CII
Don February 9th, 2010
CII
Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.” I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”
Rudolf Bultmann is no longer “hot” in biblical criticism, but his disciples continue to wreak their havoc on faith, not to mention common sense. He thought we could no longer believe the New Testament because it was mythological, and that we had to “demythologize” it in order to find what was true there. Never mind that anything that did not fit with Modernism, Rationalism, and Scientism was automatically dismissed as “mythology,” nor that when you removed the supernatural there was very little left. Well, the joke is on the Bultmanniacs. Did they really understand even mythology any better than they did the New Testament?
A Parable for Demythologizers
To Rudolf Bultmann
“We come with rusty hatchets to chop down
Old Yggdrasil, the mightiest of trees;
We come with buckets full of air to drown
Old Triton, ruler of the seven seas.
For we are Modern Men, the heirs of Time,
And won’t be ruled by anything that’s gone
Before. So if we think it more sublime
To exorcise Aurora from the dawn,
Then who is there who dares to say us nay?”
And so the desert wind swept through their minds
And found no obstacle placed in its way
To stop the stinging dust, the sand that blinds.
Blistered, parched, and withered, one by one
They fell beneath the branches of the Tree,
Succumbing to the unrelenting Sun
In cool, green shade beside the roaring Sea.
Donald T. Williams, PhD