of religion was to be found not in personal ethics or in social idealism but in
the cultus regarded as an end in itself. This was just the kind of religious
life portrayed in the New Testament, not only as a model and pattern, but as a
challenge and inspiration The New Testament was thus the abiding source of
power which enabled man to realize the true life of religion, and Christ was
the eternal symbol for the cultus of the Christian Church.(Cp. e.g. Troeltsch, Die
Bedeutung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu für den Glayben, Tübingen, 1911.) It will
be noticed how the Church is here defined exclusively as a worshipping
community, and this represents a great advance on the older liberalism. This
school rediscovered the Church as a religious institution. For the
idealist there was really no place for the Church at all. But did they succeed
in recovering the meaning of the Ecclesia in the full, New Testament sense of
the word? For in the New Testament the Ecclesia is invariably a phenomenon of
salvation history and eschatology.
Moreover, if the History of Religions school is
right, the kerygma has once more ceased to be kerygma. Like the liberals, they
are silent about a decisive act of God in Christ proclaimed as the event of
redemption. So we are still left with the question whether this event and the
person of Jesus, both of which are described in the New Testament in
mythological terms, are nothing more than mythology. Can the kerygma be
interpreted apart from mythology? Can we recover the truth of the kerygma for
men who do not think in mythological terms without forfeiting its character as
kerygma?
5. An Existentialist Interpretation the Only
Solution
The theological work which such an
interpretation involves can be sketched only in the broadest outline and with
only a few examples. We must avoid the impression that this is a light and easy
task, as if all we have to do is to discover the right formula and finish the
job on the spot. It is much more formidable than that. It cannot be done
single-handed. It will tax the time and strength of a whole theological
generation.
The mythology of the New Testament is in
essence that of Jewish apocalyptic and the Gnostic redemption myths. A common
feature of them both is their basic dualism, according to which the present
world and its human inhabitants are under the control of demonic, satanic
powers, and stand in need of redemption. Man cannot achieve this redemption by
his own efforts; it must come as a gift through a divine intervention. Both
types of mythology speak of such an intervention: Jewish apocalyptic of an
imminent world crisis in which this present aeon will be brought to an end and
the new aeon ushered in by the coming of the Messiah, and Gnosticism of a Son
of God sent down from the realm of light, entering into this world in the guise
of a man, and by his fate and teaching delivering the elect and opening up the
way for their return to their heavenly home.
The meaning of these two types of mythology
lies once more not in their imagery with its apparent objectivity but in the
understanding of human existence which both are trying to express. In other
words, they need to be interpreted existentially. A good example of such
treatment is to be found in Hans Jonas’s book on Gnosticism. (Gnosis und
spätantiker Geist. 1. Die mytholoaische Gnosis,
1934.)
Our task is to produce an existentialist
interpretation of the dualistic mythology of the New Testament along similar
lines. When, for instance, we read of demonic powers ruling the world and
holding mankind in bondage, does the understanding of human existence which
underlies such language offer a solution to the riddle of human life which will
be acceptable even to the non-mythological mind of today? Of course we must not
take this to imply that the New Testament presents us with an anthropology like
that which modern science can give us. It cannot be proved by logic or
demonstrated by an appeal to factual evidence. Scientific anthropology’s always
take for granted a definite understanding of existence, which is invariably the
consequence of a deliberate decision of the scientist, whether he makes it
consciously or not. And that is why we have to discover whether the New
Testament offers man an understanding of himself which will challenge him to a
genuine existential decision.
Part II:
Demythologizing in Outline
A. The Christian Interpretation of Being
1. Human Existence apart from Faith
What does the New Testament mean when it talks
of the "world", of "this world", or of "this
æon"? In speaking thus, the New Testament is in agreement with the
Gnostics, for they too speak of "this world", and of the princes,
prince, or god of this world; and moreover they both regard man as the slave of
the world and its powers. But there is one significant difference. In the New
Testament one of these powers is conspicuously absent -- viz., matter,
the physical, sensual part of man’s constitution. Never does the New Testament
complain that the soul of man, his authentic self, is imprisoned in a material
body: never does it complain of the power of sensuality over the spirit. That
is why it never doubts the responsibility of man for his sin. God is always the
Creator of the world, including human life in the body. He is also the Judge
before whom man must give account. The part played by Satan as the Lord of this
world must therefore be limited in a peculiar way, or else, if he is the lord
or god of world, "this world" must stand in a peculiar dialectical
relation to the world as the creation of God.
"This world" is the world of
corruption and death. Clearly, it was not so when it left the hands of the
Creator, for it was only in consequence of the fall of Adam that death entered
into the world (Rom. 5:12). Hence it is sin, rather than matter as such, which
is the cause of corruption and death. The Gnostic conception of the soul as a
pure, celestial element imprisoned by some tragic fate in a material body is
entirely absent. Death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23; cf. 1 Cor.
15:56). True, St. Paul seems to agree with the Gnostics as regards the effects
which he ascribes to the fall of Adam as the ancestor of the human race. But it
is clear that he later returns to the idea of individual responsibility when he
says that since Adam death came to all men "for that all sinned"
(Rom. 5:12), a statement which stands in formal contradiction to the Adam
theory. Perhaps he means to say that with Adam death became possible rather
than inevitable. However that may be, there is another idea which St. Paul is
constantly repeating and which is equally incompatible with the Adam theory,
and that is the theory that sin, including death, is derived from the flesh
(Rom. 8:13; Gal. 6:8, etc.). But what does he mean by "flesh"? Not
the bodily or physical side of human nature, but the sphere of visible,
concrete, tangible, and measurable reality, which as such is also the sphere of
corruption and death. When a man chooses to live entirely in and for this
sphere, or, as St. Paul puts it, when he "lives after the flesh", it
assumes the shape of a "power". There are indeed many different ways
of living after the flesh. There is the crude life of sensual pleasure and
there is the refined way of basing one’s life on the pride of achievement, on
the "works of the law" as St. Paul. would say. But these distinctions
are ultimately immaterial. For "flesh" embraces not only the material
things of life, but all human creation and achievement pursued for the sake of
some tangible reward, such as for example the fulfilling of the law (Gal. 3:3).
It includes every passive quality, and every advantage a man can have, in the
sphere of visible, tangible reality (Phil. 3:4ff.).
St. Paul sees that the life of man is weighed
down by anxiety (1 Cor. 7:32ff.). Every man focuses his anxiety upon some
particular object. The natural man focuses it upon security, and in proportion
to his opportunities and his success in the visible sphere he places his
"confidence" in the "flesh" (Phil. 3:3f.), and the consciousness of security finds its
expression in "glorying".
