Bultmann is the most imaginative and creative of Lutheran theologians. A dialogue with him will thus enable us to elucidate what may be problematic about the Lutheran structure of faith. For Bultmann's thought is nothing if not powerful. Every time I read Bultmann I am struck anew by the sweep of his agenda. He enables Christianity to be viable in the present age in a way which I should have thought not possible. He is also enormously appealing existentially. If at the end of the day I must reject Bultmann (and Christianity) it will then have to be on carefully thought-out grounds. I do not do so lightly. A debate with Bultmann must be the best possible way to think out where I myself stand and why. It will become apparent that in some ways I am closer to ‘Catholicism’, but it is a Catholicism shorn of revelation! The fact that one could speak in these terms must pose questions for Catholicism. How central is revelation to Catholicism? The Lutheran suspicion has been that it is not: that is the problem which Luther and Lutherans have raised in relation to the structure of Catholic thought.

Bultmann has not had a good press in the Anglo-Saxon world, perhaps particularly in England. There has been no context in which to place his thought and he has been thoroughly misunderstood. Commentators tend to start from his ‘demythologising’, which they depict in wholly negative terms.