787. Bultmann's several discussions ...

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Bultmann's several discussions (more in his earlier writings, perhaps, than in later) of the relation/difference between faith and world view are typically unbalanced or one-sided, in that he fails to make sufficiently explicit that, although Christian faith is not a world view, it nonetheless necessarily implies a world view; and that it is precisely for this reason that the preeminent danger to which faith is exposed (and from which theology, for its part, exists to protect it) is "the danger of orthodoxy, which turns confession into dogma" (GV 2: 272; cf. 3:126) and faith into holding teachings or doctrines to be true -- which is to say, having a so-called Christian world view (cf. 3:167, 190, 193).

Bultmann also argues in a way -- as, e.g., on 2:69 -- that would quite preclude his being able to argue, as he does later, that the relation between Christian faith and humanism is to be understood as the relation between gospel and law. Thus if it is true, as he later argues (e.g., 3:75) that God wills, or commands, human beings to be precisely the persons and society that the humanistic ethic calls them to be, it can't also be true that human beings, standing as they do under God's law, are not guided by "an ideal picture of human personality or of human community" (2:69). Or, again, if it were simply true, as Bultmann says, that "it is not an ideal that says to one what one should do, but rather the command to love one's neighbor" (2:70), then it could not also be true, as he says later, that the humanistic ideal is, in reality, the law of God (2:146; 3:67, 74). In the same way, if the love commandment were not, in a way, an ethical principle from which rules could be derived, as Bultmann also says in the same context, what sense could it make to say, as he says elsewhere, that the love commandment provides "a criterion for criticizing and further developing positive justice" (Existence and Faith: 204)?

3 December 2001