Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)

Wiefelstede, a Lutheran parsonage (1884-1903)

Rudolf Bultmann was born on 20 August 1884 in Wiefelstede, a small locality in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, in north-western Germany^[20]. His father, Arthur Kennedy Bultmann (1854-1919), was a Lutheran pastor; his paternal grandfather had been a missionary in Africa, while his maternal grandfather belonged to the Pietist tradition — a twofold pastoral heritage which placed the young Rudolf, from childhood, in the world of cultivated German Protestantism^[21]. His mother, Helene Bultmann née Stern, and siblings numbering four children (a sister, Helene Pleus, and two brothers, Peter and Arthur) complete the picture of a bourgeois and religious household typical of Wilhelmine Germany. His younger brother Arthur died in combat in 1917, during the First World War^[22].

Bultmann passed his school-leaving examination (Abitur) in 1903 at the Großherzogliches Gymnasium of Oldenburg — where he was the contemporary of the future philosopher Karl Jaspers, with whom he would cross swords again, much later, on the theological ground of demythologizing^[23]. This twofold pastoral origin and classical education predisposed him to theological studies, which he began in 1903.

Tübingen, Berlin, Marburg: the shaping of an exegete (1903-1910)

Between 1903 and 1907, Bultmann followed a classical course of cultivated German Protestantism: three semesters at Tübingen, two semesters at Berlin, then two semesters at Marburg^[24]. At Berlin, he was taught by Adolf von Harnack, the leading figure of liberal Protestantism and author of The Essence of Christianity (1900), as well as by Hermann Gunkel, pioneer of the analysis of literary genres applied to the Old Testament — a method whose spirit Bultmann would extend, fifteen years later, to the New Testament field^[25]. At Marburg, he settled durably in the orbit of the so-called history of religions school (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), represented notably by Wilhelm Heitmüller, whose chair of New Testament he would directly inherit in 1921.

His principal teacher remained Johannes Weiss, under whose direction he defended in 1910, at Marburg, a thesis devoted to the style of the Apostle Paul's preaching^[26]. Weiss had himself contributed, from the end of the 19th century, to rehabilitating the eschatological dimension of Jesus' preaching against the moralizing readings of classical theological liberalism — a heritage Bultmann fully integrated into his own reading of the New Testament. Another Marburg theologian, Wilhelm Herrmann, also lastingly marked his formation through his emphasis on faith as a personal experience irreducible to any rational demonstration^[27].

Doctorate, habilitation and first posts (1910-1921)

After his 1910 doctorate, Bultmann obtained his habilitation at Marburg in 1912 and became Privatdozent — an unsalaried lecturer — there until 1916^[28]. He then held a post as associate professor (außerordentlicher Professor) at the University of Breslau, in Silesia, from 1916 to 1920: his official appointment there is dated 8 September 1916^[29]. In 1917, at Essen, he married Helene Feldmann (1892-1973); the couple would have three daughters, Antje, Gesine and Heilke^[30].

In 1920, Bultmann obtained a full chair at the University of Giessen, where he succeeded the theologian Wilhelm Bousset, another leading figure of the history-of-religions school^[31]. This Giessen interlude lasted only a year: in 1921, he returned to Marburg as full professor of New Testament, succeeding this time his former teacher Heitmüller. He would remain there for thirty years, until his retirement on 31 March 1951^[32].

Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921)

It was in the very year of his return to Marburg that Bultmann published the work that would durably found his scholarly reputation: Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition ("History of the Synoptic Tradition"), translated into English only in 1963 as The History of the Synoptic Tradition^[33]. The book applies to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke the method of form criticism (Formgeschichte), already implemented for the Old Testament by Hermann Gunkel and, on the New Testament field, by Martin Dibelius in his own 1919 work, Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums.

The principle of the method is as follows: before being written down, the stories and sayings of Jesus are said to have circulated orally, for several decades, in the form of short independent units ("pericopes") shaped by the concrete needs — liturgical, catechetical, apologetic, polemical — of the primitive Christian community. Each type of pericope is said to obey laws of composition proper to its Sitz im Leben, its "setting in life" within the community's existence: preaching, baptismal catechesis, controversy with the Synagogue, moral exhortation. Reconstructing these forms would, according to Bultmann, make it possible to work back — cautiously — to the oldest strata of the tradition, while revealing how far the evangelists themselves were indebted to material already largely shaped by the faith and needs of the nascent Church before they wrote.

