Bultmann and Demythologization

Introduction

Among twentieth-century New Testament scholars, few have shaped the modern conversation as decisively—or as controversially—as Rudolf Bultmann. His program of Entmythologisierung (“demythologization”) sought neither to discard the New Testament nor to domesticate it into moralism. Rather, he aimed to interpret its proclamation (kerygma) in categories that a modern person could understand without first adopting an obsolete cosmology. For Bultmann, the mythic world picture of the New Testament—angels and demons inhabiting a three-storied universe, miracle as interruption of an otherwise closed causal nexus, apocalyptic timetables forecasting the end—could not simply be “believed” after Copernicus, Newton, and the emergence of historical consciousness. Yet the New Testament’s message still addresses the human person in her radical finitude, guilt, and need for authentic existence before God. Demythologization was the attempt to translate that message into existential understanding without trivializing its claim (Bultmann, 1984).

This chapter situates Bultmann’s program historically and philosophically, clarifies what he meant by “myth” and why he insisted on demythologization, and explains how his existential hermeneutics reorients exegesis. It offers extended exegetical soundings (Romans 6; John 11; John 20; Mark 5), engages major critiques and developments (Barth, Käsemann, Pannenberg, the “New Hermeneutic,” and more recent memory-oriented historiography), and proposes an integrative posture for doctoral students: learning from Bultmann’s insights into proclamation and decision while resisting reductive readings that dissolve the historical and ecclesial thickness of the gospel.

The Intellectual Setting: From Historicism to Existence

Bultmann’s formation spanned liberal theology’s optimistic historicism and the shocks that undid it. He absorbed rigorous historical-critical method from the German tradition—philology, form criticism, comparative religion—and he stood within the trajectory from Schleiermacher’s focus on piety through Ritschl’s value-judgments to Troeltsch’s maxims of criticism, analogy, and correlation (Soulen & Soulen, 2011). But he also experienced the crisis of World War I and the collapse of easy alignments between Christianity and culture. Two philosophical influences proved decisive. First, historicism: everything—including Scripture—comes to us historically, mediated by language, culture, and communal memory. Second, Heidegger’s existential analytic: human existence (Dasein) is thrown, finite, temporal, and always already engaged in projects; authenticity comes by resolute openness to one’s future, while inauthenticity hides in idle talk and self-deception.

From this matrix, Bultmann concluded that the New Testament’s language is “mythical”: it speaks in the idiom of an ancient world picture but aims at something enduring—summoning the hearer to faith as decision. If we mistake the idiom for the claim, we either reject the gospel as pre-scientific superstition or cling to an obsolete cosmology as a condition of belief. In both cases, the proclamation fails to confront the person here and now (Bultmann, 1984).

What Bultmann Means by “Myth”

For Bultmann, myth is not mere falsehood. It is a form of language that objectifies transcendence, picturing divine power in spatial and causal imagery familiar to ancient people. Heaven is “above,” hell is “below,” angels traverse the layers, demons cause disease, and God intervenes in the causal nexus to produce wonders. Such language is not stupidity; it is a culturally fitting way to express truths about human dependence, guilt, hope, and encounter with ultimacy. But modern persons inhabit a different plausibility structure. We explain disease in medical terms, not possession; we understand the cosmos as a homogeneous continuum governed by regularities; we live under historical consciousness, which insists that claims be argued with publicly accessible reasons (Bultmann, 1984). The task, then, is not to excise myth—as if we could retrieve a purely rational core—nor to re-mythologize by insisting that faith requires the ancient cosmology. It is to interpret myth’s intention: to hear what it says about human existence before God.

Two technical distinctions help. First, Historie versus Geschichte: Historie names what historical-critical method can reconstruct about events, causes, and dates; Geschichte names the event as it encounters and addresses me—the saving significance of Jesus’ cross and resurrection as proclamation. Second, faith versus sight: faith does not rest on neutral historical demonstration. If God is God, the divine self-disclosure cannot be made the object of detached inspection; it calls for decision (Bultmann, 1984).

