Käsemann Vs. Bultmann

In my crazed book buying spree mentioned in the last post, I also found a dirt cheap copy of Ernst Käsemann’s Paulinische Perspektiven (Tübingen: Mohr, 1969) – one, being a Paul man, I was really pleased about. I’ve already gone over his ‘Zur paulinischen Anthropologie’ (chapter one) for my exegesis of a couple of passages in 1 Cor 6.

This is the chapter where Käsemann developed his famous argument against Bultmann’s understanding of soma (body). Bultmann thought soma represented the human ‘sofern er sich selbst als Objekt seines Verhaltens gegenständlich ist, sofern er sich von selbst distanzieren und unter die Herrschaft fremder Mächte geraten kann’ (Theology of NT, 1.200, 203). Käsemann counters in claiming that ‘Leiblichkeit sei das Wesen des Menschen in seiner Notwendigkeit, am Kreatürlichen zu partizipieren, und in seiner Fähigkeit zur Kommunikation im weitesten Sinne, nämlich seiner Bezogenheit auf eine ihm jeweils vorgegebene Welt’.

This may all sound like a small exegetical aside, a petty squable, but it needs to be remembered that Bultmann’s entire programme was heavily grounded in an anthropological study of Paul (see, e.g., the contents page of his Theology of the NT), because he insisted that God or the world or whatever couldn’t be spoken of as 'out there' without also saying something at the same time about humans – his famous line: ‘Jeder Satz über Gott ist zugleich ein Satz über den Menschen und umgekehrt’.

Käsemann, as at least modern exegetes like to think, resoundingly won this argument! He writes with such energy that it is easy to get carried along by his rhetoric and not pay attention to his actual arguments! I bet he was storming preacher.

Anyway, I think I'll try to finish off my review/summary of Küng's Der Anfang aller Dinge this weekend, and by doing so introduce my next small series on the questions of intelligent design, creation and evolution. I'm off to read a bit of Moltmann.