Such a pursuit is, however, incongruous with
man’s real situation, for the fact is that he is not secure at all. Indeed,
this is the way in which he loses his true life and becomes the slave of that
very sphere which he had hoped to master, and which he hoped would give him
security. Whereas hitherto he might have enjoyed the world as God’s creation,
it has now become "this world", the world in revolt against God. This
is the way in which the "powers" which dominate human life come into
being, and as such they acquire the character of mythical entities. (Terms like
"the spirit of the age" or "the spirit of technology"
provide some sort of modern analogy.) Since the visible and tangible sphere is
essentially transitory, the man who bases his life on it becomes the prisoner
and slave of corruption. An illustration of this may be seen in the way our
attempts to secure visible security for ourselves bring us into collision with
others; we can seek security for ourselves only at their expense. Thus on the
one hand we get envy, anger, jealousy, and the like, and on the other compromise,
bargainings, and adjustments of conflicting interests. This creates an
all-pervasive atmosphere which controls all our judgments; we all pay homage to
it and take it for granted. Thus man becomes the slave of anxiety (Rom. 8:15).
Everybody tries to hold fast to his own life and property, because he has a
secret feeling that it is all slipping away from him.
The Life of Faith
The authentic life, on the other hand, would be
a life based on unseen, intangible realities. Such a life means the abandonment
of all self-contrived security. This is what the New Testament means by
"life after the Spirit" or "life in faith".
For this life we must have faith in the
grace of God. It means faith that the unseen, intangible reality actually
confronts us as love, opening up our future and signifying not death but life.
The grace of God means the forgiveness of
sin, and brings deliverance from the bondage of the past. The old quest for
visible security, the hankering after tangible realities, and the clinging to
transitory objects, is sin, for by it we shut out invisible reality from our
lives and refuse God’s future which comes to us as a gift. But once we open our
hearts to the grace of God, our sins are forgiven; we are released from the
past. This is what is meant by "faith": to open ourselves freely to
the future. But at the same time faith involves obedience, for faith means
turning our backs on self and abandoning all security. It means giving up every
attempt to carve out a niche in life for ourselves, surrendering all our
self-confidence, and resolving to trust in God alone, in the God who raises the
dead (2 Cor. 1:9) and who calls the things that are not into being (Rom. 4:17).
It means radical self-commitment to God in the expectation that everything will
come from him and nothing from ourselves. Such a life spells deliverance from
all worldly, tangible objects, leading to complete detachment from the world
and thus to freedom.
This detachment from the world is something
quite different from asceticism. It means preserving a distance from the world
and dealing with it in a spirit of "as if not" (1 Cor. 7:29-31). The
believer is lord of all things (1 Cor. 3:21-3). He enjoys that power of which
the Gnostic boasts, but with the proviso: "All things are lawful for me, but
I will not be brought under the power of any" (1 Cor. 6:12; cf. 10:23f.). The believer may "rejoice
with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep" (Rom. 12:15), but
he is no longer in bondage to anything in the world (1 Cor. 7:17-24). Everything
in the world has become indifferent and unimportant. "For though I was
free from all men, I brought myself under bondage to all" (1 Cor.
9:19-23). "I know how to be abased, and I know also how to abound in
everything, and in all things I have learned the secret both to be filled and
to be hungry, both to abound and to be in want" (Phil. 4:12). The world
has been crucified to him, and he to the world (Gal. 6:14). Moreover, the power
of his new life is manifested even in weakness, suffering, and death (2 Cor.
4:7-11; 12:9f.).
Just when he realizes that he is nothing in himself, he can have and be all
things through God (2 Cor.12: 9f.;
6:8-10).
Now, this is eschatological existence; it means
being a "new creature" (2 Cor. 5:17). The eschatology of Jewish apocalyptic
and of Gnosticism has been emancipated from its accompanying mythology, in so
far as the age of salvation has already dawned for the believer and the life of
the future has become a present reality. The fourth gospel carries this process
to a logical conclusion by completely eliminating every trace of apocalyptic
eschatology. The last judgment is no longer an imminent cosmic event, for it is
already taking place in the coming of Jesus and in his summons to believe (John
3:19; 9:39; 12:31). The believer has life here and now, and has passed already
from death into life (5:24, etc.). Outwardly everything remains as before, but
inwardly his relation to the world has been radically changed. The world has no
further claim on him, for faith is the victory which overcometh the world (I
John 5:4).
The eschatology of Gnosticism is similarly
transcended. It is not that the believer is given a new nature or that his
pre-existent nature is emancipated, or that his soul is assured of a journey to
heaven. The new life in faith is not an assured possession or endowment, which
could lead only to libertinism. Nor is it a possession to be guarded with care
and vigilance, which could lead only to asceticism. Life in faith is not a
possession at all. It cannot be exclusively expressed in indicative terms; it
needs an imperative to complete it. In other words, the decision of faith is
never final; it needs constant renewal in every fresh situation. Our freedom
does not excuse us from the demand under which we all stand as men, for it is
freedom for obedience (Rom. 6:11ff.). To believe means not to have apprehended
but to have been apprehended. It means always to be traveling along the road
between the "already" and the "not yet", always to be
pursuing a goal.
For Gnosticism redemption is a cosmic process
in which the redeemed are privileged to participate here and now. Although
essentially transcendent, faith must be reduced to an immanent possession. Its
outward signs are freedom, power, pneumatic phenomena, and above all ecstasy.
In the last resort the New Testament knows no phenomena in which transcendent
realities become immanent possessions. True, St. Paul is familiar with ecstasy
(2 Cor. 5:13; 12:1ff.). But he refuses to accept it as a proof of the
possession of the Spirit. The New Testament never speaks of the training of the
soul in mystical experience or of ecstasy as the culmination of the Christian
life. Not psychic phenomena but faith is the hallmark of that life.
Certainly St. Paul shares the popular belief of
his day that the Spirit manifests itself in miracles, and he attributes
abnormal psychic phenomena to its agency. But the enthusiasm of the Corinthians
for such things brought home to him their questionable character. So he insists
that the gifts of the Spirit must be judged according to their value for
"edification", and in so doing he transcends the popular view of the
Spirit as an agency that operates like any other natural force. True, he
regards the Spirit as a mysterious entity dwelling in man and guaranteeing his
resurrection (Rom. 8:11). He can even speak of the Spirit as if it were a kind
of supernatural material (1 Cor. 15:44ff.). Yet in the last resort he clearly
means by "Spirit" the possibility of a new life which is opened up by
faith. The Spirit does not work like a supernatural force, nor is it the
permanent possession of the believer. It is the possibility of a new life which
must be appropriated by a deliberate resolve. Hence St. Paul’s paradoxical
injunction: "If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit also let us
walk." (Gal. 5:25). "Being led by the Spirit" (Rom. 8:14) is not
an automatic process of nature, but the fulfillment of an imperative:
"live after the Spirit, not after the flesh". Imperative and
indicative are inseparable. The possession of the Spirit never renders decision
superfluous. "I say, Walk by the Spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lust
of the flesh" (Gal. 5:16). Thus the concept "Spirit" has been
emancipated from mythology.
The Pauline catalogue of the fruits of the
Spirit ("love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, temperance", Gal. 5:22) shows how faith, by detaching man
from the world, makes him capable of fellowship in community. Now that he is
delivered from anxiety and from the frustration which comes from clinging to
the tangible realities of the visible world, man is free to enjoy fellowship
with others. Hence faith is described as "working through love" (Gal.
