For generations of seminarians, the name Rudolf Bultmann was inescapable. His work was assigned in graduate theology courses and adopted by professors. His impact on Christian biblical scholarship was corrosive. However, the premises underlying his work were not seriously questioned by the institutions that required their students to study him.
Bultmann was not an atheist. Nor was he, in his own mind, an enemy of Christianity. Born in Germany in 1884, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he spent his career as a professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg and became one of the most influential Protestant Bible scholars of the twentieth century. Bultmann claimed to rescue Christianity for modern man. That belief deserves a critical response rather than deference.
Bultmann began by tracing how stories of Jesus were reshaped by early Christian communities before being written in the Gospels. That method convinced him that historians could never recover reliable information on the life and person of Jesus. Then, he drew upon the philosophy of his Marburg colleague, Martin Heidegger, who emphasized personal decision and authentic living. Those influences combined in Bultmann’s 1941 program of “demythologizing.”
Bultmann’s point was this: modern people, shaped by science, cannot believe that miracles and spirits were truly part of the New Testament world. Instead of asking whether the bodily Resurrection happened, he shifted focus to the believer’s existential encounter with the Christian proclamation. The Resurrection, to him, was not a verifiable historical event to investigate, but a message to be encountered through faith. Whether the bodily Resurrection happened in history was unimportant to his theology.
Why did Catholic and Protestant seminaries assign his teachings? And why does his thinking still show up in pulpits under other names? He simply became too influential to ignore. Moreover, the Church’s encouragement of serious historical study (from Divino Afflante Spiritu through Vatican II) was taken as permission to adopt scholarship developed elsewhere rather than wrestle with historical questions.
Fr. John A. Perricone, who entered the seminary in 1968, described the theological turmoil in his April 2026 interview with Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas. He recalled seminary instruction openly contradicting Catholic doctrine. He offered a firsthand glimpse into an environment where theological novelty was mistaken for intellectual progress, and fidelity to traditional teaching dismissed.
The Church has never treated the historical foundation of Christianity as negotiable. The scandal is not that seminarians had to read Bultmann. It is that he was often seen as a master before whom faith had to make excuses rather than as an opponent to be examined and answered. Too many seminaries failed to train priests to counter Bultmann’s arguments. Instead, they taught generations to defer to him.
The core error of Bultmann’s analysis is letting assumptions from his own age decide what God could and could not have done. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) criticized historical interpretations of Scripture presented as objective that tell us more about the mind of the interpreter than the biblical text itself. Many of Bultmann’s conclusions have since been challenged. His method did not age well, but his assumptions did.
Bultmann’s method has what I have defined in another book I am writing as the “fingerprint of evil.” It keeps the Church’s language but empties it of meaning. Resurrection and salvation survive, but the realities they name do not. Bultmann offers a weakened faith in which the historical reality of the Resurrection is diminished. His method invites believers to abandon supernatural claims. The devil does not need a willing collaborator to achieve his aims. He only needs a persuasive one. Bultmann’s method undermined Christianity from within.
Bultmann’s argument fails on at least three separate grounds, each of which I take up in Resurrection on Trial (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).
First, Bultmann arrogantly assumes that modern science renders supernatural claims of first-century believers incredible. He substitutes the prejudices of his own age for an examination of the historical evidence. The actual record does not permit that. Jesus’ crucifixion was public, attested by historical sources, and final. The earliest witnesses knew death well. When they said that the tomb was empty, that they had seen, touched, and eaten meals with the risen Jesus, they were not speaking in symbols. They were making claims others could investigate and, if false, disprove. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14). That is not a metaphor; it stakes everything on fact.
Second, Bultmann’s reading takes away what made the Resurrection shocking. As N.T. Wright has shown, bodily resurrection had a specific meaning for first-century Jews, namely that the dead would rise at the end of the age. No one who heard that Jesus was raised would have taken it as a figure of speech for feeling renewed. Something radical was claimed about one man. Bultmann was not returning to what the early Christians meant. He offered a replacement for a modern audience.
Third, Bultmann removes a crucial distinction between Christianity and any other philosophy of personal meaning. If the Resurrection is only a symbol, it carries no more historical weight than a fable or good advice. By Bultmann’s logic, finding Jesus’ bones would not change anything about the truth of the message. Faith that no discovery could disprove is not historically grounded. It is philosophy dressed up in religious language.
There is another problem that Bultmann failed to confront. Demythologizing did not remove philosophy from the Gospels; it substituted another philosophy in its place. His landmark essay is drawn from Martin Heidegger rather than from Scripture or Church tradition.
Bultmann did not remove purported mythology of the first century; he traded the eyewitness accounts for the philosophy of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, his ideas were not confined to lecture halls. They made their way to the pulpit. We witnessed followers like the late Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who dismissed the Virgin Birth, miracles, and the bodily Resurrection as myths and called on Christianity to reinvent itself without supernatural claims. He ruled out, by definition, what could have been tested with evidence.
A scholar who states a conclusion before examining the case has not conducted an inquiry. He has written a closing argument for one side and called it scholarship. What Bultmann and Spong offered was a Christianity that kept the vocabulary but dropped the Christian claims, persuasive to those who never examine it and worthless to anyone who does.
There is a plain word for keeping Christian language while emptying its substance: “heresy.” That is not an insult. It is the verdict when a theologian denies what the apostles proclaimed. Paul did not leave an escape route open. His writing in 1 Corinthians 15 defines our faith: Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared to Peter, the Twelve, more than five hundred at once, James, all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself, with each appearance offered as eyewitness testimony.
Take the Resurrection away from history and Paul’s message is empty, and those who built their lives upon it have believed in vain. In Resurrection on Trial, I answer that heresy fully in a head-on contest between evidence and doubt. When we weigh the historical evidence as any court would, the conclusion dismisses demythologizing point by point rather than deferring to it.
The Resurrection either happened or it did not. If it did not, then Christianity collapses like a house of cards. If it did, then Bultmann’s project was unnecessary. What he tried to soften was the truth. Unfortunately, the Church traded historical fact for Bultmann’s comfortable “modernization” of miraculous events. That surrender of the truth is now over. New generations of scholars are going back to the historical evidence that Bultmann downplayed.
The historical case for the bodily Resurrection is not something Christians must explain away. It is the very case Christianity was founded to proclaim. When the evidence is heard, the only rational holding is one that condemns the heresy that Bultmann taught.
Editor’s Note: For a disciplined, methodologically rigorous inquiry into the validity of the Resurrection, read Peter D. Martino’s new book, Resurrection on Trial: A Judicial Inquiry into the Christian Claim of the Resurrection of Jesus, available from Sophia Institute Press.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
