Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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where man reaches the perfection of his true, real
essence." 7 Thus, human restlessness leads man to an
instinctive search for God.
Men, living in community, seek to communicate with
one another their experience of the eschatological,
transcendent, and divine. But lack of any joint
experiential knowledge of that existence makes this
difficult. This tension forces them into the language of
"myth." Bultmann wrote, "Mythology is the use of imagery
to express the other worldly in terms of this world and
the divine in terms of human life, the other side in
terms of this side."e
Bultmann saw value in the myths of traditional
Christianity, as recorded in the Bible. But one must
peel away the husks, the mythical forms, to discover the
valuable content they enclosed. New Testament myths may
have communicated well to first century man, but
accepting them as literal truth would today require "a
sacrifice of understanding."
Changes in world view require restatement of
mythical truths. The theologian (and preacher) must
assume "the view of the world which has been moulded by
modern science and the modern conception of human nature
as a self-subsistent unity immune from the interference
of supernatural powers." 1 ° Contemporary man can no
longer accept literally such doctrines as "death . . .
[as] the punishment for sin," "the atonement," or "the
[physical] resurrection of Jesus."11