5:6). And this means being a new creature (cf. Gal; 5:6 with 6:15).
B. The Event of Redemption
I. Christian Self-Understanding without
Christ?
We have now suggested an existentialist
unmythological interpretation of the Christian understanding of Being. But is
this interpretation true to the New Testament? We seem to have overlooked one
important point, which is that in the New Testament faith is always faith in
Christ. Faith, in the strict sense of the word, was only there at a certain
moment in history. It had to be revealed; it came (Gal. 3:23,
25). This might of course be taken as part of the story of man’s spiritual
evolution. But the New Testament means more than that. It claims that faith
only became possible at a definite point in history in consequence of an event
-- viz., the event of Christ. Faith in the sense of obedient self-commitment
and inward detachment from the world is only possible when it is faith in Jesus
Christ.
Here indeed is the crux of the matter -- have
we here a remnant of mythology which still requires restatement? In fact it
comes to this: can we have a Christian understanding of Being without Christ?
The reader will recall our criticism of the
History of Religions school for eliminating the decisive event of Christ. Is
our re-interpretation of Christianity in existentialist terms open to precisely
the same objection?
It might well appear as though the event of
Christ were a relic of mythology which still awaits elimination. This is a
serious problem, and if Christian faith is to recover its self-assurance it
must be grappled with. For it can recover its certainty only if it is prepared
to think through to the bitter end the possibility of its own impossibility or
superfluity.
It might well appear possible to have a
Christian understanding of Being without Christ, as though what we had in the
New Testament was the first discovery and the more or less clear expression, in
the guise of mythology, of an understanding of Being which is at bottom man’s
natural understanding of his Being, as it has been given clear expression in
modern existentialist philosophy. Does this mean that what existentialism has
done is simply to remove the mythological disguise and to vindicate the
Christian understanding of Being as it is found in the New Testament and to
carry it to more logical conclusion? Is theology simply the precursor of existentialism?
Is it no more than an antiquated survival and an unnecessary incubus?
Such is the impression we might derive from a
consideration of the recent developments in philosophy. Might we not say that
the New Testament lays bare what philosophy calls "the historicity of
Being" ?
Count Yorck von
Wartenburg (Briefwechsel zwischen Wilhelm Dilthey und dem Grafen Paul Yorck
von Wartenburg, 1877-97. Halle, Niemeyer, 1923.) wrote to Dilthey on 15 December 1892:
"Dogmatics was an attempt to formulate an ontology of the higher historic
life. Christian dogmatics was inevitably the antithesis of intellectualism,
because Christianity is the supreme vitality."(P. 154.) Dilthey agrees:
". . . all dogmas need to be translated so as to bring out their universal
validity for all human life. They are cramped by their connection with the
situation in the past in which they arose. Once they have been freed from this
limitation they become . . . the consciousness of the supra-sensual and
supra-intelligible nature of historicity pure and simple.... Hence the
principal Christian dogmas, which include such symbols as "Son of
God", "satisfaction", "sacrifice", and the like, are,
in so far as they are limited to the facts of the Christian story, untenable.
But once they are re-interpreted as statements of universal validity they
express the highest living form of all history. They thus lose their rigid and
exclusive reference to the person of Jesus, which deliberately excludes all
other references.’’ (P. 158.)
Yorck gives by way of illustration a
re-interpretation of the doctrines of original sin and the atonement. He finds
them intelligible in the light of what he calls the "virtual
connection" which runs like a thread right through history. "Jesus is
the historical demonstration of a universal truth. The child profits from the
self-sacrifice of its mother. This involves a conveyance of virtue and power
from one person to another, without which history is impossible. [Note the
corollary -- all history, not only Christian history, involves
transference of power.] This is why rationalism is blind to the concept of
history. And sin -- not specific acts of wrong-doing, but man’s sinfulness in
general -- is, as the religious man knows from his own experience, quite
unpredictable. Is it less ‘monstrous and repulsive’ [as Dilthey had stigmatized
the doctrine of original sin] that sickness and misery are inherited from
generation to generation ? These Christian symbols are drawn from the very
depths of nature, for religion itself -- I mean Christianity -- is
supernatural, not unnatural. (P. 155.)
The development of philosophy since Dilthey’s
day has, it would seem, amply justified these contentions. Karl Jaspers has
found no difficulty in transposing Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Christian
Being to the sphere of philosophy. Above all, Heidegger’s existentialist
analysis of the ontological structure of being would seem to be no more than a
secularized, philosophical version of the New Testament view of human life. For
him the chief characteristic of man’s Being in history is anxiety. Man exists
in a permanent tension between the past and the future. At every moment he is
confronted with an alternative. Either be must immerse himself in the concrete
world of nature, and thus inevitably lose his individuality, or he must abandon
all security and commit himself unreservedly to the future, and thus alone
achieve his authentic Being. Is not that exactly the New Testament
understanding of human life ? Some critics have objected that I am borrowing Heidegger’s
categories and forcing them upon the New Testament. I am afraid this only shows
that they are blinding their eyes to the real problem. I mean, one should
rather be startled that philosophy is saying the same thing as the New
Testament and saying it quite independently.
The whole question has been posed afresh in the
recent book by Wilhelm Kamlah. (Christentum und Selbstbehauptung,
Frankfort, 1940.) It is true that Kamlah expressly attacks the eschatological
character of the Christian understanding of Being, but that is because he
misinterprets the detachment from the world which is consequent upon faith. He
understands it undialectically as a simple negation of the world, and so fails
to do justice to the element of "as if not" which is so characteristic
of the Pauline Epistles. But the understanding of Being which Kamlah develops
philosophically is manifestly a secularized version of that which we find in
Christianity. For the Christian concept of faith he substitutes
"self-commitment", by which he means "surrender to the universal
reality", or to God as the source of all Being. Self-commitment is the
antithesis of autonomy. It brings with it a revelation of the meaning of
universal reality. Further, it is emancipation, bringing inward freedom through
detachment from all sensual objects of desire. Kamlah himself is aware how
close this is to the Christian conception of faith. He says: "The
theologians have often observed the paradoxical character of this ability to
trust, at least so far as the inception of faith is concerned. It has often
been asked how the individual can come to believe at all if faith is the gift
of God and is not to be won through human effort, and how faith can be demanded
if it is outside the limit of human capacity. The question has often been left
unanswered because the theologians have failed to see that this is a problem
which is not peculiar to Christianity, but which belongs to the fundamental
structure of our natural Being." (P. 321.)
Christian faith, properly understood, would
then (on Kamlah’s view), be identical with natural self-commitment. "Since
it offers the true understanding of Being, philosophy emancipates natural
self-commitment and enables it to become what it was meant to be." (P.
326.) Thus it has no need of any revelation.
