789. Faith means at once ...

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"Faith means at once to trust and to obey. But it does not mean to accept certain teachings about Christ. To be sure, the ancient church brought all that Christ means to expression in dogmatic teachings; and these teachings have been transmitted in the ecclesial tradition. As symbolic expressions of what Christ is for us, such confessions can be repeated. But where they are laid on people as laws of faith, they are misused, and agreement with teachings takes the place of genuine confessing" (GV 3: 128 f.).

If one were to take "to obey" to mean "to be faithful," or "to be loyal," Bultmann's view of faith would converge more or less closely with H. Richard Niebuhr's as well as my own. But if "to obey" is taken more in the sense of positively responding to the call or demand for faith, itself understood in the sense of trust, Bultmann's point is different. My guess is that it is in the second sense, more than the first, that he uses the term, notwithstanding the emphasis he places on faith's being a matter of the imperative as well as the indicative (cf., e.g., GV 2: 154 f.: "Der Glaube ist Gehorsam, weil in ihm der Stolz des Menschen gebrochen wird. . . . Gehorsam und Vertrauen sind im tiefsten eines.").

3 December 2001