Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy
Author(s): J. C. O'Neill
Source: The Journal of Theological Studies, NEW SERIES, Vol. 21, No. 2 (OCTOBER 1970),
pp. 388-400
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23959277
Accessed: 18-10-2018 12:44 UTC
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BULTMANN AND HEGEL
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BULTMANNBULTMANN AND HEGEL 389
that the relationship of men to God is tied to the person of Jesus, go hand
in hand. Bultmann affirmed that he was a dialectical theologian, and as a
dialectical theologian he rejected both old orthodoxy's version of fides
quae quae creditur and liberal Protestantism's fides qua creditur in favour of a
dialectical relationship between the two. The old orthodoxy presented a
God who could not be believed; as a proved God he was reduced to being
part of the world, and the propositions about him were made matters of
resolve to be accepted rather than believed.1 But Protestantism since
Schleiermacher had reduced theology to a discussion of what it is truly
to have faith, and had forgotten the question of the truth of the faith
itself. Theology that was only interested in fides qua creditur had lost its
reason for existence. But notice that Bultmann's statement of the dia
lectical theologian's objections to liberalism explicitly connects the
'dialectical' view of God with the indispensability of Jesus Christ. ,The
topic of theology is God, and the objection against liberal theology is this,
that it has dealt not with God but with man. God means the radical
denial and destruction (Aufhebung) of man; the theology whose topic is
God can for that reason have only the λόγος του στανροΰ as its content;
but this is a σκάνδαλον for man.'2
The objections to Bultmann's twofold insistence that theology cannot
make mythological statements about God, on the one hand, and that
theology must affirm that authentic existence becomes reality only as a
result of the Christ-event, on the other hand, are obvious. The two
positions seem clearly inconsistent. If theology cannot make mytho
logical statements about God, and 'express the other-worldly in terms of
this world, and the divine in terms of human life',3 theology must deny
the exclusive importance of Jesus Christ. Either Jesus Christ must
become one among many possible historical occasions for coming to a
true non-mythological understanding of God—this is Schubert Ogden's
solution to what he calls the 'structural inconsistency' of Bultmann's
thought4—or the indispensability of Jesus Christ must be maintained at
the expense of denying the other proposition and affirming that God can
be spoken of objectively.
However, Bultmann is well aware of the charge of inconsistency, as
the statement I quoted in the first paragraph of this paper has shown,
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390 J. C. O'NEILL
and, despite that, he has never given
allegedly inconsistent positions. The
discover why Bultmann is able to m
and I shall look for the answer not in
of his works, but in a new picture of
thought. Indeed, it will be necessary
ately simple picture of his ideas in o
confidently to compare Bultmann's
predecessors. I hope that the attempt
ideas will in the end help to answ
whether or not his ideas are true.
Bultmann's thought has three simple parts. He states that if a man
would be free he must, first, see the world as the world of nature; second,
see the world as his world; and third, recognize that he is not free in his
world until he accepts the gift of God offered when Christ is preached
to him.
The first step is axiomatic for Bultmann.1 He asserts that nature is
causal, that natural events are completely at our disposal, that the uni
verse is endless and closed, and that therefore it is impossible to claim
to observe God's dealings with men as events in the natural world.
Miracles, in this sense, cannot happen, and any attempt to talk about
God's acts as observable events is mythology.
The second step is to assert that there is another equally essential way
of taking the world, and that is to take it as my world. Man has to
recognize that he lives in history and is both bound by decisions taken
before him and responsible for decisions about the future. When he
recognizes his historical situation he looks at nature and no longer sees
it as neutral nature to be mastered and manipulated; nature becomes
for him the godless existence in which he is bound.
The third step is to recognize his human situation of not being free
when he should be free, and to understand that freedom can come to him
only as a gift. Freedom is the miracle which comes from God when a man
believes in him. If a man tries to manufacture this freedom for himself
he misses the point, because the bondage consists in his trying to make
himself free. Man depends on revelation for his freedom.
These three simple steps represent the three steps of the dialectic
espoused by 'dialectical theology'. The first step is the denial of the
fides fides fides quae creditur expounded by old orthodoxy; the second step is the
recognition of the truth in the fides qua creditur of Protestantism since
Schleiermacher; and the third step is the overcoming of the subjectivity
1 See 'Zur Frage des Wunders', G.u.V. i. 214-28; Faith and Understanding, i,
pp. 247-61.
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BULTMANN AND HEGEL 391
of that Protestantism by the assertion of the essentia
revelation.
