Page History

scanned pdf

                                                                               On Bultmann's View of Western History

Bultmann's view of Western history is characterized, above all, by his judgment that it has been shaped by the two great traditions stemming from Graeco-Roman antiquity, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other. Christianity, in turn, presupposes and further develops – in develops—in a "radicalized" form – form— the Old Testament-Jewish tradition. The "radicalization" here consists in Christianity's continuing to assume with the Old Testament-Jewish tradition, over against the other tradition stemming from Greece and Rome, that history constitutes a sphere of life distinct from nature, but also insisting that the history that is decisive is not the history of Israel and of the other nations, but the history that each and every individual person experiences (GV, 3: 102).

...

The other judgment that is important to Bultmann's overall view of Western history is that, in the nineteenth century, both of these formative traditions were more and more displaced by another and very different outlook. In the earlier part of the century, this outlook took the form of a naively optimistic faith in historical progress, encouraged by the development of science and technology and the control of nature and destiny of which they seemed to give promise. The philosophical attitude corresponding to this optimistic faith Bultmann calls "positivism," by which he presumably means the kind of view represented by Comte (GV, 3: 62 f.). In any event, the course of the nineteenth century saw the development of relativism and, finally, nihilism, and thus the loss of the assurance – fostered assurance—fostered by both of the formative traditions stemming from Graeco-Roman antiquity and Christianity – that Christianity—that a human being is a person with dignity, and so an end in her- or himself, not merely a means to other ends. In a world that was becoming more and more technically controlled and politically organized, human beings more and more came to be used as mere means to ends and as mere cogs in the great machine of economic and political organizationwitness organization—witness the term "manpower" (=Menschen-Material). In the course of the twentieth century, then, under the influence of the two world wars, the earlier naively optimistic faith in progress ceased to satisfy, either becoming quite incredible or else assuming the grotesque form of the totalitarian state.

...

At bottom, then, the inhumanity of our century is connected with the failure of modern men and women to continue to be guided by the two formative traditions of Western history (GV, 3: 58 f.). By the same token, adherents of both traditions must recognize that they stand together against all subjectivism, relativism, and nihilism, in affirming the dignity of each and every person and the possibility of objective truth, goodness, and beauty and a human life lived in accordance with them (GV, 2: 146 ff.; 3: 67 ff.. , 74 f.).

8 February 1994