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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
In 1866, after a fall on the ice left her in despair of ever being able to walk again, Mary Baker Patterson (later Mary Baker Eddy) picked up her Bible and began reading stories of the healings performed by Jesus. As she lay in bed, picturing Jesus commanding the lame to rise and demons to be gone, her own sense of the power of Divine Love became so strong that she stood up and walked, knowing that she was completely healed. Free from the weakness, pain, and fear that had plagued her life for decades, Eddy became a forceful and successful leader, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist who devoted the rest of her life to teaching others to know the healing power of Divine Love.
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6. Of course, religion (and Christianity in particular) can also cause suffering. The celebration of suffering in Christian history, and the role of Christian belief in stimulating suffering, is a subject for another paper. Suffice it to say here that if its effect in promoting suffering consistently overshadowed and exceeded its healing effect, Christianity would probably be a dead or dying religion.
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10. Drawing from the existential theology of Søren Kierkegaard, Bultmann understood God's relation to the world as a powerful, ongoing activity that required engaged faith to see. Acknowledging Martin Heidegger's argument about the impossibility of ever being able to separate the vital essence of being from finite interpretations of it, he admitted that every act of demythologization involved an inevitable tendency to remythologization. Hoping to stimulate fresh experiences of God's ongoing activity in the world, Bultmann passed over questions about the literal, historical truth of the miracle stories and moved away from the quest for the historical Jesus that had inspired previous generations of New Testament scholars. Rather than thinking of a miracle “as an event which happens on the level of secular (worldly) events,” Bultmann argued that we should think of it “as happening within them.” As he claimed in 1958, “Belief in the almighty God is genuine only when it actually takes place in my very existence.” Locating the meaning of Christian revelation within the existential self, Bultmann believed that “[t]he question of God and the question of myself are identical.” Bultmann, Rudolph, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958)Google Scholar, quotations from 63, 61, and 53; also see Bultmann, Rudolf, Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting, trans. Fuller, Reginald H. (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956)Google Scholar; and Bultmann, Rudolf and five critics, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Bartsch, Hans Werner; trans, and rev. Fuller, Reginald H. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961; orig. pub. in German, 1948).Google Scholar
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