Wolfhart Pannenberg
Introduction
German theology, which has always enjoyed great influence on this side of the Atlantic, has been dominated in the 20th century by Barthian and existentialist approaches. But since the 1960s a quite different project, focusing attention again on the classical quest for ultimate truth in the midst of contemporary, post-Enlightenment culture, has been developing as well. This has come through the work of several theologians, the foremost of whom is Wolfhart Pannenberg. In the 1960’s Pannenberg’s name was linked to one of the theological fashions of the day, the “theology of hope.”
Pannenberg’s life
Wolfhart Pannenberg was born in 1928 in the city of Stettin (today part of Poland). Growing up during the Nazi era, he was pressed into military service during the final days of the Third Reich--an experience which helps account for his wariness of all ideological and political promises. His interest in religion developed after the war as the result of study and reflection during his university days, first at Berlin, then at Gottingen, Basel, and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1953, writing on the idea of predestination in the thought of Duns Scotus. In 1958 he was appointed professor of systematic theology at Wuppertal.
Pannenberg began his theological studies at the University of Berlin after World War II and also studied at the University of Gottingen and the University of Basel. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidleberg. He studied under theologians Karl Barth and Edmund Schlink, among others. Pannenberg has drawn together religion and science through much of his life.
He has also contributed substantially to the philosophy of history and the philosophy of science. He has been called an “eschatological realist” and a great interdisciplinary thinker.
Formation as theologian
Pannenberg was able to re-establish the public platform of the discipline of theology in the broader cross-disciplinary conversation of our day. He was prepared to take on a project of this magnitude through a variety of personal and educational experiences in his youth. Wolfhart Pannenberg was born in 1928 in Setting, Germany (modern day Poland). Although baptized a Lutheran as an infant, during his childhood he had almost no contact with the church. However, during his youth he did have an intense religious experience, which he refers to as his “light experience.” Placed in the categories of his later theology, his religious experience would be classified as an un-thematic experience of God very similar to Rahner’s understanding of religious experience.[1]
A curious lad, Pannenberg sought to understand his experience through reading the great philosophers and religious thinkers. Moreover, one of his teachers proved to be an important influence in Pannenberg’s conversion to the Christian worldview. He encountered this literature teacher, who had been a member of the Confessing Church during the Third Reich, during his final years of high school. This instructor convinced him to take a long hard look at Christianity, a thoughtful period of Pannenberg’s life when he concluded that Christianity was tie best philosophy. This “intellectual conversion” launched him into a vocation as a Christian theologian.[2]
Pannenberg began his theological studies after the Second World War at the University of Berlin, studying and teaching throughout his life at some of the greatest institutions in Germany. He would continue his theological investigations at the Universities of Ghottingen and Basle. At the University of Heidelberg he completed his doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of predestination of the noted medieval scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus under the supervision of the Lutheran Barthian Edmund Schlink, and in 1955 completed his Habilitationsschrift with an analysis of the role of analogy in Western thought up to Thomas Aquinas.[3]
While Pannenberg was at Basle he studied under Karl Earth, the leading Protestant theologian of his day. Pannenberg appreciated Earth’s Word of God theology which was a post-Kantian renewal of the Reformation theologies of John Calvin and Martin Luther. However, even as a student, Pannenberg sensed that Barth’s stringent critique of natural theology was too radical. Pannenberg’s study of the Medievals made him more sympathetic to God’s general revelation through creation. He was able to work this idea out first in the field of history, through a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history, and later in his work in religion and science. Eventually he was able to draw these two threads together in his life work: a three volume systematic theology.[4]
Philosophy of Science
Pannenberg is clear that the natural sciences and theology are distinct disciplines, with their own understanding of how information is gained and assessed. Nevertheless, both relate to the same publicly observable reality, and they therefore have potentially complementary insights to bring. The area of the “laws of nature” is a case in point, in that Pannenberg believes that the provisional explanations for such laws offered by natural scientist have a purely provisional status, until they are placed on a firmer theoretical foundation by theological analysis. There is thus a clear case to be made for a creative and productive dialogue between the natural sciences and religion; indeed, had this taken place in the past, much confusion and tension could have avoided.
Philosophy of Theology: Systematic Theology
In the Spring of 1988 Pannenberg published the first volume of his Systematic Theology, comprising the prolegomena to dogmatics and the doctrine of God. The six chapters of volume one explore:
1. How truth is the foundation of systematic theology
2. How the concept of God relates to this truth (natural theology)
3. How the reality of God is understood in relation to other religions
4. How to understand revelation
5. The Trinity
6. The unity and attributes of God.
In this work we sec a mature Pannenberg who has been able to fulfill his programmatic reflections in Revelation as History. In 1991 and 1993 followed the second and third volumes on christology and the church.
The primary theme of his systematic theology is truth. In order to externally verify the truth claims of Christianity, a reflective framework must be established philosophically. For Pannenberg, neither repetition of biblical axioms nor an existential leap of faith go far enough to prove the truth of Christianity. Theological discourse about God requires a relationship to metaphysical reflection if its claim to truth is to be valid. (1990: 6). Metaphysics provides an ideational superstructure in which to assert and evaluate truth claims. These claims are necessary in establishing theological discourse, because in Christian theology everything depends on the reality of God (1991:5). For example, since Pannenberg believes in the truth of the biblical narratives he prefers to refer to them as history, instead of mere “stories” as has become fashionable among contemporary narrative theologians. By centering his project on the primacy and possibility of the norm of truth, Pannenberg stands against much of the anti-realist, subjectivist postmodernists like Richard Rorty.