Apophthegms, sayings and miracle stories: the Bultmannian classification

Bultmann distributes the Synoptic material into several formal categories. The apophthegms (or "paradigms", in the vocabulary proposed by Dibelius) are brief narratives centred on a striking saying of Jesus, uttered in response to a concrete situation — for example the controversy over the Sabbath or the tribute to Caesar. The logia gather wisdom sayings or prophetic sentences, independently of any narrative framework. The miracle stories (Wundergeschichten) form a category apart, which Bultmann systematically compares with the thaumaturgic narratives of the surrounding Hellenistic world, seeing in this an indication of their late elaboration by the community rather than of a direct memory of the facts. Finally, the legends and the Passion narrative are said to constitute the most constructed narrative strata, where the theological intention of the primitive Church — proclaiming and interpreting the death and resurrection of Christ — outweighs, in his view, the concern for factual accuracy.

This classification has the effect — and this is indeed Bultmann's intention — of shifting the historical centre of gravity of the Gospels: it is no longer, in priority, the direct memory of eyewitnesses which shapes the text, but the creative power of the community itself as believers, projecting back onto the figure of Jesus the literary forms needed for its own preaching^[34]. It is very precisely this thesis — the exaltation of the "creative power of the community" (creatricem potentiam communitatis) at the expense of the direct testimony of the apostles — which the Roman instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia of 1964 would target, without naming him^[35].

"Jesus" (1926): what can be known — and not known — about the historical Jesus

In 1926, Bultmann published Jesus, translated into English in 1934 as Jesus and the Word. Extending the distinction already drawn by the German theologian Martin Kähler between the "historical Jesus" (der historische Jesus, the uncertain object of critical reconstruction) and the "historic Christ" or "Christ of preaching" (der geschichtliche, biblische Christus, the living object of the Church's faith), Bultmann radicalized this divide. He held that the available sources practically do not allow us to retrace a biography, a psychology or even the chronological course of the ministry of the Jesus of Nazareth — only the teaching transmitted by tradition remains accessible, in his view, independently of any guarantee that Jesus effectively and literally uttered it in the terms reported.

This approach durably marked the German exegesis of the interwar period: it installed a methodological scepticism of principle towards the very possibility of writing a "life of Jesus" — a literary genre then widely practised since the 19th century (Renan, Strauss) — and prepared the ground on which Bultmann would build, fifteen years later, his demythologizing programme: if the Jesus of history can hardly be known, then the essential of the Christian faith cannot rest on the historical verification of the reported facts, but on the existential reception of the message (kerygma) attached to them.

In 1923, Martin Heidegger was appointed extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Marburg, where he would teach until 1928^[36]. During those five years, Bultmann and Heidegger became close colleagues, even organizing a joint seminar and maintaining, according to the published correspondence between the two men, a "long and deep" intellectual friendship, though marked by a constant formal address (Sie), in keeping with German academic usage of the time^[37]. It was during this period that Heidegger wrote Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in 1927 — the major philosophical work of 20th-century continental thought, from which Bultmann appropriated several central categories for his own theology: the distinction between authentic (eigentlich) and inauthentic (uneigentlich) existence, being-toward-death as the fundamental structure of human existence, care (Sorge) and the call to existential decision.

Bultmann himself affirmed that Heidegger's existential analytic was, in a sense, only a "profane philosophical presentation" of the understanding of human existence already at work in the New Testament^[38] — a position which partly reverses the relation of dependence: it is not so much, in his view, that theology borrows from Heideggerian philosophy, but that philosophy confirms, on a purely anthropological plane, an intuition already present in the Christian proclamation of salvation. This intellectual closeness between the theologian and the philosopher did not fade with time: their friendship survived even Heidegger's brief political commitment to National Socialism in 1933, which deeply shocked Bultmann without definitively breaking their personal contacts — the two men died in the same year, 1976^[39].

