What did Bultmann mean by demythologisation, and why is it incompatible with orthodoxy?

Question 60083.

Bultmann’s demythologisation is one of those pieces of academic vocabulary that sounds harmless and turns out to be anything but. Rudolf Bultmann, who lived from 1884 to 1976 and taught New Testament at Marburg, argued that the message of the New Testament is wrapped in a picture of the world that no modern person can honestly hold, and that the task of the interpreter is to unwrap it.

The programme has shaped more preaching than most churchgoers realise. When you hear a sermon that treats the resurrection as the disciples’ experience of new possibility rather than as an event on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem, you are hearing the long echo of Marburg. So it is worth knowing what he actually said, and where it goes wrong.

What Bultmann Meant by Myth

By myth Bultmann did not mean a made up story in the schoolboy sense. He meant a way of speaking about the divine using the imagery of this world: heaven above and hell beneath, angels and demons acting on human affairs, God intervening from outside, a saviour descending and ascending. That framework, he argued, belongs to the first century and cannot simply be transferred into ours.

His famous line, from the 1941 essay New Testament and Mythology, is that you cannot use electric light and the wireless, avail yourself of modern medicine, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. The claim is not that the New Testament is worthless. The claim is that its worth is trapped inside a container modern people cannot accept.

Bultmann’s demythologisation is therefore not the deletion of the myth but its translation. He wanted to keep what the mythological language was trying to say and restate it in terms a twentieth century person could receive without intellectual dishonesty.

Bultmann’s Demythologisation and Existentialism

What he translated it into was the existentialist philosophy of his Marburg colleague Martin Heidegger. The New Testament, on this reading, is not primarily telling us what God did in history. It is confronting us with a call to authentic existence, a summons to abandon false security and live open to the future.

So the cross becomes the event in which I am called to die to my old self-understanding. The resurrection becomes the rise of Easter faith in the disciples, the moment the cross began to be preached as salvation. Sin becomes inauthentic existence. Eschatology becomes the crisis of decision that meets me in the present moment whenever the word is preached.

Bultmann’s demythologisation is at its most seductive here, because every one of those statements contains something true. The cross does call me to die to myself. The preached word does confront me now. The trouble is what has been quietly removed while my attention was on what remains.

What Bultmann Removed

He removed the events. For Bultmann the historical Jesus is almost entirely inaccessible behind the church’s proclamation, and in any case theologically unimportant. What matters is the kerygma, the preaching, not the Jesus of Nazareth whom the preaching describes. He was content to say that the resurrection is not an event of past history at all.

He also removed God’s action in the world in any ordinary sense. Miracles are not investigated and found wanting. They are excluded in advance, because the closed causal continuum of nature is treated as a fixed feature of the modern mind. That is the same move that drives so much of higher criticism, and it is philosophy rather than history.

Bultmann’s demythologisation, then, does not simply reinterpret the framework. It quietly evacuates the content, and it does so on grounds that were never argued, only assumed.

The First Problem: Paul Will Not Allow It

The most direct objection to Bultmann’s demythologisation is that the New Testament itself anticipates it and rejects it. In 1 Corinthians 15:14-19 Paul says that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain, that the apostles are found to be misrepresenting God, and that we are of all people most to be pitied.

Paul does not say that the resurrection is a symbol whose power survives the loss of the event. He stakes everything on the event and invites his readers to check with the witnesses, most of whom, he notes, are still alive. That is not the language of myth. That is the language of a man describing something that happened.

The Greek word Paul uses of the preached message is euangelion, news, and news is by definition a report of something that occurred. A gospel with no event behind it is not good news. It is good advice with a first century accent.

The Second Problem: The Assumption Is Not Modern, It Is Just Old

Bultmann assumed that modern people cannot believe in the supernatural. That assumption was already looking dated when he wrote it, and it looks stranger now. The confident nineteenth century picture of a closed mechanical universe has not survived twentieth century physics intact, and the idea that scientific work requires the denial of divine action is a philosophical commitment rather than a scientific finding.