Although Pannenberg is a realist, he is a realist of a particular stripe, namely an eschatological realist. He believes that there really is a capital T truth out there, but that we will not know it completely until consummation of the ages, the end of the eschaton. Since all any human knower including a theologian ever has is a provisional perception of truth, all theological statements are tentative, not fully revealing and in that sense hypothetical. For Pannenberg History in all of its totality, can only be understood when it is views from its endpoint. The consummation of the world through the second coming and judgement of Jesus Christ is the point which alone provides the perspective from which the historical process can be seen in its totality. The end of history is disclosed in advance in the history of Jesus Christ. The end of history, which has yet to take place, has been disclosed in advance of the event in the person and work of Christ.[5]
Theology of Pannenberg
Pannenberg’s systematic theology belongs in the great line of modern historicist-idealist systems, will instance only a selection of cases in point. According to Pannenberg, creation is a continuation of the event of divine self-alienation that is the life of the Trinity. The Incarnation is not finally conditioned by the contingency of sin, for what happens it the Incarnation is that the self-distinction of the eternal Son from the Father, which is the ontological principle of creation and its history, itself takes “historical form” and so achieves its full extension. Indeed, the Incarnation is “the self-realization of God in the world.” faith is the ecstasy of reason that does not undo reason because humanity is that one of the creatures in whom creation’s constituting ecstasy toward God becomes rational. Or alternatively, faith is the creature’s rational self-distinction from God that does not negate the creature because the Logos’ self-distinction from God is the creature’s ontological basis.[6]
Postmodernity is a purely negative phenomenon, so that such substance as our world may now have will continue to be that of the Enlightenment and later modernity’s effort to “overcome” the Enlightenment, it may happen that Pannenberg’s work is disregarded only long enough to be rediscovered. Pannenberg says he has no more plans for major writing and intends to cultivate roses and Chopin; perhaps he himself has the same question, and is leaving it to history.
It would not do to review a major work without scraping up some occasion of material disagreement. Again choose a matter that is general in Pannenberg’s work but becomes especially clear in the present volume.[7]
God
Pannenberg’s central significance lies in his understanding of the nature of theology and the nature of truth to which theology is related. He is attempting to change the course of contemporary theology, to provide a new direction in understanding in order to combat what he perceives to be a widespread privatisation of religion belief in general and of theology in particular.
Reminiscent of the classical view, Pannenberg sees theology as a public discipline related to the quest for universal truth. Truth is to be discerned through theological reflection and reconstruction. We must subject theological affirmations to the rigor of critical inquiry into the historical reality on which they are based. Theology must be evaluated on the basis of critical canons, as are the other sciences, which also seek to discover truth. Pannenberg believes that systematic theology should show the Christian faith’s truth for all humanity and as it illuminates all human knowledge. As a result, he entertains no difference between apologetics and dogmatic. Thus the unfolding of Christian doctrine in his Systematische Theologie is also a demonstration of his conception of God.[8]
In keeping with this understanding of truth and theology, he criticizes attempts to divide truth into autonomous spheres or to shield the truth in Christian tradition from rational inquiry. This forms the background to his lifelong battle against what he sees as modem Protestant theology’s subjectivism. By nature, truth cannot be merely subjective, Pannenberg asserts. Rather, it can only be personal, when it can be claimed at least in principle to be true for all. He boldly maintains that theological assertions are not grasped merely by some blind “decision of faith.” Faith is not a way of knowing in addition to reason, he declares, but is grounded in public, historical knowledge. For this reason, theology cannot be private and sheltered.
This aspect of Pannenberg’s understanding of truth is balanced by another. In contrast to the classical tradition, he declares that truth is not found in the unchanging essences lying behind the flow of time, but is essentially historical and ultimately eschatological. Until the eschaton, truth will remain provisional and truth claims contestable. Therefore, theology, like all human knowledge, is provisional. It simply cannot pack into formulas the truth of God. The future alone is the focal point of ultimate truth. As a result, all dogmatic statements are hypotheses to be tested for coherence with other knowledge. This, he claims, is in accordance with the Scriptures, which declare that only at the end of history is the deity of God unquestionably open to all-an event, however, that is anticipated in the present.
A second contribution Pannenberg has made to theology lies in the implications he draws from his well-known understanding of God as the power that determines everything. Pannenberg asserts that the deity of God is connected to God’s demonstration of lordship over creation. This means that the idea of God, if it corresponds to an actual reality must be able to illumine not only human existence, but also experience of the world as a whole.