Refusing the Aryan paragraph (1933)

From the National Socialists' seizure of power in 1933, the question of applying the "Aryan paragraph" to the Protestant Church — which excludes from public office, then from the pastoral ministry, anyone of Jewish ancestry — deeply divided German Protestantism between the supporters of the "Deutsche Christen" (German Christians), who accepted this exclusion, and the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which refused it in the very name of the unity of the Body of Christ, without distinction between Jew and Gentile.

On 20 September 1933, the Protestant theology faculty of Marburg published an official opinion (Gutachten), drafted notably by Bultmann and his colleague Hans von Soden, explicitly opposing the application of the Aryan paragraph in the Church — a position which contrasts sharply with that, for example, of the Erlangen faculty, which accepted it^[40]. Bultmann called this paragraph "incompatible with the essence of the Christian Church". Throughout the Nazi period, from 1933 to the regime's fall in 1945, his writings contain repeated rejections of any theological exaltation of blood, nation or race — a clear doctrinal opposition to every form of the "Aryan Christ" promoted by the Deutsche Christen^[41].

Member of the Pfarrernotbund, without public rupture

Bultmann joined the Bekennende Kirche and the Pfarrernotbund ("Emergency Covenant of Pastors"), the organization founded by Martin Niemöller to coordinate ecclesial opposition to the regime, as early as 1934^[42]. The image of a heroic resister must however be nuanced, in historical honesty: Bultmann himself would affirm that he "never directly and actively participated in political affairs". His opposition remained principally theological and academic — written protests, doctrinal refusal from the lectern — rather than active political resistance of a clandestine kind. He remained in post at Marburg for the whole duration of the regime, until his retirement in 1951, without ever being harassed to the point of losing his chair^[43].

Sheltering a fleeing student (1944-1945)

One biographical episode concretely illuminates this discreet resistance: from the autumn of 1944 until the end of the war in 1945, Bultmann sheltered in his home Uta Ranke-Heinemann, the future theologian, then a young student fleeing the Allied bombing of Essen^[44]. This private act of protection, documented by several biographies, illustrates the type of commitment — personal, discreet, unspectacular — which characterizes Bultmann's posture under Nazism: a clear and constant doctrinal refusal, without tipping over into organized or public resistance.

In the same year 1941 which saw the birth of the demythologizing programme, Bultmann also published his monumental commentary on the Gospel of John, Das Evangelium des Johannes. In it he advanced a methodologically bold and durably controversial thesis: the Johannine prologue and several discourses of the Fourth Gospel depend on an earlier source of "Revealer discourses" (Offenbarungsreden), of pre-Christian origin and Gnostic in nature, conveying the myth of a heavenly "Redeemer" (Erlösermythos) descended to reveal saving knowledge to men before ascending back to heaven.

This hypothesis, attractive for its internal coherence, has since met with serious methodological criticism from later specialists of Gnosticism and intertestamental Judaism, who have stressed the absence of solid textual proof of a "Gnostic Redeemer myth" genuinely attested before the Christian era — most of the known Gnostic texts (notably those discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, four years after the publication of Bultmann's commentary) being in reality later than the New Testament and presumably indebted to, rather than sources of, the Johannine Christian tradition. The Bultmannian hypothesis, attractive but fragile in terms of the available sources, illustrates a recurrent trait of his method: the construction of a bold historical reconstruction, but one founded on indirect evidence and Religionsgeschichte parallels whose direction of dependence (does Christianity borrow from Gnosticism, or the reverse?) remains, to this day, disputed among specialists.

The setting of a wartime lecture

On 21 April 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Bultmann delivered at Frankfurt am Main, before the Gesellschaft für evangelische Theologie — an organization close to the Confessing Church —, the lecture that would become his most famous text: Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung ("The New Testament and Mythology: The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation")^[45]. He repeated it shortly afterwards at Alpirsbach, one of the retreat and training centres used by the Confessing Church. The essay was published that same year, 1941, in the series Beiträge zur Evangelischen Theologie by Chr. Kaiser Verlag in Munich, before being republished in 1948 in the first volume of the collective debate Kerygma und Mythos, edited by Hans-Werner Bartsch — it was this post-war republication which secured the text its international circulation and controversy^[46].

