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1. Bultmann believed himself entitled to assume that the appropriate question to put to the Bible in interpreting it -- at least within the church -- is the existentialist question about human existence, in the sense of the question I am driven to ask at the scientific level of theological interpretation by the existential question about my own existence that I ask at the spontaneous level of my existence as such (NTMOBW: 106). Why did he believe himself to be so entitled? One reason was that this is the question that finally motivates -- and quite rightly motivates -- all interpretation of history and historical documents: I want to understand them so as thereby to become conscious of my own possibilities of self-understanding. But another reason -- as one might add, "at least within the church" -- is that the church's proclamation points me to a certain history and to certain historical documents as being of decisive significance for my existence (106).

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