Gordon Clark: Bultmann's Historiography (Jesus of Nazareth: Saviour and Lord)

Note that after Clark initially quotes Bultmann (following "The text reads..."), much of the rest of this article is substantially the same as what Clark writes in Historiography: Secular and Religious, pgs. 330-339 (1971). There are some slight changes, particularly in the choosing of paragraph breaks, but the first four paragraphs of this contribution are original.

1966. Bultmann's Historiography. In Jesus of Nazareth: Saviour and Lord. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Bultmann's Historiography

In 1926 Bultmann published his volume Jesus; the English translation of its second edition, under the title Jesus and the Word, appeared in 1934. Nowhere has Bultmann given a better or more extended account of his understanding of the nature of history than in the Introduction of this early book. Therefore a criticism of Bultmann's historiography can afford to confine its attention to this one volume.

I. The Setting of Bultmann's Thought

Properly to appreciate the intricacies of Bultmann's thought and to disentangle what inconsistencies there are it is necessary to have in mind the type of theology that prevailed before 1920 and its defects as Bultmann saw them. The liberalism of the nineteenth century, with the Life-of-Jesus movement, the naively optimistic view of human nature, the influence of Hegelian pantheism in the then current presentation of the immanence of God - all this prevailing theology Bultmann attacked, following the lead of Karl Barth.

It is also necessary to uncover those assumptions relative to New Testament criticism that Bultmann has never thought of questioning. These assumptions have restricted Bultmann's thought within a narrow range of choice, whereas another scholar without these assumptions could have proceeded in a very different direction. Note must also be taken of the philosophical guidelines which Bultmann accepted from Heidegger. This existential philosophy as well as the unquestioned axioms of criticism are most obvious in Bultmann's New Testament interpretation, but they definitely affect his view of history too.

II. Bultmann and Historical Science

One must remember that Bultmann is not interested in history as a professional historian, nor is he a philosopher with a consuming desire to write a philosophy of history. The problems of history entered his thought more as a side issue blocking his part. He had to dispose of them before he could proceed with New Testament criticism. Therefore, from the standpoint of thoroughgoing historiography, his remarks appear somewhat disjointed. To combine them into logical clarity is a considerable task. But if a student begins his reading of Bultmann with historiography in mind, this task is the immediate one. Therefore the surest procedure is to take the Introduction to Jesus and the Word  and go through it phrase by phrase. 

The text reads,

The essence of history cannot be grasped by "viewing" it, as we view our natural environment... Our relationship to history is wholly different from our relationship to nature... When [a man] observes nature, he perceives there is something objective which is not himself. When he turns his attention to history, however, he must admit himself to be a part of history... He cannot observe this [living] complex [of events] objectively as he can observe natural phenomena... Hence there cannot be impersonal observation of history in the same sense that there can be impersonal observation of nature (p. 3).

This opening paragraph is intended to make a sharp distinction between history and nature, and between the methods of investigation proper to each. They are said to be "wholly different." Such a position is extreme. On any reasonable definition (and Bultmann substitutes none of his own) history and science are not wholly different. There are similarities between them. Doubtless there are dissimilarities too; but, what is worse that the overstatement "wholly different," is the failure of Bultmann's attempt to describe what the differences are.

When a man observes nature, he perceives something not himself' when he turns his attention to history, he also perceives something not himself. He perceives emperors, wars, economic conditions, and even parts of nature. These are not himself. If at the same time he must admit himself to be a part of history, he also cannot avoid admitting that he is a part of nature as well. In this Bultmann has not hit upon any difference between science and history. Further, Bultmann would have a hard time proving that "there cannot be impersonal observation of history in the same sense that there can be impersonal observation of nature." Regrettably Bultmann does not explain in what sense there can be impersonal observation of nature. Since World War I there has been a philosophy of science, operationalism, that insists on the personal involvement of the scientist in his problem - a problem too that is dictated by the demands of society. Even among scientists who are not operationalists there is widespread agreement that the formulations of science depend in part on the aesthetic preferences of the formulator. Pure, objective impersonal observation of nature is not well accepted today as a description or as a goal of science. It may turn out therefore that Bultmann makes his obscure contrast between science and history only because he has retained an outmoded nineteenth-century view of science, while at the same time adopting and modifying Martin Kahler's revised view of history.

If Bultmann is relying on non-scientific common opinion for his assertion of impersonal observation of nature, on this basis there is also an impersonal observation of history. Bultmann himself obliquely admits it, when in the sentence immediately following the previous quotation he hopes that his volume Jesus and the Word will be for the reader "more than information on interesting occurrences in the past, more than a walk through a museum of antiquities."