The three-storey cosmology: a world become unbelievable

Bultmann starts from a diagnosis of the world picture proper to the New Testament:

"The world is viewed as a three storied structure, with the earth in the center, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings — the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment." — Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, trans. Reginald H. Fuller, in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, London, SPCK, 1953^[47]

This earth itself, for the New Testament, is said to be not only the theatre of ordinary natural events, but the scene of confrontation between the supernatural powers of God and His angels on one side, and of Satan and his demons on the other — powers constantly intervening in the course of nature and in everything men think, will and do, making miracles frequent rather than exceptional^[48].

For Bultmann, this cosmology — angels, demons, Satan, spirits, miraculous healings attributed to the direct intervention of supernatural powers — belongs to a bygone world, incompatible with the scientific consciousness of modern man:

"It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. […] We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world." — Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, trans. R.H. Fuller^[49]

On the eschatological plane, Bultmann also notes the objective failure of the New Testament's own expectation:

"The mythical eschatology is untenable for the simple reason that the parousia of Christ never took place as the New Testament expected. History did not come to an end, and, as every schoolboy knows, it will continue to run its course." — Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, trans. R.H. Fuller^[50]

This argument — the non-fulfilment, within the time-frame initially expected by the first Christians (including, according to Bultmann, Paul himself), of Christ's glorious return — constitutes one of the most frequently repeated pieces of the entire Bultmannian dossier.

What Bultmann really means by "demythologizing"

Contrary to a frequent superficial reading, Bultmann does not propose to eliminate myth from the Christian message pure and simple, but to reinterpret it existentially:

"Demythologizing seeks to bring out the real intention of myth, namely the intention of speaking of man's existence in its being grounded in and limited by a transcendent, unworldly power." — Rudolf Bultmann, "Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung" (1952), in Hans-Werner Bartsch (ed.), Kerygma und Mythos II, Hamburg, Reich, 1952, p. 184^[51]

In other words, myth does not claim, according to Bultmann, to offer an objective description of the cosmos, but expresses, through a pictorial and cosmologically dated language, man's understanding of his own existence before God. The task of the modern interpreter is therefore not to eliminate the mythical narratives, but to translate them into anthropological, or better, existential language: anguish before finitude, the call to emerge from an inauthentic existence folded back upon itself, openness to an authentic existence received as a gift.

The Heideggerian heritage: existential interpretation

It is here that the conceptual apparatus borrowed from Heidegger fully comes into play. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence, anguish as the revealer of finitude, the call to decision: these Heideggerian categories become, in Bultmann, the grid for "translating" the mythical content of the New Testament into terms intelligible to modern man, without thereby claiming to reduce Christianity to a mere profane philosophy — Bultmann insists that the New Testament is not a general doctrine about human nature, but the proclamation of a liberating act of God in Jesus Christ, coming to meet man in his concrete existential situation^[52].

The kerygma as a call to decision, not as a verifiable fact

The heart of the Bultmannian apparatus lies in his doctrine of the kerygma: the message of the cross and resurrection is said to be not first a set of facts objectively verifiable by the historian, but a proclamation (Verkündigung) which confronts each hearer with a personal decision — accepting or refusing an authentic existence open to God. That is why, for Bultmann, seeking to "prove" the resurrection historically amounts to missing the very nature of the event at stake.

The Resurrection: "an article of faith", not a historically verifiable fact

It is on this precise point that the disagreement with Catholic doctrine is tied most directly. Bultmann writes:

"The resurrection of Jesus cannot be a miraculous proof by which the skeptic might be compelled to believe in Christ. […] The real difficulty is that the resurrection is itself an article of faith, and you cannot establish one article of faith by invoking another. For the resurrection is an article of faith because it is far more than the resuscitation of a corpse — it is the eschatological event." — Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology, trans. R.H. Fuller^[53]

Bultmann also stresses that the Gospel narratives insisting on the physical reality of the risen body (notably Luke 24:39-43, where the risen Christ eats before His disciples to prove He is not a mere spirit) constitute, in his view, "late embellishments of the primitive tradition" rather than the oldest historical kernel^[54].