The reality of God remains an open question in the contemporary world, and Pannenberg takes this into his theological understanding. Even the contestability of the divine reality must be grounded in God, he maintains. In perceiving theology as a science, Pannenberg suggests that if God is ultimate truth, then the God hypothesis -- the claim that God is the unity of all reality -- must include within itself the current debate over God’s existence. This also places God as the all-inclusive object of theology. Even though Christian dogmatics moves beyond the doctrine of God to include anthropology, creation, Christology, ecclesiology, etc., these belong to that one overarching topic, Pannenberg declares.[9]
Trinity
This understanding of God is evident in Pannenberg’s link between the immanent Trinity (God’s eternal essence) and the economic Trinity (God as active in salvation history). His link arises from a thesis foundational to his development of Christian doctrine: all systematic theology is but the explication of what is implicit in pod’s own self-disclosure. On the basis of revelation, Pannenberg claims that the Trinity must be treated first, before discussing the unity of God found in the divine attributes. In this way, the doctrine of God is grounded n the divine economy, and the understanding of the immanent Trinity flows from the economic Trinity. Crucial to Pannenberg’s development of this theme is, his concept of self-differentiation. All three Trinitarian persons are mutually dependent on the others, he asserts. Here he offers an alternative to the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, which he finds detrimental to traditional theology. He perceives this mutual dependency in the process of salvation history and believes full revelation of God’s unity will come with the eschatological completion of the divine plan for the world.[10]
Anthropology
Pannenberg also makes a significant contribution to anthropology. He proposes that humanity is in a certain sense naturally religious, for the structure of the individual human person and of corporate human life is pervaded by religion. This is consistent with his view that one can expect to find the mark of the Creator in creation. As created by God, human destiny is to exist in the image of God, a destiny visible in human “openness to the world.” This thesis is widely known. Less familiar are two further aspects developed in his systematic theology: his understanding of the intuition of the infinite and his view of religion as the struggle for truth.
Pannenberg’s understanding of humanity’s basic religious nature builds from Schleiermacher’s early thought and from a reinterpretation of Descartes’s concept of the infinite. In the background, however, are medieval discussions about what is first known, albeit dimly, to the human mind. Two contemporary concepts illuminate this question. The first is “exocentricism” as employed by 20th century philosophical anthropology -- one must ground one’s identity outside oneself -- but for which Pannenberg finds a foundation in Luther’s understanding of faith. The other is Erik Erikson’s idea of “basic trust.”[11]
Religion
Religious awareness, Pannenberg explains, arises out of the rudimentary consciousness of the difference between “I” and “world” found already in the act of trust, which is then augmented by one’s presence in a family. As one experiences finitude and temporality in everyday life, an intuition of the infinite develops.
To this notion Pannenberg adds an innovative thesis. Intuition of the infinite does not itself constitute knowledge of God. Rather, gaining explicit knowledge from religious traditions allows one to reflect on the earlier immediate experience and to conclude that therein lay an “unthematized knowledge” of God. In other words, one can conclude that this basic intuition of the infinite relates to the theme of God only by reflecting on the process of religious history.
In this way Pannenberg connects this basic religious phenomenon to the experience of God found in religions, which become aware of the Godhead’s activity and essence through the works of creation. As a result Pannenberg views the rivalry of religions as the location of the revelation of truth. Revelation occurs only as God gives Godself to be known, Pannenberg asserts with Barth. But the focal point of this revelation is the historical process. For Pannenberg this history is the history of religions. On the world-historical stage, conflicting truth claims, which are at their core religious, struggle for supremacy. The religion that best illumines all reality will in the end prevail and thereby demonstrate its truth value.[12]
Pneumatology
Significant area is Pannenberg’s pneumatology. He rejects the prevalent tendency to reduce the Spirit’s role to that of providing explanations for situations in which rational suggestions fail. In its stead, he promotes a much broader and more biblical doctrine that emphasizes the Spirit’s all-pervasive, creative presence in creation and human life, climaxing in the new life of the believer. Pannenberg understands spirit as “field,” a conception somewhat like the field theory introduced in 19th cenrury science, which describes the interaction of material bodies in terms of interlocking networks called forces (e.g., magnetic fields).
This new pneumatology is evident in Pannenberg’s doctrine of God. In agreement with the atheistic criticism of Feuerbach and others, he rejects as a mere projection the classical understanding of God as reason and will. The divine essence, Pannenberg maintains, may be better described in terms of the incomprehensible field or spirit, which likewise comes forth as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.[13]
This same Spirit functions as the principle of the immanence of God in creation and the participation of creation in the divine life. Pannenberg relates the Christian affirmation of the Spirit as the source of life in creation to the biological discovery that life is essentially ecstatic. Every organism lives in an environment that nurtures it. And every organism is oriented by its own drives to move beyond its immediate environment toward the future of itself and its species. This is how creatures participate, in God through the Spirit, he asserts. The Spirit may be understood as the environmental network or, “field” in which and from which creatures live. The Spirit is also the “force” that lifts them above their environment and orients them toward the future. This work of the Spirit ultimately leads people to self-transcendence and forms the basis for the special life in Christ, found beyond oneself in the church.[14]
Christology
Christology offers the context for another aspect of Pannenberg’s theology. Well known is his emphasis on Jesus as the prolepsis of God’s self-disclosure, which ultimately lies at the end of history., Equally familiar is the centrality of the resurrection for Pannenberg’s Christology and his emphasis on the historicity of this event. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s confirmation of Jesus’ appearance and mission. Through it he experienced in the midst of history that eschatological transformation to which humanity is destined.[15]
Not as well known, however, are two other aspects of Pannenberg’s systematic-theological Christology that differ from, the approach taken in Jesus: God and Man. That monograph presupposed the reality of God and unfolded solely in terms of a Christology “from below,” focusing on Jesus’ humanity. Pannenberg finds this approach insufficient for Christology pursued in a systematic-theological context. Assertions concerning God can never be derived from anthropology alone, but must also proceed from the idea of God. Therefore, he proposes that Christology be developed from a specifically Christian anthropology, undertaken with an awareness of the doctrine of God.[16]
Pannenberg’s other christological innovation is his reintroduction of the concept of logos, which in Jesus: God and Man he replaced with the idea of revelation as the point of departure for Christology. In the doctrine of creation he forges a link between the logos and the scientific concept of information. This link provides the logos the cosmological function he finds necessary for its use in Christology. He docs not relate the logos to traditional physics, which abstracts laws from time. Rather, Pannenberg understands the logos as representing the order of the world as history. Jesus is the logos not as some cosmic abstract principle, but in his human life as Israel’s Messiah and as the one who brings the proper relationship of the creature to the Creator.[17]
Church
Pannenberg would replace the traditional Protestant focus on guilt and forgiveness with a sacramental spirituality. This view is the outworking of his understanding of the church as the sign of the future kingdom of God. It serves the ecumenism toward which Pannenberg’s theology is directed and which he sees as integral to the hope of humanity in general.