Christian love, through which faith operates,
is open to a similar interpretation. It is equivalent to committing ourselves
to our familiar surroundings. Indeed, Kamlah thinks he can correct the New
Testament at this point. As he sees it, the Christian conception of love
interrupts what he calls the smooth flow of history. It infringes the priority
of the immediate environment in which we have been placed by history. It
dissipates love by universalizing it instead of directing it to our true
neighbors, those who are nigh to us. Kamlah would have us see as our neighbors
those who are tied to us by the inexorable bonds of history. In this way he
would emancipate the true naturalness of man. (P. 337.)
But is it really true that in the last resort
the New Testament means by faith the natural disposition of man? Clearly
"natural" in this context means not "empirical" but
"proper to man’s authentic Being". This Being has first to be set
free. But according to Kamlah this does not require revelation. All that is
necessary is philosophical reflection. Is faith in this sense the natural
disposition of man?
Yes and no. Yes, because faith is not a
mysterious supernatural quality, but the disposition of genuine humanity.
Similarly, love is not the effect of mysterious supernatural power, but the
"natural" disposition of man. The New Testament goes part of the way
with Kamlah when it calls man-in-faith a "new creation". Its
implication is that by faith man enters upon the life for which he was
originally created.
The question is not whether the nature of man
can be discovered apart from the New Testament. As a matter of fact it
has not been discovered without the aid of the New Testament, for modern
philosophy is indebted both to it and to Luther and to Kierkegaard. But this
merely indicates the place of existentialism in the intellectual history of
man, and as far as its content is concerned it owes little to its historical
origin. On the contrary, the very fact that it is possible to produce a
secularized version of the New Testament conception of faith proves that there
is nothing mysterious or supernatural about the Christian life.
No; the question is whether the
"nature" of man is realizable. Is it enough simply to show man what
he ought to be? Can he achieve his authentic Being by a mere act of reflection?
It is clear that philosophy, no less than theology, has always taken it for
granted that man has to a greater or lesser degree erred and gone astray, or at
least that he is always in danger of so doing. Even the idealists try to show
us what we really are -- namely, that we are really spirit, and that it
is therefore wrong to lose ourselves in the world of things. Become what you
are! For Heidegger man has lost his individuality, and therefore he invites him
to recover his true selfhood. Kamlah again realizes that what he calls
"genuine historical existence" may lie hidden and buried beneath the
rubble of unreality, and that this is especially the case to-day when we are
suffering from the aftereffects of the Enlightenment. Kamlah also is aware that
self-commitment is not the natural disposition of modern man, but a demand
continually imposed upon him from without. There can be no emancipation without
obedience. (P. 403)
At the same time, however, these philosophers
are convinced that all we need is to be told about the "nature" of
man in order to realize it. "Since it is the true understanding of Being,
philosophy emancipates that self-commitment which is proper to man and enables
it to attain to its full stature" (P. 326) -- evidently, that means: it
emancipates man for true self-commitment. Philosophy seeks to
"liberate" (P. 337) the true naturalness of man.
Is this self-confidence of the philosophers
justified? Whatever the answer may be, it is at least clear that this is the
point where they part company with the New Testament. For the latter affirms
the total incapacity of man to release himself from his fallen state. That
deliverance can come only by an act of God. The New Testament does not give us
a doctrine of "nature", a doctrine of the authentic nature of man; it
proclaims the event of redemption which was wrought in Christ.
That is why the New Testament says that without
this saving act of God our plight is desperate, an assertion which existentialism
repudiates. What lies behind this difference?
The philosophers and the New Testament agree
that man can be only what he already is. For instance, the idealists believed
that the life of the spirit was possible only because they regarded man as
essentially spirit. Be come what you are! Similarly Heidegger can summon
us to the resolve to exist as selves in face of death because he opens our eyes
to our situation as one of ‘‘thrownness’’ (Geworfenheit: see "Existence
and Being`" Vision Press, 1949, p. 49f. [Translator]) into Nothing. Man has to undertake
to be what he already is. Similarly it is reasonable for Kamlah to invite us to
emancipate ourselves by an act of self-commitment, because he sees that our
empirical life is already a life of self-commitment -- we are already members
of society, we already receive its benefits and contribute to its maintenance.
The New Testament also sees that man can be
only what he already is. St. Paul exhorts Christians to be holy because they
have already been made holy (1 Cor. 6:11, cp. 5:7), and to walk in the Spirit
because they are already in the spirit (Gal. 5:25), and to mortify sin because
they are already dead unto sin (Rom. 6:11ff.); or in Johannine language,
because they are not "of the world", John 17:16) they can overcome
the world, and because they are born of God they do not sin (I John 3:9).
Eschatological existence is an attainable ideal because "the fullness of
time has come" and God has sent his Son "that he might deliver us out
of this present evil world. (Gal. 4:4; 1:4).
Thus the New Testament and the philosophers
agree that the authentic life is possible only because in some sense it is
already a present possession. But there is one difference-the New Testament
speaks thus only to Christian believers, only to those who have opened their
hearts to the redemptive action of God. It never speaks thus to natural man,
for he does not possess life, and his plight is one of despair.
Why does the New Testament take this line ?
Because it knows that man can become only what he already is, and it sees that
natural man, man apart from Christ, is not as he ought to be-he is not alive,
but dead.
The point at issue is how we understand the
fall. Even the philosophers are agreed about the fact of it. But they think
that all man needs is to be shown his plight, and that then he will be able to
escape from it. In other words, the corruption resulting from the fall does not
extend to the core of the human personality. The New Testament, on the other
hand, regards the fall as total.
How then, if the fall be total, can man be
aware of his plight? He certainly is aware of it, as the philosophers
themselves testify. How can man be aware that his fall is total and that it
extends to the very core of his personality? As a matter of fact, it is the
other way round: it is only because man is a fallen being, only because he
knows he is not what he really ought to be and what he would like to be, that
he can be aware of his plight. That awareness of his authentic nature is
essential to human life, and without it man would not be man. But his authentic
nature is not an endowment of creation or a possession at his own disposal. The
philosophers would agree thus far, for they also know that man’s authentic
nature has to be apprehended by a deliberate resolve. But they think that all
man needs is to be told about his authentic nature. This nature is what he
never realizes, but what at every moment he is capable of realizing -- you can
because you ought. But the philosophers are confusing a theoretical possibility
with an actual one. For, as the New Testament sees it, man has lost that actual
possibility, and even his awareness of his authentic manhood is perverted, as
is shown by his deluded belief that it is a possession he can command at will.
Why then has the fall destroyed this actual
possibility? The answer is that in his present plight every impulse of man is
the impulse of a fallen being. St. Paul demonstrates this in the case of the
Jews. In their search for righteousness they missed the very object of their
quest. They looked for justification from their own works; they wanted to have
a ground for glorying before God. Here is a perfect illustration of the plight
of man, of his bondage to the flesh, which the Jews were trying so frantically
to escape. This bondage leads to self-glorying and self-assertion, to a
desperate attempt to control our own destiny. If the authentic life of man is
one of self-commitment, then that life is missed not only by the blatantly
self-assertive but also by those who try to achieve self-commitment by their
own efforts. They fail to see that self-commitment can be received only as a
gift from God.
