Walter Künneth (1 January 1901 in Etzelwang – 26 October 1997 in Erlangen) was a German Protestant theologian. During the Nazi era, he was part of the Confessing Church, and in the 1960s took part in the debate around the demands of Rudolf Bultmann to 'de-mythologize' the New Testament as an advocate of a word-oriented interpretation of the Bible. The Walter Künneth Prize is named after him.
Life
Youth and Training
Walter Künneth was the fourth child of minister Lorenz Künneth and his wife, Setta (born Setta Schlupper). Young Künneth grew up in the second ministry location of his father, at Hersbruck. His mother died shortly after his birth, due to an illness connected with the birth. After attending the humanities Gymnasium in Erlangen (where he was especially shaped by the neo-Lutheran theology of Phillip Bachmann and the faculty), young Künneth studied evangelical Theology in both Erlangen and Tübingen, from Fall 1920 until 1924, with the last two at Tübingen influenced by Karl Heim and Adolf Schlatter. He attained a doctorate under Friedrich Brunstad in Philosophie in 1924, with a work on Richard Rothe's Idea of God. He also joined the Christian student-organization known as Wingolf.
Vocational Developments During his time in Practical Seminary and a curacy in Munich (which lasted until 1926), he was ordained (2/15/25) and met his wife Mathilde, born Mathilde Ammon. In 1926, Künneth was chosen as a lecturer (Dozent) for the Apologetischen Centrale at the evangelical Johannesstift Berlin-Spandau, a department of the central committee for internal missions, where his student colleagues from Wingolf, Helmut Schreiner and Carl Gunther Schweitzer, already were employed. The concern in apologetics there was both the current Weltanschauung and religious situation of the Weimar Republic and the emerging Third Reich. Through a collection of materials that were marketed, published, and renumerated, the "New Apologetic" would give a reckoning for Christian Faith in speech with the modern World : in short, the first evangelical Work Academy was established. In 1927, Künneth left Berlin for Anbach to sit for a second theological exam, and he attained his Lizentiaten with a work on Kierkegaard's concept of sin. After his official Habilitation in Berlin in 1930, he held private lectures in theology and apologetics. By 1932, he had become the leader of the Apologetischen Centrale. Künneth noted, after a search for an angle of Biblical proof, that the Resurrection did not have an adept monographical work. In response, he wrote the often-reprinted Theology of the Resurrection (1933). With Helmut Schreiner, he also published "The Nation of God," which specifically aimed with missionary intent at their own citizens in Germany. Due to the founding of the Deutsche Kirchen in the course of the year 1933, especially the meeting at the Berlin Sports Palace, the book addressed the themes posed by National Socialism: Führer-headship, the obedience principle, Jewdom, and the race question. After the events of 1937, the Centrale was closed and Künneth's work was forbidden. Künneth was also banned from publishing and teaching throughout the entire Reich. In the following year, however, Hans Meiser gave him a ministerial position at Starnberg. In 1944, he was made the deacon of Erlangen. In 1946, he became honorary professor of theology in Erlangen. In 1953, he assumed Werner Elert's chair. In his extensive work after this point, he analyzed state ethics in The Great Waste (1947) and politics in God and the Devil (1954).
Engagement with Church Politics Along with the pastor of Dahlemer, Martin Niemöller, and the (at that time) General Secretary of the DCSV (Deutschen Christlichen Studentenvereinigung) Hanns Lilje, Künneth had founded in May 1933 the Young Reformation Movement (Jungreformatorische Bewegung), which opposed the co-opting of the Lutheran Evangelical Church by the Nazi state. Künneth belonged to the "Confessing Church" and also participated in an illegal Church Test-Commission in Berlin-Spandau, under president Hienrich Albertz. In the spring of '35, he circulated a 200-page reply to the standard work on Nazi race theory, Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts. It was entitled : A Reply to the Myth - The Difference between the Nordic Myth and the Biblical Christ. In this writing, he criticized the anti-Christian ideology of Rosenberg, although he shared some of the same concepts, such as "minderwertigen", "zersetzenden", and "Weltjudentum". Based on its large success (36000 copies in three months) the Gestapo replied by questioning him, closing the Apologetischen Centrale, and banning his works. His works were banned across the entire territory of the Reich, and his venia legendi to train others was revoked. He published another work which spoke of the betrayal of Luther in connection with Rosenberg, but this was also seized and destroyed. He was appointed to the vicariate of Starnberg in January 1938 by bishop Hans Meiser of Bavaria, and in 1944, accepted a call back to Erlangen. After the war's end, Paul Althaus made him an honorary member of the faculty there in 1945, and in 1946, he was a member of the Bavarian Land-Synod. Künneth turned down calls to Mainz, Munser, and Kiel, but in 1953 took over the teaching chair of Werner Elert. Unfavorably for his memory, Künneth had during the early Reich period spoken of (limited) cooperation with the Gestapo in the matter of information sharing concerning religious minorities like Jehovah's Witnesses. During the 1960s, Künneth endorsed the death penalty from a theological conviction that opposing it was a sign of moral weakness and national apostasy.
