New Temporalities and a Temporal (Re)Turn in New Testament Studies? The Cullmann/Bultmann Debate Revisited

Abstract

In light of a recent surge of interest in time across a range of disciplines, a case has been made that New Testament studies has experienced a “temporal turn.” This claim raises an important question about how one understands the relation of recent developments to earlier, long-held debates about time among New Testament scholars. This question is answered here by revisiting the “salvation history” debate between Oscar Cullmann and Rudolf Bultmann, with the help of Paul Ricoeur’s analysis in Time and Narrative and in the context of recent trends in work on “temporalities.” This article argues that, although in many respects recent work on time offers fresh language to describe the kinds of time at stake for New Testament scholarship, it is also true that attending to the earlier debates shows how parts of the temporal turn are in fact a return to questions long considered.

Introduction

Across a variety of humanities disciplines there has recently been increased interest in time, often under the broad rubric of “temporalities.”¹ According to Lynne Moss Bahr, even the field of New Testament studies, which has a long history with “time,” has experienced a “temporal turn.”² In her account, “theoretical developments from other disciplines” have enabled new perspectives, moving beyond the well-known “now-but-not-yet” construal of time for early Christianity long dominant in scholarship.³ Even so, identifying a “turn” in intellectual habits or trends is difficult, and it is an open question at this point whether other scholars beyond those surveyed by Bahr would recognize that they have experienced any epochal change in their understanding of time.⁴ Bahr’s claim, then, raises an important question: How should one understand these recent developments in relation to earlier debates about time among New Testament scholars? The purpose of this argument is to sketch an answer to that question by way of a kind of philosophical archaeology, returning to a once-major impulse still felt in New Testament scholarship on “time”: the salvation-history debate.

Debates among New Testament scholars about the shape, character, and meaning of time reached a particular fervor with the salvation history debate in the 1950s and 1960s, closely associated with Oscar Culmann (1902–1999) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). As I will argue below, while it may seem to have disappeared as a major sphere of intellectual conflict since then, its effects remain ongoing, even as both scholars continue to have a long legacy. Tracing key threads in this debate will offer a two-fold opportunity: first, to redescribe the Cullmann/Bultmann debate with the help of Paul Ricoeur, situating it within a long-standing philosophical debate about the nature of time;⁵ second, to illuminate points of convergence and divergence between the views at stake in the salvation-history debate and some of the “theoretical developments” noted by Bahr. Paul Ricoeur helpfully functions as a common interlocutor for both old and new discussions of time, a Janus figure who can aid New Testament scholars in their movement between intellectual spaces. Revisiting and redescribing the Cullmann/Bultmann debate on Ricoeur’s terms clarifies fundamental issues at stake for those writers and thereby facilitates conversation with recent work on temporality. To begin, I will offer two brief orientations, the first to summarize the context and legacy of the Cullmann/Bultmann debate and the second to introduce some notable trends in recent work on temporality.

The Salvation History Debate and Its Legacy

The debate between Rudolf Bultmann and Oscar Cullmann about the nature of temporality—historical, Christian, existential, etc.—took place in the midst of a hive of scholarly activity, with numerous proposals related to history and eschatology being put forward: from the consistent (konsequente) eschatology of Albert Schweizer and his followers,⁶ to the realized eschatology of C. H. Dodd,⁷ to the Pannenberg circle’s proposals about “revelation as history,”⁸ to the (slightly later) apocalyptic early Christianity of Ernst Käsemann.⁹ Questions about whether or how historical time had meaning pervaded not only theological discussions concerned with the Christian’s relation to history and God, but also philosophical accounts.¹⁰ In view of this, it is not surprising that the 1946 publication of Cullmann’s Christus und die Zeit generated considerable debate, in which he found himself particularly at odds with Rudolf Bultmann and those convinced by Bultmann’s existentialist hermeneutic.¹¹

When Cullmann first worked out his views on salvation history in the early 1940s, he did so at least in part in response to the work of the Marburg theologian; who, indeed, could avoid his influence?¹² For his part, while claiming to eschew any philosophy of history at all,¹³ Cullmann’s presentation of salvation history was based fundamentally on a “simple rectilinear conception of unending time”¹⁴ moving from “formerly” through “now” to “then” and generating the classic tension between the “now” and the “not yet.”¹⁵ Within this schema, the present is defined by its being distinct from both past and future, which are, importantly for Cullmann, “a real past” and “real future.”¹⁶ That is, the divinely appointed events of the past and future exist objectively,¹⁷ apart from any particular person or vantage point, and occur along the “entire timeline” of history, running from creation to the eternal succession of the ages in the eschaton.¹⁸

