Bultmannism and Buddhism
Protestant
theologian and New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann made quite a splash
— make that, bomb crater — with his 1941 essay, “New Testament and
Mythology.”1 And
though whole schools of subsequent theologians have taken Bultmann’s
words in stride and moved on to their own new and, in some cases,
equally shocking projects, one still finds most Protestants both in
Germany and in America either blissfully ignorant of Bultmann’s
bombshell or desperately trying to forget it.
Bultmann was
far from the first to blow the whistle on the mythic, nonhistorical
character of the New Testament. Both enemies of Christianity and Liberal
Modernist theologians had already done that. Bultmann’s novelty and
wisdom lay in his recognition that myth is the irreplaceable language of
religion and that, to retain the powerful message of the myth, one must
demythologize — or, as his colleague Paul Tillich put it, “deliteralize”
— the New Testament. Liberal theologians, like Adolf Harnack and
Albrecht Ritschl, saw fit simply to subtract the myth and focus on what
was left: ethics, piety, morality. But Bultmann knew there was more to
the New Testament message than that.
What is the
purpose of myth, at least in general? Bultmann focused on the role of
myth as enshrining, or at least presupposing, the particular
self-understanding of the community that told and cherished the myth.
Thus, myths could be decoded, or demythologized, to reveal the society’s
perception of its own place in the world. Many myths are about the
comforting, dependable cyclical continuation of the familiar: the gods
recreate the world and give it new stability every year, etc. But myths
attached to rituals of rebirth and salvation — myths of grace, not myths
of nature, one might say — tell at once of a consciousness of oppression
and the thrill of new freedom and maturity. This is true equally of
puberty rite myths and mystery religion sacraments, like those of
ancient Mithraism, the Isis and Osiris cult, and the Attis religion.
Finally, the kernel of myth is the existential self-understanding of
those who tell and live the myth.
It is not as
if Bultmann thought the actual mythic narratives were henceforth
negligible. No, he knew what modern Unitarians do not seem to know: myth
is the language of religion, though the religion will be immature as
long as it fails to interpret the language. He shared the conviction of
Friedrich Schleiermacher, that one cannot practice some sort of
distilled “religion in general.” Rather, one must choose a particular
religious path, even if they all reach the same destination.
Christianity,
Bultmann thought, had reached its present crisis of interpretation
because of modernity, particularly science and its disclosures. Most of
us, no matter what we think or say we believe, simply do not occupy the
world of the ancients. We do not count on miracles or reckon with
invasive spirits and demons. We do not readily look up exorcists in the
Yellow Pages. We even have clever dispensationalist theologies to
explain why miracles do not happen anymore. Or, if we are Pentecostals
and charismatics, we try our best to live as if the ancient, mythic
miracle-world is real, but the tepid results of the typical Assemblies
of God congregation and the aberrant fanaticism of the Deliverance
Ministry both amply attest to the failure of the experiment.
So, according
to Bultmann, we face two choices: either we can abandon the New
Testament proclamation as a product of ancient superstition that does
not transcend its origins or we can ask whether the existential
self-understanding presupposed in the preaching of the first Christians
may still be valid, detachable from the mythic and prescientific
worldview of the first century. Bultmann chose and advocated the latter
option. He rejected all supernaturalism as superstition. But he did not
reject God. Indeed, the major problem he had with myth is that it
depicts the Transcendent in objectified, this-worldly terms, as if God
might reach down and temporarily suspend the normal process of cause and
effect. Insofar as myth makes God do that, myth is superstitious. God is
no mere object, no mere person. Nor would that have come as any news to
Anselm, Aquinas, or the orthodox theologians of the East. So God is no
superstition, but supernaturalism depicts him in a superstitious manner.
Jesus Christ,
on the other hand, was certainly a person, a historical individual,
though we can know precious little about him. But we do know he preached
that the individual stands naked before the keen eyes of divine judgment
in every moment. We know of his willingness to place his fate in the
hands of his Father, something we might generalize as a bearing of
radical openness toward and faith in the future. The resurrection?
