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Students of New Testament 101 will have come across the German Biblical scholar Rudolph Bultmann. One in a long line of modernist, Protestant theologians, Bultmann is famous for his attempt to \u2018de-mythologize\u2019 the New Testament. What this means is that he wanted to get rid of the troublesome and \u2018incredible\u2019 supernatural elements of the gospels.<\/p>\n
It is from his way of thinking that we get the now famous interpretation of the feeding of the 5,000 that \u201cthe real miracle was that everyone shared their lunch with one another.\u201d Anyone with a little bit of imagination can get involved in the \u2018de-mytholization\u2019 game. The Virgin Birth? A beautiful and innocent girl became pregnant and gave birth to a great teacher. He was so great that pagan myths of the god\/man being born of a virgin were later ascribed to her. We now know this could not have happened, and we learn that innocence and beauty are always to be valued.\u201d The Ascension? \u201cIt\u2019s a construction of the early church. As the disciples worked through their grief and came to accept the tragic death of their leader they came to realize a wonderful truth: that\u00a0the noble and beautiful teachings of Jesus Christ have a new, and transcendent quality\u2026\u201d Blah blah blah and so forth.<\/p>\n
The modernist re-interpreters of the gospel were seemingly well intended. They wanted to rid the New Testament of it\u2019s primitive, first century supernaturalism\u2013believing that this would make the gospel accessible for modern people. What the goof balls didn\u2019t understand is that modern people\u2013just like people in the first century\u2013actually want their religion to be supernatural. That\u2019s what religion is all about. Taking the supernatural out of religion is like playing tennis without the net. \u2018Modern\u2019 has nothing to do with it. With supreme arrogance they seemed to think that ancient people found miracles far easier to believe than modern people.\u00a0This is dumb. Ancient people were smart too. They knew miracles were difficult just like modern people. The people of the first century understood that virgins don\u2019t get pregnant, and walking on water doesns\u2019t usually happen, and\u00a0that feeding 5,000 people with one lunch is not an everyday occurrence. Err. That\u2019s why they recorded the miracles in the first place\u2013because they were extraordinary. In other words, because they were\u00a0miracles.<\/p>\n
Why were so many seemingly smart people taken in by this naked emporer? Just because the guy was German and had a name that had two \u2018n\u2019s at the\u00a0end and smoked a pipe and looked smart? Maybe. Of course it has all to do with the philosophical trends that had been going on in the West since the \u2018enlightenment\u2019, but that\u2019s another topic.<\/p>\n
Back to Bultmannnn. Why didn\u2019t anyone see the most glaring error of all? Bultmann and his gang of intellecutal bullies were all for \u2018de-mythologizing\u2019 the New Testament. But the whole obvious point is that the New Testament, and the documents of the early church do not\u00a0present the gospel stories as \u2018myth\u2019 at all.\u00a0They present them as history. To be sure, the stories work on us as myth, but as J.R.R.Tolkien said to C.S.Lewis, \u201cThey work on us like all the other myths, except they really happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
What Bultmann wanted to\u00a0do was to steer around the historical accounts of the miraculous\u2013to leave them in place as \u2018marvelous stories\u2019 but assuming that the supernatural simply couldn\u2019t have happened like that, they wanted to draw people to the \u2018real meaning\u2019 of the stories.\u00a0The implication, of course, is that the events didn\u2019t really happen at all, or if they happened they\u00a0were ordinary events that the \u2018aw gawrsh!\u2019 stupid early church members\u00a0interpreted as miraculous\u00a0(like everybody sharing their lunch becoming a miraculous multiplication of food) What Bultmann the de-mythologizer actually did therefore, was to turn what was reported as real events and historical accounts into\u2013hey presto!\u2013myths. A myth being a beautiful (but fictional) story with transcendent meaning to guide us through life.<\/p>\n
Bultmann\u2019s \u2018great accomplishment\u2019 therefore was to turn historical events into myth while claiming to \u201cde-mythologize\u201d them.<\/p>\n
If this subterfuge, double talk, intellectual obfuscation\u00a0and deception isn\u2019t direct from the pit I don\u2019t know what is.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Students of New Testament 101 will have come across the German Biblical scholar Rudolph Bultmann. One in a long line of modernist, Protestant theologians, Bultmann is famous for his attempt to \u2018de-mythologize\u2019 the New Testament. What this means is that he wanted to get rid of the troublesome and \u2018incredible\u2019 supernatural elements of the gospels. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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