Bultmann, on the other hand, utterly rejected Cullmann’s linear account of temporality in favor of a radically eschatological and existential account of “the temporality of Christian existence.”¹⁹ While he did not dispute that time continues in its most banal—even objective—sense, he argued that mere succession is not the important aspect of temporality relative to the New Testament.²⁰ Christian temporality is not marked by linear temporal succession but by an encounter with Christ (in the kerygma) as the eschatological event par excellence.²¹ The only way one’s experience in the eschaton can be considered “temporal,” then, is to understand it as existing “in constantly new decisions,”²² in a “now” that constitutes “an isolated moment without continuity with all that has gone beforehand.”²³ Faith, as genuine decision, cannot operate on the basis of “objective guarantees in the world.”²⁴ This applies to the past as much as it does the future. The relation of present and future cannot be one of causality and development for Bultmann, because the latter is nothing short of an act of God that stands outside the process of world history and to which one must remain radically open.²⁵ In short, where Cullmann prioritizes an objective, linear account of historical time within which the Christian is situated, Bultmann rejects this in favor of a subjective, existential constitution of temporal experience.

Over the course of the 1970s, within the field of New Testament studies, the heated debates about the salvation historical paradigm cooled as scholarly energies shifted to other topics.²⁶ Additionally, for many in the latter half of the twentieth century, the perceived theological and institutional entailments of salvation history have placed it beyond the pale: in the context of our present political and ecclesial woes, what sense could there be in sacralizing the status quo, even “sanctifying the sadistic”?²⁷ Moreover, the salvation history debate itself became closely connected with the debate around “apocalyptic,” the character of apocalyptic literature and its interest in eschatology, building on and engaging with the work of Ernst Käsemann in particular.²⁸ As David Congdon has noted, the result of this link has been that, within current debates about “apocalyptic,” scholars tend to argue either for observable, divinely determined, future events in the world (i.e., analogous to Cullmann’s objective account of historical time) or “something nonliteral, transcendent, and indirectly or paradoxically present” now (aligned with the view of Bultmann).²⁹ Of course, aspects of Bultmann and Cullmann’s arguments also remained influential among various other exegetical and theological discussions—from hermeneutics and theological interpretation to ecumenical discussions between Protestants and Catholics—and, indeed, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, each scholar has had something of a renaissance.³⁰ The continued presence of both Cullmann’s and Bultmann’s accounts of time (historical, eschatological, Christian, etc.), therefore, is now simultaneous with new works announcing a “temporal turn” in the field, thereby pressing home the question of how the two are related. Before we can begin to bridge the “old” and the “new,” however, a brief orientation to the latter is necessary.

A Brief Trip through Time

Tracing the rise and the various threads of recent work on temporality is highly complicated and fraught with pitfalls, not least because of the inherently self-reflexive quality of such accounts, which requires that one “be alert to the temporal forms of historical analysis and representation, and to temporal assumptions and habits that shape fields and objects of knowledge.”³¹ In the present case, moreover, there is no single fountainhead or trajectory that serves as a reference point for something like “temporality studies.” Instead, there appears to be parallel developments across several disciplines, each of which positions itself within a particular intellectual genealogy.

On the one hand, there has been a steady stream of contributions from the philosophy of history. Scholars such as Hayden White have argued influentially, if controversially, that all historiography is subject to certain narrative conventions inherent to narrative representation, including chronology, teleology, plot (or emplotment), and moral evaluation.³² To this discussion, Paul Ricoeur has contributed considerably. His major works—stretching at least from The Symbolism of Evil (1961) to Memory, History, Forgetting (2000)³³—constitute an extended philosophical reflection on the human experience of the world, mediated through language, represented as narrative (both fictional and historical), implicating both self and other in the process of remembering, memorializing, and forgetting.³⁴ Ricoeur’s work has emphasized, among other things, that there are multiple ways of conceptualizing time and that these can and do conflict with one another—cosmological time, monumental time, clock time, human time.³⁵ External reference to the world in historiographical accounts always comes by way of representation, of a symbolic “standing for,”³⁶ in which the past is (re)present(ed) in and for the present, with the social and political possibilities that implies. Ricoeur’s account of time, history, and narrative has proved influential, not only in subsequent philosophies of history but also across a variety of historiographical and sociological projects.³⁷

Among narratologists, debates about the centrality and character of time are long-standing. The early work by Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the (somewhat underdeveloped) term “chronotope,” which attempts to articulate the way in which narrative time is bound to narrative space, and the configuration of the two together constitutes differing modes of representing time within narratives.³⁸ Later, in his general theory of narrative, Gérard Genette influentially articulated the distinction between story and narrative in which the chronological order of the underlying story differs from the order of the narrative presentation.³⁹ More recently, the disruptive and pluralizing possibilities of this division have been emphasized by Mieke Bal, who expands Genette’s division into a three-tiered narrativity.⁴⁰ The temporality of narratives, on Bal’s account, includes a variety of complicating factors—matters of sequential ordering, rhythm, and frequency—that help to account for what she calls “multi-temporality,” referring to the contemporaneous and conflicting presence of multiple temporal frameworks. She calls this experience “heterochrony.”⁴¹ Representing temporality in narrative, then, is complex precisely because human temporal experience is itself complex.⁴²

