Rudolf Karl Bultmann

Overview

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884-1976) was a German Lutheran New Testament scholar who taught at the University of Marburg from 1921 to 1951.¹ He is regarded as one of the founders of Gospel form criticism through his 1921 History of the Synoptic Tradition,² and he is best known for a program of “demythologizing” the New Testament, first set out in his 1941 essay “New Testament and Mythology,” which reads the Gospels’ miracle accounts as a mythological husk around an existentialist message about authentic human existence.³ His approach is often grouped with the dialectical/neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, though he pressed the existential turn further than either.⁴

Life and Ministry

Bultmann was born August 20, 1884, in Wiefelstede, in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, the son of a Lutheran pastor.¹ He studied theology at the universities of Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg, where he came under the influence of the history-of-religions school and, later, the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, his colleague at Marburg from 1923 to 1928.¹ After teaching at Breslau and Giessen, he was appointed professor of New Testament at Marburg in 1921, a chair he held until his retirement in 1951; he continued writing and lecturing until his death in Marburg on July 30, 1976.¹

Theological Contribution

Form criticism of the Gospels

Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921) is one of the standard founding texts of form criticism, the method of classifying Gospel material by literary form and tracing each unit’s transmission through the oral tradition of the early church, alongside Martin Dibelius’s From Tradition to Gospel and Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu.²

The existential hermeneutic and the kerygma

Bultmann held that “the word of God” is not simply identical with the biblical text, and pressed this existential approach further than Barth or Brunner, to the point that critics have accused him of denying that a religious encounter with God requires any connection to a historical Jesus at all.⁴ Following Schleiermacher, Bultmann treated religion as something that “can only be immediately experienced,” so that “textuality is a barrier to immediacy.”⁵ On this reading he interpreted the early Christian movement apart from the Old Testament story of Israel: for Bultmann Christianity was “not a religion about the past but about the experience of the kerygma [proclamation] in the present.”⁵

Historie, Geschichte, and demythologizing

Bultmann distinguished ordinary, verifiable “history” (Historie) from history that is existentially significant for the believer (Geschichte), and argued that treating God or Christ as an “object” of historical inquiry was itself illegitimate for faith.⁶ On that basis he treated the Gospels’ “metaphysical” language, including the accounts of Jesus’ miracles and bodily resurrection, as a mythological “parable” whose real content is an existential message, recoverable once the modern reader strips away its first-century cosmology.⁶ Bultmann’s own statement of the program, in his Theology of the New Testament, held that “the essential thing about the eschatological message is the idea of God that operates in it and the idea of human existence that it contains, not the belief that the end of the world is just ahead.”³ He distinguished this from simply discarding Jesus’ eschatological preaching altogether, describing his own task instead as recovering the deeper meaning “concealed under the cover of mythology”: the insecurity of present existence before an imminent future and the call to live openly toward it.³ Bultmann located the beginning of this demythologizing already within the New Testament itself, in Paul and especially John, where Jesus Christ is the eschatological event and responding to the preached word in faith is itself “to live an eschatological existence.”³

Historical Significance

Bultmann’s existential reading of the New Testament influenced more radical successors. Michael Kruger notes that thinkers including Karl Jaspers, Fritz Buri, and Van Austin Harvey pressed Bultmann’s logic further still, arguing that existential fulfillment need not involve Christ at all and could occur through other historical figures worthy of emulation.⁴

Evangelical evaluations grouping Bultmann with Barth and Brunner under an “existential/neo-orthodox” model of Scripture’s authority credit the approach with rightly noting that the church’s reception of the biblical books has a real existential dimension, but press what Kruger calls “the most fundamental concern”: “the existential model’s unfortunate separation of the authority of God and the authority of Scripture.”⁷ If a text is authoritative only when it “imposes” itself on a reader in the moment, Kruger argues, quoting Carl F. H. Henry, “the idea of a fixed scriptural canon collapses. Only isolated fragments of the Bible that ‘impose’ themselves become the Word of God, and these cease to be the Word of God when not self-imposing.”⁷ Oswalt presses a parallel objection against demythologizing specifically: Paul’s own argument that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17) ties New Testament theology directly to the historicity of the events it proclaims, so that theology, for Oswalt, cannot be cleanly separated from the history Bultmann treated as dispensable.⁶ Bultmann’s demythologizing program is also read, in Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, as a modern instance of a lineage of denying the historicity of the Gospels’ miracle reports that runs back through nineteenth-century figures such as David Friedrich Strauss.⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Wikipedia, s.v. “Rudolf Bultmann,” accessed 2026-09-17. No library-held source treats Bultmann’s own biography as its subject; these bare career facts (birth date and place, education, university posts, death date) are sourced to this non-library encyclopedia entry, the same convention used for bare biographical facts in roger-olson.md, robert-w-jenson.md, robert-letham.md, and philipp-melanchthon.md. His theological views are sourced to library-held works throughout. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon,” 96: “Standard form-critical works include Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968); Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel; and Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu.” ↩ ↩²
Stephen Witmer, “Keeping Eschatology and Ethics Together: The Teaching of Jesus, the Work of Albert Schweitzer, and the Task of Evangelical Pastor-Theologians,” Themelios 39, no. 3 (2014): 497-98, quoting Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book”: “Bultmann also affirms that the ‘word of God’ is not to be equated with the Scripture, but he is even more radical in his existential approach to the Christian faith than are Barth and Brunner, causing some to criticize Bultmann for denying that a religious encounter requires any connection to a historical Jesus… many of Bultmann’s more radical successors (Karl Jaspers, Fritz Buri, and Van Austin Harvey) continued to make the case that existential fulfillment need not have anything to do with Christ at all, but could occur through other historical figures worthy of emulation.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, Question of Canon, chap. 3, “The Writing of Canon,” 82-83, quoting Francis Watson: Bultmann and Schleiermacher held that “the reality of religion can only be immediately experienced” and that “textuality is a barrier to immediacy”; and Kruger’s own comment: “it is no surprise that Bultmann insists on interpreting the early Christian movement apart from the Old Testament story of Israel, for him, it is not a religion about the past but about the experience of the kerygma in the present.” ↩ ↩²
John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), chap. 9, “Origins of the Biblical Worldview: Alternatives.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, “The Church’s Book,” quoting Carl F. H. Henry. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 4, “Revelation,” editorial note. ↩