Demythologization as Hermeneutical Program

In the 1941 lecture “New Testament and Mythology,” Bultmann proposed to interpret the New Testament’s mythic assertions in existential terms. Demons name not cosmological beings but the enslaving powers that hold a person in fear and self-deception. Resurrection names not a resuscitation within the continuum of Historie but God’s eschatological verdict disclosed in proclamation: the crucified Jesus is Lord, and his cross is the end of my self-assertion and the beginning of authentic life in trust. Eschatology names not a timetabled end of the world but the advent of God’s future into the present, the now in which I am summoned to die and rise with Christ (Bultmann, 1984).

Demythologization is thus a hermeneutical discipline, not a historical claim about what did or did not “really happen.” It seeks the illocution of New Testament speech acts: what this language does to its hearers. It insists on form-critical sobriety: much New Testament material circulated as oral units shaped by the church’s preaching; we must ask how these forms functioned to call forth faith (Bultmann, 1963). And it is a theological wager: God addresses us today in the kerygma, not merely once upon a time in Palestine. The question is not whether we can “prove” Easter as an event inside the continuum of causes, but whether we will stand under the Word that declares death destroyed and life given in Christ.

Bultmann’s Use of Historical-Critical Tools

Bultmann did not denigrate historical work. His History of the Synoptic Tradition is a classic in form criticism, classifying pericopes (pronouncement stories, miracle stories, legends, myths), mapping their stereotyped structures, and proposing social settings (Sitz im Leben) in the early church (Bultmann, 1963). He distinguished the historical Jesus (as reconstructed by critical method) from the kerygmatic Christ (the crucified-and-risen one proclaimed). The historical Jesus is presupposition, not content, of faith: faith is not trust in a biographical reconstruction but response to God’s call in the gospel. Bultmann’s stringent judgments here—his skepticism toward much of the “life of Jesus” enterprise, his readiness to see kerygmatic shaping in the tradition—flow from his conviction that the New Testament’s point is proclamation, not museum-grade reportage.

Exegetical Soundings

Romans 6:1–11—Dying and Rising with Christ

Paul declares that those baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, so that “we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). A demythologizing reading does not deny baptismal rite or communal practice. It asks what the language does: it summons the hearer to understand herself as already judged and liberated in Christ, called out of the “old self” toward authentic existence under grace. “Death to sin” is not an invisible substance but an existential turn: no longer living under the project of self-securing mastery but yielding oneself to God as an instrument of righteousness. The “resurrection” Paul speaks of is not postponed but already present as new life—eschatology in the present tense (Bultmann, 1984). The text’s intention is not speculative knowledge about metaphysical changes in the soul; it is the call to live as one who has died and risen now.

John 11—“I Am the Resurrection and the Life”

When Jesus proclaims “I am the resurrection and the life,” Martha initially defers resurrection to “the last day.” Jesus pulls it into the present: “whoever believes in me, even if he die, shall live; and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). A demythologizing interpretation hears this as existential disclosure. Death is not merely biological cessation; it is the inauthentic existence that flees from truth into self-deception. Resurrection is the gift of authentic life under God’s future. The narrative sign—Lazarus called out—is not a laboratory event to be rerun; it is a sign that interprets life and death under the Word. The point is not to deny the narrative; it is to read the sign’s intention: to call hearers out of death into trusting existence before God.

John 20—The Easter Narratives and Faith

The Fourth Gospel closes with an explicit telos: “These are written so that you may believe… and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). For Bultmann, Easter is the eschatological event attested in proclamation: the crucified is now confessed as Lord, and in that confession the church is constituted. Faith rests not on neutral inspection of an empty tomb—Historie cannot deliver the object of faith—but on the Word that confronts and frees. The Thomas scene thus dramatizes the passage from seeing to believing; the beatitude—“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”—articulates the primacy of proclamation over sight (Bultmann, 1984). Again, the claim is not that nothing happened; it is that the text’s claim upon us is not reducible to a report’s verification procedures. It is an address demanding decision.

Mark 5—Demons and Deliverance

The Gerasene demoniac’s torment, narrated in vivid mythic idiom, becomes for Bultmann a representation of enslaving powers: fear, guilt, destructive patterns that disintegrate personhood. “Legion” names the manifold agencies by which a life is fragmented. Jesus’ word restores personhood to communion: clothed, in his right mind, seated with the Lord. A demythologized reading speaks directly to modern captivity—to addiction, ideologies, structures of domination—without requiring a return to an outmoded demonology. Yet here the danger of reduction appears: we must not explain away the New Testament’s robust sense of supra-personal evil. Demythologization at its best translates without trivializing; it preserves the text’s claim that the powers exceed mere human weakness, even as it renders the claim in categories that can encounter modern self-understanding.