It is very exactly this position which the Catechism of the Catholic Church contradicts, in the most explicit terms:

"The mystery of Christ's resurrection is a real event, with manifestations that were historically verified, as the New Testament bears witness. […] Given all these testimonies, Christ's Resurrection cannot be interpreted as something outside the physical order, and it is impossible not to acknowledge it as an historical fact." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §639 and §643^[55]

The republication of the 1941 essay in the collective volume Kerygma und Mythos, edited by Hans-Werner Bartsch from 1948, triggered a large-scale international theological debate, bringing together the responses of several major figures of German Protestantism — translated into English as early as 1953 as Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate^[56].

Karl Barth: a head-on misunderstanding

Although stemming, in the 1920s, from the same dialectical theology movement as Bultmann — alongside Friedrich Gogarten and Eduard Thurneysen, around the journal Zwischen den Zeiten — Karl Barth broke with him resoundingly over demythologizing. In 1952 Barth published a critical pamphlet reproaching Bultmann with making the very content of the kerygma depend on an external philosophy — Heidegger's — at the risk of emptying the Christian proclamation of all objective content. An often-reported anecdote, though resting on no word-for-word verified quotation, sums up the scale of their mutual incomprehension: Barth is said to have compared their dialogue to communication between "a whale and an elephant".

Helmut Thielicke: "he will end with the flesh"

The Lutheran theologian Helmut Thielicke signed one of the most vigorous criticisms in the volume, in his essay "The Restatement of New Testament Mythology":

"Bultmann has thrown down a serious challenge to the very foundations of the Church. […] The logical consequence of his restatement of mythology is the elimination of salvation history and the substitution of philosophy for theology." — Helmut Thielicke, in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, trans. R.H. Fuller, London, SPCK, 1953^[57]

Thielicke takes up, to describe the slide he perceives in Bultmann, the Pauline image of the Epistle to the Galatians: "Having begun with the Spirit… Bultmann threatens to end with the flesh" (allusion to Galatians 3:3)^[58]. He nevertheless states his position with nuance: "The very profound doctrinal differences which separate me from Bultmann cannot drive me to regard him as a heretic"^[59] — a sign that the debate, lively as it was, remained internal to Protestantism and respected the forms of theological charity.

Karl Jaspers: a disguised rationalism

The philosopher Karl Jaspers, Bultmann's schoolmate at the Oldenburg Gymnasium, likewise engaged in a long and influential controversy against the demythologizing programme, published as Die Frage der Entmythologisierung (Munich, Piper), translated into English as Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth (1958)^[60]:

"Jaspers […] accused him, first, of propagating a false rationalism in religious debate; second, of arbitrarily dismissing the manifestations, embedded in myth, of the spiritual experiences of those living in earlier historical époques; and, third, of aligning all transcendent experiences to a standard scheme of relative value." — Chris Thornhill and Ronny Miron, "Karl Jaspers", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy^[61]

In other words, Jaspers reproaches Bultmann with appealing to a critique of mythology while himself reintroducing, in disguised form, a rationalism which disqualifies a priori the spiritual value proper to mythical language — an objection which joins, by a different philosophical path, the Catholic critique of the rationalist presupposition identified by the 1964 instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia^[62].

Paul Tillich: "deliteralization", not "demythologization"

Although Bultmann, Paul Tillich and Heidegger were colleagues at Marburg during the 1924-1925 academic year, no published correspondence between Bultmann and Tillich could be documented — their theological dialogue remains, for the most part, indirect, each expressing himself at a distance on the other's work. Tillich proposed replacing the very term "demythologizing" with what he considered the more cautious term of "deliteralization":

"I have often stated that he should speak not of demythologization but of deliteralization, which means not taking the symbols as literal expressions of events in time and space." — Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought, ed. Carl E. Braaten, London, SCM Press, 1968^[63]

For Tillich, religious language is and must always be mythological to a certain extent; wanting to eliminate it rather than understand it amounts to mistaking the very nature of the religious symbol: "He does not know the meaning of myth. He does not know that religious language is and must always be mythological"^[64]. A revealing criticism, in that it comes from a theologian himself largely won over, like Bultmann, to an existential reading of Christianity influenced by continental philosophy.