Alongside these threads, much recent work on temporality is found in queer theoretical approaches to literary, visual, and historical materials.⁴³ One factor that is particularly prevalent is the emphasis on the role affect (or emotion, depending on the writer) plays in temporal frameworks and expectations.⁴⁴ In these works, the oft-presumed chronologies for growth, maturity, (re)production, and so on are illuminated as culturally constructed ways of marking time, conventional narratives, which are disjunctive with other temporal experiences.⁴⁵ For Carolyn Dinshaw, queer historiography is fundamentally an act in which historiographers and readers are affectively engaged with those who have gone before them: historians both engage in and offer their readers a “touch across time.”⁴⁶ This past can be important for retrieving a community over time, a heritage that otherwise risks not-being, and thereby structures actions in the present.⁴⁷

This is far too brief a summary of these intellectual trends, but I hope that it suffices to draw out a few observations. First, however inexorably the arrow of time appears to move forward, time is not in fact simply a uniform category, a precondition for activity or knowledge; it is experienced and even suffered by different people in different ways.⁴⁸ The present is “full and attached rather than empty and free-floating” with relation to both past and future.⁴⁹ The ability of narrative to link past, present, and future as well as narratological possibilities for representing multiple temporal regimes is a strongly recurring theme across these discussions, whether in terms of Ricoeur’s essential linking of narrative and varying conceptions of time, Bakhtin’s chronotopes and Bal’s heterochrony, or Dinshaw’s articulation of asynchrony.⁵⁰ Temporal experience is shot through with multiple temporal rhythms which can and do come into conflict—the time-related conflict experienced by an early career academic with young children jumps to mind, for instance—which can bring experiences of suffering, a sense of being “out of time” in multiple senses of the phrase.⁵¹ As some recent work in anthropology has argued, moreover, temporal frames differ between cultural contexts, and different “chronotopes”—here, ways of construing the temporality of a relevant context—are able to disrupt one another.⁵² Each moment, on this view, is a “pluritemporality” inhabited by objects and people acting, suffering, changing at different tempos and according to varying temporal logics.⁵³ In a related way, then, how we “tell” or “mark” time matters for how individuals and communities navigate questions of identity. Telling time is attached not only to technical skills (such as the development and use of clocks) but is in all cases inextricably bound up with cultural norms. The past may be gone, but it remains present insofar as we experience its traces and insofar as it shapes actions, identities, and possibilities in the present.⁵⁴ As one philosopher has recently put it, the “challenge for a phenomenological and philosophical account of time is not to provide one homogenous theory of time.”⁵⁵ Time and history are here deeply linked with narrative, experience, affect, identity, and plurality. These themes, in various guises, will return variously throughout this argument.

Redescribing the Salvation History Debate

I turn now to redescribing the Bultmann/Cullmann debate with the help of Paul Ricoeur. This accomplishes two principal goals: 1) it shows that any “return” to these thinkers should not aim to be a recapitulation—we shall see that they are insufficient as singular accounts of time—and 2) it will frame Cullmann’s and Bultmann’s accounts of time in a way that facilitates easier conversation with the concerns of recent work in the final section below. The first section here will focus on relating Bultmann and Cullmann to Ricoeur’s typology of philosophies of time, while the latter sections will turn to the “intertwining” of history and fiction in narrative emplotment and the inclusion of the reader in the mimetic interpretive process.

A. Cullmann, Bultmann, and Ricoeur’s Temporal Typology

As I sketched above, Cullmann and Bultmann present themselves as proponents of objective and subjective accounts of time, respectively—the former emphasizing “real” events on a salvation-historical timeline and the latter emphasizing the subjective, existential weight of decisions “now.” These two approaches of temporality occupy a fundamental place in Paul Ricoeur’s analysis in Time and Narrative. “A constant thesis” throughout the work is “that speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination,” with both objectivist and subjectivist accounts unable to incorporate fully the insights and concerns of the other.⁵⁶ Ricoeur’s “rumination” runs along two tracks presented across three pairs of philosophers, three moments of debate between subjective and objective accounts of time. On one side are Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger, whose phenomenological account of temporality Ricoeur refers to as “the subjective time of the philosophers.”⁵⁷ On the other side we find Aristotle, Kant, and the “ordinary” conception of time rejected by Heidegger, all of whom attempt to ground their accounts of time in objective features in the world, apart from human perception.⁵⁸ Between these two sides lies a fundamental aporia, which neither line of argumentation can itself fill. The divergent views of Augustine and Aristotle set the terms of the subsequent discussion.⁵⁹