The linchpin of Pannenberg’s proposal for an ecumenical sacramental spirituality lies in baptism, for in this rite the believer’s identity and existence extra se in Christ are signified and grounded. Yet the central expression of this spirituality is found in the celebration of the Eucharist, which he sees as the proleptic sign of the future fellowship in the kingdom of God, which no political order can fulfill.
Pannenberg’s ecumenical theology of the Eucharist seeks to include the concerns of all major Christian traditions. Integral to it ate both an emphasis on the real presence of the risen Lord, reflecting the concern of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions, and on widening the rite beyond the elements themselves to encompass the entire celebration and the Spirit’s crucial role in it, in keeping with the Orthodox and Reformed positions. He likewise advocates understanding the role of clergy as representing the unity of the church. All of this is directed to overcoming the major stumbling blocks to church unity. Unity is crucial, Pannenberg maintains, if the church is to exercise a positive influence in secular society.[18]
Eschatology
The final contribution of Pannenberg’s program is its eschatological orientation, for his entire systematic theology focuses on the eschaton, and thereby on hope. He understands the kingdom of God as the glory of the Trinity demonstrated in God’s rulership over creation. He docs not view it in terms of an ethical community, as does much of 19th century theology, but in accordance with the exegetical discoveries of the 20th century, which find the source of this term in the apocalyptic movement and the teachings of Jesus. The biblical message of the kingdom is eschatological in orientation, for it proclaims God’s ultimate lordship over creation, which lordship has already broken into history in the appearance of Jesus. En route to the eschaton, the Christian community lives in hopeful expectation of the final consummation of the lordship of God over the entire world. Only then will the glory and reality of the triune God be fully demonstrated.
Since the publication of Revelation as History (German 1961, ET 1969), the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg has been distinguished by a focus on eschatology and universality, by an intense and intellectually rigorous conviction that the concrete anticipation of the eschaton in Jesus’ resurrection was also the meaning of the universal history of God’s relationship to creation. Christian Mostert’s God and the Future expounds, explores and defends this remarkable theological achievement, bringing to the fore the union of eschatology and universality in Pannenberg’s complex and innovative understanding of the future. For Mostert, while the early Pannenberg (of e.g. the ‘Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation’ in Revelation as History) emphasized eschatology, and the later Pannenberg (of the magisterial three volume Systematic Theology; volume 1 German 1988; ET 1991) the doctrine of the trinity, his work is characterized by a fundamental union between a theology of God’s rule and God’s being, a complex and sustained elucidation of the trinitarian meaning of Christian eschatology.[19]
Conclusion
Pannenberg is well situated among the great contemporary Protestant theologians. On the one hand, he is clearly a confessional Lutheran “Word of God” theologian. Yet, on the other hand, from a methodological point of view he is a post-Enlightenment liberal. His attempt to bring together Lutheran tradition with a contemporary method is what makes his theology so interesting and compelling.
One important legacy that Pannenberg will leave for your young theologians at the turn of the century is an interdisciplinary paradigm for constructing theology. Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology is a brilliant presentation of an authentically Christian and intellectually plausible view of reality, developed in intradisciplinary theological cooperation and tested in interdisciplinary dialogue with other sciences. Philosophy plays a critical, multi-faceted role in theology which is conducted in this paradigm. It provides a metaphysical reflection to describe the world which is an independent locus of systematic theology is comparative theology, seeing Christian theology from the outside perspective of other theologies. Nonetheless, Pannenberg, by taking Troeltsch’s philosophical criticisms to heart, staying true to Lutheran Orthodoxy, and establishing the credibility of the Christian belief through the cannons of probable reasoning, Pannenberg has produced a post-Enlightenment Christian system which is comprehensive, credible and compelling.
Bibliography
George H. Kelm. “Basic Questions in Theology Vol: 11.” Fortress Press, 1971. Philadelphia. Trans.
http//:www.christiancentury.org. “God’s Presence in History.” 1981.
Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. “Jesus – God and Man.” Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968. Trans.
Geoffrey Bromiley. “Systematic Theology.” Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Vol.1, Trans. 1991.
Stanley J. Grenz. “20th Century Theology.” Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1992.
[1] Pannenberg. “God’s presence in history” (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1981), p.260.
[2] Ibid., p.261.
[3] Tupper 1974, p.19-44.
[4] Stanley J. Greny, 1992, p.186.
[5] Systematic Theology volume one, 1988.
[6] Stanley J. Greny, p.187.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., p.190.
[9] Pannenberg, “Basic questions in theology” volume two (SCM Press LTD, London, 1971), p.44.
[10] Stanley J. Greny, p.192.
[11] www.christiancentury.org
[12] Pannenberg, Basic Questions, p.65-118.
[13] www.christiancentury.org
[14] Ibid.
[15] Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, p.21.
[16] Ibid., p.33.
[17] Ibid., p.365.
[18] www.christiancentury.org
[19] Ibid.