The glorying of the Jew over his faithfulness
to the law and the glorying of the Gnostic in his wisdom are both illustrations
of the dominant attitude of man, of his independence and autonomy which lead in
the end to frustration. We find the same thing in idealism with its deus in
nobis:
Lay hold on divinity; make it your own: Down it will climb from its heavenly throne.
In Heidegger’s case the perversity of such an
attitude is less obvious because he does not characterize resolve as
self-commitment. But it is clear that the shouldering of the accident of his
destiny in the facing of death is really the same radical self-assertion on
man’s part. Kamlah is relatively nearer to the Christian position when he
asserts that the commandment of self-commitment is capable of fulfillment
because God grants an understanding of himself (Pp. 341, 353) or because
"Reality" makes self-commitment possible to man by disclosing its own
meaning to him, (P. 298) or because self-commitment receives an indication of
its own intelligibility from "Reality" itself. (P. 330) But to assert
the intelligibility of Reality is to my mind a counsel of despair. Is it not a
desperate act of self-assertion when Kamlah says: "It is not possible to
doubt altogether in the intelligibility of Reality"? (P. 358) This surely
goes to prove that the only reasonable attitude for man to adopt apart from
Christ is one of despair, to despair of the possibility of his ever achieving
authentic Being.
This at any rate is what the New Testament
asserts. Of course it cannot prove its case any more than the philosophers can
prove the intelligibility of Reality. It is a matter for decision. The New
Testament addresses man as one who is through and through a self-assertive
rebel who knows from bitter experience that the life he actually lives is not
his authentic life, and that he is totally incapable of achieving that life by
his own efforts. In short, he is a totally fallen being.
This means, in the language of the New
Testament, that man is a sinner. The self-assertion of which we have spoken is
identical with sin. Sin is self-assertion, self-glorying, for "No flesh
should glory before God.... He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord"
(1 Cor. 1:29, 31; 2 Cor. 10:17). Is that no more than an unnecessary
mythologizing of an ontological proposition? Can man as he is perceive that
self-assertion involves guilt, and that he is personally responsible to God for
it? Is sin a mythological concept or not? The answer will depend on what we
make of St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians: "What hast thou that thou
didst not receive? but if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if
thou hadst not received it?" (1 Cor. 4:7). Does this apply to all men
alike, or only to Christians? This much at any rate is clear: self-assertion is
guilt only if it can be understood as ingratitude. If the radical
self-assertion which makes it impossible for man to achieve the authentic life
of self-commitment is identical with sin, it must obviously be possible for man
to understand his existence altogether as a gift of God. But it is just this
radical self-assertion which makes such an understanding impossible. For
self-assertion deludes man into thinking that his existence is a prize within
his own grasp. How blind man is to his plight is illustrated by that pessimism
which regards life as a burden thrust on man against his will, or by the way
men talk about the "right to live" or by the way they expect their
fair share of good fortune. Man’s radical self-assertion then blinds him to the
fact of sin, and this is the clearest proof that he is a fallen being. Hence it
is no good telling man that he is a sinner. He will only dismiss it as
mythology. But it does not follow that he is right.
To talk of sin ceases to be mere mythology when
the love of God meets man as a power which embraces and sustains him even in
his fallen, self-assertive state. Such a love treats man as if he were other
than he is. By so doing, love frees man from himself as he is.
For as a result of his self-assertion man is a
totally fallen being. He is capable of knowing that his authentic life consists
in self-commitment, but is incapable of realizing it because however hard he
tries he still remains what he is, self-assertive man. So in practice authentic
life becomes possible only when man is delivered from himself. It is the claim
of the New Testament that this is exactly what has happened. This is precisely
the meaning of that which was wrought in Christ. At the very point where man
can do nothing, God steps in and acts -- indeed he has acted already -- on
man’s behalf.
St. Paul is endeavoring to express this when he
speaks of the expiation of sin, or of "righteousness" created as a
gift of God rather than as a human achievement. Through Christ, God has
reconciled the world to himself, not reckoning to it its trespasses (2 Cor.
5:19). God made Christ to be sin for us, that we ,through him might stand
before God as righteous (2 Cor. 5: 21). For everyone who believes, his past
life is dead and done with. He is a new creature, and as such he faces each new
moment. In short, he has become a free man.
It is quite clear from this that forgiveness of
sins is not a juridical concept. It does not mean the remission of punishment.
(It is worth noting that St. Paul never uses the term, though it reappears in
the deutero-Pauline literature; see e.g. Col. 1:14; Eph. 1:7) If that were so,
man’s plight would be as bad as ever. Rather, forgiveness conveys freedom from
sin, which hitherto had held man in bondage. But this freedom is not a static
quality: it is freedom to obey. The indicative implies an imperative.
Love is the fulfillment of the law, and therefore the forgiveness of God
delivers man from himself and makes him free to devote his life to the service
of others (Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14).
Thus eschatological existence has become
possible. God has acted, and the world -- "this world" -- has come to
an end. Man himself has been made new. "If any man is in Christ, he
is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become
new" (2 Cor. 5:17). So much for St. Paul. St. John makes the same point in
his own particular language. The knowledge of the "truth" as it is
revealed in Jesus makes men free (8:32), free from the bondage of sin (8:34).
Jesus calls the dead to life (5:25) and gives sight to the blind (9:39). The
believer in Christ is "born again" (3:3ff.); he is given a fresh start
in life. He is no longer a worldling, for he has overcome the world through
faith (I John 5:4).
The event of Jesus Christ is therefore the
revelation of the love of God. It makes a man free from himself and free to be
himself, free to live a life of self-commitment in faith and love. But faith in
this sense of the word is possible only where it takes the form of faith in the
love of God. Yet such faith is still a subtle form of self-assertion so long as
the love of God is merely a piece of wishful thinking. It is only an abstract
idea so long as God has not revealed his love. That is why faith for the
Christian means faith in Christ, for it is faith in the love of God revealed in
Christ. Only those who are loved are capable of loving. Only those who have received
confidence as a gift can show confidence in others. Only those who know what
self-commitment is by experience can adopt that attitude themselves. We are
free to give ourselves to God because he has given up himself for us.
"Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his
Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (I John 4:10). "We love,
because he first loved us."(I John 4: 19).
The classic statement of this self-commitment
of God, which is the ground of our own self-commitment, is to be found in
Rom.,. 8:32: "God spared not his Son, but delivered him up for us; how
shall he not also with him freely give us all things?" Compare the
Johannine text: "God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal
life" (John 3:16). There are also similar texts which speak of Jesus’
giving up himself for us: `’. . . who gave himself for our sins, that he might
deliver us out of this present evil world" (Gal. 1:4); "I have been
crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in
me: and the life which I live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is
in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me" (Gal. 2:19f.) .
Here then is the crucial distinction between
the New Testament and existentialism, between the Christian faith and the
natural understanding of Being. The New Testament speaks and faith knows of an
act of God through which man becomes capable of self-commitment, capable of
faith and love, of his authentic life.
Have we carried our demythologizing far enough?
