The German Genius

that the Bible is not a revelation from God but a human record of that revelation. God’s single revelation occurred in Jesus Christ, meaning that we can approach God, or make ourselves available to be approached by Him, only by learning from and emulating Jesus, and we must do this for ourselves. 18 Barth was also essentially optimistic for mankind, saying that although individually we may turn away from God (his definition of sin), we are “powerless to undo what Christ has done.”
    Such was the impact of Barth’s theology that, by the time the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was a public figure. He then emerged as one of the leaders—if not the leader—of church opposition to the National Socialists, expressed in the so-called Barmen Declaration of 1934. 19 In the previous April, the “Evangelical Church of the German Nation” ( Deutsche Christen ) had been created under Nazi influence and published its guiding principles, which made anti-Semitism a central plank of this new religion and forbade marriage between “Germans and Jews.” 20 In reply, Barth was one of those founding the so-called Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), which rejected the attempt to set up an exclusively German church. In May 1934 representatives of the Confessing Church met at Barmen and delivered a declaration, based on a draft that Barth had prepared, in which they rejected the “false doctrine” that “there could be areas of our life in which we would belong not to Jesus Christ but to other lords.” Barth himself refused to take the oath of unconditional allegiance to Hitler, was dismissed, and returned to Basel where he continued to speak out in support of the Jews. 21
    Much influenced by Karl Barth, and a member of the Confessing Church, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) also shared a profound belief in the importance of the New Testament as witness to the hope God gave to the world—to us—in the person of Jesus Christ. 22 This, for him, made Christianity the form of faith that God intended for us. Born in Wiefelstede, the son of a pastor, Bultmann grew up in Oldenburg and studied at Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg. He then lectured at Breslau and Giessen before returning to Marburg as a full professor in 1921, remaining there until he retired in 1951.
    Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition ( The History of the Synoptic Tradition ), published in 1921, reflected his fascination with the Higher Criticism but also his belief that by clearing away all the historical accretions, we are better able to know the real Jesus, what Bultmann called the kerygmatic Jesus, the Jesus as revealed in his teaching, which is what matters more than historical details about his life. 23 Besides Barth, Bultmann was much influenced by his friend and Marburg colleague, Martin Heidegger, whose brand of existentialism, then being worked out in Being and Time (1927), was a secular, philosophical equivalent of what the philosopher was trying to say—namely, that there are four main categories of human existence: first, man has a relationship to himself (in the way that we say someone is “at one” or “at odds” with himself); second, man is a possibility, rather than a predetermined actuality; third, every man’s experience is unique and defies classification; and four, man exists in the world, is caught up in it. 24 Bultmann saw about him the anxieties of the modern world—especially strong in the wake of World War I—and he observed what he described as a “flight” into business, money-making, social status-seeking, and the enjoyment of ephemera, what amounted to him as a world without God. 25
    In Das Evangelium des Johannes ( The Gospel of John ; 1941)—which proved to be a best seller—his argument was that a close reading between the lines revealed that John’s Gospel was very different from the other three (now generally accepted) and that there was within it a series of signs that help us to know how to live once we have stripped away accretions derived from Jewish apocalyptic traditions and Gnostic redemption myths. This was what became famous as Bultmann’s “demythologizing” of the Bible. He thought that the Gospel of St. John was intended for a largely gentile audience (not the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem, which other scholars claimed in regard to the other gospels) and that the Gospels were less books to be read than preached as sermons, to be heard and fired up by. Bultmann thought that the Resurrection was a