Abstract
Konrad Hammann,
Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography
, trans. Philip E. Devenish, Polebridge Press: Oregon, USA, 2013; 624 pp.: 9781598151183, £51.95/$60.00 (hbk)
Rudolf Bultmann lived a very ordinary, extraordinary life. For all the apparent controversy that accompanied his famous work on demythologizing, or the publication of great texts like his Jesus book or The Commentary on John or the Theology of the New Testament, Bultmann spent the greatest part of his life in one place, at Marburg University, teaching and writing theology, philosophy and New Testament studies. At the same time he lived through the First World War; the Nazi regime and the Second World War; and survived long enough to witness the space race and the liberalizations of the 1960s. It was a life marked by the greatest regularity that the settled university life has to offer, set against the background of the great upheavals of the twentieth century.
There is a controversialist’s account of all that work, of course, but this isn’t it. Instead Konrad Hammann has written a very fine book for people who want to have an exhaustive study of Bultmann’s real character, and it is certainly hard to imagine any writer discovering more about this theologian’s life. Indeed the material covering the 1930s, 40 s and 50 s is full of great insight and humane judgement. Hammann has done a true service to Bultmann by demonstrating in tremendous detail exactly how actively opposed to Nazism he really was. Bultmann was massively unsettled by Hitler but chose to express that fact through immense loyalty, to friends and others, to Jews and Christians, but nearly always in private. That, of course, is one of the secrets of Bultmann’s life: for, unlike Barth, perhaps, Bultmann was an intensely modest and private man.
Too much writing about the old dialectic theologians will stray into polemic but there is no need to go there any longer; for Hammann has shown that, while one may maintain the old stereotype, the more accurate account is significantly different. There are some relatively weaker sections, of course. I am unconvinced by his analysis of Bultmann’s relationship with Heidegger, and I think there is more here to tell, in a different way, about the old demythologizing debates and their debt to historical phenomenology. But Hammann, to be fair, sets out to write as a historian rather than a philosopher, so his chapters on the 1920s should be read in that light.
In contrast Hammann’s last pages about Bultmann’s final months are intensely moving, a beautiful testimony to a good Christian life by a younger writer who, I am certain, must be a very fine pastor in his own right. That, in the end, is certainly the best way to recall Bultmann and his work: in the spirit of genuine piety that is such a great feature of Lutheran Protestantism. Whatever the old controversies and his contemporary marginalization, Bultmann deserves that much and has always deserved, too, a fitting account of his devoted life. Konrad Hammann has provided it and we are the better for his work.