Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Theologian - Wolfhart Pannenberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theologian - Wolfhart Pannenberg. Show all posts

Friday, February 27, 2015

Michael Root - The Theological Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Paucity of Theological Leadership in the Church Today


Wolfhart Pannenberg

The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/03/the-achievement-of-wolfhart-pannenberg

by Michael Root
March 2012

Some theologians are mirrors of their time. The mid-twentieth century rises from the pages of Tillich as palpably as Combray rising from Proust’s tea and madeleines. Other theologians have a more conflicted relation with their age: engaged, but cutting against the grain; in their time, but not quite of it. Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the most gifted Protestant theologians of his generation, has never seemed quite to fit his surroundings, which may say more about his surroundings than about him. The German theological world has been far less shaken than the English-speaking world by the changes in academic culture of the last decades: feminism, the hermeneutics of suspicion, the dismissal of truth-claims as disguised assertions of power. Even by German standards, however, Pannenberg’s theology has an oddly old-fashioned air.

Pannenberg is not a man who follows fads. Postmodernity seems to have passed him by. Jean-François Lyotard famously characterized postmodernity as incredulity toward metanarratives, the comprehensive stories ”Marxist, Enlightenment liberal, religious” that make us confident that we have the Big Picture. Pannenberg is convinced that without a metanarrative, we are lost. Until you have the Big Picture, your understanding of the details will always be deficient. He seems to have self-consciously rejected postmodernism as a style of reflection. He has sought, in notable contrast to the majority of his theological peers, to address universal human reason.

Politically, Pannenberg has also stood apart. He does not belong to the academically fashionable left. He studied Marx as a philosophy student in the late 1940s in Berlin and found him wanting. He was disturbed by the sympathy for totalitarian dictators shown by fellow theologians during the 1970s and 1980s, and he made his concerns public. Though for years he was a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he was sharply critical of the liberationist turn in the World Council as a whole.

In recent years, he has been outspoken in his opposition within the Evangelical Church in Germany to any approval of homosexual relations. He said that a church that approved homosexual relations had by that act ceased to be a true church. In 1997, he created a public stir when he returned his Federal Order of Merit after the order was bestowed on a lesbian activist. He argued that the constitution of the Federal Republic committed the state to uphold marriage and family and that by honoring a lesbian activist, the state was acting in contradiction to its own basis. This action did not increase his popularity in academic circles.

He has also stood apart ecumenically. When German Protestants were increasingly worried about an alleged loss of a distinct Protestant identity, he promoted an ecumenical opening to Catholicism. While on occasion he wrote as a Lutheran on Lutheran topics, he has never been attracted to what George Hunsinger has called “enclave theology,” theology done within strictly defined confessional limits, in which those limits are taken as given. For Pannenberg, it does not follow that because a proposition is authentically Lutheran it is therefore correct.

He was one of the most prominent academic defenders in Germany of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the 1999 agreement on the doctrine of justification between the Catholic Church and the churches of the Lutheran World Federation that was violently attacked by a significant portion of his colleagues. More disturbing to many, especially in the difficult ecumenical situation in Germany, where the shrinking number of Christians is almost evenly divided between Protestant and Catholic, he has said that the unity of the church perhaps requires a papacy and that quite possibly the only churches that will survive far into the third millennium are Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical rather than mainline Protestant.

---

All of this may make Pannenberg attractive to readers of First Things. His close friendship with Richard John Neuhaus, who wrote an introduction to one of Pannenberg’s first books translated into English, led to his writings appearing regularly in these pages. There is much to commend in Pannenberg’s theology, but there are also some warnings and object lessons in his work, both in his difference from and in his similarity to his immediate predecessors and colleagues.

Pannenberg was born in 1928, in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland), the son of a German civil servant. Religion played no role in his upbringing, but in autobiographical sketches, he recounts a decisive moment in his early life, an epiphany that in fact occurred on Epiphany. “On January 6, 1945, on my way home from music lessons, a long walk from one town to another, I had a visionary experience of a great light not only surrounding me, but absorbing me for an indefinite time. I did not hear any words, but it was a metaphysical awakening that prompted me to search for its meaning regarding my life during the following years.”

In this brief description can be found two foci of Pannenberg’s lifelong outlook: on the one hand, an openness to the miraculous, the supernatural, to what a reductivist natural science would dismiss, and on the other, a deep desire to understand revelation, and to understand it rationally, even “metaphysically.” The late William Placher entitled a review of the first volume of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology “Revealed to Reason,” and that title catches the deep structure of an outlook already visible in this account of his teenage experience. As with most of the Protestant theologians who came before him, “revelation” was a central category of his theology, but unlike them, he did not share in the rejection of a rational metaphysics that so shaped (and skewed) their work.