Critiques and Developments

Barth’s Christological Protest

Karl Barth admired Bultmann’s seriousness about the Word but feared that demythologization would collapse revelation into human self-understanding. Revelation is God’s act, not re-description of human existence. For Barth, the resurrection is God’s sovereign deed that judges and recreates history; it cannot be “translated” without loss of ontic content (Barth, 1968). Moreover, Barth worried that making decision central risks turning faith into an existential posture rather than reception of God’s act. Bultmann retorted that he did not reduce revelation to human consciousness; rather, he insisted that revelation arrives only as confronting address, never as an object among objects (Bultmann, 1984). The debate presses doctoral readers to ask what kind of claim biblical texts make and what counts as adequate description of God’s action.

Käsemann’s Apocalyptic Corrective

Ernst Käsemann, a student who loved and resisted his teacher, famously re-insisted on apocalyptic: God’s liberating lordship breaks in as cosmic rule, not merely existential self-understanding. He criticized domesticated eschatology and argued that justification is a “storm center” whose scope is cosmic; the New Testament’s language of powers and new creation cannot be reduced without theological loss (Käsemann, 1979). Käsemann’s “canon within the canon” (the lordship of Jesus who justifies the ungodly) and his renewed attention to continuity between Jesus and the early church reopened historical questions Bultmann had bracketed.

Pannenberg: Revelation as History

Wolfhart Pannenberg insisted that revelation occurs in history and is accessible, in principle, to public inquiry. The resurrection—while not demonstrable like a lab event—belongs to the sphere of Historie, not merely Geschichte; Christianity stakes itself on claims about what God has done in the world (Pannenberg, 1976). Pannenberg’s program challenged any neat separation of proclamation from event and sought to overcome the split Bultmann presupposed. His critique is salutary where demythologizing readings have lost nerve about the world-engaging character of the gospel.

The New Hermeneutic: Word as Event

Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs developed what came to be called the “New Hermeneutic,” arguing that biblical language is not a husk for propositional content but a speech-event in which the world is disclosed. Here Bultmann’s concern for proclamation deepens into linguistic insight: the Word happens; it creates a world. This move rehabilitates metaphors and narratives as ways of knowing, not obstacles to it (Ebeling, 1963). It can correct crude reductions of demythologization to paraphrase: instead of “translating away” myth, attend to how biblical language works to open reality.

Memory, Resurrection, and Global Critiques

Recent work on memory and Jesus tradition argues that communal memory, though malleable, remains tethered to events; the Gospels’ portraits are not free inventions but remembered and interpreted history (Dunn, 2003; Allison, 2010). N. T. Wright’s massive case for the bodily resurrection challenges any reading that evaporates Easter into inward transformation; he insists that Second Temple Jewish categories and early Christian praxis are best explained by a real, bodily vindication of Jesus, interpreted as the launch of God’s new creation (Wright, 2003). From global Christianities—Pentecostal, African, Asian—comes another critique: why assume that “modern man” cannot inhabit a world of spirits and miracles? Demythologization can look Eurocentric if it universalizes a particular Western epistemic sensibility. Liberationist and feminist interpreters further press that “existential decision” must not eclipse systemic evil and communal transformation; exorcism narratives can name not only interior bondage but also oppressive structures.

Theological Evaluation

Bultmann’s program offers durable gains. It honors that Scripture addresses persons, not just scholars; it takes modern critical consciousness seriously without ceding Scripture’s authority; it resists both credulous fundamentalism and dismissive skepticism; it attends to genre and function, to what texts do in the community. His insistence that biblical language is proclamation prevents exegesis from freezing into museum philology. And his form-critical discipline permanently sharpened our sensitivity to the social lives of texts (Bultmann, 1963).

Yet the risks are real. If demythologization becomes a method of subtraction, it can evacuate the gospel’s world-engaging claims. If Geschichte is severed from Historie, faith risks becoming a noble inwardness insulated from critique. If existential decision eclipses ecclesial, sacramental, and eschatological concreteness, the New Testament’s embodied, communal salvation thins out. And if the “modern person” is posited in universal terms, we ignore the plural epistemologies of the global church.

