Living Wittily

Barth and Bultmann at Loggerheads About What a Sermon is, and What It Is For!

In Hammann's biography of Rudolf Bultmann there's an interesting spat (exchange?) between Barth and Bultmann about what preaching is and what it is for. Bultmann had submitted two sermons to Barth for inclusion in the journal Barth was editing, Theological Existence Today. Barth declined to publish them. His reason? In Bultmann's sermons he saw "not really Christ preached, but rather...the believing person made explicit."

Bultmann wasn't surprised his sermons were rejected, and wrote to Barth:

"When you ask questions of the text, it is according to a dogmatic recipe; the text does not speak with its own voice. After a few sentences, one already knows everything that you will say and only asks oneself now and again how he is going to get that out of the words of the text that follow...this exegesis doesn't grip me; the text does not address me; rather, the blanket of dogmatics is spread out over it." Bultmann proposed that the goal of preaching is "that under the auspices of the word, the listener's existence is made transparent to him."   (HammannPage 337)

I guess we are overhearing a debate about the importance of doctrinal preaching over against the relevance of contextual preaching. But that's too simple and does justice to neither preacher. Both are theologians whose faith commitment remained central to all their work; both are preachers whose goal was to be the medium of God's address to the congregation. Barth would not deny the dogmatic control exerted in exegesis, but I think would argue that dogmatic control was rooted in and grows out of faithfulness to the text itself. Likewise Bultmann would not argue that preaching should explicitly address the context and experience and existence of the congregation, but any reading of his sermons makes clear Christ is indeed preached; but not as dogmatic theology. Barth was right to trace this clear division of opinion, and difference in style and content, to how each saw the relationship between Christology and Anthropology. It is interesting that Barth's quarrel with Brunner can be summed up in almost exactly the same terms and concerns.

Bultmann and Brunner were deeply engaged in the relations of gospel and culture. Barth's project was altogether less interested in cultural context and human existence as such; his starting point was the dogmatic core of Christian faith. That first, and that last. Yet it is also true to say something similar about Bultmann and Brunner so far as the central dogmatic core is concerned. Though for Bultmann the priority is given to the Bible text, and its critical apppropriation in terms that make sense and connect with contemporary thought. It is a fascinating disagreement between Barth and Bultmann. Both honour the biblical text, and both affirm the centrality of Christ for Christian theology. It is at the point of delivery, the preaching of the Word, that they so deeply disagree about what a sermon should be, and do. 

 

Five Books I'm Glad I Read in 2016 2) Exposure, Helen Dunmore

If you can't be bothered reading stories, I'm not sure pastoral ministry is a good idea for a vocation. I don't usually take the high ground like that, but there is something odd about saying "I'm called to ministry" while being disinterested in the narrative flows of human life, or complacent about the thickly textured existence that is human experience. Character, plot, tensions, resolutions, imagined encounters between people, with all their complexities of motive, meaning, and communication. Then too all the possibilities of misunderstanding, ignorance, hurt; these and many other features of the novel provide scenarios rich in hermeneutic possibility, forcing us to question and sympathise, to like and dislike, to care and not to care.

Pastoral ministry is a callling to enter the mess of human life, not as the great solver of problems, but as the companion and fellow traveller, the caring friend who knows when to shut up and when to interfere and risk the friendship itself. But even more, pastoral ministry, in its caring and accompanying actions, is a willingness to enter another person's story, and create a new complexity as their story and mine begin to be told together, in the exchanges and encounters and commitments that make up every serious relationship. Novels allow us to rehearse these.

Stories well told pull us into worlds where people and problems and hopes and fears, and all the brokennness and wholesomeness of life are opened up to sight. Tragedy and comedy, failure and achievement, fallibility and courage, moral anguish and spiritual longing, evil and good, diminishment and growth, the whole many-stranded fankle of human life in its complexificated messiness, are open to our eyes, displayed for our moral insight, and narrated not for our comfort in happy endings, but for our education in what it takes to be human. Novels are at their best when they challenge our assumptions, pull the rug from beneath our far too self-confident feet, and unnerve us by showing us our deeper and darker thoughts we are loathe to admit are there at all. 

