ABSTRACT
In the course of this study I have developed a hermeneutic of the New Testament, which takes seriously that the New Testament is both a his torical document and the sacred scripture of Christianity. This approach has been developed starting with a discussion of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann' s respective presuppositions which led them to their different positions. In the discussion of the Barth-Bultmann debate, usually only the differences on the surface are recognised, so that Barth' s approach is described as 'theologieal', and Bultmann's either as 'existentialist' or even as merely 'technicai'. Yet at the heart of this argument lies a fundamental disagreement about the relation between the transcendent and the immanent with important implications for their distinct hermeneutical approaches. In short, Karl Barth assumes that the text cannot contain the meaning to which it refers; the text can onIy point at its meaning. Thus the interpreter has to reach to the meaning through the text, in order to arrive at 'the Word behind the words.' Rudolf Bultmann, on the contrary, holds that the text itself can carry the meaning, which is thus to be found in the words of the text rather than behind them. Further, we have discussed the epistemological foundations of the existentialist interpretation and have seen that Bultmann's hermeneutical approach does not dissolve theology into anthropology but that it is a possible way of understanding the world without turning it into an object.