No doubt an impersonal observation of history, or, as J. H. Hexter put it, a love of the past for the sake of the past, is history on a low level; perhaps it is very superficial history; but unless history is arbitrarily defined as one's personal involvement in present controversies, the possibility of impersonal or disinterested observation remains.

So far, then, Bultmann has asserted a difference between history and science. There are many differences; but Bultmann has failed to mention any because of a defective view of science and an as yet unclear notion of history.

The better form of history, or, if Bultmann insists, the only form of history, is to see "Jesus [or presumably any historical figure] as a part of the history in which we have our being, or in which by critical conflict we achieve being, [in which case history books] must be in the nature of a continuous dialogue with history" (pp. 3f., italics in original).

This language is the echo of existential philosophy and needs to be demythologized. If this means merely that a student's character can be altered, if he can come to himself, if he can develop his personality - and so "achieve being" - by a critical examination of the past, well and good. Even those historians who are most insistent on objectivity would approve such a "dialogue" with history. But whether Bultmann would agree that this demythologizing had preserved the essential truth of his thought is another matter. It is indeed a doubtful matter because the explanation he offers is unclear.

"The dialogue," continues Bultmann, "does not come as a conclusion, as a kind of evaluation of history after encounter with history takes place only in the dialogue." Presumably this means that history does not consist in learning that Napoleon reached Moscow only to find the city deserted; after which we conclude that it is poor strategy to invade Russia in the winter. The first half is not the actual encounter with history, and possibly the second half is not the dialogue.

Bultmann's "dialogue is no clever exercise of subjectivity on the observer's part," as it might be if someone decided that a mechanized invasion of Russia would not flounder into Napoleon's predicament. No, Bultmann's dialogue is "a real interrogating of history, in the course of which the historian puts this subjectivity of his in question, and is ready to listen to history as an authority" - an authority apparently that tells us mechanization makes no difference.

Now if we mean by the term encounter the personal adoption of certain principles to guide our own conduct, principles intuited in our study of napoleon, it makes fair sense to say that "the actual encounter with history takes place only in [or by means of] the dialogue." But if the dialogue is not a kind of evaluation of Napoleon's defeat, it is hard to say what encounter means. It is hard to grasp the meaning of "a real interrogating of history," or to know what to do in order "to listen to history as an authority." Does the continuing quotation clarify this puzzle?

"Further, such an interrogation of history does not end in complete relativism... Precisely the contrary is true: whatever is relative to the observer - namely all the presuppositions which he brings with him out of his own epoch and training and his individual position within them - must be given up, that history may actually speak."

Now it is superficially intelligible to imagine a hypostatized history demanding that we lay aside all presuppositions before it continues its lecture. But whatever would follow would be a lecture and not a dialogue. A dialogue, an interrogation, means that the historian asks questions; but without presuppositions and a personal position no questions can be asked. This is so obvious that Bultmann admits it in the next sentence: "History, however, does not speak when a man... assumes neutrality, but speaks only when he comes seeking answers to the questions which agitate him." How true! But, of course, in this sentence Bultmann contradicts what he has just finished saying.

The difficulties grow greater, not less, as we proceed. Having prohibited the personal presuppositions of individual historians, he goes further and prohibits schools of historiography from having common presuppositions. Bultmann admits that the methods of historiography permit an objective determination of chronological sequence; but he claims that this misses the true significance of history precisely because of the presuppositions. "Thus quantitatively it collects many new facts out of history, but learns nothing genuinely new about history and man. It sees in history only as little or as much of man and humanity as it already explicitly or implicitly knows; the correctness or incorrectness of vision is always dependent on this previous knowledge" (p. 5). 

By implication therefore Bultmann will provide us a method of understanding history such that our vision will be independent of our previous knowledge. We shall be limited neither by personal ideas nor by the methods of any school, but shall encounter history directly.

"An example may make this clear." It is to be sure, an example of constrictive presuppositions improperly applied. But whether it demonstrates our ability to write history independently of our previous training and present ideas remains to be seen.

A historian sets himself the aim of making a historical phenomenon or personality "psychologically comprehensible." Now this expression implies that such a writer has at his disposal complete knowledge of the psychological possibilities of life... Making anything "comprehensible" means the reduction of it to what our previous knowledge includes... On this assumption the criticism of the tradition is based, so that everything which cannot be understood on that basis is eliminated as unhistorical (pp. 5f.).

Very likely Bultmann has in mind some nineteenth-century attempts to explain the personality of Jesus. Strauss and the others assumed that the mind of Jesus had to be essentially like our own. Since therefore He could not have had messianic delusions of grandeur, He must have been nothing more than a good teacher of ethics; for only that can be historical which falls within the limits of the historian's present experience.

