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I have two questions about this:
1. Why is what faith accepts on authority "something unbelievable"? – On my understanding, it is because what faith accepts on authority is neither a matter of fact nor a matter of principle (in Leibniz's terms, neither a "truth of fact" nor a "truth of reason"), but an existential truth, and therefore is "unbelievable," which is to say, unbelievable in the ways in which (or on the grounds on which) either truths of fact or truths of reason are rightly taken to be believable. And this leads to my second question:
Wiki Markup 2. Why is what faith accepts on authority not "something unintelligible"? -- – On my interpretation, it is because what faith accepts on authority, being an existential truth, is in its own way (or on its own ground) intelligible, which is to say, intelligible because acceptance of it is at one and the same time acceptance of our own possibility of understanding ourselves-by understanding ourselves – by which, I take it, Bultmann can only mean, the possibility of understanding ourselves in the eulogistic sense of "understanding ourselves authentically."

In support of this interpretation, I would appeal to another closely related passage, where Bultmann says, "\[T\]he possibility of the word's being understood coincides with the possibility of one's understanding oneself. What one is asked is whether one is _willing_ to understand oneself as the word instructs one to do. In
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 the fact that one _can_ thus understand oneself lies the sole criterion of the word's truth -- or better expressed, perhaps, it is to this alone that anybody who asks for a criterion is to be referred" (_Glauben und Verstehen_ 1: 284; cf. also, _Christ without Myth_: 86).

As for just how Bultmann's meaning in this passage is to be understood, I take him not to be making the trivial point that, since anyone human has the ontological possibility of somehow understanding oneself, one can understand oneself as the word instructs one to do. This would be so far from being anything like a "criterion" of the truth of the word that Bultmann would cut a comic figure in proposing it as such. Therefore, his point, I believe, has to be that the only, and the sufficient, "criterion" of the truth of the word is that it explicitly confronts one with the same fundamental option implicitly confronting one as soon and as long as one is human at all, and thus calls one to accept what one is, ever has been, and ever will be called to accept in every moment of one's existence. From which it follows that any demand for some other supposed legitimation of the word's truth can only be refused in the way in which, according to the gospels, Jesus repudiated the demand of the Pharisees to accredit himself by a miraculous sign (Mk 8:11 f.).

4 July 2006