The best way forward is not to choose between “event” and “address,” history and proclamation, but to hold them together. Biblical texts claim that God has acted in Israel and in Jesus, and that this action addresses us. The resurrection is both God’s deed—however we gloss its mode—and the proclamation that summons faith; baptism is both water in time and participation in Christ; exorcism both liberation from supra-personal powers and transformation of the self. Doctoral readers can receive Bultmann’s hermeneutical courage as a prompt to say clearly what claims they believe Scripture makes—and then to risk saying them in a way that truly confronts hearers in their worlds.

Assignments

First, students should compose an extended comparative exegesis of John 20:24–31 in two parts. The initial part will present a rigorously sympathetic Bultmannian interpretation that explicates how the narrative functions as proclamation inviting decision, clarifies the role of Geschichte over Historie, and articulates the demythologized sense of “seeing” and “believing,” with close engagement of Bultmann’s essays. The second part will offer a critical dialogue with N. T. Wright’s account of resurrection, assessing whether and how a confession of bodily resurrection can be coordinated with a kerygmatic focus (Bultmann, 1984; Wright, 2003).

Second, students should prepare a research paper on Romans 6 that reconstructs the text’s baptismal imagery within the social and ritual world of the early churches, then offers an existential interpretation of “dying and rising with Christ” in dialogue with Bultmann and Käsemann. The paper should conclude by testing whether existential interpretation need evacuate sacramental realism or whether it can intensify participation by clarifying its lived shape (Bultmann, 1984; Käsemann, 1979).

Third, students should design a seminar presentation that traces the category of “myth” across one synoptic exorcism narrative, one Johannine sign, and one Pauline apocalyptic passage. The presentation will show how form criticism frames each text’s genre and function, how demythologization would construe its intention, and how the “New Hermeneutic” invites attention to the language-event itself. A concluding section should address global critiques and propose context-sensitive strategies for preaching these texts today (Bultmann, 1963; Ebeling, 1963).

Finally, students should draft a methodological position paper that states in first-person terms how they will adjudicate the relation of Historie and Geschichte in their own dissertation work. The paper should explicitly engage Barth’s and Pannenberg’s critiques and articulate criteria for when historical claims are indispensable to theological claims—and when they are not (Barth, 1968; Pannenberg, 1976).

Conclusion

Rudolf Bultmann asked the church and the academy to take both modernity and the gospel with full seriousness. He refused the easy outs: neither a nostalgic return to pre-critical cosmology nor a reduction of Christianity to ethics or vague uplift. His wager was that the New Testament can be heard afresh when its mythic idiom is interpreted as an existential summons: God’s eschatological future confronts us in the word of the cross, calling us from inauthenticity to faith. The controversy his program still provokes is a sign that the questions he forced upon us remain unavoidable: What kind of claims do biblical texts make? How do proclamation and event relate? What is required of a modern interpreter to hear and to speak truly?

For doctoral students in historiography and exegesis, Bultmann is a crucial teacher—even where we dissent. He disciplines us to ask what texts do, to risk clarity about our own hermeneutical commitments, and to speak the gospel in a way that can be heard without surrendering its scandal. The enduring task is integrative: to retain the gains of historical criticism; to honor the canonical form and the church’s rule of faith; to confess God’s action in history without denying the primacy of God’s address; and to preach in language that confronts real lives. Demythologization, properly chastened, can serve such a vocation: not by subtracting the gospel, but by refusing to let its claim be buried beneath an idiom no longer able to address.

References

Allison, D. C. (2010). Constructing Jesus: Memory, imagination, and history. Baker Academic.

Barth, K. (1968). The Epistle to the Romans (E. C. Hoskyns, Trans., 6th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Bultmann, R. (1963). History of the synoptic tradition (J. Marsh, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1921)

Bultmann, R. (1984). New Testament and mythology and other basic writings (S. Ogden, Ed. & Trans.). Fortress Press.

Bultmann, R. (1951–1955). Theology of the New Testament (K. Grobel, Trans., 2 vols.). Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Dunn, J. D. G. (2003). Jesus remembered. Eerdmans.

Ebeling, G. (1963). Word and faith. Fortress Press.

Käsemann, E. (1979). New Testament questions of today. SCM Press.

Pannenberg, W. (1976). Revelation as history (D. Granskou, Ed.). Westminster Press.

Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.