DEMYTHOLOGIZING

Demythologizing refers to a hermeneutical method that takes the position that much of Scripture is mythological, and that it is necessary to take account of this fact in perceiving the religious significance of Scripture. The prominence of this method in the second half of the twentieth century was due to Rudolf bultmann (1884–1976), particularly to his essay of 1941 titled "The New Testament and Mythology; The Problem of Demythologizing the New Testament Preaching." Bultmann proposed that a thorough demythologizing is the key to interpreting the mythological statements in the NT, the means to recover the deeper meaning of myth, and the process to clarify and restore the challenge and call of the Word of God.

To understand demythologizing one must consider myth first and then hermeneutics. After considering the characteristics of mythology and the relationship between myth and the NT, this article will treat of the relationship between hermeneutics and mythology in Bultmann's thought and present a critique thereof. It will then discuss the rehabilitation of the category of myth in Catholic thought.

Mythological Thought. No one definition of myth is completely satisfactory. Bultmann's methodology considers myth an unscientific and primitive manner of conceiving and expressing thought in which imagery is used to express the otherworldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of the human. Thus the transcendence of God is expressed by spatial distance. Because myth concretizes, hell and heaven are localized. As a primitive and uncritical way of reasoning, myth attributes disease to demons, the current state of evil to a primeval war among gods, and cosmic phenomena to the activity of spirits.

Characteristics. The essence of mythological thought appears in opposition to the developed, scientific, objective, and critical thought best exemplified in the empirical sciences and the modern scientific world. While scientific thought seeks intelligibility from within phenomena, mythical thought postulates otherworldly causes. Scientific thought proposes a closed world; mythical thought, an open world. Mythical thought further presents human existence itself as open and susceptible to outside influence. Thus myth really expresses the enigma and mystery of human existence, its dependence on otherworldly powers. Since mythical thought manifests purpose and intention, the possibility of demythologizing lies in the relatively modern discovery of a controlled hermeneutics that seeks to reach the intention and meaning of myth.

Myth and the New Testament. Before proceeding to hermeneutics as a method of understanding myth, the broad structure of myth in the NT must be considered. In the obsolete cosmology of the NT the world is spatially conceived in three layers: heaven, earth, the underworld. Earth is capable of influence from above and below. Before the Redemption man is under the hegemony of the lower world and is so influenced that Satan, sin, and death dominate him. In the redemptive process God's Son is sent from above to overcome the lower forces. Thus there is continual conflict of the upper and lower forces.

Aptly taken from gnosticism and the Jewish apocalyptic, myth permeates the presentation of the salvation history. jesus christ is the preexistent son of god. He is born of a virgin and performs miracles. His death expiates the sins of others and His Resurrection precipitates a cosmic catastrophe. He descends into hell and ascends into heaven, whence He shall return on the clouds to judge. Soon a resurrection of the dead will signify the final defeat of powers from the nether world. Believers united by faith in the saving events portrayed in mythical terms are bound to Christ by Baptism [see baptism (in the bible)] and the eucharist, which work like purely physical forces. Hermeneutics must distill the meaning of myth and at the same time preserve the Gospel as kerygma.

Hermeneutics and Mythology. If the genre of myth was a stage of expression in a civilization of limited science and fewer literary forms and was found in literature contemporaneous with the Bible, then hermeneutics could expect to find and hope to interpret myth in the Bible. With relative ease and certainty one could locate myth in Genesis. J. G. Eichhorn (1752–1827), who had introduced C. G. Heyne's concept of myth into Biblical criticism, further applied the theory to the temptations of jesus, the apparition of the angels, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. In 1835 D. F. strauss applied the theory of myth to the entire NT. Scholars of mythological tendencies sought an apologetic significance—some religious or theological purpose—in the newly discovered mythology. Their problem was to eliminate myth and to retain a significant religious truth capable of independent existence.

Existentialist Hermeneutics. From his earliest days Bultmann had been occupied with the problem of interpreting documents. He rejected solutions of the liberal theologians and those of the History of Religions School (see religions, comparative study of). He based his own hermeneutical method on a viewpoint large enough to interpret myth and to retain the NT as kerygma. Bultmann's teacher, Wilhelm Herrmann, had said that to say something about God is to affirm something about man, and that understanding history is understanding one's own existence. Wilhelm dilthey had asserted that all understanding and interpretation involves a prior relation, that is, the relation of the interpreter in his life to the subject or text at hand. Thus Bultmann was to say later that there is no such thing as presuppositionless interpretation; the perspective and interests of the interpreter govern all interpretation. The precise basis for interpreting Scripture is the question about God at the heart of human existence.