Later life In 1961, Mathilde died, the mother of his three children: Irmela, Adolf, and Freidrich-Wilhelm. Three years later, he married Gerda Bwtz of Lauban. In 1962, and in 1966, he was awarded medals of honor for service in Bavaria. In 1962, Wartburg Theological Seminary made him an honorary member of faculty. Künneth interpreted Bultmann's challenge to mythologized Christianity as a second Confessional fight, and became the leading member of the group of "No Other Gospel", along with Peter Beyerhaus, Paul Deitenbeck, Rudolf Baumer, Gerhard Bergmann, and Wilhelm Busch. In March 1966, he founded with Baumer the "Düsseldorf Declaration". In the 1960s, he participated in lectures, panel discussions, and other public offerings and debates with thinkers like Gerhard Ebeling, Joachim Kahl, Heinz Zahrndt, Dorothee Solle, Jorg Zink, Ernst Kasemann, Gunther Klein, and Ernst Fuchs; as an ecclesiastical office holder and confessional Christian, he was an anomaly. In 1981, he received the Order of Maximillian for Art and Knowledge. He died 26 October 1997, and a large crowd attended his funeral and burial at the churchyard of Neustadter.
Argument with Rudolf Bultmann In the 50s and 60s, Künneth had engaged himself to undertake the struggle against Rudolph Bultmann's demand to "de-mythologize" the New Testament. In the very center of the controversy stands the Resurrection of Jesus, just as the matter of his person and work (Christology). Künneth attempted to answer Bultmann's contention that the essence of the Gospel was the kernel of mythical truth embedded in the three-tiered, mythical Universe without failing to acknowledge Bultmann's insights. He did agree with Bultmann that If the resurrection is an event on the plane of history, then it also participates in all that determines the nature of history. The resurrection event is then a relative fact in the context of the phenomena and life of history, stands in continuity with a multitude of other known and unknown factors belonging to this world, is an element in historical existence and as such possesses no absolute validity but is subject to conditions and thus to the uncertainties and probabilities of all history. To insist upon the historic character of the resurrection has the result of objectifying it, ... that means... that the assertion of its historicality leads to an irresistible process of dissolution, which ominously threatens the reality of the resurrection itself. ( Künneth, The Theology of the Resurrection (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965), pp. 24–25.)
His difference with Bultmann can be described: It is important now to notice the strategic point of difference between Künneth and Bultmann : Künneth is able to avoid objectifying apologetics and rationalizations without demythologizing. He is able to achieve much the same end by adopting something' like Barth's insistence that though the event of the resurrection truly occurred in our world, it "transcends" historical causality and thus is (fortunately or unfortunately) undetectable by the historian's methods. (from Robert M. Price, "Risen Indeed?")
Künneth believed that although Bultmann was correct that empirical evidence could never decide the matter of the Resurrection (an event which was the Ur-Wunder of God, the prime miracle), and that Bultmann was also correct that saying so would destroy the transcendent content of the Ur-Wunder, still Bultmann had destroyed the Gospel by implying that Christ's victory over our time world of death and sin was a purely mythical one, with no implications for sinful creatures trapped in an immanent world.
Theologie der Auferstehung (Theology of the Resurrection – 1933)
[All footnotes are from the Concordia edition of 1965, St. Louis].
Künneth begins by noting that "the bankruptcy of a secularized theology in the face of the resurrection is (of course) largely due to Schleiermacher", who maintained that the spiritual presence of Jesus and his influence on the disciples he left behind was not contingent on any news of the facts of Christ's resurrection (p. 16). Ritschl added to the confusion by approaching from the other direction: the qualities of the exalted Christ are already contained in his existence in time. Künneth sees this as enormously over-simplistic, and notes wryly, of those who conclude that Christ's resurrection was largely a "vision" of the fervent would-be apostles, that Jesus himself taught that visions from beyond the grave would not alter the religious experience of men (the parable of Lazarus and Dives, Luke 16:29ff). Künneth argues that "the resurrection of Jesus cannot be cut out of" the Christian kerygma/message (p. 36) [either to dispose of it or to explain it]: for that would leave us merely with matters for psychic or sociological investigation, however inadequate, scientifically, these explanations would be to account for the duration, intensity, and persistence of the Christian faith (and here, one cannot help but think of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience). To imagine Dogma to be what Matthew Arnold took it to be, the Aberglaube, or added Belief above and beyond the Facts, would be to imprison Christianity forever within the continuum of space and time, which for Künneth, is subject to uncertainty and mortality and subjectivity. This, in fact, is just what Adolf Harnack had done in Germany, as Arnold was writing in England : Dogma was interpreted, via Higher Criticism, to be a Greek addition to the pure New Testament.