Possibly Bultmann was here influenced by Martin Kahler. In opposition to the Life-of-Jesus movement (Strauss, Baur, Renan), Kahler pointed out that despite their claims to presuppositionless objectivity the authors filled in the gaps disclosed by historical criticism with the unsupported fancies of their individual psychology. For this and other reasons Kahler concluded that a biography of Jesus is impossible.

Now, Kahler scored a decisive blow against the Life-of-Jesus movement by uncovering the inconsistency between the ideal of objectivity and the practice of reducing Jesus to the personal limitations of His critics. But Bultmann's historiography is not too clear. What follows is if it is true that psychological analysis presupposes a "complete knowledge of the psychological possibilities of life?" Would it not follow that historical analysis also presupposes a complete knowledge of historical possibilities? In short, it would be impossible to know anything without knowing everything.

Such a Platonic or Hegelian requirement of omniscience is a serious philosophical problem. It is not to be dismissed thoughtlessly. J. H. Hexter, in his Reappraisals of History, castigates historical relativism as a fad and insists on the "rudimentary distinction" between knowing something and knowing everything, but he omits all philosophic justification for this distinction.

Obviously this distinction must be maintained, if a human being is to be able to know anything at all. Make omniscience the prerequisite of partial knowledge, and partial knowledge vanishes. But Bultmann, like Hexter, offers no help: less help in fact, for Bultmann lets the requirements of omniscience stand. Indeed, he says explicitly, "So far as pure psychological facts of the past are the objects of investigation, such a method is (for the psychological experts) quite correct" (p. 6).

Bultmann is no concerned to deny the presupposition of omniscience. The point he makes is the quite different one that psychology does not explain history. Whoever is of the belief that only through history can he find enlightenment on the contingencies of his own existence, will necessarily reject the psychological approach, however justified that method is in its own sphere" (p. 6). The plain suggestion is that only history can shed light on life's contingencies. Psychology cannot.

If Bultmann had said that the psychological facts of the past are impossible to recover, and that only overt actions can be recovered, his suggestion would be plausible. But to admit that the psychological expert can correctly investigate the past and to deny that his results can give enlightenment is a position most difficult to credit. Yet he insists that "in such a belief this book is written."

On this basis Bultmann prides himself on refraining from pronouncing value judgments.

A judgement of value depends on the point of view which the writer imports into the history... [value judgements] are given from a standpoint beyond history. As against this I have especially aimed to avoid everything beyond history and to find a position for myself within history. Therefore evaluations which depend on the distinction between the historical and the superhistorical find no place here. Accordingly this book lacks all the phraseology which speaks of Jesus as a great man, genius, or hero; he appears neither as inspired nor as inspiring, his sayings are not called profound, nor his faith mighty, nor his nature child-like. There is also no consideration of the eternal values of his message... (pp. 7-8).

Why, then, should we study Jesus? Or why should any history be studied? If we cannot evaluate one event as important and another as unimportant, if we cannot distinguish a profound statement from nonsense, or a great man from a moron, on what basis does an historian choose his subject? All this is the theory of objective, presuppositionless history, which Strauss and Baur professed but which no one ever practices.

Bultmann gives something of a verbal answer to such questions. After rejecting the items mentioned, he immediately says, "Attention is entirely limited to what he purposed and hence to what in his purpose as a part of history makes a present demand on us." This verbalism, however, does not remove the objection. It does not explain why one should pay attention to Jesus' purpose rather than to Pilate's or to Zebedee's; nor is a value judgment avoided when it is asserted that Jesus' purpose makes a present demand on us. If anyone should reply that we study Jesus' purpose rather than Zebedee's because we have more information about Jesus, Bultmann cuts the ground away by insisting, "I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus."

In particular it is impossible to know whether Jesus believed Himself to be the Messiah or not. Without such knowledge, however, is it at all possible to determine what Jesus' purpose was? This point concerning the messianic consciousness is of singular importance, and Bultmann recognizes that "it was really no trifle to believe oneself Messiah, [for] whosoever so believed must have regulated his whole life in accordance with this belief, [and] if this point is obscure we can, strictly speaking, know nothing of the personality of Jesus." Bultmann himself believes that Jesus did not claim to be Messiah; but then to our amazement he continues, "I have in this book not dealt with the question at all - not so much because nothing can be said about it with certainty as because I consider it of secondary importance."

How could it be secondary if one who "so believed must have regulated his whole life in accordance with this belief?" Concretely such a one would have regulated his words and teaching in accordance with this belief, so that the significance of what he said and the purpose of what he did could only be construed in messianic terms.