There is also something faintly patronising in the argument. Ancient people were not credulous fools who found virgin births and resurrections unremarkable. Joseph knew where babies come from. Thomas wanted to touch the wounds. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were not expecting a risen man, which is exactly why they did not recognise one.

I have set out more on the relationship between the sciences and the text at can science contradict the Bible, and on the wider question at are faith and reason opposed to each other.

The Third Problem: It Cannot Be Preached

There is a pastoral test that Bultmann’s demythologisation fails badly. Take it to a graveside. Tell a widow that her husband’s body will not rise, but that the language of resurrection expresses the possibility of authentic existence in the face of death. She will know she has been handed a stone.

Christian hope has always been concrete because the resurrection of Jesus was concrete. He ate fish. He showed His hands. The tomb was empty, and the earliest opponents of the church argued about where the body had gone rather than denying that it was missing. Take the event away and the comfort goes with it.

That is why the churches most thoroughly shaped by this programme have emptied. A message that has been translated into a summons to authenticity can be obtained more cheaply elsewhere, and people know it.

What We Can Learn from Him Anyway

I do not want to leave the impression that nothing can be gained here. Bultmann was a serious scholar of Greek, and his technical work on the language of John repays reading even where his conclusions do not. He also pressed a legitimate question that evangelicals sometimes dodge: how does a text written into one culture address people in another?

The answer, though, is not translation into philosophy. It is the ordinary work of exposition, which distinguishes the cultural clothing of a passage from its abiding claim without dissolving its historical content. When Paul tells women to cover their heads, I ask what that signified in Corinth. When Paul says Jesus rose on the third day, I do not ask what that signified. I ask whether it happened.

The dividing line is not between literal and figurative reading. It is between a text that reports acts of God in history and a system that has decided in advance that no such acts occur. See what is literal interpretation for how I approach that.

The Marburg Setting

Bultmann did not arrive at his programme in isolation, and the setting explains a good deal. He taught at Marburg from 1921, in a Germany shaken by defeat and revolution, in a theological faculty where liberal Protestantism had spent a century domesticating the miraculous and where the confident nineteenth century quest for the historical Jesus had recently collapsed.

Albert Schweitzer had demonstrated that the liberal Jesus, a gentle teacher of timeless ethics, was largely a reflection of the scholars who reconstructed him. That was a fair criticism and it left a vacuum. If the historical Jesus could not be recovered, what was left for faith to rest on?

Bultmann’s demythologisation was his answer to that vacuum. Rather than trying to rescue a historical figure from behind the texts, he relocated faith entirely in the present encounter with the preached word, where no amount of historical research could threaten it. Understood that way the programme was defensive as much as destructive, and it is easier to see why serious believing scholars found it attractive.

How the Programme Reached British Pulpits

Ideas of this kind rarely arrive with a label on them. Bultmann’s demythologisation reached ordinary English speaking congregations through a chain of popularisers, most famously John A. T. Robinson, whose Honest to God in 1963 sold a million copies and told an astonished public that the God up there was an outdated picture.

From there it entered ministerial training and, in time, the pulpit. The signs are recognisable once you know them. Resurrection is spoken of as the disciples’ new understanding. Miracles become signs of what is always true rather than events that happened. The language of Scripture is retained while the referent quietly evaporates.

I do not think most preachers who talk this way have read Bultmann. That is precisely the problem with a successful idea: it stops needing its author. What began as a technical proposal in a German faculty ends as a vague pulpit habit of never quite saying that anything occurred.

The Historical Jesus After Bultmann

The interesting development is that scholarship did not stay where Bultmann left it. His own pupils, notably Ernst Kasemann, reopened the question of the historical Jesus in the 1950s on the grounds that a faith with no connection to a real man in Galilee was in danger of becoming mythology of another sort.