Given the relation of man to the text, it was partially Martin Kähler's influence that suggested that human existence as described in the NT is historical, geschichtlich, for salvation history too is the field of human decisions. Both Kähler and Bultmann saw in the NT, especially in St. paul the Apostle, history absorbed into eschatolo gy, so that historical significance is in the human choice, the now of accepting or rejecting God (Rom 7.7–25). Salvation history is the history of the man who is freed from sin and death to live under grace (Rom 6.14). And human existence receives its historical and eschatological character through a willed encounter with Christ in the preached word. Strictly human history, therefore, is distinguished from and goes beyond what is commonly called world history or the study of nature because man's history is constituted by actions, decisions, and choices based on man's own understanding of himself. Inquiry into man's existence, therefore, cannot be neutral because man lacks the distance required for neutral observation. Thus man's existence is historical and must be understood and interpreted in this historical sense.

Application to the New Testament. The kerygma of the Church proclaims that in Scripture man will receive a decisive understanding of his existence. But the saving events are not recovered by strictly neutral or disinterested historiography but rather by personal engagement. Hence the question about God (which is really the question about human existence) comes face to face with a particular understanding of God and human existence. This interested, involved, existential question about existence—answered in the NT—is not answered by objectifying processes that would offer an illusory security but rather by faith. Thus is the relation of man to the NT resolved.

At this point Heideggerian philosophy has provided the concepts and terms by which human existence may be understood, interpreted, and explained. This philosophy correctly assumes that being can speak to man. The reflective analysis of existence seeks the meaning of existence. Faith, on the other hand, shows that this question is really the question about God. While philosophy cannot give man the power to achieve authentic existence, it can put man in a position where he is capable of meeting God. Philosophy can further provide the theoretic structure capable of articulating the understanding of existence found in the NT.

All the above aspects focus on the one major element of the NT—the possibility of a new understanding of existence given to man in the supreme events of salvation. Myth, therefore, is interpreted in terms of what God says about human existence through the mythological accounts. Thus the expiatory death of the preexisting Son of God intends to convey the eschatological character of God's activity in Christ so far as this event is decisive for man. The purpose of the Resurrection narratives is didactic, not historical. The Resurrection accounts inform man that Christ's death was not an ordinary death but the judgment and salvation of the world. Cross and Resurrection together are the judgment of the world and the possibility of a new and authentic existence for man. In the preached Word man is asked to understand himself as crucified and risen with Christ. The intention of the mythological portrayal is to present a reality beyond the objectifiable and observable in its decisive significance.

Critique. Bultmann's basic hermeneutics have the merit of attempting to make revelation relevant for modern man through a systematized theology and a pertinent interpretation of modern significance. The concomitant presuppositions of this kind of demythologizing intelligently stress what James M. Robinson has called the heuristic involvement of the scholar in the work of interpretation. Demythologizing further emphasizes that God speaks to every aspect of the human condition. Thus demythologizing intends to preserve the vertical perspective of the Bible by reaching the Lord as Lord here and now and by demanding authentic Christian witness here and now. At the same time demythologizing seeks to preserve seeming opposites—the transcendence of God as well as the dimension of God as the God-for-us, an idea so congenial to the Greek Fathers.

However, there are evident difficulties to Bultmann's posture of demythologizing. Many scholars have noted that demythologizing tends (despite Bultmann's emphasis on the fact that self-understanding depends on events outside of man's consciousness) to minimize or eliminate the objective reality of the saving events. It is difficult to see how demythologizing avoids turning Christ into a symbol where inward faith is almost the sole determining constituent of saving reality.

Secondly, admitting God's activity in history, as demythologizing certainly does, the difficulty of distinguishing myth from events that are nonmythical yet beyond the range of normal occurrence must make one cautious in calling too much of the NT myth. Nor are mythical extra-Biblical parallels apodictic proof that similar Gospel incidents are mythological because of a socalled scientific world view. Arguments here must be treated with the complexity and finesse they deserve.