Introduction
German theology, which has always enjoyed great influence on this side of the Atlantic, has been dominated in the 20th century by Barthian and existentialist approaches. But since the 1960s a quite different project, focusing attention again on the classical quest for ultimate truth in the midst of contemporary, post-Enlightenment culture, has been developing as well. This has come through the work of several theologians, the foremost of whom is Wolfhart Pannenberg. In the 1960’s Pannenberg’s name was linked to one of the theological fashions of the day, the “theology of hope.”
Pannenberg’s life
Wolfhart Pannenberg was born in 1928 in the city of Stettin (today part of Poland). Growing up during the Nazi era, he was pressed into military service during the final days of the Third Reich--an experience which helps account for his wariness of all ideological and political promises. His interest in religion developed after the war as the result of study and reflection during his university days, first at Berlin, then at Gottingen, Basel, and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1953, writing on the idea of predestination in the thought of Duns Scotus. In 1958 he was appointed professor of systematic theology at Wuppertal.
Pannenberg began his theological studies at the University of Berlin after World War II and also studied at the University of Gottingen and the University of Basel. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidleberg. He studied under theologians Karl Barth and Edmund Schlink, among others. Pannenberg has drawn together religion and science through much of his life.
He has also contributed substantially to the philosophy of history and the philosophy of science. He has been called an “eschatological realist” and a great interdisciplinary thinker.
Formation as theologian
Pannenberg was able to re-establish the public platform of the discipline of theology in the broader cross-disciplinary conversation of our day. He was prepared to take on a project of this magnitude through a variety of personal and educational experiences in his youth. Wolfhart Pannenberg was born in 1928 in Setting, Germany (modern day Poland). Although baptized a Lutheran as an infant, during his childhood he had almost no contact with the church. However, during his youth he did have an intense religious experience, which he refers to as his “light experience.” Placed in the categories of his later theology, his religious experience would be classified as an un-thematic experience of God very similar to Rahner’s understanding of religious experience.[1]
A curious lad, Pannenberg sought to understand his experience through reading the great philosophers and religious thinkers. Moreover, one of his teachers proved to be an important influence in Pannenberg’s conversion to the Christian worldview. He encountered this literature teacher, who had been a member of the Confessing Church during the Third Reich, during his final years of high school. This instructor convinced him to take a long hard look at Christianity, a thoughtful period of Pannenberg’s life when he concluded that Christianity was tie best philosophy. This “intellectual conversion” launched him into a vocation as a Christian theologian.[2]
Pannenberg began his theological studies after the Second World War at the University of Berlin, studying and teaching throughout his life at some of the greatest institutions in Germany. He would continue his theological investigations at the Universities of Ghottingen and Basle. At the University of Heidelberg he completed his doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of predestination of the noted medieval scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus under the supervision of the Lutheran Barthian Edmund Schlink, and in 1955 completed his Habilitationsschrift with an analysis of the role of analogy in Western thought up to Thomas Aquinas.[3]
While Pannenberg was at Basle he studied under Karl Earth, the leading Protestant theologian of his day. Pannenberg appreciated Earth’s Word of God theology which was a post-Kantian renewal of the Reformation theologies of John Calvin and Martin Luther. However, even as a student, Pannenberg sensed that Barth’s stringent critique of natural theology was too radical. Pannenberg’s study of the Medievals made him more sympathetic to God’s general revelation through creation. He was able to work this idea out first in the field of history, through a neo-Hegelian philosophy of history, and later in his work in religion and science. Eventually he was able to draw these two threads together in his life work: a three volume systematic theology.[4]
Philosophy of Science
Pannenberg is clear that the natural sciences and theology are distinct disciplines, with their own understanding of how information is gained and assessed. Nevertheless, both relate to the same publicly observable reality, and they therefore have potentially complementary insights to bring. The area of the “laws of nature” is a case in point, in that Pannenberg believes that the provisional explanations for such laws offered by natural scientist have a purely provisional status, until they are placed on a firmer theoretical foundation by theological analysis. There is thus a clear case to be made for a creative and productive dialogue between the natural sciences and religion; indeed, had this taken place in the past, much confusion and tension could have avoided.
Philosophy of Theology: Systematic Theology
In the Spring of 1988 Pannenberg published the first volume of his Systematic Theology, comprising the prolegomena to dogmatics and the doctrine of God. The six chapters of volume one explore:
1. How truth is the foundation of systematic theology
2. How the concept of God relates to this truth (natural theology)
3. How the reality of God is understood in relation to other religions
4. How to understand revelation
5. The Trinity
6. The unity and attributes of God.
In this work we sec a mature Pannenberg who has been able to fulfill his programmatic reflections in Revelation as History. In 1991 and 1993 followed the second and third volumes on christology and the church.
The primary theme of his systematic theology is truth. In order to externally verify the truth claims of Christianity, a reflective framework must be established philosophically. For Pannenberg, neither repetition of biblical axioms nor an existential leap of faith go far enough to prove the truth of Christianity. Theological discourse about God requires a relationship to metaphysical reflection if its claim to truth is to be valid. (1990: 6). Metaphysics provides an ideational superstructure in which to assert and evaluate truth claims. These claims are necessary in establishing theological discourse, because in Christian theology everything depends on the reality of God (1991:5). For example, since Pannenberg believes in the truth of the biblical narratives he prefers to refer to them as history, instead of mere “stories” as has become fashionable among contemporary narrative theologians. By centering his project on the primacy and possibility of the norm of truth, Pannenberg stands against much of the anti-realist, subjectivist postmodernists like Richard Rorty.