Since then the archaeological and documentary evidence has moved steadily in a direction Bultmann did not anticipate. The pool of Bethesda with its five porticoes, the Pilate inscription at Caesarea, the ossuary of Caiaphas, the growing appreciation of how carefully oral tradition was transmitted in a Jewish setting: none of this proves the resurrection, but it makes the confident scepticism of 1941 look distinctly of its period.

Bultmann’s demythologisation was presented as the only honest option for a modern person. Eighty years later it looks more like the theology of a particular moment, and a moment that has passed. See what role archaeology plays in understanding Scripture.

What Should Replace It

If demythologisation is the wrong answer to a real question, what is the right one? The question was how a first century text speaks to a twenty first century reader, and the answer the church has used for two thousand years is exposition rather than translation into philosophy.

Exposition asks what the author meant, in his language, to his readers, and then asks what follows for us. It distinguishes cultural form from abiding substance without dissolving the events. Paul’s instructions about meat offered to idols address a situation most British Christians will never face, and the principle about conscience and the weaker brother transfers directly. Nothing had to be demythologised to make that work.

The difference between exposition and demythologisation is therefore not a difference of sophistication. It is a difference about whether the text is reporting anything. One approach asks what happened and what it means; the other has already decided that nothing happened and asks only what it means. See 2 Peter 1:16, where Peter insists that he did not follow cleverly devised myths.

The Cost to the Congregation

I want to finish the critique where it lands, which is on ordinary people in pews. A theology of demythologisation gives a congregation nothing to hold in a crisis. It offers a summons to authenticity, and authenticity does not raise the dead.

Consider what it removes over a lifetime of hearing. There is no God who acts, so there is no point in petition. There is no bodily resurrection, so the grave is final. There is no returning Jesus, so history has no destination. What is left is a set of noble attitudes, and people can obtain those without getting out of bed on a Sunday.

The statistics of the churches that went furthest down this road tell the story more clearly than any argument I could make. Demythologisation was offered as the way to keep Christianity credible for modern people, and modern people responded by leaving in very large numbers.

Reading the Gospels as Testimony

There is an alternative to demythologisation that the Gospels themselves propose, and it is worth naming. They present themselves as testimony. Luke says he has followed all things closely from those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, so that his reader may have certainty concerning the things he has been taught.

Testimony is a legitimate route to knowledge and we rely on it constantly. Almost everything you believe about history, science and your own infancy rests on the reports of others whom you have judged reliable. The question with the Gospels is therefore the ordinary one we ask of any witness: were they in a position to know, and are they telling the truth?

That is a far more fruitful question than whether the modern mind can tolerate a miracle, and it puts the discussion where the New Testament itself wants it. Luke wrote his account for a named individual so that he could check.

So, now what?

If you meet Bultmann’s demythologisation in a lecture, a commentary or a pulpit, the question to ask is simple. What did this scholar decide before he opened the text? Once you see the assumption, the conclusions lose most of their authority, because they were never conclusions in the first place.

And if you are preaching, preach the events. Say that the tomb was empty. Say that the God who made the world is perfectly capable of acting within it. There is a reason Paul rested the whole weight of the Christian faith on one Sunday morning in a Jerusalem garden, and there is no version of Christianity worth having once that morning is turned into a metaphor. What would be left of your own hope if it were?

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:14 (ESV)

For Further Study

For the primary material, Bultmann’s essay New Testament and Mythology is collected in Kerygma and Myth, and his Theology of the New Testament sets out the programme at length. For the evangelical response, Millard J. Erickson’s Christian Theology handles the historical Jesus question carefully, and Charles C. Ryrie’s Basic Theology gives a clear account of revelation and the supernatural that shows why the assumption behind demythologisation cannot be granted. J. Dwight Pentecost’s The Words and Works of Jesus Christ is a useful reminder of how much of the Gospel record simply disappears once the miraculous is ruled out in advance.