history as expendable (e.g. the empty tomb in toto) is due to the fact that purely in his capacity as a New Testament critic he is extremely, and I believe unwarrantably, distrustful of the tradition. His historical scepticism is not necessarily implied in his critique of mythology.
(c) His heavy reliance on the particular philosophy of (Heidegger’s) Existentialism as a replacement for the mythological world-view is historically, and indeed geographically, conditioned. He finds it valuable as a substitute for the contemporary generation in Germany; but we are not bound to embrace it as the only alternative.
One of the earliest and most penetrating criticisms of Bultmann’s original essay was made by Bonhoeffer, and to quote it will serve as a transition to his own contribution. ‘My view of it today’, he writes from prison in 1944,
would be not that he went too far, as most people seem to think, but that he did not go far enough. It is not only the mythological conceptions such as the miracles, the ascension and the like (which are not in principle separable from the conceptions of God, faith and so on) that are problematic, but the ‘religious’ conceptions themselves. You cannot, as Bultmann imagines, separate God and miracles, but you do have to be able to interpret and proclaim both of them in a ‘non-religious’ sense.11
Must Christianity be ‘Religious’?
What does Bonhoeffer mean by this startling paradox of a non-religious understanding of God?12
I will try to define my position from the historical angle. The movement beginning about the thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (under which head I place the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art, ethics and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions concerning science, art, and even ethics, this has become an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at any more. But for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’, and just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, what we call ‘God’ is being more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.
Catholic and Protestant historians are agreed that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be discerned, and the more they bring in and make use of God and Christ in opposition to this trend, the more the trend itself considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world which has attained to a realization of itself and of the laws which govern its existence is so sure of itself that we become frightened. False starts and failures do not make the world deviate from the path and development it is following; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varying forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of ‘God’. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ultimate questions – death, guilt – on which only ‘God’ can furnish an answer, and which are the reason why God and the Church and the pastor are needed. Thus we live, to some extent by these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without ‘God’? . . .
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