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Should Paul’s communal sense of self remain in any sense normative for us, or is it simply an outmoded husk we should shell to get at the kernel? This chapter argues, rather, that to embrace Paul as another we must take a final detour to the self through community: We must interpret Paul’s horizon, interpret our own horizon, and narrate the continuity between the two as the historical life of one community. The chapter argues that Rudolf Bultmann’s attempt to avoid this detour on appeal to a transcendental self cannot be sustained. Yet two crucial aspects of Bultmann’s work are retrieved: First, a phenomenological account articulates the transcendence of self and other in the encounter with the risen Lord. Second, a variant of demythologizing bridges the gap between Paul’s context and ours — but a demythologizing that invites greater suspicion of our own framework while affirming the work of the Spirit in our community.

To correlate the ontology of the self in community with Paul’s communal self is to affirm what we share with Paul while acknowledging our real distance from him. This correlation responds to two interrelated questions. First, how can the ontology help us to understand Paul? Second, how can the ontology help us to let Paul address us again? The chapter responds to these questions, first by correlating Rudolf Bultmann’s account of Pauline anthropology with the ontology of the self in community. How is such a correlation justified? In conversation with Jürgen Moltmann and Robert Jenson, the chapter concludes with a theological account of interpretation in community: Paul can speak again in our interpretations because we live with him in the community of the living and dead in Christ, and because the Spirit of Christ is the subject of the conversation in our community.

After his encounter with the risen Christ, St. Paul had to retell Israel’s story, and in so doing, his own understanding of self and community underwent a profound shift. Is it possible that the strong tie between Paul’s understanding of self, community, and the community’s story is something we should bracket or, as Rudolf Bultmann says, demythologize? Rather, this book asserts that two conversations in philosophy and theology can mutually contribute to our present understanding of the self in community: Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, and the new perspective debate in biblical studies about the meaning of law, works, faith and justification in St. Paul’s letters. With respect to the first conversation, the chapter places Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self in the context of theological debates about selfhood. With respect to the second conversation, the chapter demonstrates how the book’s interpretation of the Pauline texts draws critically from the new perspective studies within a Lutheran framework that is responsive to critics of the new perspective.

This chapter traces some significant shifts within the historical paradigm that has guided most modern biblical scholarship. It details the development of historical-critical study in the nineteenth century. The chapter then considers the expansion of sociological interest in both the Old and New Testaments. This is followed by a discussion of the work of Rudolf Bultmann, focusing on the strategies he employs in order to undertake theological interpretation. The chapter suggests that behind Bultmann's theological hostility to the liberals' quest for the historical Jesus stood a variety of Lutheran and existentialist emphases and phobias.

This chapter describes the liberal theological method of Schubert Ogden. It begins by describing the most important contributors to Ogden’s thought: Rudolf Bultmann’s existential hermeneutics, Alfred North Whitehead’s analysis of human subjectivity, and Charles Hartshorne’s concept of God. The chapter then describes Ogden’s method of interpreting and validating theological claims, displayed in his dual criteria of adequacy. Theological claims must be appropriate to Jesus Christ (an existential criterion) and credible to common human experience and reason. Ogden derives his articulation of common human experience through a transcendental analysis of the conditions of the possibility of any and all acts of human subjectivity. Further, Ogden’s transcendental argument for God’s existence yields an understanding of God whose existence is necessary. The descriptive sense Ogden associates with “God” thus picks out God alone as its referent. Additionally, the descriptive senses associated with the predicates of theological claims are also derived from elements of human experience. We can therefore have knowledge, either through acquaintance or through description, of whether the conditions described in those descriptive senses are satisfied. Therefore, This allows him to meet the demands of Russell as well as Flew and other falsification theorists.

This chapter examines the moment of protest and cultural crisis initiated by Friedrich Gogarten, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gogarten was one of the intellectual fathers of the movement that came to be called “crisis” or “dialectical” theology. He challenged the notion of a “continuity” between modernity and Protestantism and insisted, like Barth, that theology must include logos, rational investigation and discourse. Bultmann is concerned to show the significance of God's status as both wholly other and yet in contact, through the divine Word, with the world of man. This chapter considers how these three thinkers assessed the situation of modernity (as it unfolded over some four centuries from 1500 to 1900) and how they expressed their rejection of this situation in order to offer a new approach to religion and God.

