Chapter 18 of 404

The Existential Jesus

While acknowledging Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus, Bultmann theologically circumvented it. Perhaps insufficiently heedful of Schweitzer’s critique of nonapocalyptic Jesuses made in the interpreters’ image,⁶⁴ Bultmann created a Jesus relevant to the reigning philosophic paradigm of his own day, especially at the University of Marburg, where he taught.⁶⁵ His Jesus preached an existential message akin to that of the university’s renowned philosopher, Martin Heidegger.⁶⁶ Bultmann could then accommodate historical skepticism to the fullest, welcoming skeptics to the fold, because he had nothing theologically to lose from it.⁶⁷ History could not affect Jesus’ existential message, and this translation for Bultmann’s secular audience could make his Jesus appealing even to those for whom philosophic assumptions had rendered traditional faith impossible.

Bultmann felt that realized eschatology (the future promises fulfilled in the present) within the New Testament itself showed that the delay of Jesus’ “return” had already led to this process of reinterpretation in the first century.⁶⁸ The problem, of course, is that in most NT documents this realized eschatology stands alongside and anticipates future eschatology as well (see e.g., Rom 8:23; 1 Cor 2:9-10; 15:50-54; Phil 1:23; 3:20-21). Bultmann often deployed a form of “content criticism” in which texts that disagreed with his interpretation were declared in conflict with the genuine spirit of New Testament theology.⁶⁹

One danger in producing a Jesus relevant primarily to one’s own era, whether “conservative,” “liberal,” or something else, is that this Jesus is ultimately not very relevant to other cultures or other eras.⁷⁰ It has not surprisingly proved much easier to recontextualize the Jesus of the Gospels for other settings than to recontextualize Bultmann’s Jesus. Indeed, Bultmann’s largely skeptical approach to history did not even leave enough information about the “original” Jesus for scholars to rework. Bultmann’s critics complain that the existential approach to Jesus “dehistoricizes” Jesus, taking him out of his first-century context;⁷¹ the relevance of an existential Jesus has naturally faded with the marketability of existentialism. Many have argued that Bultmann was obsessed with a now out-of-date worldview.⁷²

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