In book 11 of the Confessions, Ricoeur finds an account in which the lived experience of time assumes center stage. Time, as such, does not have independent being to which one has access, but it is instead characterized by the distentio animi—a stretching of the mind between memories of the past and expectations of the future. The present is marked by focused attention, intentio, which is attended by the distentio of memory and expectation.⁶⁰ Ricoeur notes, though, that beginning from internal experiences of intentio and distentio obscures the fact that, on Augustine’s own terms, the “mind begins by submitting to [objective] succession and even suffering it, before constructing it.”⁶¹ In other words, Augustine is unable to derive the measurability of time, a key facet of objective accounts, from the experience of intentio and distentio and in fact tacitly borrows from a time that precedes and grounds human temporal experience. For his part, Aristotle begins from the opposite direction. Time, he notes, is measurable because it is “something of movement.”⁶² That is to say, time is measured by movement and therefore takes on the spacial quality of magnitude in relation to the movement between two points in time, from the “before” to the “after.”⁶³ These points in time, like points in space, are inherently countable (if, strictly speaking, innumerable) as features of an objective temporal movement.⁶⁴ Time is, then, a series of instants, marked relative to the infinitely divisible movement of a body through space, without any place for a “present” as a privileged place for human experience.⁶⁵ Aristotle’s “before” and “after” do not map directly onto Augustine’s experience of past, present, and future, nor are they completely independent. Ricoeur argues, on the contrary, that there is a tacit interweaving of the two perspectives: the distentio animi tacitly presupposes a before and after across which the mind is stretched, while Aristotle’s time is “caught between movement … and the soul that observes it.”⁶⁶

As with Aristotle and Augustine, so also with the debate that follows. According to Ricoeur, Husserl’s phenomenological analysis in a way replicates Augustine’s distentio animi through his arguments about retention of the past and protention of the future, ever occurring in the present moment.⁶⁷ On the other hand, on Ricoeur’s analysis, Kant attempts to remove time from human perception; time, as such, is an infinite and infinitely divisible succession that exists outside perception and grounds judgments about duration, coincidence, and the like.⁶⁸ Both sides of the debate, he argues, fail to provide an account of the other that does not already rely on elements of the excluded view: “Each refers back to the other … a mutual borrowing, on the condition of a mutual exclusion.”⁶⁹ When it comes to Heidegger, he attempts to push the phenomenological/subjectivist view as far as he can, trying to account for perceived “objective time” (datability of events, shared/public time, etc.) as already related to a “primordial time” of Dasein, marked by the futurity of “being-towards-death” which determines the past and present.⁷⁰ Ricoeur argues that Heidegger nevertheless fails to provide a complete account of time, because from his “primordial time” one cannot derive a clear place for the priority of the “time of nature”—geological and evolutionary time—that entirely precedes human experience.⁷¹ Ricoeur concludes his discussion of these two lines of argument by reiterating his central aporia: “we cannot think about cosmological time (the instant) without surreptitiously appealing to phenomenological time, and vice versa.”⁷² In this way, Ricoeur’s typology presents objective and subjective accounts of time as opposing ways of accounting for time that always find themselves mutually implicating.

How, then, do Cullmann’s and Bultmann’s views of time fit into this typology? In view of Ricoeur’s philosophical interlocutors, two initial links are significant. While Cullmann continually denied the influence of any philosophy of history, at least one critic noted the deep affinity between his linear timeline and Aristotle’s objective and measurable series of instants.⁷³ For Cullmann, as we saw above, salvation historical events are fixed, divinely determined points of reference for the believer, which precede and exceed one’s own horizon and amid which one positions oneself in faith. Bultmann, however, offers a view of time that, if not indebted to, has at least been shaped by Heidegger’s formulation: the present is determined by its own future that, while radically absent, constrains the person into a position of constant decision.⁷⁴ For him, past and future only exist for the believer in the present “now,” the former radically relativized and the latter radically open. So far, they provide two more examples from the twentieth century that demonstrate the outline of Ricoeur’s temporal aporia.