All of this Helen Dunmore's book does well. It is a story of betrayal and deceit, but also of faithfulness and loyalty. At the centre of the novel is a marriage tested to the limits by secrets, unspoken suspicions, perseverance in believing in someone who seems not to deserve such faithfulness. The nature of love and desire, the accidental ways in which we meet people and begin to care and to commit and to bind our own destiny to theirs is all told in the context of cold war politics, spying as a way of life, and then the betrayals that can sometimes be deliberate and devastating, or inadvertent, but still devastating. Making the novel more interesting are the legacies of previous relationships, the half-life of our histories as these continue to influence decisions, subvert moral principle and impinge on the central relationships in the lives of the protagonists.

A review shouldn't spoil the plot, tell the ending or in any other way compromise the storyteller's primary goal - to draw you into the story and keep you reading till the last sentence. So no more clues here; just the observation that in a culture riven by suspicion and fear as were the 1950's and early 60's, there are telling parallels to our own culture where fear of commitment and its costs and consequences are just as acute. What makes this novel important is the integrity in Dunmore's writing. At no point did she take the easy way of resolving the dilemmas that are inherent in human relationships, nor does she simplify or guarantee success in that desperate search of the human heart for a place to stand, to feel safe, or at least understood. Good novels deepen our understaning of others, school us in compassion for human weakness and longing, and remind us of our own flawed hopes, missed chances and moments of insight that are amongst our most expensive and enriching gifts. 

Five Books I'm Glad I Read in 2016: 1. Rudolf Bultmann. A Biography.

One of the more satisfying audits is to review a year's reading. I mainly read books, though I do a lot of research and casual reading by browsing favourite websites, and sometimes being diverted to new sources and resources for my interests. But yes, books remain my mainstay for learning, reading, praying, thinking, meditating, struggling, nourishing and stimulation. As Rachel Cooke wrote of Christopher De Hamel's Meeting with Remarkable Manuscripts, in the digital age, the book is "the ultimate analogue consolation."

Actually the whole paragraph is worth pondering for its persuasive commendation of writing and reading as safeguards of knowledge, wisdom and yes, respect for truth:

"A scholar who can convey his enthusiasm and erudition to the lay person without ever seeming to patronise, his tone is so urbane and wise, you find yourself absorbing the most arcane and complicated stuff – the history of handwriting, say – almost by osmosis. The religious texts he describes, born of endless labour and unfathomable (to us) faith, seem not to connect at all with our own times, and yet they do, in ways I cannot begin to describe here. In a digital world that cares less and less for facts, moreover, de Hamel’s book, the product of a lifetime’s learning, is the ultimate analogue consolation."

But those words refer to a book I haven't read. This past year I've read several books that have filled gaps, opened new seams, extended horizons, or whatever other metaphor describes a book that changes the way we see the world, ourselves and the relations between the two. 

Konrad Hammond, Rudolf Bultmann. A Biography. This is more than an intellectual history of one of the greatest New Testament scholars of last or any other century. It is a history of the cultural changes in Germany from pre First World War, through the rise of National Socialism, and on into the late mid 20th Century. Bultmann's intellectual and theological development is traced with care, told with fairness and supported by an encyclopedic grasp of detail. Superficial evaluations, often based on theological presuppositions conservative or liberal, and whether adulatory or dismissive, are simply disqualified by this massive account of a mind refusing to have the questions silenced, and equally resistant to easy closure or cheap conclusions.

Demythologising was the bogey word for much of Bultmann's career. Yet even after his death his work is still by many scholars judged to be a benchmark of scholarly discipline. Further, some of his most admiring critics concede that even though his answers may be wrong, wrong headed or no longer tenable, the questions he asked, and the methods he used in asking them, remain programmatic for the discipline of NT studies.  Often it is the scholar who identifies the basic issues, the more intrtactable problems and the key critical questions, whose contribution is the most durable.

