Perhaps no individual has done more to shape modern interpretation of the Bible than the late Marburg professor, Rudolf Bultmann. Known for his radical program of demythologizing the New Testament, he argued that an objective grammatico-historical method of biblical interpretation is neither possible nor desirable. Bultmann called for a new vorverstandnis, a “prior understanding” that controls interpretation of the Bible. In order for us to get valid answers from the Bible we must learn how to ask the right questions. We must cut through the mythological husk of the New Testament to glean the authentic kernels of relevant truth.
    
What demands such a radical approach to the Bible is that the Bible was written by people who believed in a view of the world that Bultmann declares modern science has totally destroyed. He argued that one cannot avail himself of electricity, television, medicine, and other technological wonders and believe in a three-tiered universe of heaven up there, hell down below, and the earth in the middle. The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age where people believed in angels, demons, miracles, and a dying and rising God.
    
The only “miracles” Bultmann allows are the miracles of modern technology. It is not supernatural forces that affect our lives, but natural forces. Illness is caused by bacteria and viral strands, not demons. We live in a world where matter can be released into energy but where water does not become wine, ax heads do not float, and corpses do not return from the grave.
    
Underlying Bultmann’s critique of the biblical worldview is his own uncritically accepted view of a nineteenth-century assumption of a closed mechanistic universe. In this system there is room for God a Creator but the world operates as a well-oiled machine, left to run on its own with no tinkering or intrusions from its maker save for a mystical, spiritual visitation now and then that is outside the realm of ordinary history. For Bultmann salvation is punctiliar; it occurs virtually in an existential moment of decision. It occurs spontaneously, “directly from above.”
    
Here the gospel is ripped from its historical framework and hurled into a mystical never-never land. The two planes of time and space are reduced to the “here and now” of the existential event of faith.
    
Underlying this crisis of hermeneutics or the correct approach to biblical interpretation is an age-old philosophical question. The question is—“How is God related to the universe?”
    
Historically there are three answers to this question. The three basic models may be described as 1) secondary causality, 2) causal monism, 3) concurrence.
    
The secondary causality model assumes that the only causal power that operates in this world is the power exerted by the parts of the world-machine itself.  Human beings as causal agents are cogs in the wheels of this vast machine. The deistic paradigm of this view allows for God as the primary cause of the universe-machine, but once he designs and builds the machine he leaves it to run by its own power. Here God is like Aristotle’s unmoved mover, a do-nothing king who reigns but does not rule.
    
The idea of a closed mechanistic universe became popular in seventeenth-century Europe and made massive inroads into the thinking of modern man. It was challenged by many, especially the so-called “occasionalists” who developed an alternate model we call causal monism. Causal monism appears in many forms and indeed ante-dated the seventeenth-century philosophers. The basic assumption of the casual monism is that God is the only causal agent in reality. They would say that when I put my pen to this paper I am not the actual cause of writing this essay but merely the coincidental occasion for God to make these words appear on paper. God is the invisible direct cause of every thing that happens. Individual freedom is ultimately an illusion.
    
Both a mechanistic reduction of causality to secondary causes alone, and a reduction of all causality to God alone are foreign to the biblical view. The biblical view is that of concurrence. Concurrence affirms that we live in a universe where God sustains and governs what he creates. He is sovereign over every natural action and reaction. He is sovereign over every human decision. But his sovereign reign does not exclude secondary causes. He works his will through the means of real human choices and real natural powers.
    
Bultmann insulted ancient man by calling him “pre-scientific.” The first century Romans did not have microchip computers, but they were not stupid. The ancient Greeks didn’t watch television but they still had minds. Archimedes would have been as astonished to see an ax head float in his bathtub as Albert Einstein would. The biblical miracles were recorded as miracles because New Testament people were as unaccustomed to seeing water turn into wine and corpses rising from the graves as we are. The Bible records these events as miracles and not as myths precisely because ancient man was as empirically oriented as we are. Yet there was nothing in their scientific knowledge that precluded a view of God and the world as concurrence. There is nothing to preclude that same view of concurrence now. Television and computers do not preclude the sovereignty of God. Indeed they affirm it.

The article was previously published in Eternity Magazine, October 1987.