Ernst Käsemann: The Student Who Broke With Bultmann

Käsemann is my favorite kind of theologian to collect, because his books are also a record of an argument with his own teacher. He earned his doctorate at Marburg in 1931 under Rudolf Bultmann, and the two stayed in close theological and personal correspondence for the rest of Bultmann's life — right up until the moment Käsemann, in a 1953 lecture to a circle of Bultmann's own former students, effectively told him he was wrong.

That lecture, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” published in 1954, is the founding document of what scholars call the New Quest — a direct challenge to Bultmann's skepticism about recovering anything of the historical Jesus behind the Gospels' kerygma. It's a short, dense piece, usually found collected in his essay volumes, and it's worth reading precisely because you can hear a student's respect for his teacher and his refusal to simply inherit his conclusions in the same breath.

Before any of that scholarly reckoning, though, Käsemann was a Confessing Church pastor in Gelsenkirchen, a coal-mining district, where in 1937 he spent several weeks in Gestapo detention for publicly defending communist miners from the pulpit. It's not incidental biography — the same willingness to argue against the institution he belonged to shows up later in how he read Paul.

His scholarly capstone is the Commentary on Romans (German 1973, English translation 1980), the summation of a career spent arguing that Paul's theology can't be understood apart from Jewish apocalyptic expectation — Käsemann's own memorable phrase was that apocalyptic is “the mother of Christian theology.” Pair it with the essay collection Perspectives on Paul (1971) and the earlier New Testament Questions of Today (1969) for the fuller arc of his thinking on Paul before the commentary pulled it all together.