2018-03-31 Rudolf Bultmann

I find Bultmann's analysis of the modern vs. the pre modern worldview of early Christianity as current and clear now as when he wrote it 75 years ago. The first 3 or 4 pages of "New Testament and Mythology" make his case that the worldview of the early Christians cannot be held by modern man however hard he tries.

Pretty much everything else I've read of Bultmann I find incomprehensible as I do with every other theologian I've encountered. Abstractions about God sound like gobbledegook to me. I retreat back into the observation that the Mark 10:19 "secular" commandments were written down in the 1st century by Mark's author who attributes them to Jesus, who in turn attributes them to his God. Those commandments seem self evidently right to me, and do not by themselves require belief in the pre modern worldview Bultmann writes about. It appears to me that Jesus tried to keep them himself and to keep faith with the God he believed in until he was murdered by the State of his time. I vowed as a young man to try to keep his God's Mark 10:19 commandments and to worship his God as best I can without falsely witnessing to a pre modern worldview I do not have. I feel pretty cornered in how to keep that vow. Jesus' God is to me the source of those Commandments, and beyond that I fear to venture any assertions.