My interest in the history of New Testament interpretation made this book a weighty ingot of gold for me. Some of the greatest Christian minds have delved deep into those ancient, potent and subversive texts and have sought a deeper understanding not only of the foundation documents of our Faith, but have probed and pondered the transformative events to which they bear witness. In the middle years of the 20th Century Bultmann was a major planet drawing many other scholars into his orbit. And although many differed from him in their conclusions, the contribution of a veritable galaxy of NT scholars to our understanding of the New Testament has been far reaching, and echoes still down the decades into our own time. Names like Dibelius, Kasemann, Cullmann, Jeremias, Conzelmann, are some of those whose life work was inevitably responsive to, or reactive against, Bultmann's work. Bultmann's own interlocutors included Heidegger, Gogartern, Von Soden, Barth and others whose philosophical and theological emphases coincided or collided with his own. Like all good biographies this is the story of a life, in all its humanity, but given depth by also being an account of the mind of a great scholar theologian, and of a man of faith. Bultmann's faith was deeply entangled in the cultural and intellectual categories of Existentialism, but it is readily apparent to anyone who takes time to read him, and to hear his faith resonating in his sermons, that this complex and powerful personality was grounded (a word he would approve) in a faith deeply christological and forward looking to the eschaton and final triumph of the Christ of faith.

Ironically, and thankfully, those who don't need or can't afford the hard copy book (it is very expensive) can download to Kindle for £7.43 - this is the bargain of the year for those happy with a digital copy. But as noted above, with a big book token to take the weight of its purchase, I am happy to own it as a book, an analogue consolation Kindle notwithstanding!

"So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart." Psalm 90.12

It has been a long year. Half a month of it left. First will come Christmas, then that last week of waiting for the chronological confirmation it is a New Year, marked by fireworks, bells, and in Aberdeen, ship horns from the harbour. Waiting for New Year can be an exercise in passive patience, or an episode of agitated impatience, or even  a process of slow release anticipation; alternatively, waiting can be a time of fallow resting, allowing new ideas to seed and propagate, in the fertile mulch of memory, previous hopes and new born choices.

It's strange how the threshold of a date can be disturbing, interrupting the routine flow of days and weeks. Birthdays, anniversaries whether of gladness or sadness, liturgical mileposts in the year's journey, and that end of year full stop, when midnight gives way to a new year. The clock and the calendar are little different from the scrape marks on the prisoner's wall, a way of dividing time, recording how much has passed. There are no ways of assessing how much is still to come. 

For years now I have tried to save a day of quiet sometime between Christmas and New Year, for fallow resting. With a few sheets of paper, a pen, a Bible, a diary, and enough time to think backwards, and forwards. The cliche about the unexamined life not being worth living, like all cliches, has enough truth to make it bear repeating. But the over-examined life isn't much fun either. A life dissected, analysed, appraised, evaluated by various criteria from productivity and achievement, to pleasure and fulfilment, can become an exercise either in self congratulation or mass produced guilt.

So marking out fallow time, to think back and think forward, and allow our forward thinking to be shaped by our backward thinking, is not so much an exercise in self-praise or self-blame. It is the ongoing attempt to live wisely. It is the courtesy of listening, taking time to listen to our lives. It is a bid for freedom from unexamined routine. It is a taking seriously of this self which is a changing continuity that thankfully can never be pinned down to a definitive me. It is one practical way of trying for once to be obedient to a word of Scripture:

"So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a wise heart." Psalm 90.12

Numbering our days in turn means more than accurate chronology. It surely has to mean weighing the days for significance, which in turns begs a question. Significant for whom, and for what? Only when we honestly reflect backwards can we have some sense of what worked out, what mattered then and still matters, what was achieved and at what cost and was it worth it? What are the triggers of joy, the events that shaped us, the circumstances that drew us out of complacency towards challenge and change, the encounters and relationships which inevitably become part of our history, and some of them, of our identity.

It has been a long year. So I am ready again to spend a day waiting. Thinking of the story so far, in the company of the One whose Presence is the driver of the narrative? How different from that is prayer? The poet Psalmist was humble enough to recognise that careful numbering of days is not our default setting. It has to be learned, and therefore has to be taught. His words are an honest prayer for wisdom which cannot be imbibed like raw data, but is the fruit of reflection, humility, and seriousness of purpose going forward.

That contemporary management cliche, "going forward" seems to suggest there is no such thing as going backward, or if there is, it isn't a desirable state of affairs. But reflection is exactly that, a going backward, a retracing of steps, thoughts, choices, encounters, events, circumstances and everything else that makes up the interwoven but patterned tapestry that is out life. Reflection is two faced though; it is also a going forward in thought, choice and hopefulness. The question is, having reflected backwards, what we now choose, what we hope for, and thus what we decide will now be the priorities of those days still to be numbered, and on which we have no right to presume, other than in the mercy of God.