To start with, Bultmann made short work of the gospels and proclaimed, as noted earlier, that the gospels did not preserve the actual doings and teachings of Jesus and that nothing could now be known of the Jesus of history. He dismissed the stories based on Old Testament prophecies as concoctions by the evangelists. He dismissed all miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. He dismissed such of Jesus' sayings as could be traced to Jewish thinking of Jesus' time. "By a series of deductions he concluded that much of what appears in the gospels was not what Jesus had actually said and done, but what Christians at least two generations removed had invented about him, or had inferred from what early preachers had told them. Not surprisingly, Bultmann's approach left intact little that might have derived from the original Jesus — not much more than the parables, Jesus' baptism, his Galilean and Judaean ministry and his crucifixion. Recognizing this himself, he condemned as useless further attempts to try to reconstruct the Jesus of history."15 Next, he invented a Jesus whom he named as the Christ of Kerygma.
Enquiry into what the real Jesus really believed or experienced inside himself, was ruled out. "Bultmann warned, in peremptory fashion: 'the kerygma does not permit any enquiry into the personal faith of the preacher' (that is, Jesus)... He is both heir and defiant defender of a long century of growing scepticism about the ability of the New Testament texts to tell us anything at all certain about the historical Jesus. He is an equally staunch opponent of what in the Reformation tradition was known as psychologism, that is, the attempt to describe the inner mental states of Jesus... In his view, then, to try to find out if Jesus was himself a man of faith was a task both idle and possibly pernicious. The true kerygma, the true preaching of Jesus as Lord, simply forbade it. Faith in Jesus...rules out any talk about the faith of Jesus."16
Jesus was simply to be presented as Lord without bothering about the basis and quality of that lordship. "Bultmann does not hold the same view of the divinity of Jesus as did Aquinas. Yet he is equally convinced that in the preaching of Jesus as Lord, if we are only open to it, God himself encounters us and enables us to make the faith-decision... Speculation about the personal faith of the historical Jesus is at best unhelpful to such an encounter with God in the preaching of Jesus as Lord. At best it will mislead us into thinking that Christian faith is merely a matter of imitating some mental states of Jesus presented to us now by some reliable historian."17
Bultmann's starting point was Kahler's thesis that the Gospels were "faith documents", and that they should not be subjected to historical scrutiny. But he carried the thesis much farther. "By the time Bultmann has finished developing Kahler's thesis, it is clear, the embargo on the quest of the historical Jesus is no longer based primarily upon the alleged inability of the historical method working on the sources at our disposal to paint a substantial picture of the historical Jesus. The point is made with mainly theological intent by Bultmann, as in his oft-quoted sentence: 'Faith, being a personal decision, cannot be dependent upon a historian's labours'... Clearly enough, the suggestion...is that Christian faith should not require the support of critical history."18
He places a ban not only on history but also on philosophy. "The object of our faith, according to Bultmann, is the Christ of the kerygma (the Christ of Christian preaching or proclamation) and not the person of the historical Jesus, and the 'Christ of the kerygma is not a historical figure which could enjoy continuity with the historical Jesus'. The Christ of Christian preaching is the risen Lord, not a historical Jesus. Bultmann would not want us to think that the faith by which our lives are literally saved is 'mere knowledge' or intellectual acceptance of a 'theoretical world view' that refers all existence back to a creator God. Rather, there is 'an individual man like us in whose action God acts, in whose destiny God is at work, in whose word God speaks'. And to have faith in this one is to let God rule our lives and not let them be ruled by any human power or plan or any worldly possession. 'What we are to learn from the cross of Christ is to go as far as to believe precisely this; and it is for this reason that Christ is our Lord, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.'"19
What is this kerygma or Christian proclamation? It is the cross rather than the gospels, says Bultmann. "But, of course, 'in the kerygma the mythical form of the Son of God has appeared in place of the historical person of Jesus'...The man in whose action God acts, in whose destiny God is at work, in whose word God speaks, is the Son of God, not the historical Jesus. 'The obedience and self-emptying of Christ of which he (i.e. Paul) speaks (Phil. 2.69; Rom.15.3; II Cor. 8.9) are attitudes of the pre-existent and not of the historical Jesus,' 'and the cross is not regarded from a biographical standpoint but as saving event..."'20
