Rudolf Bultmann for the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Rudolf Bultmann, perhaps the greatest New Testament scholar of the twentieth century, was born in Oldenburg in Germany in 1884. He studied in Marburg and was a professor in Marburg from 1921 to 1951. A member of the Confessing Church during the Nazi period, he lectured after the war in America (Yale) and in Britain (Gifford lectures, Edinburgh). For a period in the mid-twentieth century, Bultmann was the centre of discussion in New Testament studies. Systematic theology became for many writers largely a matter of New Testament hermeneutics, with the relation of faith to history as its focus. In philosophy, the tum to existentialism (around the work of Bultmann's friend and colleague Martin Heidegger) and issues in the philosophy of history were prominent. In writing his Ph.D. thesis on Faith and History in the work of Rudolf Bultmann, lain Nicol was researching at the heart of the contemporary problematic, in a school of theology-Glasgow-whose senior members were then at the cutting edge of Bultmann scholarship: John Macquarrie, Ian Henderson and Ronald Gregor Smith. I note with some embarrassment, however, that Zeit und Geschichte, the seminal Bultmann Festschrift of 1964, has been borrowed only three times in the thirty-seven years since publication-a sign of the times. Dr. Nicol took due note of the major criticisms which have been made of Bultmann. But he also found him a constructive dialogue partner for a contemporary theology.