Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth

by Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Karl Bultmann, Norbert Guterman (Translator)

"Two of the most brilliant German thinkers of the twentieth century were Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann. Jaspers, the philosopher, and Bultmann, the theologian, were both influenced by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the rise of the existentialist movement. Late in their careers they interacted on the subject of Bultmann's attempt to divest Christianity of its mythical components and make sense of it in more modern terms." This running debate is a compilation of articles originally published in various scholarly journals by Jaspers and Bultmann. The first half of the book is Jaspers's lengthy and critical analysis of Bultmann's interpretation of Christianity. Finally, in response, Jaspers accepts some of Bultmann's clarifications but takes him to task on the subject of "justification by faith," which he feels Bultmann defines too narrowly and too exclusively.

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Theology, Christianity, Nonfiction

117 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1958

About the author

Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883 to a mother from a local farming community, and a jurist father. He showed an early interest in philosophy, but his father's experience with the legal system undoubtedly influenced his decision to study law at university. It soon became clear that Jaspers did not particularly enjoy law, and he switched to studying medicine in 1902.

Jaspers graduated from medical school in 1909 and began work at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg where Emil Kraepelin had worked some years earlier. Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and set himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach. In 1913 Jaspers gained a temporary post as a psychology teacher at Heidelberg University. The post later became permanent, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice.

At the age of 40 Jaspers turned from psychology to philosophy, expanding on themes he had developed in his psychiatric works. He became a renowned philosopher, well respected in Germany and Europe. In 1948 Jaspers moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland. He remained prominent in the philosophical community until his death in Basel in 1969.

Jaspers' dissatisfaction with the popular understanding of mental illness led him to question both the diagnostic criteria and the methods of clinical psychiatry. He published a revolutionary paper in 1910 in which he addressed the problem of whether paranoia was an aspect of personality or the result of biological changes. Whilst not broaching new ideas, this article introduced a new method of study. Jaspers studied several patients in detail, giving biographical information on the people concerned as well as providing notes on how the patients themselves felt about their symptoms. This has become known as the biographical method and now forms the mainstay of modern psychiatric practice.
Jaspers set about writing his views on mental illness in a book which he published in 1913 as General Psychopathology. The two volumes which make up this work have become a classic in the psychiatric literature and many modern diagnostic criteria stem from ideas contained within them. Of particular importance, Jaspers believed that psychiatrists should diagnose symptoms (particularly of psychosis) by their form rather than by their content. For example, in diagnosing a hallucination, the fact that a person experiences visual phenomena when no sensory stimuli account for it (form) assumes more importance than what the patient sees (content).

Jaspers felt that psychiatrists could also diagnose delusions in the same way. He argued that clinicians should not consider a belief delusional based on the content of the belief, but only based on the way in which a patient holds such a belief (see delusion for further discussion). Jaspers also distinguished between primary and secondary delusions. He defined primary delusions as autochthonous meaning arising without apparent cause, appearing incomprehensible in terms of normal mental processes. (This is a distinctly different use of the term autochthonous than its usual medical or sociological meaning of indigenous.) Secondary delusions, on the other hand, he classified as influenced by the person's background, current situation or mental state.

Jaspers considered primary delusions as ultimately 'un-understandable,' as he believed no coherent reasoning process existed behind their formation. This view has caused some controversy, and the likes of R. D. Laing and Richard Bentall have criticised it, stressing that taking this stance can lead therapists into the complacency of assuming that because they do not understand a patient, the patient is deluded and further investigation on the part of the therapist will have no effect.

Most commentators associate Jaspers with the philosophy of existentialism, in part because he draws largely upon the existentialist roots of Nietzsche and Kierk

Reviews

[Brett Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is about the 1953-54 debate through a series of letters between theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) and polymath philosopher and Protestant Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) about myth in Christianity. Notions of sanitizing the Bible of mythological elements commonly reported in the Levant and elsewhere in ancient times got started in 1830s Germany. Picking up on Enlightenment criticism (maybe with a dose of Voltaire) there was a fair amount of venom involved in dismissing the whole religious project as outdated for modernity. But Bultmann inherits this as a believer with hopes of attenuating the mythical elements while elevating the message. As Joseph Campbell would say, To hold the connotation above the denotation. For Bultmann, to emphasize the myths was to miss the message and reduce Christianity to something like a powerful magic show rooted in past events, not present personal revelations.

For Jaspers, to disinfect the legends is to remove the artistic authority of myths that, like an invisible thread, attach us to a deeper significance beyond abstract analysis. But like Bultmann, Jaspers also sees religion (of any sort) in trouble in modernity. “The real task,” says Jaspers, “is not to demythologize, but to recover mythical thought in its original purity, to appropriate…the marvelous mythical contents that deepen us morally…closer to transcendence.” Bultmann says the chasm between modernity and myths that can no longer communicate as they once did disallows this. Jaspers says they do (Campbell says they can), that the human mind remains fundamentally the same as the ancients, though wrongly swayed by a kind of popular “superstition of science.”

