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Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolf Bultmann and Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects of His Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Hans Jonas
Hans Jonas
Affiliation:
New School for Social Research
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Extract

Prefatory Note: In July, 1976, Rudolf Bultmann, the last of the great Protestant theologians of this century, died in Marburg, Germany, a few weeks before his 92d birthday. An almost life-long friendship, beginning with my being his student in the 1920s, bound me to this man of towering scholarship, clarity of mind, purity of character, and deep — if troubled — piety. In November, 1976, the Theological Faculty of Marburg University held a memorial for its longtime professor of New Testament studies, which was attended by many persons from all over Germany and neighboring countries this side of the iron curtain. Of the two academic lectures delivered before that audience, one was by a New Testament theologian and erstwhile student of Bultmann, Professor Erich Dinkler from Heidelberg, the other by me, not a theologian but a philosopher, not a Christian but a Jew. The complete proceedings of the memorial meeting have been published under the title Gedenken an Rudolf Bultmann by J. C. B. Mohr in Tübingen, 1977. Only part of what I had prepared in writing was orally presented at the occasion, but the whole was printed. I here submit my own English version of the unabridged German essay, which in the spirit of Bultmann's own openmindedness pushes some of his theoretical concerns beyond the point which he himself had reached.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , January 1982 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1982

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References

1 Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments.

2 All quotations in what follows are from Bultmann's collected essays published under the title Glauben und Verstehen [Faith and Understanding] (Tübingen: Mohr, 1933–1965).Google Scholar Only the first two of these have been translated into English: Faith and Understanding I (London: SCM, and New York/Evanston: Harper & Row, 1969)Google Scholar and Essays Philosophical and Theological (London: SCM, and New York: Macmillan, 1955).Google Scholar Since all but one of my quotations are from later volumes, with this one exception the translations are mine and the references are to the German text. Volume and page numbers are indicated after each quotation without naming the individual essay.

3 The connection of the two purposes is expressed, e.g., thus: demythologizing “removes a false stumbling block and brings into focus instead the true one, namely, the message of the cross” (4. 157).

4 See Heller, Erich, “Hannah Arendt und die Literatur,” Merkur 30 (1976) 10, pp. 999f.Google Scholar; and for what follows, Jonas, Hans, “Acting, Knowing, Thinking: Gleanings from Hannah Arendt's Philosophical Work,” Social Research 44/1 (1977) 40.Google Scholar Also, see my statement, with special reference to Bultmann, toward the end of the essay “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Phenomenon of Life (New York:Harper & Row, 1966Google Scholar; reprint ed., Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979; and again, Chicago: Midway Reprint [University of Chicago], 1982) 260–61.

5 See Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking (New York/ London:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) 104.Google Scholar

6 See for my attempt at constructing such a model as part of a reappraisal of the psychophysical problem: Jonas, H., Macht oder Ohnmacht der Subjektivität? (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981).Google Scholar A first and shorter version of the argument was presented in “On the Power or Impotence of Subjectivity,” Philosphical Dimensions of the Neuro-Medical Sciences (ed.Engelhardt, H. T. and Spicker, S. F.Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1976) 143–61.Google Scholar

7 It will be noticed that what we said about threshold conditions in nature, opening into causally equivalent alternatives of succession, applies also — more palpably even—to history, which can be said to be a constant sequence of ‘threshold situations’, where every moment is potentially a ‘zero point’, a watershed for divergent continuations. To be sure, there are great differences of degree, of states more settled or more fluid, with option alternatives of smaller or larger amplitudes, and ‘small’ is probably the rule. But sometimes, it seems, moments of exceptional pregnancy occur, in whose critical mix large issues are poised and wait as it were for the mover to come along and actualize the momentous possibility (or one of a prominent pair of alternatives) that lies ready to be ‘triggered'. It is still a possibility only, and what will really happen is unpredictable. Even the ‘possibility’ as such, though sometimes discerned by actor or contemporary witness, is more often known in retrospect only after having become reality.

8 Examples are found in the philosophical work of Emil Fackenheim and in the literary work of Eli Wiesel, A modest contribution on my part is “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” in Out of the Whirlwind (ed. Friedlander, A. H.New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968 465–76.Google Scholar

9 This turn of the dialogue is not wholly imaginary but once was actually taken in a correspondence between us over my Ingersoll Lecture, “Immortality and the Modern Temper,” of 1961 (now the last essay in my The Phenomenon of Life); part of the epistolary exchange is appended to its German version in Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit (Kleine Vandenhoeck Reihe 165; Göttingen, 1963Google Scholar; for Bultmann's side, see p. 67, for mine, p. 71). Obviously, my resorting, in that lecture, to a symbolic myth —a liberty taken from the paradigm of Plato — was as such already at odds with Bultmann's rigorous demythologizing, and the divergence was later articulated by me in the ending of “Heidegger and Theology” (see above, n. 4). Still later, I ventured to draw some conclusions fromthis hypothetical ‘myth1 in terms of a rational ‘theology', thus going one step further on the road of ‘objective’ doctrine which Bultmann shunned from deepest instinct: see “The Concept of God after Auschwitz,” referred to in n. 8.