Bultmann is trapped all the deeper because he holds that Jesus no more than Luther and Napoleon was interested in His own personality. What these men had at heart was their work, "the cause to which they surrendered their lives. Moreover, their work does not mean the sum of the historical effects of their acts; for the this their view could not be directed. Rather, the 'work' from their standpoint is the end they really sought, and it is in connection with their purpose that they are the proper objects of historical investigation" (pp. 9-10). But if it is impossible to know whether or not Jesus believed Himself to be Messiah, how in the world could we know His standpoint and the end He really sought?

Bultmann tries to evade the force of this consideration by insisting that the purpose of an historical character can be reproduced only in the form of sayings, ideas, or teaching. Of course this is true. We could know whether Jesus believed Himself to be Messiah only if His words clearly indicated it. But we ought not to come to these words with the a priori resolution to read out of them all such claims. Nor ought we to come to them, as Bultmann does, convinced that they do not form a system of general truths, or propositions universally valid apart from the concrete life situation of the speaker. Rather, we must read the words of Jesus and then the words of Plato to see which claimed to be Messiah and which claimed to propound universal truths. Bultmann's a priori judgment that Jesus' words are not such a set of universal truths is all the more surprising in view of his opinion that Jesus did not claim to be Messiah. And the surprise increases when he gives his reason. The reason is not, of course, that a messianic consciousness has things to say beyond general truths, but that so to understand the non-messianic Jesus would be to miss "the essential of history" (pp. 10-11). Ideal systems are judged by standards beyond history, and to learn them from history, as we do when we read Plato's dialogues, is to reduce history to the role of a stimulus to Platonic reminiscence, i.e. a clarification of pre-existing knowledge. "Such a view would be essentially rationalistic; history as event in time would be excluded" (p. 11). So it would, no doubt; but how does this show that Jesus did not teach a Platonic view?

There is a further complication. Bultmann indeed believes that historical criticism can recover a sufficient number of Jesus' sayings. But his criticism is so intricate, his axioms so unquestionable, and his conclusions so tenuous that one is inclined to question his optimism. 

The sources, in his opinion, give the message of the early Church, much of which originated with the Church, and much else modified by the Church. The Gospel of John is not a source at all, and the Synoptics are composed of several layers. The Hellenistic layer must be discarded; Palestinian material remains.

Within this Palestinian material again different layers can be distinguished, in which whatever betrays the specific interests of the church... must be rejected as secondary, [because apparently the church could not possible have given a correct report]. "By means of this critical analysis an oldest layer is determined, though it can be marked off with only relative exactness [relative to the inclinations of the individual critic]. Naturally we have no absolute assurance that the exact words of this oldest layer were really spoken by Jesus. There is a possibility that the contents of this older layer are also the result of a complicated historical process which we can no longer trace (p. 13).

With all this skepticism as to what Jesus taught, a skepticism based on an a priori judgment of what Jesus could not have said and what the reporting Church could not state correctly, how can Bultmann determine that Jesus did not teach a system of eternal ideas as Plato did?

But none of this troubles Bultmann. Anyone interested in the personality of Jesus might be troubled, but "for our purpose it has no particular significance. It is precisely this complex of ideas in the oldest layer of the synoptic tradition which is the object of our consideration" (p. 13-14).

Why? Because Bultmann is an impersonal historian and has arbitrarily chosen this layer as an academic exercise? Quite the contrary! "It meets us as a fragment of tradition coming to us from the past, and in the examination of it we seek the encounter with history" (p. 14).

But why should we not seek the encounter with history in the Hellenistic layer instead of the Palestinian layer? The Hellenistic lay also meets us as a fragment of tradition coming to us from the past. Or, why should we not seek the encounter is Herodotus or Henry Thomas Buckle? The texts of any such authors can be encountered, existentialized, and allegorically interpreted. Any of them can be used for a continuous dialogue with history. Why select one epoch of history rather than any other? 

III. Reasons for Bultmann's Failure

Bultmann, I believe, cannot give satisfactory answers to these questions for three reasons. First, his New Testament criticism is as arbitrary as that of Strauss, and his demythologizing is on a level with the allegorical method of the early patristics. Second, his notion of historiography is confused. He tries and fails to separate science from history; he requires and prohibits presuppositions; and he stirs together the objectivism of the nineteenth-century historians with the subjectivism of twentieth-century existentialism. And third, this existential philosophy with the encounter it recommends is unintelligible. I know what it means to learn political lessons from history and to evaluate on non-historical moral grounds the crimes or the virtues of great men, but I haven't the slightest idea of what Bultmann means by encounter or achieving being. Such empty phrases will never furnish a defensible view of historical investigation.