In fact, the positions of Cullmann and Bultmann do more than this. While both profess to reject the views of their opponent, they do not in practice exclude the other. In the first instance, Cullmann’s salvation history is only intelligible from the perspective of faith—a particular faith, moreover, as articulated within the salvation historical framework as a whole.⁷⁵ Like Aristotle and Kant in Ricoeur’s analysis, Cullmann relies on a subjective, phenomenological aspect of time to authorize his claims about the ostensibly objective temporal succession in salvation history. Crucially for his view, Cullmann argues that while salvation history is an objective fact, open to investigation by all insofar as it speaks about historical events, it is only recognizable as salvation history from a perspective of faith.⁷⁶ The events involved are “not instigated by the readers, nor by the readers’ faith … having taken place apart from their faith—pro nobis, but extra nos.”⁷⁷ But the pro nobis illuminates the central role of a particular faith perspective; under normal historiographical conditions, one would not think of past events happening for the historian. Only from the perspective of “faith” can one see that Christ acts as the decisive “mid-point,”⁷⁸ in whose life, ministry, death, and resurrection all salvation history comes to a point and is accomplished there in nuce.⁷⁹

Bultmann’s existential account, on the other hand, surreptitiously retains a place for a meaningful historical event—something that happens apart from the believer and confronts them in their existential now. To be sure, Bultmann expends considerable effort on excising the Christ event from the normal course of temporal succession: “If the redemptive history were an objective event in a remote past, if it were ‘an objective redemptive history’ in that sense, liberal faith would be perfectly right in repudiating it.”⁸⁰ And yet, as Karl Jaspers noted, for all Bultmann’s criticisms of objective events in history, Christ remains an event experienced “by way of that miracle of about 1950 years ago.”⁸¹ The Christ event stands as the eschatological event par excellence and it is that which confronts, addresses, affects believers—an actual event in history that, far from being erased or “consumed” by the past,⁸² is consistently affirmed in Bultmann’s arguments.⁸³

The Bultmann/Cullmann debate, then, instantiates Ricoeur’s account of the aporia between subjective and objective views of time: neither is fully satisfying on its own and both tacitly borrow ground from the other. With that in view, we can turn to Ricoeur’s discussion of emplotment and mimesis which will set the stage to consider the salvation history debate in relation to recent concerns about the experience of time and the way in which history writing offers a founding “touch across time.”

B. Emplotment and Mimesis in Ricoeur

Ricoeur begins his discussion of narrative poetics, as he does so many other discussions, by turning to Aristotle, who supplies a crucial pair of concepts, muthos and mimesis. Both are taken by Ricoeur to designate a dynamic aspect of composition: the former is the act of emplotment, “organizing events into a system,” while the latter is “the active process of imitating or representing something.”⁸⁴ The former is the primary means of addressing the temporal aporia sketched above, while the latter attends to the larger communicative process within which emplotment is embedded.

The act of emplotment is a mediating activity, which is to say that it refers to bringing together particular and heterogeneous events, agents, interactions, contexts, and outcomes into a plot.⁸⁵ Furthermore, and importantly, plot mediates a variety of temporal characteristics—the anonymous instant, the personal present—in a poetic rather than analytic mode.⁸⁶ As an act of configuration, emplotment brings together this disparate material into a single unit, seen and mapped as whole. The tension between an authoritative “monumental time” and the “living times” of particular individuals, which have been severed by a “divorce between worldviews,” can be represented in narrative form.⁸⁷ Yet the narrative is designed to be read within the time emplotted, “to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfillment in the ‘conclusion’ of the story.”⁸⁸

What is true of fictional narratives, Ricoeur argues, is likewise true of history writing.⁸⁹ Historians encounter a heterogeneous cast of characters, times, locations, motivations, which must be represented in the work of history, the representation of the past in the present.⁹⁰ The historian’s role in selection, arrangement, and representation is an act of emplotment in which the heterogeny is grasped together. Insofar as the historian engages in narrative emplotment—even given an intention of fidelity, of doing justice to the people and events in question⁹¹—there remains an inevitable “interweaving (entrecroisement) of history and fiction.”⁹² Accordingly, there is no single narrative of history; the events and characters can always be selected, arranged, and represented from a different angle.⁹³ Nevertheless, each emplotment requires a “narrative coherence” in which one event leads to another toward a fitting conclusion, followable by a reader.⁹⁴

The second term Ricoeur borrows from Aristotle, mimesis, comes in at this point, with the engagement of the reader in the narrative process. This term signifies the dynamic quality of narrative composition—emplotment—and the role of imitation within a broader activity of communication.⁹⁵ Put simply, Ricoeur locates the activity of emplotment within a process that terminates not with the work but with the reader. The “entry of the work, through reading, into the field of communication marks at the same time its entry into the field of reference.”⁹⁶ The question of reference here is not a matter of historical verisimilitude—Ricoeur addresses that under the language of “standing for”⁹⁷—but is rather a matter of a relation between the world of the reader and that of the text.⁹⁸ Through a narrative resolution of the temporal aporia by emplotment, a reader’s experience of time can be reconfigured through their mimetic engagement with the temporal configuration in the work. Dissonances between different temporal frameworks—geological, official, political, biological, etc.—can be represented and, perhaps, even held together.⁹⁹ The historical understandings of individuals, communities, and societies are shaped by the narratives they transmit, even as dominant accounts are affirmed, rewritten, challenged, and rejected. The time in which a reader encounters these narratives, their present, is characterized by “acting and suffering,” a time of crisis “in the double sense of a time or judgment and a time of decision.”¹⁰⁰ As such, it is laden with ethical responsibility, to act well, to choose wisely, to promise, to intervene.¹⁰¹ By placing the reader and work in a mimetic framework, then, Ricoeur articulates the reciprocal involvement of both parties, in which the reader interprets the work’s representation of its world, and the work shapes the reader’s experience of her world.