Are we still left with a myth, or at least an event which bears a mythical
character? It is possible, as we have seen, to restate in nonmythological terms
the New Testament teaching on human existence apart from faith and in faith.
But what of the point of transition between the old life and the new, authentic
life? Can it be understood otherwise than as an act of God? Is faith genuine
only when it is faith in the love of God revealed in Christ ?
2 . The Event of Jesus Christ
Anyone who asserts that to speak of an act of
God at all is mythological language is bound to regard the idea of an act of
God in Christ as a myth. But let us ignore this question for a moment. Even
Kamlah thinks it philosophically justifiable to use "the mythological
language of an act of God" (p. 353). The issue for the moment is whether
that particular event in which the New Testament sees the act of God and the
revelation of his love -- that is, the event of Jesus Christ -- is essentially
a mythical event.
(a) The
Demythologizing of the Event of Jesus Christ
Now, it is beyond question that the New
Testament presents the event of Jesus Christ in mythical terms. The problem is
whether that is the only possible presentation. Or does the New Testament
itself demand a restatement of the event of Jesus Christ in non-mythological
terms? Now, it is clear from the outset that the event of Christ is of a wholly
different order from the cult-myths of Greek or Hellenistic religion. Jesus
Christ is certainly presented as the Son of God, a pre-existent divine being,
and therefore to that extent a mythical figure. But he is also a concrete
figure of history -- Jesus of Nazareth. His life is more than a mythical event;
it is a human life which ended in the tragedy of crucifixion. We have here a
unique combination of history and myth. The New Testament claims that this
Jesus of history, whose father and mother were well known to his contemporaries
(John 6:42) is at the same time the pre-existent Son of God, and side by side
with the historical event of the crucifixion it sets the definitely
non-historical event of the resurrection. This combination of myth and history
presents a number of difficulties, as can be seen from certain inconsistencies
in the New Testament material. The doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence as given
by St. Paul and St. John is difficult to reconcile with the legend of the
Virgin birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke. On the one hand we hear that "he
emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of
men: and being found in fashion as a man . . ." (Phil. 2:7), and on the
other hand we have the gospel portraits of a Jesus who manifests his divinity
in his miracles, omniscience, and mysterious elusiveness, and the similar
description of him in Acts as "Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God
unto you by mighty works and wonders and signs" (Acts 2:22). On the one
hand we have the resurrection as the exaltation of Jesus from the cross or
grave, and on the other the legends of the empty tomb and the ascension.
We are compelled to ask whether all this
mythological language is not simply an attempt to express the meaning of the
historical figure of Jesus and the events of his life; in other words,
significance of these as a figure and event of salvation If that be so, we can
dispense with the objective form in which they are cast.
It is easy enough to deal with the doctrine of
Christ’s preexistence and the legend of the Virgin birth in this way. They are
clearly attempts to explain the meaning of the Person of Jesus for faith. The
facts which historical criticism can verify cannot exhaust, indeed they cannot
adequately indicate, all that Jesus means to me. How he actually originated
matters little, indeed we can appreciate his significance only when we cease to
worry about such questions. Our interest in the events of his life, and above
all in the cross, is more than an academic concern with the history of the
past. We can see meaning in them only when we ask what God is trying to say to
each one of us through them. Again, the figure of Jesus cannot be understood
simply from his inner-worldly context. In mythological language, this means
that he stems from eternity, his origin is not a human and natural one.
We shall not, however, pursue the examination
of the particular incidents of his life any further. In the end the crux of the
matter lies in the cross and resurrection.
(b) The Cross
Is the cross, understood as the event of redemption,
exclusively mythical in character, or can it retain its value for salvation
without forfeiting its character as history?
It certainly has a mythical character as far as
its objective setting is concerned. The Jesus who was crucified was the pre-existent,
incarnate Son of God, and as such he was without sin. He is the victim whose
blood atones for our sins. He bears vicariously the sin of the world, and by
enduring the punishment for sin on our behalf he delivers us from death. This
mythological interpretation is a mixture of sacrificial and juridical
analogies, which have ceased to be tenable for us today. And in any case they
fail to do justice to what the New Testament is trying to say. For the most
they can convey is that the cross effects the forgiveness of all the past and
future sins of man, in the sense that the punishment they deserved has been
remitted. But the New Testament means more than this. The cross releases men
not only from the guilt, but also from the power of sin. That is why, when the
author of Colossians says "He [God] . . . having forgiven us all our
trespasses, having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against
us, which was contrary to us; and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing it
to the cross" he hastens to add: "having put off from himself the
principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them
in it" (Col 2:13-15).
The historical event of the cross acquires
cosmic dimensions. And by speaking of the Cross as a cosmic happening its
significance as a historical happening is made clear in accordance with the
remarkable way of thinking in which historical events and connections are
presented in cosmic terms, and so its full significance is brought into sharper
relief. For if we see in the cross the judgment of the world and the defeat of
the rulers of this world (I Cor 2:6ff.), the cross becomes the judgment of
ourselves as fallen creatures enslaved to the powers of the "world".
By giving up Jesus to be crucified, God has set
up the cross for us. To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern
ourselves with a mythical process wrought outside of us and our world, with an
objective event turned by God to our advantage, but rather to make the cross of
Christ our own, to undergo crucifixion with him. The cross in its redemptive
aspect is not an isolated incident which befell a mythical personage, but an
event whose meaning has "cosmic" importance. Its decisive,
revolutionary significance is brought out by the eschatological framework in
which it is set. In other words, the cross is not just an event of the past
which can be contemplated, but is the eschatological event in and beyond time,
in so far as it (understood in its significance, that is, for faith) is an
ever-present reality.
The cross becomes a present reality first of
all in the sacraments. In baptism men and women are baptized into Christ’s
death (Rom. 6:3) and crucified with him (Rom. 6:6). At every celebration of the
Lord’s Supper the death of Christ is proclaimed (1 Cor: 1l.26). The communicants thereby partake of his
crucified body and his blood outpoured (1 Cor. 10:16). Again, the cross of
Christ is an ever-present reality in the everyday life of the Christians.
"They that are of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with the passions
and the lusts thereof" (Gal. 5:24). That is why St. Paul can speak of
"the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been
crucified unto me, and I unto the world" (Gal. 6:14). That is why he seeks
to know "the fellowship of his sufferings", as one who is
"conformed to his death" (Phil. 3:10).
The crucifying of the affections and lusts
includes the overcoming of our natural dread of suffering and the perfection of
our detachment from the world. Hence the willing acceptance of sufferings in
which death is already at work in man means: "always bearing about in our
body the dying of Jesus" and "always being delivered unto death for
Jesus’ sake" (2 Cor. 4:10ff.).
Thus the cross and passion are ever-present
realities. How little they are confined to the events of the first Good Friday
is amply illustrated by the words which a disciple of St. Paul puts into his
master’s mouth: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up
on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for
his body’s sake, which is the Church" (Col. 1:24).
In its redemptive aspect the cross of Christ is
no mere mythical event, but a historic (geschichtlich) fact originating
in the historical (historisch) event which is the crucifixion of Jesus.