Jaspers is longwinded, hyper-philosophically picky, and often feels like a toothache. An unrelenting throb in one’s head that makes us want to dig that tooth out with a spoon. Bultmann is much less snarky or insulting, and more respectful, though clearly miffed with Jaspers, who, Bultmann claims, argues over things which Bultmann has no concern or quarrel (partly true). After Jaspers' next letter (toothache), Bultmann responds with a single short paragraph. Something like, “Nice communicating with you.” An informative, sometimes brilliant book, but best served with pain killers.

[Davy Bennett]

Donating browned and heavily underlined pages.
1964 NoonDay Press.
Did not get Goldwater elected.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modernity was a troubling thing for those who had to live through it. Pure, objective, unassailable science was quickly supplanting religious ideas, and paring those ideas down to what they were – mere myths perpetrated on us by those who wanted to exert social and cultural control. Or at least this was the conclusion reached by many who, with the advent of a new way of approaching universal truth, now wanted nothing to do with that old-time religion. But not everyone felt the same way. This very short book introduces the thought of Rudolph Bultmann, one of the leading German theologians of the early twentieth century and proponent of “demythologization,” and Karl Jaspers, the well-known German existentialist and philosopher. First, there is a very capable introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann, followed by an opening statement by Jaspers, a reply by Bultmann, and then a closing reply by Jaspers. Jaspers and Bultmann both being dyed-in-the-wool Heideggerians, it is interesting to read about their intellectual justifications regarding the respective virtues and weaknesses of hermeneutics as applied to religious myth.

As I mentioned earlier, toward the latter part of Bultmann’s career, he started to talk about something called demythologization, in which he attempts to divest religious meaning and intent from the original myths in which they are couched. For Bultmann, the Ascension and the Virgin Birth (just to name two highly representative religious myths) mean something, but the fact that the religious content is ensconced in the language of the miraculous is a serious stumbling block for the modern man whose mind has come to see the miracle as ridiculous and impossible. Therefore, these myths need to be reconfigured – divested – of their Biblical form and given a structure which is makes getting at their meaning and significance possible for someone living in the twentieth century.

Jaspers, however, sees the element of myth as indispensable from the content of religious belief itself. Jaspers claims that “reading” these myths without their mythical structures is impossible. He rejects the idea that any religion can be understood apart from its mythical origins. The topology of the origins themselves, he argues, is essential to our understanding. Religious myths are not there to provide us with a decoding project; their cutting away cannot happen without the simultaneous disappearance of any possibility of a religious message. Myth is, for Jaspers, das Umgreifende (the Great Encompassing) by and through which we can escape the worn dualities of subjectivity and objectivity, and achieve a sort of transcendence.

Jaspers saw Bultmann’s project of demythologization as a sanitizing one, one that failed to understand myth as an essential vehicle for apprehending and describing the transcendent. Jaspers comes close to the one that Northrop Frye constructs in “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature,” in which he suggests that modern attempts to read the Bible are often foiled because we no longer read and write in the mythical; rather, he thinks, following Vico’s tripartite theory of language, that our system of writing has since taken on empirical, positivistic concerns. While Frye thinks that one cannot read the Bible without myth since it is written in myth, Jaspers respects the mythic, and asserts that the religious person must come to terms with it. Jaspers accuses Bultmann of a scientism which sees itself as being responsible for not be accused of foolish mythologies.

I would like to include a word about the construction and editing of the book itself. It has a wonderful introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann which provides one of the greatest contexts and explanations of the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century. However, Jaspers’ first parry in the conversation includes a lot of material from his Existenzphilosophie which is completely unnecessarily for the overall understanding of the text and the content of the argument at hand. This part of the text includes explanation the reader could have done without, like “We cannot think unless something becomes an object for us. To be conscious means to live in that clarity which is made possible by the split between I and the object. But it also means to live within the walls constituted by the split between the I and something known to be an object.” And so on. If this language had been excised, the book would have made its argument in tighter, more cogent terms. Also, of the 88 pages devoted to the back-and-forth of Bultmann and Jaspers, Bultmann is allotted a grand total of 12 pages, which makes me think the editor may have had a slight bias. In any case, the substance of the debate is fascinating, but these weak points to detract from the overall rating. I would recommend a close examination of these ideas for anyone interested in the shapes and trends of liberal theology in the twentieth century, but one can probably find another publication whose editor is less clumsy in communicating them.

[Jc · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book presents an argument between Karl Jaspers (philosopher) and Rudolf Bultmann (theologian), both considered "brilliant German thinkers of the 20th c.". They discuss how and how much myth and mythical thinking is central to christianity. I have to say from my perspective (a "strong" atheist who is relatively widely read [for a nonbeliever] in christian history, philosophy, and theology), their arguments are rather self-serving. They appear to just be trying to convince their opponent that they have the better understanding of TRUE protestant christianity. I do not recommend this to anyone except the serious student of 20th c. religious philosophizing who is trying to fill in a few gaps. I am sure that to moderate-to-liberal christian thinkers of the 1950s this righteous mumbling seemed cutting edge. Of historical interest only.

[Joseph Sverker]

It is interesting to read a book where two such influential thinkers in philosophy, respectively theology is writing to each other. I am not quite sure they ever get to interact properly or that they come to understand their differences. It is useful as a short insight into their different thoughts, and also how they see that they differ while still defining themselves within, more or less, existentialism.