In the Old Aberdeen Book Shop yesterday for a long trawl through the shelves, a browse amongst the novels, a meandering nosey around the art books, and then a final quick reprise up and down the theology bookcases. And the providence of God rewards my perseverance!
This World and the Beyond. The Marburg Sermons of Rudolph Bultmann. Published in English in 1960, but these sermons were preached in Germany between 1936 and 1950, in the heart of Hitler's Germany. Bultmann was one of the giants of 20th Century New Testament scholarship, whose programme of demythologisation earned him bogey man status amongst more conservative biblical scholars. But even his most severe critics acknowledged the genius, brilliance and erudition of a scholar who dominated the discipline of New Testament Studies for two generations.
But these sermons are something else. They are the flip side of Bultmann the demythologising critic; they are the words of a kerygmatic theologian proclaiming the Kerygma, and extolling the reality of the crucified risen Christ. But they are also fearless preaching from the pulpit of a persecuted and pressured church, targeted by the most ruthless and ultimately godless of ideologies, and in danger of selling its soul and betraying its own family by colluding with an increasingly anti-semitic and lethal regime. Bultmann lived the Christian faith with a courage and hopeful forthrightness that is too easily forgotten by those opposed to his theology, and arrogantly dismissive of his Christian credentials. These sermons are Bultmann at his most devoted to Christ. Some of them positively ring with a confidence and boldness that was the last thing a regime seeking to domesticate the church wanted to hear.
Here are some lines from December 1939 - they should be read slowly, then once again imagining words like these proclaiming the Word in Germany 3 months into war:
He bestows upon us the light of life, that unquestioning transparent luminosity of our being. For in Him the love of God shines fully; because, if we are so prepared, he becomes understandable to us as the very act and initiative of the divine love, as the gift to us of the Divine love. It is the love of God which has always sustained us and ever will sustain us. To be sustained and held by the love of God means to have an attitude of unquestioning childlike acceptance, to be comforted and commit ourselves to the control of a hand which guides everything for the best even when we ourselves do not know what the best for us is.
By this means our life gains clarity and peace. This does not mean that in the ground plan of our life, in its purposes and aims, we embody an intelligent solution to the riddle of existence. Every question which is aimed at mastering the secret pattern of existence must in fact be silenced; and we remain ignorant of the goal to which God is leading us. No, our life gains clarity only because everything He sends us we may and must receive as the gift of His love.
"Let his loving glance deeply penetrate your soul, and His eternal light and joy will flood your being. Heartt and mind and spirit shall then awaken to new life."
That is the pure Gospel according to John. That is devotional writing of a quite different order from much of today's fast written, quickly thought, and swiftly forgotten Christian equivalents of the Mind, Body, Spirit and Self Help genres. What a generation of theologians in Germany in the second third of the 20th Century. Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Brunner, Lohmeyer; these were heroes; but there were others whose scholarship and academic weight was thrown behind the Nazi will to power and allowed themselves to be used as justification for anti-semitic policies that would lead like iron rails to Auschwitz. Bultmann was not one of them.
The sermon of June 17 1945 is moving, brilliant, and courageous. Preaching on 2 Cor 4:6-11 Prof Bultmann's rallies his chapel of seminarians and faculty while extolling truth, beauty, and the life of the spirit in terms that are so relevant to Christians today. A really inspiring book! How I would like to hear the corruption and materialism of today confronted in such terms from the pulpit!
Posted by: The Tiny Chapel | August 29, 2015 at 02:50 AM