Tuesday, March 12, 2024

What's the point?

When Bultmann wishes to reinterpret the objective facts of kerygma, e.g. as given in the Apostles’ Creed, in terms of an existential decision which we have to make in order to understand, not God or Christ or the world, but ourselves, we are converting the gospel of the New Testament into something quite different, converting christology into anthropology. It is shockingly subjective. It is not Christ that really counts, but my decision in which I find myself. At this point one sees Bultmann’s involvement in the theological tradition of Schleiermacher and Ritschl that grew out of German pietism and subjectivism, and also in the tradition of the Marburg school of philosophy which tried in vain to break out of phenomenology by existential decision. Moreover, the existential decision with which Bultmann works is not that of Kierkegaard in which the fact and person of Christ is all determining, but that of the Roman Catholic but atheistic Heidegger, who took Kierkegaard’s idea, and altered it by abstracting it entirely from its objective ground in Christ and attaching it to a secularised notion Of tradition which he retained from his Roman Catholic upbringing.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 286–87

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