The abiding significance of the cross is that it is the judgment of the world,
the judgment and the deliverance of man. So far as this is so, Christ is
crucified "for us", not in the sense of any theory of sacrifice or
satisfaction. This interpretation of the cross as a permanent fact rather than
a mythological event does far more justice to the redemptive significance of
the event of the past than any of the traditional interpretations. In the last
resort mythological language is only a medium for conveying the significance of
the historical (historisch) event. The historical (historisch)
event of the cross has, in the significance peculiar to it, created a new
historic (geschichtlich) situation. The preaching of the cross as the
event of redemption challenges all who hear it to appropriate this significance
for themselves, to be willing to be crucified with Christ.
But, it will be asked, is this significance to
be discerned in the actual event of past history? Can it, so to speak, be read
off from that event? Or does the cross bear this significance because it is the
cross of Christ? In other words, must we first be convinced of the significance
of Christ and believe in him in order to discern the real meaning of the
cross? If we are to perceive the real meaning of the cross, must we understand
it as the cross of Jesus as a figure of past history? Must we go back to the
Jesus of history ?
As far as the first preachers of the gospel are
concerned this will certainly be the case. For them the cross was the cross of
him with whom they had lived in personal intercourse. The cross was an
experience of their own lives. It presented them with a question and it
disclosed to them its meaning. But for us this personal connection cannot be
reproduced. For us the cross cannot disclose its own meaning: it is an event of
the past. We can never recover it as an event in our own lives. All we know of
it is derived from historical report. But the New Testament does not proclaim
Jesus Christ in this way. The meaning of the cross is not disclosed from the
life of Jesus as a figure of past history, a life which needs to be reproduced
by historical research. On the contrary, Jesus is not proclaimed merely as the
crucified; he is also risen from the dead. The cross and the resurrection form
an inseparable unity.
(c) The Resurrection
But what of the resurrection? Is it not a
mythical event pure and simple? Obviously it is not an event of past history
with a self-evident meaning. Can the resurrection narratives and every other
mention of the resurrection in the New Testament be understood simply as an
attempt to convey the meaning of the cross? Does the New Testament, in
asserting that Jesus is risen from the dead, mean that his death is not just an
ordinary human death, but the judgment and salvation of the world, depriving
death of its power? Does it not express this truth in the affirmation that the
Crucified was not holden of death, but rose from the dead?
Yes indeed: the cross and the resurrection form
a single, indivisible cosmic event. "He was delivered up for our
trespasses, and was raised for our justification" (Rom. 4: 25). The cross
is not an isolated event, as though it were the end of Jesus, which needed the
resurrection subsequently to reverse it. When he suffered death, Jesus was
already the Son of God, and his death by itself was the victory over the power
of death. St. John brings this out most clearly by describing the passion of
Jesus as the "hour" in which he is glorified, and by the double
meaning he gives to the phrase "lifted up", applying it both to the
cross and to Christ’s exaltation into glory.
Cross and resurrection form a single,
indivisible cosmic event which brings judgment to the world and opens up for
men the possibility of authentic life. But if that be so, the resurrection
cannot be a miraculous proof capable of demonstration and sufficient to
convince the skeptic that the cross really has the cosmic and eschatological
significance ascribed to it.
Yet it cannot be denied that the resurrection
of Jesus is often used in the New Testament as a miraculous proof. Take for
instance Acts 17:31. Here we are actually told that God substantiated the
claims of Christ by raising him from the dead. Then again the resurrection
narratives: both the legend of the empty tomb and the appearances insist on the
physical reality of the risen body of the Lord (see especially Luke 24:39-43).
But these are most certainly later embellishments of the primitive tradition.
St. Paul knows nothing about them. There is however one passage where St. Paul
tries to prove the miracle of the resurrection by adducing a list of
eye-witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3-8). But this is a dangerous procedure, as Karl Barth
has involuntarily shown. Barth seeks to explain away the real meaning of 1
Cor.15 by contending that the list of eye-witnesses was put in not to prove the
fact of the resurrection, but to prove that the preaching of the apostle was,
like the preaching of the first Christians, the preaching of Jesus as the risen
Lord. The eyewitnesses therefore guarantee St. Paul’s preaching, not the fact
of the resurrection. An historical fact which involves a resurrection from the
dead is utterly inconceivable!
Yes indeed: the resurrection of Jesus cannot be
a miraculous proof by which the skeptic might be compelled to believe in
Christ. The difficulty is not simply the incredibility of a mythical event like
the resuscitation of a dead person-for that is what the resurrection means, as
is shown by the fact that the risen Lord is apprehended by the physical senses.
Nor is it merely the impossibility of establishing the objective historicity of
the resurrection no matter how many witnesses are cited, as though once it was
established it might be believed beyond all question and faith might have its
unimpeachable guarantee. No; the real difficulty is that the resurrection is
itself an article of faith, and you cannot establish one article of faith by
invoking another. You cannot prove the redemptive efficacy of the cross by
invoking the resurrection. For the resurrection is an article of faith because
it is far more than the resuscitation of a corpse-it is the eschatological
event. And so it cannot be a miraculous proof. For, quite apart from its
credibility, the bare miracle tells us nothing about the eschatological fact of
the destruction of death. Moreover, such a miracle is not otherwise unknown to
mythology.
It is however abundantly clear that the New
Testament is interested in the resurrection of Christ simply and solely because
it is the eschatological event par excellence. By it Christ abolished
death and brought life and immortality to light (2 Tim. 1:10). This explains
why St. Paul borrows Gnostic language to clarify the meaning of the
resurrection. As in the death of Jesus all have died (2 Cor. 5:14f.), so through his resurrection all
have been raised from the dead, though naturally this event is spread over a
long period of time (1 Cor. 15:21f.).
But St. Paul does not only say: "In Christ shall all be made alive";
he can also speak of rising again with Christ in the present tense, just as he
speaks of our dying with him. Through the sacrament of baptism Christians
participate not only in the death of Christ but also in his resurrection. It is
not simply that we shall walk with him in newness of life and be united
with him in his resurrection (Rom. 6:4f);
we are doing so already here and now. "Even so reckon ye yourselves to be
dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Jesus Christ" (Rom. 6:1l).
Once again, in everyday life the Christians participate
not only in the death of Christ but also in his resurrection. In this
resurrection-life they enjoy a freedom, albeit a struggling freedom, from sin
(Rom. 6:11ff.). They are able to "cast off the works of darkness", so
that the approaching day when the darkness shall vanish is already experienced
here and now. " Let us walk honestly as in the day" (Rom. 13:12f.): "we are not of the night, nor
of the darkness.... Let us, since we are of the day, be sober . . . " ( I
Thess. 5:5-8). St. Paul seeks to share not only the sufferings of Christ but
also "the power of his resurrection" (Phil. 3:10). So he bears about
in his body the dying of Jesus, "that the life also of Jesus may be
manifested in our body" (2 Cor. 4:10f.).