Ernst Käsemann breaks with the master (1953)

Bultmann's scepticism about the possibility of knowing the historical Jesus did not convince all his own students. On 20 October 1953, Ernst Käsemann, a former doctoral student of Bultmann at Marburg, delivered before the university's alumni a lecture, "Das Problem des historischen Jesus", which inaugurated what historiography has baptized the "New Quest" of the historical Jesus (New Quest)^[65].

Without renouncing the methodological gains of form criticism, Käsemann and several other disciples of Bultmann — Günther Bornkamm, author of Jesus von Nazareth (1956), as well as Hans Conzelmann, Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling — hold it possible and necessary to recover, behind the kerygma, an authentic historical kernel of Jesus' ministry, rather than stopping at their master's radical agnosticism. Bultmann, at first open to this development, would subsequently show himself critical of it.

Günther Bornkamm, Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt

Among the many students trained by Bultmann at Marburg also figure the philosopher Hans Jonas, future author of The Imperative of Responsibility, and — a less well-known but well-attested biographical fact — the philosopher Hannah Arendt. In the autumn of 1924, after her school-leaving examination at Königsberg, Arendt began theological studies at Marburg and attended Bultmann's New Testament seminar: it was precisely in this seminar that she met Hans Jonas, then the only two Jewish students enrolled in the course^[66]. Arendt studied at Marburg until 1926, also attending the philosophical teaching of Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann.

After the Second World War, Bultmann attained an international recognition unprecedented for a German exegete. In 1951, the very year of his retirement from Marburg, he undertook a lecture tour in North America, whose synthesis was published in 1958 as Jesus Christ and Mythology — a work which contributed to diffusing his hermeneutical programme widely in the English-speaking world. In 1955, he was invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, published in 1957 as History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity.

His academic career received numerous institutional honours: honorary doctorate from the University of Marburg (1920), member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1932), Doctor of Divinity of the University of St Andrews in Scotland (1935), Reuchlin Prize of the city of Pforzheim (1957), corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy (1958), member of the Göttingen Academy (1960), foreign member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1968), and member of the order Pour le Mérite for sciences and arts (1969)^[67]. The city of Marburg has since named a street in his memory, Rudolf-Bultmann-Straße, near the university where he taught for thirty years.

What a Catholic can acknowledge in Bultmann's work

Before stating the disagreement, intellectual honesty demands acknowledging what in Bultmann's work is legitimate and useful, even for a Catholic exegete. His philological rigour in analysing literary forms, his attention to genres and to the oral transmission of tradition, his acute consciousness of the hermeneutical problem — how to render intelligible, to a man shaped by modern science, a message come from another cultural world — constitute gains from which Catholic theology itself knew how to profit, critically and within bounds, through the methodological opening begun by Divino Afflante Spiritu and confirmed by Dei Verbum. His moral courage in the face of National Socialism, documented by the 1933 opinion against the Aryan paragraph and his membership in the Confessing Church, likewise deserves to be saluted without reserve.

Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943): a prudent opening, before the radicalization

Two years after Bultmann's lecture on demythologizing, Pope Pius XII published, on 30 September 1943, the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which legitimized for Catholic exegesis a prudent use of literary criticism and of the study of ancient literary genres:

"Hence the Catholic commentator, in order to comply with the present needs of biblical studies, in explaining the Sacred Scripture and in demonstrating and proving its immunity from all error, should also make a prudent use of this means, determine, that is, to what extent the manner of expression or the literary mode adopted by the sacred writer may lead to a correct and genuine interpretation; and let him be convinced that this part of his office cannot be neglected without serious detriment to Catholic exegesis." — Pius XII, Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, 30 September 1943, §38^[68]

This text is not a direct reply to Bultmann — no source documents an explicit causal link between the two publications, separated by two years in the middle of a world war — but it illuminates the same moment in the history of 20th-century biblical exegesis: where German Protestantism radicalized, with Bultmann, form criticism into historical scepticism and existential demythologizing, the Catholic Church prudently and within bounds opened the way to the use of the same critical tools — without ever renouncing the affirmation of the substantial historicity of the Scriptures.

The instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia (1964): three stages against scepticism

Twenty years later, on 21 April 1964, the Pontifical Biblical Commission published the instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia — De historica Evangeliorum veritate, which constitutes the most directly relevant magisterial response to the excesses of form criticism — without ever naming Bultmann. The document begins by acknowledging the legitimacy of a prudent use of the method:

"As occasion warrants, the interpreter may examine what reasonable elements are contained in the 'Form-Critical method' that can be used for a fuller understanding of the Gospels." — Pontifical Biblical Commission, Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia, 21 April 1964, §V, trans. Joseph Fitzmyer^[69]

But the same paragraph immediately continues with a warning aimed, without naming it, at the very heart of the Bultmannian presupposition:

"But let him be wary, because scarcely admissible philosophical and theological principles have often come to be mixed with this method. […] For some proponents of this method have been led astray by the prejudiced views of rationalism. They refuse to admit the existence of a supernatural order and the intervention of a personal God in the world through strict revelation, and the possibility and existence of miracles and prophecies. […] Finally, others make light of the authority of the apostles as witnesses to Christ, and of their task and influence in the primitive community, extolling rather the creative power of that community." — Pontifical Biblical Commission, Sancta Mater Ecclesia, §V, trans. J. Fitzmyer^[70]

The document then proposes a structure in three stages of the Gospel tradition — the life and teaching of Jesus, the post-Easter apostolic preaching, the redaction by the evangelists — which acknowledges an authentic redactional work of the sacred authors (selection, condensation, pastoral adaptation) while locking in, in the same breath, the non-negotiable affirmation of the substantial fidelity of this transmission^[71]. A significant fact: the Latin text explicitly uses the word "mythical" in quotation marks regarding the person of Jesus — "nec […] hic in 'mythicam' personam mutatus est" ("he was not changed into a 'mythical' person") — a strong indication that the document consciously answers, though without naming it, the very vocabulary of the Bultmannian Entmythologisierung^[72].

Dei Verbum §19 (1965): "the historical truth of the Gospels" as a rampart

The Second Vatican Council took up and consolidated this line in the dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum, promulgated on 18 November 1965. §19, explicitly devoted to the "historical" character of the Gospels, affirms:

"Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy held, and continues to hold, that the four Gospels just named, whose historical character the Church unhesitatingly asserts, faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day He was taken up into heaven (see Acts 1:1)." — Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, 18 November 1965, chap. V, §19^[73]

A footnote of the document (note 34) refers explicitly to the 1964 instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia, confirming the direct textual filiation between the two documents^[74]. Cardinal Augustin Bea, a Jesuit, former rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute and a major architect of the conciliar preparation on this point, had circulated from the very beginning of the Council a dossier on the historicity of the Gospels prepared since 1960 — a sign that the question, far from being a mere point of abstract doctrine, had mobilized the highest magisterial attention in the face of the dead ends of the historical-critical scepticism then dominating German Protestant exegesis.

The Catechism and 1 Corinthians 15: the Resurrection as a historical fact

The Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes, in its section on the Resurrection (§639-657), a formulation which answers point by point the Bultmannian thesis of the Resurrection as a mere unverifiable "article of faith":

"Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles' encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §647^[75]

This formula articulates precisely what the Bultmannian demythologizing dissociates: an event at once historically verifiable and theologically transcendent, without the one excluding the other. The Catechism relies explicitly on St Paul, whose First Epistle to the Corinthians constitutes the oldest and most solemn testimony of the Easter kerygma:

"If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." — Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:14^[76]

Named Catholic theologians answer Bultmann

Beyond the magisterial texts, several Catholic theologians engaged, from the 1950s, in a direct and named critical dialogue with Bultmann's work.

The Belgian Jesuit Léopold Malevez published in 1954 Le message chrétien et le mythe. La théologie de Rudolf Bultmann (Desclée de Brouwer), one of the most complete Catholic treatments of the time: he reproached Bultmann with having, in the end, "taken away from the Christian his Lord", by dissolving the objective content of faith — first and foremost the Incarnation itself — into a pure existential decision without verifiable historical anchorage^[77]. The German theologian Heinrich Fries, in Bultmann-Barth and Catholic Theology (1955), denounced what he called a "pre-Copernican" attitude: making human pre-understanding the determining criterion of all understanding of revelation amounts to inverting the correct theological hierarchy, in which it is revelation which must judge and transform human pre-understanding, not the reverse.

