Rudolf Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament, which shaped generations of students during his lifetime (1886–1976) and beyond, is here revisited by a stellar cast of contributors, eleven of whom each address one of its chapters while two others provide synthetic conclusions.
The general approach is one of critical appreciation, ‘critical’ being for several contributors the dominant note in relation to a multiply-implausible ménage à trois of Troeltschian historicism, Heideggerian ahistorical existentialism and a hyper-Lutheran penchant for departicularised Gnostic accounts of salvation by (self-) knowledge. So Udo Schnelle, ‘The Kerygma of the Hellenistic Church aside from Paul’ (pp. 39–59) both praises and critiques Bultmann's ‘extravagant abbreviation’ in his almost complete suppression of pre-and non-Pauline Christianity along with his misguided Gnostic history-of-religions grid. Similarly Jörg Frey (‘Johannine Christology and eschatology’, pp. 101–32) finds Bultmann on John roundly inadequate as either history or exegesis, admirably coherent on its own terms but untenable as a reading of the texts. (See further Samuel Byrskog, ‘The message of Jesus’, pp. 3–22; C. Kavin Rowe, ‘The Kerygma of the earliest Church’, pp. 23–37; Richard B. Hays, ‘Humanity prior to the revelation of faith’, pp. 61–77; Richard Bauckham, ‘Dualism and soteriology in Johannine theology’, pp. 133–53; Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘The rise of church order’, pp. 155–72; James D. G. Dunn, ‘The development of doctrine’, pp. 173–91; Larry W. Hurtado, ‘Christology and soteriology’, pp. 193–209.) Somewhat distinctively, Wayne A. Meeks (‘The problem of Christian living’, pp. 211–29) faults the entire exercise of New Testament theology as ‘a category mistake’; Bultmann's brittle narrative of decline from Pauline and Johannine peaks, along with his ‘self-consuming paradox of the indicative and imperative’, is found unsuited to an understanding of early Christian ethics.
In marked contrast, Bultmann's project receives a much warmer welcome from one of his Marburg sucessors and from Durham. John M. G. Barclay's (‘Humanity under faith’, pp. 79–99) analysis of Bultmann's systematising account of righteousness, grace, faith and freedom finds it ‘a beautifully consistent reading of the whole of Paul’ – unmatched by ‘anyone alive today’ (though supplemented by Barclay on grace as gift without regard to worth). In the first of two concluding essays Angela Standhartinger (‘Bultmann's theology of the New Testament in context’, pp. 233–56) stresses Bultmann's political context and legacy, culminating in Dorothee Sölle. Francis Watson (‘Bultmann and the theological interpretation of Scripture’, pp. 257–72), finally, discerns in Bultmann's notion of kerygma and his soteriological theology of fallenness, salvation-event and faith an eminently theological interpretation of Scripture; critics of either his theologising or his demythologising are swept aside as ‘old, tired, and unfruitful’.
The editors of this volume share such enthusiasm for the study of Bultmann, which their brief introduction (pp. vii–x) at one point compares somewhat problematically to rabbinic meditation on the divine throne. Certainly the excellence of the contributors ensures a consistently high quality. At the same time there is something oddly unsatisfactory about setting this distinguished team to work mainly on individual chapters of the chopped-up Theology: the resulting, sharply diverging appraisals inevitably leave Bultmann's whole looking less than its parts. Beyond Bultmann nevertheless remains a welcome, high-energy contribution to the continuing reappraisal of one of the twentieth century's most influential interpretations of the New Testament.
