by Karen Pusey

Created on: April 01, 2009

TWENTIETH CENTURY THEOLOGIANS

To understand what went on in the 20th.c, it is necessary to understand, amongst other things, existentialism. This philosophical shift of understanding began with the 19th c. Danish thinker, Kierkegaard. He was a melancholy fellow. His childhood had been of the stern religious kind. His love live was disastrous. He expected only unhappiness in life. Unless we recognise this preoccupation with self, we will not understand Kierkegaard or his thinking. Unlike those who went before him, his philosophy was rooted in subjectivism. Genuiness could not be arrived at by reason. The answer lay in a leap of faith. Truth was forever divorced from reason. From this, it is easy to see that existentialism is a way of doing philosophy, rather than philosophy itself.

It is impossible to write of all 20th.c. theologians, but three stand out as giants in the century, Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and Karl Barth 1886-1968). Three very different men, but all had been influenced by the prevailing wind of doing philosophy. All had faced the fact that they were living an "inauthentic" existence, characterised by angst and the attempt to fill the emptiness with worldly things The darkness of two world wars. and the disclosures of horrors unknown before. clouded the horizon But it was possible to take the leap of faith, to throw oneself into "authentic" existence.

Bultmann faced the fact that 20th. c. people, who were reasonably educated, could not accept the Bible as literally true. He developed the strategy of form criticism- that is the realisation that the gospels were collections of stories falling into certain genres. In an age of oral communication alone, various communities of Christians preserved stories of Jesus. It was impossible to rate them as "true" in the literal sense. In fact, we do not know very much about Jesus from the gospels. They were written as theological pieces.

Bultmann set himself the task of presenting Jesus as the Christ to 20th century men and women. His 1941 essay, "New Testament and Mythology" contains the sentence,""It it impossible to us the electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.". He paints the picture of the three decker universe, with the flat earth at the centre, heaven above and the underworld beneath. God, who is above, sees to it that there are miracles,

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