In France, the Jesuit René Marlé published in 1956 Bultmann et l'interprétation du Nouveau Testament (Aubier-Montaigne, "Théologie" series), a reference work which durably introduced Bultmannian thought into the French-speaking Catholic world — while maintaining, in its revised 1966 edition, firm reservations about the hermeneutical radicalism of its object of study^[78]. Xavier Léon-Dufour, in Les Évangiles et l'histoire de Jésus (Seuil, 1963), adopted a still more nuanced position: he took up certain tools of form criticism while opposing head-on, through a "regressive method" working back from the texts to the founding event, the Bultmannian historical scepticism about reaching the real Jesus through the Gospel tradition^[79]. Finally, Jean Daniélou, in his essay "Demythologizing in the School of Alexandria" (1968), mobilized the Alexandrian allegorical tradition inherited from Origen as a Catholic hermeneutical counterpoint to Bultmannian demythologizing — showing that a spiritual reading of the biblical text, far from dissolving its historical anchorage as Bultmann does, can on the contrary deepen it without ever denying it^[80].

The 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission: Bultmann finally named

It was only in 1993, in the document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church — prefaced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith —, that the Catholic Magisterium explicitly named Bultmann and formulated its most synthetic critique of the demythologizing programme:

"To this kind of research into literary genres was joined the 'critical study of forms' (Formgeschichte), which Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann introduced into the exegesis of the synoptic Gospels. Bultmann combined form-critical studies with a biblical hermeneutic inspired by the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger. As a result, Formgeschichte often stirred up serious reservations. […] We must frankly accept that certain hermeneutical theories are inadequate for interpreting Scripture. For example, Bultmann's existentialist interpretation tends to enclose the Christian message within the constraints of a particular philosophy. Moreover, by virtue of the presuppositions insisted upon in this hermeneutic, the religious message of the Bible is for the most part emptied of its objective reality (by means of an excessive 'demythologization') and tends to be reduced to an anthropological message only." — Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, 1993, preface by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger^[81]

This judgment, formulated after half a century of critical reception, sums up the essential of the Catholic disagreement with the Bultmannian enterprise: not a refusal of the hermeneutical demand — how to render the Christian message intelligible to modern man remains a legitimate question, which the Church herself has never ceased to work on from Divino Afflante Spiritu to Vatican II —, but a refusal of the anthropological reduction which, under cover of existential translation, deprives the kerygma of its anchorage in an event which truly occurred in history: the Incarnation, death and bodily Resurrection of Christ.

Rudolf Bultmann died on 30 July 1976 at Marburg, at the age of 91, and is buried in the municipal cemetery of the city where he taught for thirty years^[82]. His influence on 20th-century New Testament exegesis remains considerable and lasting: the form criticism he systematized remains a working tool — framed and criticized, but not abandoned — of contemporary exegesis, Catholic as well as Protestant; his insistence on the hermeneutical problem of translating the Christian message for modern man continues to nourish theological reflection well beyond strictly Bultmannian circles; and his own students, by engaging the New Quest of the historical Jesus against him as early as 1953, showed that his heritage in no way implied adherence to his most radical scepticism.

For a Catholic reader, Bultmann's heritage remains ambivalent in the most rigorous sense of the term: an exegete of unquestionable philological rigour, several of whose critical tools were received, prudently and within bounds, by Catholic exegesis itself; but also the artisan of a hermeneutical reduction — the dissolution of the kerygma into pure existential decision, cut off from its anchorage in a fact which truly occurred — which the Magisterium, from Divino Afflante Spiritu to the 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission by way of Sancta Mater Ecclesia and Dei Verbum, never ceased to refuse in the very name of faith in the Incarnation: God became man, lived, died and truly rose again in the history of men, and not only in the Easter faith of His disciples.

• Karl Barth — former companion of dialectical theology, become one of the severest critics of the demythologizing programme.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — another great German Protestant figure confronted with National Socialism within the Confessing Church.
• Friedrich Schleiermacher — father of modern liberal Protestantism, from whom Bultmann's exegetical school inherits, in its own way.
• Paul Tillich — colleague at Marburg (1924-1925), critic of "demythologizing" in the name of a "deliteralization" more attentive to religious language.