In time for the 125th anniversary of the birth of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), by 1950 ‘the most important New Testament scholar of the Protestant world’ (laudatio, p. 289; cf. p. 397), Konrad Hammann has published the first large-scale biography, entailing a full introduction to his work. As a biography, the book is successful; the details and the life are narrated well and accurately. Especially fine is the story of Bultmann's conduct during National Socialism and its aftermath (pp. 255–95, 352–63); indeed, this is the highlight of the book. That Bultmann stayed in Germany, kept his position, remained loyal to his Jewish friends and was openly critical of the Nazis may puzzle some because it does not fit with the idea that there ‘cannot be a right life within the false one’, but there it is.
Hammann is weaker when it comes to Bultmann's thought and to the people who interacted with and influenced him. He is especially weak on philosophy; the chapters on Heidegger's interaction with Bultmann – the most interesting aspect for many readers, as Bultmann arguably was, and is, the principal Heideggerian Protestant theologian – are a bit pedestrian (pp. 192–206). The work of Nikolai Hartmann, after all the godfather to one of Bultmann's daughters and obviously a personal friend, is completely neglected.
As regards theologians, Hammann always and automatically takes Bultmann's part, which does not always make for fair or even accurate results – concerning Jülicher, for instance, or Karl Barth. Especially flawed is Hammann's depiction of Rudolf Otto, who almost appears as a jealous stick-in-the-mud naïve theologian (pp. 118–20, 130–2; apparently he was nice and intelligent earlier, when Bultmann still liked him; pp. 90–1). In fact he was the more successful lecturer, scholar (Otto's publication and citation record is better than Bultmann's, for what that is worth) and perhaps even theologian if we look at empirical theology or sociology of religion in the sense of what people actually do believe when they say they do.
Bultmann is surely best-known as the father of ‘demythologisation’ (properly demythisation) and for his work on the ‘historical Jesus’. Both debates, although of course completely conditioned by the context within which Bultmann worked (in particular the legacy of Liberal Theology), are of especial interest today in the context of the ‘new atheism’ and the response to it. Put simply, Bultmann tries to reveal the message of the New Testament that is obscured, for modern times, by its ancient Middle Eastern metaphors. He argues that ‘not the historical Jesus, but Jesus Christ, the preached one, is Lord’ (p. 433): he who became the Christ not through his (Jewish ethical-millennial) teachings, but rather through the interpretation, not of the early Jerusalem community of the Apostolic age, but of the Hellenic one (pp. 376–7, 401) and then especially of the two genuine Fathers of Christianity, St Paul and St John the Evangelist (pp. 399–408). It is the kerygma that Christians believe in. The historical Jesus is quite incidental.
All of this is by now fairly mainstream in Protestant theology (or was until quite recently), even though it was attacked back then (Hammann rarely concedes honest motives to those who criticised or were against Bultmann; usually they are depicted as fundamentalist yokels [pp. 424–9]) and empirically shared by hardly anyone who would identify themselves as believing Protestants. The problem is that if the resurrection is essentially just a myth, and if Jesus did not rise into the kerygma, i.e. if he either was not Christ or did not know it, then Christianity is unique amongst the great religions of mankind in actually being falsifiable (p. 439). It seems that Bultmann, in conversation, generally conceded this, but the work remains, and Hammann does not really know what to do with that admittedly crucial central point: ‘no dogma, no Dean’.
On demythologisation, Hammann acknowledges with but a few remarks what was already the most trenchant contemporary criticism, viz. that it completely overrates the role and importance of scientific belief in modern society. Bultmann famously thought that ‘one cannot use electric light and the radio and in sickness look for remedy in modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the world of spirits and magic of the New Testament’ (pp. 310, cf. p. 329), but as his friend Max Kommerell wrote to him ‘we all’ actually do not think in a scientific way but experience the world ‘poetically, mythologically, enthusiastically, sympathetically … we only think natural-scientifically when we check something in an encyclopaedia’ (p. 316 n. 274; Hans Jonas's point, p. 504). This may be easier to see today, but contemporary criticism shows that that was clear even then, and – it would have been surprising otherwise, given his intellectual context – Bultmann did acknowledge this from the 1950s (p. 394). The question in the end is whether this issue, as the Jesus Christ question, is not one in which, indeed, Bultmann's theology – not as lived and preached (pp. 319–30), but the theory – is, as I heard it quipped in Marburg in my youth, a faith for people with a PhD.
As regards the discussion of Bultmann's work, Hammann tries to steer a middle ground. He takes his views as implicitly correct and only occasionally, if at important junctures, does he briefly discuss it in relation to today's mainstream perspective (pp. 330, 403, 415, 437). It remains unclear what Bultmann's legacy to today's theology and Protestant faith could be. I would suggest that Otto Kaiser's recent Weihnachten im Osterlicht (Stuttgart 2008), which is a Bultmannian ‘biblical introduction to Christian faith’, does provide the latter. And, as Hammann acknowledges, the development of Protestant theology in the last two or three decades has made respective amends, also regarding the necessary connection of the historical Jesus with the kerygma (p. 441) and against the ‘night of no images’ in the succession of demythologisation (p. 330), but while this squares well with the ‘historical Bultmann’, the question is whether it also does with his work. The historical dimension and importance of this work remain none the less significant, while Bultmann's life, regardless of his theology, is genuinely interesting. Hammann's biography is thus well worth reading despite its drawbacks.