The modern scholarly task of “biblical theology,” “theology of the Old Testament,” or “theology of the New Testament” may be historically traced from around 1800 and through the 20th century. Its goal was both to describe the theology contained in the Bible but also to use that historical construction as a foundation for modern Christian theological appropriation of the Bible. The task, though, led either to bad theology, bad historiography, or both. A robust, Christian, orthodox theology must move beyond the limits of modernism and practice more creative, innovative readings of scripture.

Turning to the New Testament, the chapter examines the prologue to St John’s Gospel as an exemplary commentary on Christian vocation. However, this requires rejecting interpretations that have seen John’s logos in terms of Platonic ideas or ‘ratio’, as in much ancient and medieval commentary (Eckhart’s commentary is used for illustration). German Idealism (Fichte) refigures ratio in terms of will, and in the twentieth century, Michel Henry foregrounds ‘life’. A rediscovery of the word element is found in Ferdinand Ebner and Rudolf Bultmann. Their insights are used to develop an original interpretation of the Gospel, contrasting John’s existential focus on calling and the name with Platonizing interpretations.

The chapter provides an overview of leading scholarship on John since 1907. The important figures are Wrede, Wellhausen, Schwartz, Bultmann, Dodd, Barrett, Brown, Martyn, Culpepper, Segovia, Frey, and Schnelle. Developments of Johannine scholarship are analysed in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts, but the analysis also highlights an intrinsic logic of the developments within and beyond historical criticism, where the latter is seen as focusing on Literarkritik (source criticism), Religionsgeschichte (history of religion), and the Johannine community. Narrative criticism and intercultural criticism are placed along the trajectory. A narrative philosophical approach is presented which draws on insights from narrative criticism and combines them with a focus on questions that are de facto philosophical pertaining to ontology, cosmology, epistemology, and ethics. The chapter ends by presenting the overall theory of the divine plan concerning Jesus and his addressees.

This chapter sets forth Baur’s theology of the New Testament as a historical–critical reconstruction, one having as its basis the ethical imprint of Jesus’ religion, and, at the same time intending to express an enduring religious truth that is to be understood against the background of Baur’s philosophy of history. For him, as for Bultmann nearly a century later, New Testament theology was theology in the sense of being itself truthful talk of God, not simply a reconstruction of the history of early Christian theology. Baur’s historical theology was, like Bultmann’s, a way of doing contemporary theology, not merely a historian’s contribution to the theological enterprise that could as well be done by a non-theologian. Their historical work was part of their different but analogous modern theological syntheses of faith, philosophy, and criticism.

Theologians of many stripes in the last century reacted negatively to the notion that God acts in history. Some have argued that the concept of divine action is inapposite to the findings of modern science, and others eschewed the language of special divine action on the grounds that it is unworthy of God, among other concerns. In this chapter the author engages one of the first theologians to tackle these objections head on: Schubert Ogden. He evaluates Ogden’s efforts, with an eye to his methodological assumptions that govern his work as a whole. He argues that Ogden’s account is deficient in its assumptions about the nature of action in general and divine action in particular.

The introduction spells out the general argument of the book. It presents Latour not as a sociologist and/or anthropologist but as an “empirical philosopher” crucially interested in the problem of tradition. It shows that, via Latour’s academic teacher André Malet, the practice of Biblical exegesis developed by Rudolf Bultmann had a major impact on the development of actor-network theory (ANT). It also points out that Latour’s writings reflect an almost continuous but somewhat half-hearted dialogue with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Between 2000 and 2010, Bruno Latour starts to shape his general theory of “regimes of enunciation” or “truth production.” In addition to science and technology, he considers religion, law and other areas. While his discussion of institutions and materiality remains tied to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the general framework is provided by an encounter between exegesis and phenomenology, i.e. between Rudolf Bultmann on the one side and Etienne Souriau as well as Gilbert Simondon on the other.

The conclusion argues that Bruno Latourșs philosophy is characterized by the gesture of innovation. His ultimate aim is to provide a new sociology for a new society. However, Latour’s innovation implies multiple gestures of oblivion, of effacement. One price to pay is to cut off almost all connections to historical materialism, Marxisms and similar strands of critical thought and action.