Who is to proclaim the kerygma or the proclamation? Bultmann's answer is quite clear. "It is the proclamation of the Christian community, not the repetition of the alleged preaching of Jesus or of the implications of his ministry, that can enable us, by God's grace, to confess Jesus as our present Lord, the crucified and the risen saviour, in the confession of whose name we contact that faith in God as the creator and giver of all life and existence by which we must then live. Only the Christian preaching demands our faith in the fact that this once crucified man is Lord of the world, and thus faces us with the awful paradox that the least likely of events is God's saving act in the world..."21
We are back to Tertullian: "It is certain because it is impossible." Whatever be the facts, the conclusions of Christian theologians remain the same. Christianity, they say, must retain its right to aggress against others, even if all evidences goes to show that its founder is a fiction, that the fiction is insufferably filthy, and that all its tom-tom in defence of that fiction is pure hogwash. Christian theologians will go on playing the game so long as the victims of Christian aggression do not tell them that their "risen Lord" and the rest is rubbish, pure and simple, and that the sooner they stop selling this junk, the better for their own morals and mental health. I am reminded of an observation which Mahatma Gandhi had made on the character of Christian theology. Talking to some Christian missionaries on 12 March 1940, he had said, "Among agents of many untruths that are propounded in the world one of the foremost is theology. I do not say that there is no demand for it. There is demand in the world for many a questionable thing."22
By the time he died in 1976, Bultmann had become far more famous than Schweitzer. The reason is very simple. Compared to the halting, half-yes-half-no, and mournful manner of Schweitzer, Bultmann was far more brazen-faced in his casuistry. It can be laid down as a rule that the more crooked and crafty a theologian, the higher the prestige he acquires in the eyes of those Christians who want to maintain that their abominable superstition is sublime truth, and that their aggression against other people has a divine sanction. It is the misfortune of the victims of Christian aggression that they have not only to counter the aggression in various forms but also to wade through the stinking cesspit that is Christian theology. Those who do not know the wiles of Christian theology are most likely to walk into the missionary trap. Missionary language is no guide to missionary intentions.
Commenting on Bultmann's proposition that kerygma means proclaiming the risen Lord, J. Jeremias, Professor of theology at the University of Gottingen, observed that this amounted to saying that Christianity began "after Easter" (crucifixion), and that this was "comparable to the suggestion that Islam began only after the death of Muhammad".23 Rev. D.E. Nineham, Warden of Keble College, University of Oxford, repudiated Bultmann's view that "if Jesus of faith is religiously satisfying, his historicity need not be insisted on", and replied that "such a standpoint reduces the gospel to a series of false statements about the life of a man who either never lived or was in fact toto caelo different from the statements about him'."24 The Jewish scholar, Dr. Geza Vermes, made fun of the Bultmann school by commenting that ihey have "their feet off the ground of history and their heads in the clouds of faith".25
James P. Mackey suspects that "people who try to force upon me a too dichotomous choice between Christian faith and critical history are hiding from me, and perhaps from themselves, a very definite, and a very questionable presumption about the Christian faith", and that "when the question concerns the sources of this faith in our lives, the manner in which we can contract this faith, then Bultmann's presumptions begin to show, and then they are questionable".26 He frowns upon the interdict which Bultmann has laid on all historical enquiry into the origins of Christianity. "Where does the Christian proclamation come from and where did it get this specific content, if not from the actual, historical life and death of Jesus of Nazareth?" he asks.
"Clearly," he continues, "Bultmann does not want such questions asked or answered. All attempts to raise and resolve such questions represent to him an illicit procedure, an attempt to 'legitimate' our preaching and our responding faith, an attempt to give ourselves 'a good conscience' about it. We are faced purely and simply with the proclamation which Bultmann has outlined... It makes no difference from what human words or deeds it came to us (oddly enough the only one from whom we can be quite sure this proclamation did not come is the historical Jesus)."11 In simple language, Bultmann asks us to accept a self-evident falsehood as self-evident truth.