The Core Assumption
Meaning lives in the existential self-understanding the text expresses and demands, so its mythological form must be translated, not believed as a worldview.
The Four Assumptions
- Where meaning lives
- Meaning lives in the text's address to the reader's existence: the kerygma is understood when it summons the hearer to an authentic self-understanding before God.
- What the text is
- The text is the church's proclamation clothed in an ancient mythological worldview of heavens, spirits, and cosmic powers, which modern hearers cannot honestly adopt as their picture of the world.
- Who may interpret
- The authorized interpreter is the exegete equipped with an existential analytic, drawn by Bultmann from the early Heidegger, who can state the self-understanding a text presupposes and offers.
- What counts as a good reading
- A reading is adequate when it translates the text's mythological statements into their existential content without remainder of worldview, and confronts the hearer with the decision of faith.
Genealogy
This method arose in the 20th c period (Launched by the essay New Testament and Mythology in 1941; debated through the 1950s).
Key proponents: Rudolf Bultmann, John Macquarrie, Schubert M. Ogden.
Key texts: Kerygma and Myth edited by Hans Werner Bartsch; New Testament and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann; An Existentialist Theology by John Macquarrie.
The Procedure
These are the same steps The Workshop will walk you through.
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Identify the mythological elements
List the text's statements that belong to the ancient worldview: cosmic structures, spirits, miracles as interruptions of nature, and mythic eschatology.
Why this step matters: Demythologizing begins by honestly naming what modern readers are actually being asked to picture.
How to do it: Distinguish statements about the world's furniture from statements about God and human existence, and be exact about which is which.
What goes wrong here: Calling anything supernatural mythological and thereby prejudging the theological question.
You record: An inventory of the text's mythology. Done well when: Each item is shown to belong to the ancient picture of the world rather than to the kerygma itself.
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Recover the existential intention
State the understanding of human existence before God that each mythological statement objectifies.
Why this step matters: Myth, for Bultmann, speaks of human existence in the language of the world; interpretation reverses the objectification.
How to do it: Use the vocabulary of authenticity and inauthenticity, anxiety, care, and decision, and tie each term to the specific text.
What goes wrong here: Substituting a generic existentialism for the text's particular claim about existence.
You record: The text's existential content. Done well when: The existential statement explains why the text chose this mythological form.
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Confront the hearer with the decision
Formulate the claim the translated text now makes on the reader: the self-understanding to be surrendered and the one to be received.
Why this step matters: The kerygma is not information but address; the reading is unfinished until it reaches the point of decision.
How to do it: State the decision in the second person terms the text itself warrants, and refuse to soften it into general edification.
What goes wrong here: Ending with a description of what ancient hearers decided instead of the decision now demanded.
You record: The decision the text demands. Done well when: The decision follows from the existential content recovered, not from an imported agenda.
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Apply the cross as the control
Check the translation against the cross, which for Bultmann is the one event that is both historical and eschatological and so resists dissolution into myth or idea.
Why this step matters: The cross anchors demythologizing: the program interprets myth, but the kerygma itself rests on the act of God in Christ.
How to do it: Ask of each translated element whether it still points to the crucified and risen Christ as God's act, or whether it has become a timeless truth about human nature.
What goes wrong here: Letting the existential translation float free of the particular event of Jesus Christ.
You record: A cross-checked translation. Done well when: Every translated claim is traced back to the event of Christ as its ground.
Inputs Required
- A New Testament text read with historical-critical care
- An existential analytic of human existence, such as Heidegger's early analysis
- A clear statement of the modern worldview problem the program addresses
Outputs Produced
- An inventory of the text's mythological worldview elements
- A translation of those elements into existential self-understanding
- A formulation of the decision of faith the kerygma demands
Quality Criteria
Under this method, a good reading is one that meets these tests:
- Mythological and kerygmatic elements are distinguished with arguments, not by intuition
- The existential translation explains the text's chosen forms rather than discarding them
- The cross and resurrection of Christ remain God's act, not a symbol for a human possibility only
Common Errors
- Confusing demythologizing with deleting the miraculous, when it claims to interpret rather than eliminate
- Assuming Bultmann denied the resurrection as God's act, when he affirmed it while refusing to treat it as a publicly verifiable miracle of nature
- Using existential categories so loosely that any text can be made to yield the same sermon
Strengths
- It faced honestly the fact that modern readers cannot adopt the ancient worldview by an act of will
- It kept the New Testament's address to the individual hearer at the center of interpretation
- It set the agenda for a generation of debate about faith, history, and worldview
Weaknesses and Critics
- Its existential analytic is drawn from one philosopher's early work and dates as that philosophy is questioned
- Its sharp split between the text's worldview and its kerygma can be difficult to police in practice
- It drastically thins the cosmic and communal dimensions of the New Testament's hope
Karl Barth: Barth objected that Bultmann's program lets an existential philosophy decide in advance what the text may say, so that the kerygma is measured by Heidegger's analytic instead of the analytic being judged by the kerygma. (Barth's contribution to Kerygma and Myth and his Rudolf Bultmann: An Attempt to Understand Him (1952))
Ernst Käsemann: Käsemann, Bultmann's own pupil, objected that existential interpretation dissolves the apocalyptic and cosmic frame of early Christian faith into individual self-understanding, and he reopened the quest of the historical Jesus against his teacher's prohibition. (Käsemann's 1953 lecture on the problem of the historical Jesus and his essays on apocalyptic)
Internal Schools
Bultmann school proper: This school keeps the full program: demythologizing as interpretation, the existential analytic as its instrument, and a strict refusal to ground faith in historical research.
Post-Bultmannian new quest school: This school, formed by Bultmann's pupils such as Ernst Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm, retained existential interpretation while reopening the question of the continuity between the historical Jesus and the kerygma.
Exemplar Readings
Demythologizing the Three-Story Universe (New Testament cosmology passages in Bultmann's 1941 essay): Bultmann's own exemplar: the ancient picture of heaven above and hell below is not to be believed or discarded but interpreted, as the objectified form of the truth that human life stands open to powers beyond its own control and is addressed by God from beyond itself.
The Resurrection as Kerygmatic Event (1 Corinthians 15 in Bultmannian reading): The reading refuses to treat the resurrection as a resuscitation available to historical proof, and instead hears Paul's chapter as the proclamation that the cross is God's saving act, in which the hearer is summoned to die to the old self-understanding and live by faith.
What This Method Cannot Do
This method cannot recover the corporate and cosmic dimensions of New Testament hope, such as the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation, in their full textual weight, because its instrument translates cosmic statements into individual self-understanding. It also cannot justify its own existential analytic from the texts, since the analytic is brought to them from philosophy.
Site Stance
The site has not yet assigned its stance on this method. The stance assignments wait on the named reviewers, the same naming the Christian Assessment verdicts wait on. The method stands here in full in the meantime: a stance discloses the site's judgment, and it never filters what a reader may read or run. The stance values and their criteria stand on the criteria page.
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Across the Site
This method belongs to the Philosophical Hermeneutics family. Its sources stand in the References register; its family stands among the site's tools; the positions it produces can be compared in the Diptych.
Primary Sources
- New Testament and Mythology by Rudolf Bultmann (1941), in Kerygma and Myth edited by Hans Werner Bartsch
Secondary Sources
- An Existentialist Theology by John Macquarrie (1955)
- Christ without Myth by Schubert M. Ogden (1961)