C. Emplotting (Salvation) History

We noted above how Cullmann’s objective account of historical time is achieved by borrowing from a subjective account, inscribing it by acknowledging that salvation history is only visible from a particular faith perspective. For Cullmann, it is this perspective that authorizes his presentation of salvation history as both part of and distinct from world history in its general sense. He notes: “By virtue of our birth we belong to many ‘histories’—the history of our family or the history of our nation.”¹⁰² Salvation history, then, is simply one more “history” to which believers belong. Furthermore, Cullmann clarifies that salvation history, though linear, “is definitely not faith in an ‘unbroken’ causal connection, but faith in a connection revealed only by God, resting upon a completely incalculable selection of individual events.”¹⁰³ In other words, salvation history is fundamentally selective: only some events are taken up in elucidating the salvation historical schema; others are left behind as of no consequence to the development of salvation as (and in) history. Further, “their selection cannot be explained historically,”¹⁰⁴ which is to say that they are not inevitable within a supposed web-like continuity of historical causality. This aspect of his schema, Cullmann admits, raises the question about “whether one may properly use the expression ‘salvation history’ (Heils-geschichte).”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, as a highly constructed, selective account of discrete events, only visible from a particular faith perspective, Cullmann notes in one place that his view of Heilsgeschichte has a specific affinity with narrative.¹⁰⁶ In terms borrowed from Ricoeur, Cullmann’s salvation historical narrative—his Heilserzählung that runs from tragedy to comedy, the narrowing of election through disobedience and its broadening thanks to the work of Christ¹⁰⁷—is “a mediation between the individual events or incidents and a story taken as a whole … [and it] brings together factors as heterogeneous as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, unexpected results.”¹⁰⁸

There is, further, a second level of historiographical selection at work in Cullmann’s account of salvation history, insofar as he admits that a complete narrative of salvation history is not present in any particular New Testament text.¹⁰⁹ Rather, it is Cullmann himself who articulates it—presenting an otherwise hidden unity of the New Testament witness by reading between the lines, using one text to fill out another, harmonizing apparent differences. In this process, he is interested in finding what “constitutes the common essence, according to the witness of the New Testament.”¹¹⁰

Perhaps predictably, Bultmann rejects this account of history and Cullmann’s exegetical practice. On the latter point, he argued that “carrying up the statements of the various New Testament writings to the same level seems … to lead to an illicit harmonization.”¹¹¹ The writings in the New Testament display both variation and development over time, and he rejects any approach that does not give full weight to these differences.¹¹² Bultmann’s criticism of Cullmann’s harmonizing tendencies points to another crucial element of emplotment noted by Ricoeur: namely, that history is not a story that can only be told in one way. On Ricouer’s view of emplotted history, Cullmann’s schema, insofar as its emplotment selects and mediates various events, times, agents, can offer itself as a historical account or, at least, as “an analogy to history,” as he put it.¹¹³ As such, his schema would remain perpetually open to rewriting from other perspectives. As a theological claim, however, it is not so open. Insofar as Cullmann claims to relate the plot within which all others must find their place—a path not subject to alternative itineraries—the “analogy” with history breaks down. Moreover, Cullmann’s claim that salvation history is the plot of history in the New Testament is undermined not only by Bultmann’s exegetical skepticism but by the very act of emplotment itself. There can be no question about whether Cullmann is merely “describing” some historical facet of early Christian thought; his schema extends far beyond the statements of any particular textual witness, encompassing even contemporary history,¹¹⁴ and claims to lay hold of something behind the texts, a viewpoint (in faith!) that authorizes a particular reading of them. It is this latter claim, moreover, with its fixity and concomitant closure of (salvation) history, that Bultmann also rejects. As we have seen, Bultmann’s view of Christian temporality rejects development across past, present, and future. The eschatological event has already taken place, and it is what confronts us in the gospel.¹¹⁵ Any emplotment of the believer amidst past, present, and future, then, is inherently problematic for Bultmann, insofar as it does not account for the existential position of the Christian in time. This leads, in the end, to the final aspect of this redescription of the salvation history debate, the problem of situating the believer in time.