Although Pannenberg is a realist, he is a realist of a particular stripe, namely an eschatological realist. He believes that there really is a capital T truth out there, but that we will not know it completely until consummation of the ages, the end of the eschaton. Since all any human knower including a theologian ever has is a provisional perception of truth, all theological statements are tentative, not fully revealing and in that sense hypothetical. For Pannenberg History in all of its totality, can only be understood when it is views from its endpoint. The consummation of the world through the second coming and judgement of Jesus Christ is the point which alone provides the perspective from which the historical process can be seen in its totality. The end of history is disclosed in advance in the history of Jesus Christ. The end of history, which has yet to take place, has been disclosed in advance of the event in the person and work of Christ.[5]
Theology of Pannenberg
Pannenberg’s systematic theology belongs in the great line of modern historicist-idealist systems, will instance only a selection of cases in point. According to Pannenberg, creation is a continuation of the event of divine self-alienation that is the life of the Trinity. The Incarnation is not finally conditioned by the contingency of sin, for what happens it the Incarnation is that the self-distinction of the eternal Son from the Father, which is the ontological principle of creation and its history, itself takes “historical form” and so achieves its full extension. Indeed, the Incarnation is “the self-realization of God in the world.” faith is the ecstasy of reason that does not undo reason because humanity is that one of the creatures in whom creation’s constituting ecstasy toward God becomes rational. Or alternatively, faith is the creature’s rational self-distinction from God that does not negate the creature because the Logos’ self-distinction from God is the creature’s ontological basis.[6]
Postmodernity is a purely negative phenomenon, so that such substance as our world may now have will continue to be that of the Enlightenment and later modernity’s effort to “overcome” the Enlightenment, it may happen that Pannenberg’s work is disregarded only long enough to be rediscovered. Pannenberg says he has no more plans for major writing and intends to cultivate roses and Chopin; perhaps he himself has the same question, and is leaving it to history.
It would not do to review a major work without scraping up some occasion of material disagreement. Again choose a matter that is general in Pannenberg’s work but becomes especially clear in the present volume.[7]
God
Pannenberg’s central significance lies in his understanding of the nature of theology and the nature of truth to which theology is related. He is attempting to change the course of contemporary theology, to provide a new direction in understanding in order to combat what he perceives to be a widespread privatisation of religion belief in general and of theology in particular.
Reminiscent of the classical view, Pannenberg sees theology as a public discipline related to the quest for universal truth. Truth is to be discerned through theological reflection and reconstruction. We must subject theological affirmations to the rigor of critical inquiry into the historical reality on which they are based. Theology must be evaluated on the basis of critical canons, as are the other sciences, which also seek to discover truth. Pannenberg believes that systematic theology should show the Christian faith’s truth for all humanity and as it illuminates all human knowledge. As a result, he entertains no difference between apologetics and dogmatic. Thus the unfolding of Christian doctrine in his Systematische Theologie is also a demonstration of his conception of God.[8]
In keeping with this understanding of truth and theology, he criticizes attempts to divide truth into autonomous spheres or to shield the truth in Christian tradition from rational inquiry. This forms the background to his lifelong battle against what he sees as modem Protestant theology’s subjectivism. By nature, truth cannot be merely subjective, Pannenberg asserts. Rather, it can only be personal, when it can be claimed at least in principle to be true for all. He boldly maintains that theological assertions are not grasped merely by some blind “decision of faith.” Faith is not a way of knowing in addition to reason, he declares, but is grounded in public, historical knowledge. For this reason, theology cannot be private and sheltered.
This aspect of Pannenberg’s understanding of truth is balanced by another. In contrast to the classical tradition, he declares that truth is not found in the unchanging essences lying behind the flow of time, but is essentially historical and ultimately eschatological. Until the eschaton, truth will remain provisional and truth claims contestable. Therefore, theology, like all human knowledge, is provisional. It simply cannot pack into formulas the truth of God. The future alone is the focal point of ultimate truth. As a result, all dogmatic statements are hypotheses to be tested for coherence with other knowledge. This, he claims, is in accordance with the Scriptures, which declare that only at the end of history is the deity of God unquestionably open to all-an event, however, that is anticipated in the present.
A second contribution Pannenberg has made to theology lies in the implications he draws from his well-known understanding of God as the power that determines everything. Pannenberg asserts that the deity of God is connected to God’s demonstration of lordship over creation. This means that the idea of God, if it corresponds to an actual reality must be able to illumine not only human existence, but also experience of the world as a whole.
