The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

by David Bentley Hart

But the real danger that Bultmann's thought represents is a gnostic etiolation of the gospel, its transformation into a fable of the soul, whose true meaning is a wisdom and peace vouchsafed inwardly, in the intactile depths of the self. His theology demonstrates with extraordinary clarity that to demythologize is not to demystify; its ultimate effect is not to ground faith in history or the worldliness of creaturely being, but to de-historicize, to unworld the soul, to make faith the experience of a mystical eschaton in perpetual advent, in the inner core of the present, imparted to the self in its most inviolable subjectivity. The church as a society in time (and society, therefore, as potentially the church) is displaced from the center of faith by the story of the self as a homeless wanderer seeking escape from history.