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The Kerygma and the Cuckoo's Nest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
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Influenged by Tillich's so-called method of correlation, theologians in recent decades have been inclined to approach existential situations as if they simply raised questions to which the dogmatic tradition provided answers. Accordingly, in my teaching for example, I have often read Camus's The Plague together with Buber's I and Thou, Tillich's The Courage To Be with Brecht's Mother Courage and so on. However, the effect of such correlations has, as often as not, been to set the questions moving in the other direction. The traditional ‘answers’ of theologians have been challenged by the existential concerns of the secular writers. In particular the very raison d'être of theology, the articulation of the transcendent presence of God in the world, has become problematical.Granted that Buber's I-You relationship correlates with Camus's portrayals of authenticity, for instance, why do we need to mention Buber's ‘Eternal You’? Can we even make sense of such talk? Granted that Tillich's types of anxiety correlate with his sense of faithful courage, must his affirmation of life in spite of the negativities of existence be ontologically rooted in some ‘Ground of Being’? As we ponder such questions the existential contexts discussed seem to have evaporated all content from the theological answers.
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References
page 302 note 1 My primary reference is to Bultmann's, contributions to Kerygma and Myth, ed. Bartsch, H. W., tr. R. H. Fuller (New York: Harper and Row, 2nd ed. 1961)Google Scholar, and Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., tr. Grobel, K. (New York: Scribners, 1951)Google Scholar. On Heidegger in this context see Macquarrie, J., An Existentialist Theology (London: Student Christian Movement, 1955)Google Scholar. On Bultmann and demythologising see Johnson, Roger A., The Origins of Demythologizing (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974).Google Scholar
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page 304 note 1 Kesey, Ken, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Signet paperback (New York: Viking Press, 1962)Google Scholar. Page references given hereafter in the text are to this edition. The sense of ‘cosmos’ used here is that found, e.g., in Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy, Anchor paperback (New York: Doubleday, 1969).Google Scholar
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page 305 note 2 See Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, Semeia 4 (1975), p. 75fGoogle Scholar. Notice in passing, contra Ricoeur, that in this instance the shift is from a metaphorical to a literal mode, rather than vice versa: what serves the parabolic function of reversing the expectations of the previous speaker is not the use of metaphor as such but the disruptive effect of playing on the shift from literal to metaphorical or metaphorical to literal uses of terms.
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page 310 note 2 When Bultmann cites this summary verse in his Theology of the New Testament it is in the context of a discussion of preaching (see Volume One, p. 87). I think he neglects the evangelical significance of Torah for both Jesus and Paul, typically subsuming it under a Lutheran view of Law and obedience (e.g. in Primitive Christianity and Jesus and the Word), and likewise concentrates on demythologising the miraculous elements of the healing stories to the neglect of their other dimensions. But to argue this here would take us too far afield.
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