Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.3 The Flight from History
have been adapted and shaped. It also meant, secondly, that 'many sayings
[within the Jesus tradition] originated in the church itself. Here Bultmann envisages
material being drawn in from Judaism and wider religious traditions, or
early Christian prophets speaking a word of (the risen) Jesus, in each case, presumably,
words which spoke to the community's needs and which were considered
by the community as worthy of inclusion in the Jesus tradition. 42 This working
hypothesis provided Bultmann with one of his key critical tools: 'whatever
betrays the specific interests of the church or reveals characteristics of later development
must be rejected as secondary'. 43
More to the immediate point, none of these negative conclusions (negative
for questers) really mattered. For form criticism gave Bultmann the confirmation
(provided, ironically, by his historical method) that his theological shift, in following
Barth, was correct. The early church was also not interested in the historical figure
of Jesus, that is, in the life and personality of the Jesus who walked and taught
in Galilee. Kahler was right: the only Jesus who meets us through the pages of the
Gospels, even when we have completed our form-critical analysis, is the Christ of
faith. Barth's claim that all hangs on the word of God in preaching depends not
only on Paul, but is confirmed also by the Gospels. This Christ of faith can be encountered
in the here and now and is not at all dependent on a reconstructed historical
Jesus, were that even possible. The conclusion that it is not possible carries critical
historical weight, but no significance for faith. Faith does not depend, and
should not be made to depend, on history. In an outcome that reflects the influence
of Herrmann as well as Kahler, Bultmann was in effect able to find a secure refuge
for faith in the moment of existential encounter with the word of proclamation, an
area for faith invulnerable indeed to the challenge and acids of historical criticism.
In all this Bultmann was able to bridge, or rather disregard, the gulf between
his negative historical-critical findings and his very positive faith in the
kerygmatic Christ by means of an existentialist hermeneutic. He makes this clear
in a revealing passage in Jesus and the Word. 44
When I speak of the teaching or thought of Jesus, I base the discussion on no
underlying conception of a universally valid system of thought [like his ra-
42. See further below §8.2.
43. Bultmann, Jesus 13.
44. Bultmann, Jesus 11. He was more explicit in his famous 1941 address on 'Neues
Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen
Verkündigung', in which he directly addressed the problem of interpreting the thought-world of
the NT writers and unfolded his programme of demythologizing: 'Our task is to produce an existentialist
interpretation of the dualistic mythology of the New Testament. ..' (ET 'New Testament
and Mythology', in H. W. Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth [London: SPCK, 1957] 1-44
[here 16]).
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