D. Locating the Believer

As we saw above, for Ricoeur the process of emplotment is intimately connected with his framework of mimetic communication: narratives, particularly historical accounts, quietly include their readers and have the potential to shape their understanding of the self and the world. This experience is temporal as well as affective, ethical, and existential. Similarly, a major, perhaps even central, concern for both Oscar Cullmann and Rudolf Bultmann is to articulate the way in which every Christian relates to Christ—his life, death, and resurrection—who stands as a foundation for their faith and practice. Bultmann, for his part, wears this concern openly: in his “New Testament and Mythology” he famously begins with a concern to make the Christian faith intelligible to his contemporary Christians.¹¹⁶ Historical events, as such, are not ultimately meaningful because true meaning requires an encounter between the believer and Christ “in the kerygma.”¹¹⁷ It is in the present and presence of this encounter that one stands “in constantly new decisions.”¹¹⁸ The enduring objective, external force of the Christ event is admitted into his theological program almost against his will—while maintaining the indelible specificity of the Christ event, it is something he attempts to minimize at every turn in favor of the existential encounter.¹¹⁹ Cullmann approaches the inclusion of the contemporary believer from the opposite direction, working from his objectivist account of historical time and salvation history. These objective events, extrinsic to any given person, nevertheless implicate the believer in its totalizing timeline: salvation history comprehends the entire timeline from beginning to end, including the present of the early church and the present of contemporary society. This is not an accidental effect of Cullmann’s argument: it is essential.¹²⁰ Locating the believer within salvation history is what enables the connection between the believer and the saving event of Christ.

As a result of this focus on the particular Christian, every Christian, Cullmann and Bultmann both mark out the present for a special significance. It is the space in which one is confronted with the Christ event—either maximally in the sweep of salvation history or minimally in Bultmann’s stripped back account. Cullmann and Bultmann are both concerned with connecting the believer as directly as possible to Christ. In Cullmann’s own terminology, which could almost be mistaken for a line from Bultmann, all historical periods are “immediate” to this event.¹²¹ The past is not “purely past. It must constantly give meaning to the present so that the present finds its significance and fulfils its task.”¹²²

The Salvation History Debate and New Temporalities

What remains to be done at this point is to highlight the ways in which the old debate between Cullmann and Bultmann, here redescribed with the help of Paul Ricoeur, anticipates, touches on, is developed by, and is otherwise ambivalently related to the recent trends in “temporalities” discussed earlier. There, several important threads were noted: the plurality of time, its affinity with narrative representation, its inextricable link with experience and affect, and the place of individual and communal identity formation in temporal frameworks. If I have done my job well, certain connections between the Cullmann/Bultmann debate and these newer studies should be immediately evident. In what follows, I will group my observations under three categories: 1) the enduring role of narrative emplotment; 2) the connection of temporal experience and affect; and 3) multi-temporality.

A. Narrative Emplotment

The gap between “story” and “discourse,” noted above, continues to be widely acknowledged and, importantly, the distinction between these two narrative levels is fundamentally temporal. The narrative order of events is rarely strictly linear, making use of anticipations, flashbacks, foreshadowing, and other mechanisms for interrupting time. From the perspective of Ricoeur’s arguments, one can see, too, that the gap in fictional narratives carries over into historical accounts, in which the historiographical act of representation likewise proceeds without strict linearity (in its use of appeals to later effects, background factors, comparisons, and structural correlations, among other similar tools). The time of the events and the time of the telling are inescapably different. Here, the Bultmann/Cullmann debate was nearly ahead of its time. From the vantage point of Ricoeur’s analysis and other accounts of narrative temporality, one is able to recognize Cullmann’s grasping together of heterogeneous events and agents for what it is, namely, a constructive act of emplotment. The affinity between salvation history and narrative, therefore, fits easily within a certain narrative-historiographical frame: the lack of direct and successive causal continuity between the events that constitute Cullman’s salvation historical narrative is permitted within the rhetorical and explanatory scope of historical accounts. Both Bultmann’s critique and Cullmann’s defense of his schema, however, show that neither were alert to this possibility; both writers resorted to arguments about the place of selectivity and a lack of successive continuity between events in salvation history.¹²³ For neither writer was there any positive role for the constructive activity of the history-writer, which stands in marked contrast with narrative historiographical work subsequently. Furthermore, it leads to a certain closure of Cullmann’s salvation historical schema: to the extent that he did not acknowledge his own role in constructing the account from otherwise disparate material, he conflated his voice and that of the New Testament authors, claiming that the latter only said what the former articulated (and vice versa). Only one salvation historical narrative, then, becomes possible. This does not appear to allow for the multiplicity of temporalities, which will be discussed below. Bultmann objected to such (exegetical and historical) closure, arguing instead for a radically open future and an ambivalent relation of the present and the past.¹²⁴ The multi-temporal and asynchronous possibilities in narratives and human experience, moreover, offer new vantage points on the meaning(s) of history as well as its representation.¹²⁵

