The Mission of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology by David W. Congdon (review)

Rudolf Bultmann’s literary deposit and theological legacy have suffered an interesting fate in subsequent Protestant theology, especially in the recent trajectory of North-American Lutheran dogmatics and homiletics. In the middle of the twentieth century, Bultmann’s writings were all the rage among Anglophone Lutherans hoping to shore up theological work and preaching against the challenges posed by modernity. His insistence upon the ongoing centrality of the early Christian kerygma for the church’s theological and homiletical tasks appeared well-suited to counter, all at once, the unchecked historicism marking the professional religious studies guilds, the emergence of militant atheism, and the conversion ploys and privatistic pieties of the new evangelical populism of Billy Graham and Robert Schuller. Within a couple of decades, though, and for a variety of reasons, the spell of Bultmann’s kerygmatic program of demythologization had largely dissipated. While pockets of Bultmannian Lutheranism endured here and there (mainly as promulgated by seminary professors who remained committed to demythologization as a hermeneutical agenda), his influence gradually and conspicuously waned among theologians and biblical scholars, conservative and progressive alike.

The volume under review makes a persuasive case that Bultmann’s theological legacy is worthy of re-interpretation. With one additional book on Bultmann in print (Rudolf Bultmann: A Companion to His Theology, 2015) and another on the way (Bultmann: A Guide for the Perplexed, 2017), author David W. Congdon, Associate Editor at IVP Academic, has become a leading interpreter of Bultmann’s theology. He is a skilled writer and careful researcher, and the reader willing to labor through this massive tome will be rewarded with a fresh evaluation of Bultmann’s work that situates his thought in the context of Christianity’s missionary response to the changing intellectual and cultural conditions of modernity.

The relationship––and putative acrimony––between Bultmann and Karl Barth is front and center of the book’s claims. Congdon seeks to dismantle the notion that Bultmann and Barth were up to different things, suggesting instead that the former’s program of demythologization is the extension into hermeneutics of the latter’s missionary-dialectical theological program. This reading is animated by the thesis that it was Barth who departed from Bultmann, and not the other way around, as is typically claimed. Along the way, Congdon’s more significant rewriting of the history of modern theology emerges; namely, the assertion that dialectical theology–– both in the form of Barth’s revolt against the antecedent liberal tradition and Bultmann’s rejection of historicism in New Testament studies––was profoundly missionary (in an anti-constantinian and anti-colonial sense). Bultmann and also Barth are thus depicted as Christian missionaries to modernity, contextualizing the gospel (as good missionaries must do) so that it can speak anew to modern hearers. Congdon, building on an important essay by Eberhard Jüngel from the 1990s, helpfully corrects commonly held misunderstandings of the concept of “myth” underlying demythologization, demonstrating that, for Bultmann, the goal of demythologizing interpretation is to uncover the truth of myth mediated through the ancient texts.

This modest review can hardly do justice to a monograph of such size and scope. The book demands patient consideration, and is highly recommended to those interested in Bultmann’s work and legacy, and, more generally, in the genealogies of modern theology. Having awarded such praise, it is also worth noting that, for this reviewer at least, Congdon’s study does little to dispel some abiding worries over Bultmann’s program. In particular, the book did not mitigate my suspicion that Bultmann’s location of the resurrected Christ in the church’s kerygma gives way to a somewhat porous Christology, according to which Christ’s prophetic office occludes his work as priest and king, and the career of Christ is conflated to his role as proclaimer and proclaimed. The question remains, then, whether and to what extent Congdon’s work will succeed in resuscitating Bultmann’s thought for the...