Rudolf Bultmann's courageous thought has been right at the centre of living Christian theology ever since the 194os. There is no doubt that his challenge will be equally crucial for the 196os. What we have so far lacked is an account of 'Bultmannism' clearly stating its message for preachers and lay people. Now Dr Bultmann has himself supplied this lack, and has taken the opportunity of making his position sharply clear in response to criticism that he is abandoning the essence of Christianity. For all who ask how Christianity can be restated without the 'myths' of the first century, the appearance of this short book is a help and an encouragement.

It is difficult to overestimate the singularity of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann's Theology of the New Testament changed the course of New Testament interpretation and has continued to influence the field until today. As ambitious in scope as it is consistent in method, Bultmann's volume asks and provides answers to the big questions. Bultmann also found a way to wed a sober-minded commitment to historical reconstruction to his deep desire for the New Testament to speak to contemporary humans.

Rudolf Bultmann remains the most influential New Testament scholar of the twentieth century. He weds rigorous source and form criticism to an unrelenting historicism while still articulating a robust, challenging, and relevant theology. Bultmann's grand achievement is not that he convinced everyone. Rather, it is that his work still remains the measuring stick for the study of the New Testament and early Christianity. Bultmann was no mere historian, technical critic, or New Testament theologian. Bultmann's geniusaand some think his Achilles heelaresides in his strategic use of existential philosophy as a means of interpreting the significance of Christianity. In History and Eschatology , first presented as the 1955 Gifford Lectures, Bultmann steps back to address larger philosophical questions about the relationship between history and the Christian future and then expands to consider how meaning exists within history. Bultmann begins with a discussion of ancient cyclical understandings of history before exploring the fundamental eschatological shift in historical understanding. Bultmann credits the Judeo-Christian tradition with reconceptualizing history as linear with a clear end, culminating in the second coming of Christ. But, as Bultmann argues, this new understanding of history was not without its own problems. The early church's profound disappointment in Christ's failure to return forced a Christian reinterpretation of historyaa teleological oneathat flourished in the Renaissance and eventuated, surprisingly, in Marxism. According to Bultmann, this teleology neglects the individual's participation in the Christ event. In the end, Bultmann draws on Paul and John to challenge this purely teleological approach and ground a Christian understanding of history and eschatology in the historical event of Christ that is both timeless and immediately present. Only through this Christ event, both in the past and future, does life find eternal meaning.

From 1926 to 1936 Rudolf Bultmann offered an introductory course in theology, which he continually revised and refined. Finally published posthumously, and now available in English for the first time, WHAT IS THEOLOGY? presents a clear compendium of the theology of a member of one of this century's rare number of giant scholars.