B. Time, History, Affect

As we have seen for Cullmann and Bultmann, and in his own way Ricoeur, the place and role of the believer (or reader) is of crucial importance. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that the central point at stake in the Cullmann/Bultmann debate is how the Christian relates to the Christ event. For Cullmann, the grand sweep of salvation history encloses both within a common frame. For Bultmann, it is in the encounter “now,” in the kerygma, that one meets Christ. And yet, as outlined above, both writers retain language of another view: Cullmann epitomizes all salvation history in the Christ event and claims immediacy to that for all Christians; Bultmann retains a certain external, historical distinctiveness for the Christ event. The past remains a force in the present for both writers, not only in general but also for the spiritual life of Christians (individually and in community). The combination of internal, historiographical, and theological impulses in salvation history is never articulated as such. The recent work highlighting the deep links between history, temporality, and affect or emotions, however, sheds a bright light on the debate in question here. In Carolyn Dinshaw’s poetic terminology, what Cullmann’s salvation history offers is a “touch across time,” a historically construed community which is not in fact directly accessible to, and does not stand in direct (successive) continuity with, present readers. Bultmann’s existentialist account attempts to offer a more immediate intimacy with Christ, but even this remains, as we noted, a touch “by way of that miracle of about 1950 years ago.”¹²⁶ Other contributions of queer theory to the issue of temporality are relevant here. Bultmann’s critique of the historical and exegetical closure of Cullmann’s system could be nuanced by attending to the ways Cullmann’s temporal framework may be disjunctive with other temporal and historical experiences. If one accepts Cullmann’s view of salvation history as “chrononormative,” to borrow Elizabeth Freeman’s language, what does one make of voices who argue “salvation” is not a meaningful description of historical experience?¹²⁷ What would be the affective or emotional entailments of a disjuncture between Cullmann’s normative schema and the experience of those ostensibly enfolded by it? This leads, again, to the question of heterogeneous time, with which I will conclude.

C. Multi–Temporality

Perhaps one of the most widespread developments in studies of temporality is the growing consensus (if one can speak of such things) that time itself is plural, multiple, heterogeneous. This leads to categories of “heterochrony” (Bal), “asynchrony” (Dinshaw), and others. Cullmann acknowledged a certain multiplicity of “histories”—that of the family or the nation¹²⁸—though, given his central interest in articulating “salvation history” as the ultimate, cosmically determinative historical frame, he did not devote any space to reflecting on this multiplicity. Indeed, this is one area in which it appears that neither Cullmann nor Bultmann focused on anything remotely in proximity to the plurality of time. One might argue, though he did not, that Bultmann’s radically existential account of the “encounter” with Christ, along with his radically open future, allows for as many temporalities as there are people to experience them. Even more, the experience of the eschatological in the present articulates a kind of multiple-temporality: the banal procession of time does not exclude the eschatological experience any more than the encounter with Christ extracts one from the present world.¹²⁹ It is this kind of plurality, possible in every moment, that is of particular interest to recent discussions. Mieke Bal’s discussion of heterochrony is driven home with the example of the undocumented immigrant, caught in “a kind of social schizophrenia that makes the migrant always rushing and always stagnating at the same time.”¹³⁰ Likewise, Dinshaw’s asynchrony is pursued particularly in accounts of people being out of step with time, those like Rip van Winkle who inadvertently time travel in their sleep. But the endurance of the past in traces that affect the present is another example of such asynchrony.¹³¹ In the case of the salvation history debate, is it possible for each event within salvation history itself to participate in multiple temporalities? Further, would it be possible for Cullmann’s schema to account for multi-temporal and asynchronous experiences as such, without turning heterochrony into being merely an aberration on a normative, cosmic history of salvation?

It is possible that these questions may be answered in the affirmative, though I do not know what Cullmann might say to such things. Bultmann, perhaps, could have offered an answer to these questions, though he never reflected on them directly. The purpose of the present argument, however, is not to try and retrieve or resuscitate one or the other of these views as an overarching theological paradigm or reading strategy. Rather, with the help of Ricoeur’s work, this article offers a kind of philosophical redescription of the salvation history debate in order to bring its dynamics and concerns into conversation with ideas arising from recent work on temporality. Bahr’s suggestion that New Testament studies has undergone a “temporal turn” is intriguing and helps illuminate the need to account for the relationship between old and new discussions of time. This argument is only an initial step, but what I hope is clear from the above discussion is that whatever the trend is among New Testament scholars, any temporal “turn” invites a return: here, returning to an interest in the way the reader/believer is implicated in the historiographical accounts we produce through our emplotments. And, in attending to the questions that time raises for scholars of the New Testament (and related materials in early Christianity and early Judaism), the new categories, frameworks, and perspectives in recent work on temporalities offer many new avenues of inquiry and much new light to be spilled on old materials.