Similarly, when the Corinthians demand a proof of his apostolic authority, he
solemnly warns them: "Christ is not weak, but is powerful in you: for he
was crucified in weakness, yet he liveth in the power of God. For we also are
weak in him, but we shall live with him through the power of God toward
you" (2 Cor. 13:3f.).
In this way the resurrection is not a
mythological event adduced in order to prove the saving efficacy of the cross,
but an article of faith just as much as the meaning of the cross itself.
Indeed, faith in the resurrection is really the same thing as faith in the
saving efficacy of the cross, faith in the cross as the cross of Christ.
Hence you cannot first believe in Christ and then in the strength of that faith
believe in the cross. To believe in Christ means to believe in the cross as the
cross of Christ. The saving efficacy of the cross is not derived from the fact
that it is the cross of Christ: it is the cross of Christ because it has this
saving efficacy. Without that efficacy it is the tragic end of a great man.
We are back again at the old question. How do
we come to believe in the cross as the cross of Christ and as the
eschatological event par excellence? How do we come to believe in the
saving efficacy of the cross?
There is only one answer. This is the way in
which the cross is proclaimed. It is always proclaimed together with the
resurrection. Christ meets us in the preaching as one crucified and risen. He
meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. The faith of Easter is just
this -- faith in the word of preaching.
It would be wrong at this point to raise again
the problem of how this preaching arose historically, as though that could
vindicate its truth. That would be to tie our faith in the word of God: to the
results of historical research. The word of preaching confronts us as the word
of God. It is not for us to question its credentials. It is we who are
questioned, we who are asked whether we will believe the word or reject it. But
in answering this question, in accepting the word of preaching as the word of
God and the death and resurrection of Christ as the eschatological event, we
are given an opportunity of understanding ourselves. Faith and unbelief are
never blind, arbitrary decisions. They offer us the alternative between
accepting or rejecting that which alone can illuminate our understanding of
ourselves.
The real Easter faith is faith in the word of
preaching which brings illumination. If the event of Easter Day is in any sense
an historical event additional to the event of the cross, it is nothing else
than the risen of faith in the risen Lord, since it was this faith which led to
the apostolic preaching. The resurrection itself is not an event of past
history. All that historical criticism can establish is the fact that the first
disciples came to believe in the resurrection. The historian can perhaps to
some extent account for that faith from the personal intimacy which the
disciples had enjoyed with Jesus during his earthly life, and so reduce the
resurrection appearances to a series of subjective visions. But the historical
problem is not of interest to Christian belief in the resurrection. For the
historical event of the rise of the Easter faith means for us what it meant for
the first disciples -- namely, the self-attestation of the risen Lord, the act
of God in which the redemptive event of the cross is completed. (This and the
following paragraphs are also intended as an answer to the doubts and
suspicions which Paul Althaus has raised against me in Die Wahrheit des
kirchlichen Osterglaubens, 1941, p. 90ff. Cp. also my
discussion of Emanuel Hirsch’s "Die Auferstehungsgeschichten und der
christliche Glaube", 1940, in Theol. Lit.-Ztg., 1940, pp. 242-6.)
We cannot buttress our own faith in the
resurrection by that of the first disciples and so eliminate the element of
risk which faith in the resurrection always involves. For the first disciples’
faith in the resurrection is itself part and parcel of the eschatological event
which is the article of faith.
In other words, the apostolic preaching which
originated in the event of Easter Day is itself a part of the eschatological
event of redemption. The death of Christ, which is both the judgment and the
salvation of the world, inaugurates the "ministry of reconciliation"
or "word of reconciliation" (2 Cor. 5:18f.). This word supplements the cross and makes its
saving efficacy intelligible by demanding faith and confronting men with the
question whether they are willing to understand themselves as men who are
crucified and risen with Christ. Through the word of preaching the cross and
the resurrection are made present: the eschatological ‘`now" is here, and
the promise of Isa. 49:8 is fulfilled: "Behold, now is the acceptable
time; behold, now is the day of salvation" (2 Cor. 6:2). That is why the apostolic
preaching brings judgment. For some the apostle is "a savior from death
unto death" and for others a "savior from life unto life" (2
Cor. 2:16). St. Paul is the agent through whom the resurrection life becomes
effective in the faithful (2 Cor. 4:12). The promise of Jesus in the Fourth
Gospel is eminently applicable to the preaching in which he is proclaimed:
"Verily I say unto you, He that heareth my words and believeth on him that
sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not unto judgment, but hath passed out
of death into life.... The hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the
voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live" (John 5:24f.). In the word of preaching and there
alone we meet the risen Lord. "So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by
the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17).
Like the word itself and the apostle who
proclaims it, so the Church where the preaching of the word is continued and
where the believers or "saints" (i.e., those who have been
transferred to eschatological existence) are gathered is part of the
eschatological event. The word "Church" is an eschatological term,
while its designation as the Body of Christ emphasizes its cosmic significance.
For the Church is not just a phenomenon of secular history, it is phenomenon of
significant history, in the sense that it realizes itself in history.
Conclusion
We have now outlined a program for the
demythologizing of the New Testament. Are there still any surviving traces of
mythology? There certainly are for those who regard all language about an act
of God or of a decisive, eschatological event as mythological. But this is not
mythology in the traditional sense, not the kind of mythology which has become
antiquated with the decay of the mythical world view. For the redemption of
which we have spoken is not a miraculous supernatural event, but an historical
event wrought out in time and space. We are convinced that this restatement
does better justice to the real meaning of the New Testament and to the paradox
of the kerygma. For the kerygma maintains that the eschatological emissary of
God is a concrete figure of a particular historical past, that his
eschatological activity was wrought out in a human fate, and that therefore it
is an event whose eschatological character does not admit of a secular proof.
Here we have the paradox of Phil. 2:7 "He emptied himself"; of 2 Cor.
8:9: ". . . though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor";
of Rom. 8: 3: "God, sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh";
of I Tim. 3:16: "He was manifested in the flesh"; and above all of
the classic formula of John 1:14: "The Word became flesh."
The agent of God’s presence and activity, the
mediator of his reconciliation of the world unto himself, is a real figure of
history. Similarly the word of God is not some mysterious oracle, but a sober,
factual account of a human life, of Jesus of Nazareth, possessing saving
efficacy for man. Of course the kerygma may be regarded as part of the story of
man’s spiritual evolution and used as a basis for a tenable Weltanschauung.
Yet this proclamation claims to be the eschatological word of God.
The apostles who proclaim the word may be
regarded merely as figures of past history, and the Church as a sociological
and historical phenomenon, part of the history of man’s spiritual evolution.
Yet both are eschatological phenomena and eschatological events.
All these assertions are an offense, which will
not be removed by philosophical discussion, but only by faith and obedience.
All these are phenomena subject to historical, sociological and psychological
observation, yet for faith they are all of them eschatological phenomena. It is
precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation
against the charge of being mythological. The transcendence of God is not as in
myth reduced to immanence. Instead, we have the paradox of a transcendent God
present and active in history: "The Word became flesh".
Discernment—the Most Neglected of
All Spiritual Gifts