The reality of God remains an open question in the contemporary world, and Pannenberg takes this into his theological understanding. Even the contestability of the divine reality must be grounded in God, he maintains. In perceiving theology as a science, Pannenberg suggests that if God is ultimate truth, then the God hypothesis -- the claim that God is the unity of all reality -- must include within itself the current debate over God’s existence. This also places God as the all-inclusive object of theology. Even though Christian dogmatics moves beyond the doctrine of God to include anthropology, creation, Christology, ecclesiology, etc., these belong to that one overarching topic, Pannenberg declares.[9]
Trinity
This understanding of God is evident in Pannenberg’s link between the immanent Trinity (God’s eternal essence) and the economic Trinity (God as active in salvation history). His link arises from a thesis foundational to his development of Christian doctrine: all systematic theology is but the explication of what is implicit in pod’s own self-disclosure. On the basis of revelation, Pannenberg claims that the Trinity must be treated first, before discussing the unity of God found in the divine attributes. In this way, the doctrine of God is grounded n the divine economy, and the understanding of the immanent Trinity flows from the economic Trinity. Crucial to Pannenberg’s development of this theme is, his concept of self-differentiation. All three Trinitarian persons are mutually dependent on the others, he asserts. Here he offers an alternative to the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, which he finds detrimental to traditional theology. He perceives this mutual dependency in the process of salvation history and believes full revelation of God’s unity will come with the eschatological completion of the divine plan for the world.[10]
Anthropology
Pannenberg also makes a significant contribution to anthropology. He proposes that humanity is in a certain sense naturally religious, for the structure of the individual human person and of corporate human life is pervaded by religion. This is consistent with his view that one can expect to find the mark of the Creator in creation. As created by God, human destiny is to exist in the image of God, a destiny visible in human “openness to the world.” This thesis is widely known. Less familiar are two further aspects developed in his systematic theology: his understanding of the intuition of the infinite and his view of religion as the struggle for truth.
Pannenberg’s understanding of humanity’s basic religious nature builds from Schleiermacher’s early thought and from a reinterpretation of Descartes’s concept of the infinite. In the background, however, are medieval discussions about what is first known, albeit dimly, to the human mind. Two contemporary concepts illuminate this question. The first is “exocentricism” as employed by 20th century philosophical anthropology -- one must ground one’s identity outside oneself -- but for which Pannenberg finds a foundation in Luther’s understanding of faith. The other is Erik Erikson’s idea of “basic trust.”[11]
Religion
Religious awareness, Pannenberg explains, arises out of the rudimentary consciousness of the difference between “I” and “world” found already in the act of trust, which is then augmented by one’s presence in a family. As one experiences finitude and temporality in everyday life, an intuition of the infinite develops.
To this notion Pannenberg adds an innovative thesis. Intuition of the infinite does not itself constitute knowledge of God. Rather, gaining explicit knowledge from religious traditions allows one to reflect on the earlier immediate experience and to conclude that therein lay an “unthematized knowledge” of God. In other words, one can conclude that this basic intuition of the infinite relates to the theme of God only by reflecting on the process of religious history.
In this way Pannenberg connects this basic religious phenomenon to the experience of God found in religions, which become aware of the Godhead’s activity and essence through the works of creation. As a result Pannenberg views the rivalry of religions as the location of the revelation of truth. Revelation occurs only as God gives Godself to be known, Pannenberg asserts with Barth. But the focal point of this revelation is the historical process. For Pannenberg this history is the history of religions. On the world-historical stage, conflicting truth claims, which are at their core religious, struggle for supremacy. The religion that best illumines all reality will in the end prevail and thereby demonstrate its truth value.[12]
Pneumatology
Significant area is Pannenberg’s pneumatology. He rejects the prevalent tendency to reduce the Spirit’s role to that of providing explanations for situations in which rational suggestions fail. In its stead, he promotes a much broader and more biblical doctrine that emphasizes the Spirit’s all-pervasive, creative presence in creation and human life, climaxing in the new life of the believer. Pannenberg understands spirit as “field,” a conception somewhat like the field theory introduced in 19th cenrury science, which describes the interaction of material bodies in terms of interlocking networks called forces (e.g., magnetic fields).
This new pneumatology is evident in Pannenberg’s doctrine of God. In agreement with the atheistic criticism of Feuerbach and others, he rejects as a mere projection the classical understanding of God as reason and will. The divine essence, Pannenberg maintains, may be better described in terms of the incomprehensible field or spirit, which likewise comes forth as the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.[13]
This same Spirit functions as the principle of the immanence of God in creation and the participation of creation in the divine life. Pannenberg relates the Christian affirmation of the Spirit as the source of life in creation to the biological discovery that life is essentially ecstatic. Every organism lives in an environment that nurtures it. And every organism is oriented by its own drives to move beyond its immediate environment toward the future of itself and its species. This is how creatures participate, in God through the Spirit, he asserts. The Spirit may be understood as the environmental network or, “field” in which and from which creatures live. The Spirit is also the “force” that lifts them above their environment and orients them toward the future. This work of the Spirit ultimately leads people to self-transcendence and forms the basis for the special life in Christ, found beyond oneself in the church.[14]
Christology
Christology offers the context for another aspect of Pannenberg’s theology. Well known is his emphasis on Jesus as the prolepsis of God’s self-disclosure, which ultimately lies at the end of history., Equally familiar is the centrality of the resurrection for Pannenberg’s Christology and his emphasis on the historicity of this event. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s confirmation of Jesus’ appearance and mission. Through it he experienced in the midst of history that eschatological transformation to which humanity is destined.[15]
Not as well known, however, are two other aspects of Pannenberg’s systematic-theological Christology that differ from, the approach taken in Jesus: God and Man. That monograph presupposed the reality of God and unfolded solely in terms of a Christology “from below,” focusing on Jesus’ humanity. Pannenberg finds this approach insufficient for Christology pursued in a systematic-theological context. Assertions concerning God can never be derived from anthropology alone, but must also proceed from the idea of God. Therefore, he proposes that Christology be developed from a specifically Christian anthropology, undertaken with an awareness of the doctrine of God.[16]
Pannenberg’s other christological innovation is his reintroduction of the concept of logos, which in Jesus: God and Man he replaced with the idea of revelation as the point of departure for Christology. In the doctrine of creation he forges a link between the logos and the scientific concept of information. This link provides the logos the cosmological function he finds necessary for its use in Christology. He docs not relate the logos to traditional physics, which abstracts laws from time. Rather, Pannenberg understands the logos as representing the order of the world as history. Jesus is the logos not as some cosmic abstract principle, but in his human life as Israel’s Messiah and as the one who brings the proper relationship of the creature to the Creator.[17]
Church
Pannenberg would replace the traditional Protestant focus on guilt and forgiveness with a sacramental spirituality. This view is the outworking of his understanding of the church as the sign of the future kingdom of God. It serves the ecumenism toward which Pannenberg’s theology is directed and which he sees as integral to the hope of humanity in general.