I think all three steps can be found present in everything Bultmann
has written, in the early essays collected in the first volume of Glauben
undund Verstehen, in the two great works published in 1941, the commentary
on John's Gospel and the two essays published together as Supplement
No. 7 of Evangelische Theologie, which set off the demythologizing
debate, and in the later restatements. The repetition of the three basic
steps makes Bultmann's theology both monotonous and tremendously
persuasive. He is free to develop a detail with great subtlety because the
basic moves are almost axiomatic: the world is closed and endless; man
is not free and should be free; the only miracle is the miracle of revela
tion. Our task of tracing the historical roots of Bultmann's thought
should, then, be relatively simple. We can disregard the details and
concentrate on the three basic steps. As we trace back the history of the
ideas that Bultmann was able to regard as almost axiomatic, we shall also
be able to see why he regarded all attempts to objectify God as inadmiss
able while insisting that Jesus Christ is the only way to God and
freedom.
Bultmann himself has openly acknowledged one source of his ideas,
the man from whom he learnt so much, and with whom he disagreed so
profoundly, 'my truly honoured teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann'.1 The first
and second of the two steps are taken straight from Herrmann; on the
third they part company.
Herrmann argued that a God who is objectively proved would be
part of the world and therefore not God; but a God who is seen as the
fulfilment of the highest aspirations of human life is vulnerable to the
fatal objection that the idea of his existence is beautiful but not true. To
escape the dilemma Herrmann proposed to return to an early intuition
of Kant's, that 'religion is only to be found in the man who addresses
himself to action, or, in other words, in the life of man regarded from
the historical and not the merely naturalistic standpoint'.2 But the man
who addresses himself to action, if he is serious, finds life empty and
void because he never attains inward independence. He can only be
saved by a clear revelation of utter dependence that is at the same time
an act of free will. True historical existence is only attained in the act of
submission to revelation.
From Herrmann, Bultmann learnt his near-axioms, that nature is a
closed causal system, that man to live must address himself to action and
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392 J. C. O'NEILL
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BULTMANN AND HEGEL 393
true miracle as against miracles that are supposed to int
laws of nature, Bultmann says, 'the assertion that an
miracle expressly contradicts the idea that this event c
as an event in the world' and cites Luther's Conclusio to Rom. viii. 26:
'Necesse est enim opus Dei abscond! et non intelligi tunc, quando fit.
Non autem absconditur aliter quam sub contraria specie nostri conceptus
seu cogitationis.'1 This looks impressive support, until we observe that
the context in Luther is a discussion of prayer, in which Luther shows
that God gives the opposite of what we ask in order to drive us to
passivity. Luther is arguing that God does a strange work in order to do
his own work (Isa. xxviii. 21), not that God's work is in the world of
encounter rather than in the world of natural events. Luther's illustra
tion of his point, given in the next sentence, is the strange work of the
Spirit announced to Mary by Gabriel (Luke i. 35).
Bultmann is, of course, perfectly aware of the gulf between him and
Luther, and knows that he has applied sola fide to the problem of nature
in a way not even open to Luther. He is probably right to see in Luther a
forerunner of his own ideas, but the connection between Luther and
Bultmann is too complex and too distant for us to hope to get more light
from it for our problem of the seeming inconsistency in Bultmann's
thought.
If Herrmann does not support Bultmann's third step, and Luther
does not support his first step, perhaps the other great figure in his
history, Kirkegaard, will support all three. Perhaps he does, but we
can hardly be sure, for Kirkegaard has renounced the cold analytic mode,
which is so important a part of Bultmann's discourse. Kirkegaard
rejected the attempt to objectify God in the structures of Christendom,
and mocked at the vanity of trying to prove God, but he did not, so far
as I know, dispassionately discuss whether or not the universe was a
closed and endless system. Kirkegaard taught Bultmann that there are no
disciples at second hand,2 but he did not want to teach the lesson of the
importance of preaching from the printed word and the importance of the
church that, perhaps surprisingly, is a key part of Bultmann's theology.3
Kirkegaard was a great influence on Bultmann, but I do not find in
1 G.u.V. i. 22ο; Faith and Understanding, i, p. 253. The citation from Luther
is in Johannes Ficker, Anfdnge reformatorischer Bibelauslegung, i (1908, 4th. ed.,
1930), 1930), p. 204; W.A. lvi. 376 f.; Martin Luther, Vorlesung iiber den RomerbriefRomerbrief
1315/1516, 1515/1516, ed. Martin Hofmann, vol. ii (Darmstadt, 1960), p. no; Luther:
Lectures Lectures on Romans, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (London, 1961), p. 242.
22 Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes (Gottingen, 1941), p. 431, η. 1 et
passim.passim.
