Jesus The Man and Jesus The Christ: Did Bultmann Change?

JESUS THE MAN AND JESUS THE CHRIST: DID BULTMANN CHANGE? RUDOLF BULTMANN'S POSITION on the question of the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of the kerygma is-from one point of viewa much easier topic to discuss today than it would have been prior to 1959. In that year, Bultmann delivered an address to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in which he answered the critics of his position and in so doing clarified what his position really was.1 Prior to 1959, this position was difficult to state with precision not only because his ideas were discussed in a number of books and essays spanning a number of years but because at times his views seemed contradictory. We read, for example, in his highly controversial 1941 essay entitled "New Testament and Mythology " that 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.2 All of this seems to indicate that Jesus of Nazareth is-in his own personal history-the means of our salvation. And yet in another passage we read what appears to be the opposite: " The Jesus of history is not kerygma, any more than my book was.3 1 Rudolf Bultmann, " The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus " (hereafter PKHJ), in The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, ed. and tr. Carl E. Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1964), pp. 15-42. • Rudolf Bultmann, "Kerygma and Myth" (hereafter K&M), tr. R. Fuller, (New York: Harper [Torchbooks], 1961), p. 44. • Ibid., p. 117. The "book " to which Bultmann refers here is his Jesus and the Word. See complete citation below. 267 268 JEFFREY G. SOBOSAN For in the kerygma Jesus encounters us as the Christ-that is, as the eschatological phenomenon par excellence. Neither St. Paul nor St. John mediate an historic encounter with the historic Jesus." 4 And again: "I am deliberately renouncing any form of encounter with a phenomenon of past history, including an encounter with the Christ after the flesh, in order to encounter Christ proclaimed in the kerygma." 5 Contradictory statements and ideas such as these are inevitable whenever a thinker is trying to develop an orginal idea. But his students and followers appreciate clarification. This is precisely what the 1959 Heidelberg Address accomplished : it clarified and refined what before had been at most an ambiguous position. But I submit that the Address did not alter his position. This I feel has always remained the same. The task of this essay will be to demonstrate why and how this assertion can be made. THE VocABULARY oF THE EssAY Before I can develop Bultmann's position, it is important to arrive at some initial and perhaps unsophisticated understanding of the terms involved, and then, secondarily, the nature of the problem. But the terms and the problem are not separable; in fact, because of Bultmann's use of the terms, the terms are the problem. This is because for Bultmann the terms signify two distinct realities: the Christ of the kerygma is an event, an understanding, a revelation apart from the Jesus of history whose life has ended and who cannot be present to our existence. Traditional Christology, while at times retaining the two terms, will apply them to one reality: the kerygmatic Christ is the Jesus of history who was put to death and raised to life for our justification (Rom. 4: 25) and who lives as present to our personal histories as a transcendent but living person. The reasons for the split between the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ are based on two conclusions Bultmann • Ibid. "Ibid. DID BUl/l'MANN CHANGE? ~69 draws from his study of the New Testament which are fundamental for any understanding of his position. Bultmann observes that Jesus did not proclaim himself as the savior; that is, he did not demand faith in himself precisely in the role of Savior of the World. Jesus's...