Word: bultmann
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...orthodoxy that stressed the Biblical imperatives of God's word to man. He retreated into seclusion when the Nazis took and twisted to their own ends his idea of a necessary link between theology and a dynamic' social order. After the war, Gogarten backed Rudolf Bultmann's demythologization of the Bible, and later argued, as had Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that secularization is a legitimate consequence of Christianity-that the church must march with history, accepting the knowledge science thrusts upon...
Ever since World War II, German Protestantism has been dominated intellectually by Demythologizer Rudolf Bultmann and the existentialist theologies of his Marburg disciples. In recent years, however, Bultmann's radical skepticism concerning the historic character of Christian revelation has come under concerted attack by a spirited group of younger theologians known as the "Pannenberg circle," after Wolfhart Pannenberg of Mainz University. It is Bultmann's conviction that the Gospels tell almost nothing authentic or trustworthy about the Jesus of history. Pannenberg's answer is that Christianity is nothing if it is not historically true...
Scriptural Authoritarianism. Pannenberg's dispute with Bultmann centers on revelation and its relationship to history. To Bultmann, faith and reason are totally separate, as are God's history and man's; the divine will is known only through the kerygma (proclamation) -God's word as contained in Scripture, which is understandable only through faith. Pannenberg argues that Bultmann preaches a kind of "Biblical authoritarianism" of God's word and, in effect, pushes Christian faith outside the boundaries of history. On the contrary, Pannenberg insists, God is not only the ground of all existence...
...most controversial of Pannenberg's theses is his contention that the Resurrection is, properly understood, a historical event. Largely because the idea of a return from death is a concept incomprehensible to modern man, Bultmann considers the Resurrection a trans-historical myth. Pannenberg concedes that there is no way of knowing the exact mode of the Resurrection-was it simply a special vision given to Jesus' disciples, or a reconstitution of his body?-but he insists that there is no justification for dismissing it as legend. The fact of the Resurrection, he declares, was one of the primitive...
...remains to be seen whether Pan nenberg-who is now working out the philosophical foundation for a full-scale theology of history-proves to be an effective counter to Bultmann. But even Pannenberg's critics concede that he has once again raised several traditional issues that have been largely ignored by contemporary German theologians. In contrast to both Bultmann and Switzerland's Karl Barth, who strongly emphasizes the uniqueness of God's revelation in Christ, Pannenberg stresses the continuity of Old and New Testaments. Compared with theologies that place exclusive stress on Biblical authority, Pannenberg...