3 e.g.3 e.g.3 e.g. G.u.V. i. 110; Faith and Understanding, i, p. 141; Johannes, pp. 374-7
at 37s: 'he who is glorified is he who is at work in his church'.
621.2 C C
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394 J· C. O'NEILL
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BULTMANNBULTMANN AND HEGEL 395
against miracles, which appears so strikingly in Bultmann's argument
for the necessity of demythologization, that acceptance of miracles
actually contradicts the nature of God.
When a God effects something, it is a working of spirit on spirit. ... In
miracles, however, the spirit seems to be working on bodies. . . . Miracles
therefore are the manifestation of the most «ndivine, because they are the
most unnatural of phenomena. They contain the harshest opposition
between spirit and body, two downright opposites here conjoined without
any mitigation of their prodigiously harsh contradiction. Divine action is
the restoration and manifestation of oneness; miracle is the supreme
disseverance.1
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396 J. C. O'NEILL
but bound and of man freed that we wo
before the rise of existentialism, in vain
knew Schelling and dealt critically with
was Schelling—admittedly, after Hegel's
his own later philosophy—who coined th
Hegel was well aware of the issues at sta
language. The Hegelian history of the sp
into a contradiction which is overcome t
the expression in objective language of th
is the subject-matter of existentialist ph
The crown and summit of Hegel's syste
the crown and summit of Bultmann's the
passes from the second stage to the third
that moment as death and resurrection:'... not the life that shrinks from
death and keeps itself undefiled by devastation, but the life that endures
and preserves itself through death is the life of the spirit. Spirit gains its
truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment.'2 Only by
passing through and understanding all the forms of spirit does spirit
finally come to know itself. History understood is both the recollection
of everything and the Golgotha where everything seems lost; absolute
spirit attains the actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without
which it would die and remain alone, at this Golgotha.3
In other words, spirit comes to know itself, when it understands the
doctrine of the Trinity that lies at the heart of revealed religion, and app
lies it to itself. Religion is, after all, the sum of all the forms of the spirit,
but although revealed religion is the ,true structure (Gestalt)' of spirit,
this true structure must still be overcome in order to resolve the
objectivity of religion.4
For Hegel Christ is the axis on which the history of the world turns.
He says,
God is recognized as Spirit, only when known as the Triune. This new
principle is the axis on which the History of the World turns. This is the
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BULTMANN AND HEGEL 397
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398 J. C. O'NEILL
Radical freedom in history, the gift of God
he is responsible, entails that the gift co
particular historical occurrence that is Jes
step is individual, like Hegel's, a participatio
like Hegel's, and a movement into freedom
has refused to follow Hegel in taking up (a
God in this final Absolute Knowledge.
Now we are in a position to understand
problem, the problem about why Bultm
apparently inconsistent positions: the neces
language concerning God and the necessity t
indispensable. Bultmann knows that these
collide, but he never, so far as I know, dis
length, however often he insists on their un
My answer is to suggest that Bultmann h
course the crucial moves in Hegel's philo
proposition that the Trinitarian principle
history of the world turns. Bultmann, like
talk about God, and then saw, as part of th
importance of the doctrine of reconciliation
Hegel was convinced that the revealed relig
as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was the sum
of scorn both for those theologians who, as ch
emptied religion of its true content, and for
out of piety, reduced faith to the shibbole
shares the same scorn, and insists that 'we h
turtur to proclaim; we have not to produc
about personalities strong in faith and love
Just as the doctrine of the Trinity is the
which makes him assert that the moment in which that doctrine was
revealed marks the axis of world history, so the doctrine of the Incarna
tion is essential to Bultmann's system. This becomes clearest in his essay
on 'The Significance of the Old Testament for the Christian Faith'.4
He argues that in Israel man first saw the possibility of regarding the
world as 'history' rather than as just 'nature'; in Israel man learnt to
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BULTMANN AND HEGEL 399
understand that he was responsible and faced with th
future. But although the Old Testament knew about g
about law, that knowledge was of no use to all men eve
the knowledge was mediated only through membersh
race. Men who did not belong to that race could not re
of God. But then God inaugurated the proclamation o
all, by the church's proclamation of Jesus Christ. Thi
not a reminder of past events, in the way the Old Test
Israel of past events in her history.
Jesus cannot be remembered like Abraham or Moses,
be remembered like the passage through the Red Sea or
Sinai. For he is the eschatological act of God which ma
folk-history.... The news of the forgiving grace of God
no historical report about a past event, but it is the procla
church,church, that now addresses every man directly as G
which Jesus Christ is present as the ,Word'. For God—
grace—encounters the individual immediately in this W
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400 J. C. O'NEILL
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