Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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option of standing aloof. Having heard the preached
word, "the whole man is under the necessity of decision;
there is no neutrality for him, he has to decide between
the only two possibilities which are there for his life,
between good and evil."'"'
Preaching "demands . . . obedience." Words Bultmann
wrote concerning Jesus' preaching apply equally well to
all preaching:
Now it can be only: either--or! Now the
question is whether a man really desires God
and His Reign or the world and its goods; and
the decision must be drastically made. . . .
Everyone is confronted with deciding what he
will set his heart upon--on God or worldly
goods. . . . For the Reign of God one must be
ready for any sacrifice.
Obedience, to be effective, must come from the
depths of inner being. A slavish legalism will not
suffice.
Radical obedience exists only when a man
inwardly assents to what is required of him,
when the thing commanded is seen as
Intrinsically God's command; when the whole man
stands behind what he does; or better, when the
whole man is in what he does, when he is not
doing something obediently, but is essentially
obedient.4.-7
Preaching "demands . . . faith." The Christian
message, even in Bultmann's demythologized form, retained
the necessity of faith.
The purpose of demythologizing is not to make
religion more acceptable to modern man by
trimming the traditional Biblical texts, but to
make clearer what the Christian faith is. He
must be confronted with the issue of decision,
be provoked to decision by the fact that the
stumbling block of faith, the skandalon, is
peculiarly disturbing to man in general, not
only to modern man.'se