The linchpin of Pannenberg’s proposal for an ecumenical sacramental spirituality lies in baptism, for in this rite the believer’s identity and existence extra se in Christ are signified and grounded. Yet the central expression of this spirituality is found in the celebration of the Eucharist, which he sees as the proleptic sign of the future fellowship in the kingdom of God, which no political order can fulfill.
Pannenberg’s ecumenical theology of the Eucharist seeks to include the concerns of all major Christian traditions. Integral to it ate both an emphasis on the real presence of the risen Lord, reflecting the concern of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions, and on widening the rite beyond the elements themselves to encompass the entire celebration and the Spirit’s crucial role in it, in keeping with the Orthodox and Reformed positions. He likewise advocates understanding the role of clergy as representing the unity of the church. All of this is directed to overcoming the major stumbling blocks to church unity. Unity is crucial, Pannenberg maintains, if the church is to exercise a positive influence in secular society.[18]
Eschatology
The final contribution of Pannenberg’s program is its eschatological orientation, for his entire systematic theology focuses on the eschaton, and thereby on hope. He understands the kingdom of God as the glory of the Trinity demonstrated in God’s rulership over creation. He docs not view it in terms of an ethical community, as does much of 19th century theology, but in accordance with the exegetical discoveries of the 20th century, which find the source of this term in the apocalyptic movement and the teachings of Jesus. The biblical message of the kingdom is eschatological in orientation, for it proclaims God’s ultimate lordship over creation, which lordship has already broken into history in the appearance of Jesus. En route to the eschaton, the Christian community lives in hopeful expectation of the final consummation of the lordship of God over the entire world. Only then will the glory and reality of the triune God be fully demonstrated.
Since the publication of Revelation as History (German 1961, ET 1969), the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg has been distinguished by a focus on eschatology and universality, by an intense and intellectually rigorous conviction that the concrete anticipation of the eschaton in Jesus’ resurrection was also the meaning of the universal history of God’s relationship to creation. Christian Mostert’s God and the Future expounds, explores and defends this remarkable theological achievement, bringing to the fore the union of eschatology and universality in Pannenberg’s complex and innovative understanding of the future. For Mostert, while the early Pannenberg (of e.g. the ‘Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation’ in Revelation as History) emphasized eschatology, and the later Pannenberg (of the magisterial three volume Systematic Theology; volume 1 German 1988; ET 1991) the doctrine of the trinity, his work is characterized by a fundamental union between a theology of God’s rule and God’s being, a complex and sustained elucidation of the trinitarian meaning of Christian eschatology.[19]
Conclusion
Pannenberg is well situated among the great contemporary Protestant theologians. On the one hand, he is clearly a confessional Lutheran “Word of God” theologian. Yet, on the other hand, from a methodological point of view he is a post-Enlightenment liberal. His attempt to bring together Lutheran tradition with a contemporary method is what makes his theology so interesting and compelling.
One important legacy that Pannenberg will leave for your young theologians at the turn of the century is an interdisciplinary paradigm for constructing theology. Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology is a brilliant presentation of an authentically Christian and intellectually plausible view of reality, developed in intradisciplinary theological cooperation and tested in interdisciplinary dialogue with other sciences. Philosophy plays a critical, multi-faceted role in theology which is conducted in this paradigm. It provides a metaphysical reflection to describe the world which is an independent locus of systematic theology is comparative theology, seeing Christian theology from the outside perspective of other theologies. Nonetheless, Pannenberg, by taking Troeltsch’s philosophical criticisms to heart, staying true to Lutheran Orthodoxy, and establishing the credibility of the Christian belief through the cannons of probable reasoning, Pannenberg has produced a post-Enlightenment Christian system which is comprehensive, credible and compelling.
Bibliography
George H. Kelm. “Basic Questions in Theology Vol: 11.” Fortress Press, 1971. Philadelphia. Trans.
http//:www.christiancentury.org. “God’s Presence in History.” 1981.
Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. “Jesus – God and Man.” Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968. Trans.
Geoffrey Bromiley. “Systematic Theology.” Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, Vol.1, Trans. 1991.
Stanley J. Grenz. “20th Century Theology.” Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1992.
[1] Pannenberg. “God’s presence in history” (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1981), p.260.
[2] Ibid., p.261.
[3] Tupper 1974, p.19-44.
[4] Stanley J. Greny, 1992, p.186.
[5] Systematic Theology volume one, 1988.
[6] Stanley J. Greny, p.187.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., p.190.
[9] Pannenberg, “Basic questions in theology” volume two (SCM Press LTD, London, 1971), p.44.
[10] Stanley J. Greny, p.192.
[11] www.christiancentury.org
[12] Pannenberg, Basic Questions, p.65-118.
[13] www.christiancentury.org
[14] Ibid.
[15] Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, p.21.
[16] Ibid., p.33.
[17] Ibid., p.365.
[18] www.christiancentury.org
[19] Ibid.
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