772. Why is it that Bultmann singles out ...

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Why is it that Bultmann singles out only the two philosophies of idealism-humanism and existentialism (while quite ignoring naturalism) as important for theology's Auseinandersetzung with philosophy today (GV 3: 193 ff.)?

There may be more than one reason, such as, possibly, his judgment that naturalism, in denying that there even is any such thing as the self or person, is not even worth theology's engaging in serious discussion. But I think it mainly has to do with what he has in mind when he says, in his "Autobiographical Reflections," "I have personally lived through important shifts both in the history of recent theology and in the history of modern philosophy -- shifts that stand in a peculiar parallelism" (EF: 287). The shift in the history of modern philosophy to which he refers is almost certainly the shift from idealism-humanism to existentialism. This is confirmed, I believe, when he says that "through the discovery of the historicity of human existence, the philosophy of existence broke with the idealistic tradition and with its guiding metaphysics of the Spirit" (193). But it is also confirmed indirectly by the role he assigns to "the so-called dialectical theology" which once again became aware of the critical difference between the Christian and the idealistic understandings of existence after this difference was in danger of being lost in the theology of the nineteenth century, which was so extensively influenced by the philosophy of idealism (192 f.).

5 December 2001