Thirdly, Bultmann's opposition between myth and empirical scientific thought is perhaps too rigid and does not allow for the polymorphism of human cognition on all levels and the complementary dialectic rather than contradictory opposition of various modes of cognition. More work is required to appreciate the analogous nature of understanding and insight.

Contemporary Catholic Thought. Modern studies in the field of depth psychology and the history of religions have brought about a far-reaching rehabilitation of myth. Myth is rather commonly regarded by Catholic scholars as a distinct mode of knowledge that can never be adequately reduced to rational discourse and as a mode essential to religious expression. If religion is understood as a dialogue between God and man, and if Revelation is viewed as the total process by which God draws near to man and manifests his presence, then assuredly the possibility that the divine presence might be apprehended and registered in mythical thought and symbolism must be kept open.

Among Catholic biblical scholars the thought of Mircea eliade and Paul ricoeur on myth has been influential in recent years. Eliade describes myth as the narration of a sacred history, relating an event that took place in primordial time, the sacred time of the beginning. Myth narrates how through the deeds of supernatural beings a reality came into existence. Myth can be known, experienced, and lived by means of recitation and ritual. The myth is lived in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or reenacted. The relevance of such a description for a deeper understanding of both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharist has been grasped by Catholic biblical scholars.

In his work, Paul Ricoeur has analyzed the process whereby a primal experience finds a language, assembles that language into a myth, and subsequently generates reflection on the myth, which reflection, in turn, becomes a theology. Myth, secondary symbolism according to Ricoeur, emerges from primary symbolism and develops into an elaborate, tertiary symbolic system. In the NT are found the primary symbols of sin and redemption from sin. The NT theologies accept the myth of the rebellion of the primal man, Adam, as the narrative account of the origin of the primary symbol, "sin," and accept the symbol "sin" as corresponding to a fundamental aspect of reality experienced in the world (e.g. Rom 5.12). But there is also in the NT the corresponding primary symbol of redemption from sin (e.g. Rom 5.18–21), which is based upon the death of Jesus interpreted as redemption by means of the symbolic language deriving from the suffering servant passages in Isaiah 53, and expressing the fundamental view of mankind's situation in the light of resurrection faith. From these examples it may be seen that the type of myth or mythical symbol that is the concern of the NT and scholars is the existential myth.

The existential myth or mythical symbol comes into existence so that man can live meaningfully in the tension of his unlimited desire to know, his orientation toward the transcendent, and his finite capacity both to know and to achieve. Against man's permanent horizon of mystery, transcendence and the unknown, mythical symbolism provides both a necessary and realistic orientation; it provides some realistic sense of balance in the tension at the heart of all human existence, and as such is permanently a legitimate vehicle of human meaning and cognition. The existential mythical symbol is found not only in the creation myth involving Adam and the vicarious redemption found in Second Isaiah, but is also biblically expressed in the concept of cosmic salvation found in the prologue of John's Gospel and in such similar NT hymns as Philippians 2.6–11; Colossians 1.15–20; 1 Timothy3.16; Hebrews 1.2–5 and 1 Peter 3.18–22. And certainly the eschatological and apocalyptic presentation of both the OT and NT fulfill the criteria of existential mythical symbolism.

The most common function of the mythical symbol in the NT is that of interpreting history. In the crucifixion narrative for example, Mark presents details taken from Psalms 69 and 22, which are concerned with the righteous sufferer and God's vindication of him: Mark 15.23, the offering of wine mingled with myrrh from Psalms 69.21; 15.24, the dividing of the garments from Psalms 22.18; and 15.29, the mocking from Psalms 22.7. These narrative details are not true at the level of factual history but are included because the crucifixion of Jesus is interpreted by Mark as the death of the righteous sufferer whom God vindicated and hence as the fulfilment of Psalms 69 and 22. In an interpreted sense, however, they are true and their use illustrates how the NT narrative through the mythical symbol interprets the event. In much of the NT history (Historie ) is presented as historic (Geschichte ), and that history as historic involves history as historical and the historical as interpreted by the mythical symbol.

See Also: hermeneutics, biblical; myth and mythology (in the bible).

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[p. j. cahill/

j. ryan]