Bultmann knew good and well that the resurrection of Jesus was a myth
borrowed from contemporary mystery religions. It functions, first, as
metaphor for the fact that the death/cross of Christ always remains
etched against the horizon, re-presented in Christian preaching, to
challenge us to abandon faith in all but God. Second, it stands for and
catalyzes the transformation one undergoes by casting one’s lot with
God. Borrowing the terms of his colleague Martin Heidegger, Bultmann
called such Godward living “authentic existence,” the renunciation of
the illusion of self-sufficiency. Anything short of it he named
“inauthentic existence” — equivalent, I think, to what Tillich called
“idolatrous faith.”
This
Christian gospel, Bultmann maintained, is independent of the mythic
prescientific world picture amid which it entered history. As a result,
no one, to be a Christian, need accept the existence of angels, demons,
a future apocalypse, or a future life — though here again, since
surviving the death of the body is not exactly a mythical notion, just a
scientific unknown, Bultmann did not reject it. Indeed, insofar as
churches do make such beliefs prerequisites for salvation, they are
requiring cognitive “works,” no matter their hypocritical prattle about
“faith alone.”
One can be an
equally good Christian whether one believes in a round earth and disease
germs, or in a flat earth and demons. But to require belief in the
furniture of an ancient worldview, against all knowledge and better
judgment, is bad Christianity, as it requires the sacrifice of the
intellect. And that, for Bultmann, is the mirror-image of the futile
attempt of the Liberal Modernist to sacrifice the mythology of the Bible
instead of listening to it.
Buddhism
What might it
look like if a world religion — not just a small group of ivory-tower
academics — were to embrace the Bultmannian perspective? What if some
major faith placed demythologizing at the forefront of its missionary
efforts? Take a look at Buddhism. Buddhism seems from the first to have
been able to make Bultmann’s distinction between the genuine
stumbling-block of the gospel (or of the dharma) and the false
stumbling-block of parochial worldviews. Buddhism promoted a saving
message of self-reliance, of altering one’s self-understanding. The
result would be an amazing new freedom, a cutting of the bands that tie
one to the delusive world of samsara. To be sure, early Buddhism,
surviving today as Theravada, was more optimistic than Bultmann on this
sufficiency of self-effort; later Buddhism, Mahayana, came to parallel
Bultmann, insisting that one must rely upon Other-power — the saving
grace of Amitabha Buddha — to be saved.
But in either
case, Buddhists clearly understood that traditional faith, in their case
Vedic Hinduism, was irrelevant, whether true or false. That is, if Indra,
Vishnu, and Siva did indeed inhabit Lotus-palaces in heavens of bliss,
and even if they actually did deign to answer prayers — so what? How did
that get anybody liberated from this sinful world, and from endless
bondage to its false desires and its sufferings? It simply did not
matter if the traditional map of the cosmos or pantheon of gods was
accurate. Early Buddhists took for granted that it was all true, albeit
irrelevant. And here is the key: later Buddhists, as they entered new
cultural zones, did not require converts to believe in the symbolic
universe of Hinduism. If one believed in Taoist deities or aboriginal
spirits, even if one bargained with them on a day-to-day basis, it was
all the same. The message of salvation, of self-understanding, of
quenching desire and abandoning false belief in an ego-self (atman), was
seen as fully compatible with anyone’s inherited mythology. Or, as with
many Buddhists in today’s West, with no mythology at all.
Perhaps not
surprisingly, Buddhism has its own stubborn fundamentalists who insist
on literal belief in the twenty-five various Buddhas of Buddhist
“history.” These devout folks are fully as scandalized at scholarly
debunking of the myths of Dipankara, Amitabha, and others as the
detractors of the Jesus Seminar are. But it is safe to say that Buddhism
as a whole has a much larger place for those, say, Zen masters, who
minimize the importance, à la Bultmann, of a historical Buddha. On
The Long Search, a BBC television series surveying world religions,
host Ronald Eyre inquired of a Zen abbot, “Does the Buddha exist?” The
answer was, “For those who need the Buddha to exist, he exists. For
those who do not need him to exist, he does not exist.” The real and
relevant Buddha is the Buddha-nature latent in all sentient beings. Can
we imagine a Christianity willing to make the same admission about
Christ? “If you meet the Christ on the road to Emmaus — kill him.”
1See
the most recent reprinting and translation, Rudolf Bultmann, “New
Testament and Mythology,” New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic
Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1989), pp. 1-43.
By
Robert M. Price
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