He was drafted into the German army in the last days of World War II and was briefly a British prisoner of war. Following the war, he studied philosophy and theology at German universities, including a brief time with Karl Barth at Basel (not a happy encounter: “I learned . . . that Barth did not like criticism from his students”). His studies did not follow the standard paths trod by Protestant students. His doctoral dissertation was on Duns Scotus on predestination and his habilitation (the second dissertation required to teach in the German universities) addressed the concept of analogy from the ancient Greeks through the medieval period. Under his doctoral adviser at Heidelberg, Edmund Schlink, who had been a Protestant observer at Vatican II, he imbibed an orientation to ecumenism that was to characterize his theological work.

More immediately important for his development were the lectures at Heidelberg by the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad, who emphasized how for the Old Testament God is revealed in his acts in history: the Exodus, the reception of the Promised Land, the return from exile in Babylon. God might speak to Elijah in a “still, small voice” heard only interiorly, but the great promise is that God will act publicly so that the “nations” will “know that I am the Lord.”

A group of graduate students met regularly to discuss the broader theological significance of von Rad’s approach, and in 1961 they produced a small volume of essays with the provocative title Revelation as History, with Pannenberg as the editor and the author of the systematic essay that summarized their understanding. He insists that he had no idea the book would create waves. German Protestant theology had been dominated since the early 1920s by various theologies that had stressed and interwoven the concepts of revelation as foundational to theology and of the Word of God as a concrete address calling for a radical decision of faith or unfaith, with varying emphasis on whatever the address might actually say. That Word was not open to rational investigation, and classical apologetics was not just useless, it was a betrayal of the sovereignty of the Word which allows no space for such reflection. The post-World War II struggles between the followers of Barth and of Rudolf Bultmann took place on territory marked out by these concepts.

Revelation as History questioned the tight correlation of revelation with the concept “Word.” The writers insisted that God’s Word is about something and what it is most immediately about is a historical event: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the inbreaking of the kingdom he inaugurates. We may need God’s Word to understand the event, but the event is fundamental, for it reveals the agent who performs it.

But what event could definitively reveal the one God who is Lord of all? The only possibility is an event that sums up and gives meaning to all events. And that is what we find in Jesus as the one who is the final Kingdom he brings. He is himself the End, the eschaton, the event in whose light all events are rightly seen. Jesus may be a great teacher, and he may atone for our sins, but his teaching and suffering are of decisive significance only because he is the Lord who comes “to unite all things, . . . things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10). As such, he is the revelation both of God and of the meaning of history.

Such an event cannot be private; it does not have its primary home in human interiority, but “all flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5). That full publicity will only be realized when Jesus returns, but in the “between times” after the resurrection and before the return, those who receive Jesus have the key to reality. That key is not private; if it is the key to truth, it is not removed into its own sphere, immunized from rational investigation and critique. Pannenberg insisted that even the resurrection is open to historical inquiry and that the open-minded historian should conclude that the resurrection is at least plausible and perhaps probable.

Pannenberg carried this youthful commitment to both revelation and reason into his mature theology. Revelation as History vaulted him into prominence. Professorships followed at Wuppertal, Mainz, and then, for the longest span of his career, beginning in 1968 and ending with his retirement in 1994, at Munich. A constant stream of essays was punctuated by large studies of Christology (Jesus—God and Man , 1964), theology and science ( Theology and the Philosophy of Science , 1973), theological anthropology ( Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1983), and the three volumes of hisSystematic Theology (1988 to 1993).

[Pannenberg's] Systematic Theology is certainly his crowning achievement, bringing together his staggering learning, theological and otherwise, in a unified vision of the meaning of the faith. Pannenberg has remained remarkably consistent over the years. Systematic Theology can be read as a much fuller account of the vision first put forward in Revelation as History twenty-five years before: Eschatology remains the key theological locus; Jesus continues to be understood as the anticipatory realization of the final reign of God over all things; Christianity is rational, though this claim is somewhat chastened. New perhaps is the emphasis on ecclesiology. The church is the foretaste of the future unity of humanity and of all things, the place where the future impinges visibly, sacramentally, on the present. (And hence, [why] the division of the church is so scandalous [to Pannenberg]; [his] ecumenical commitments are [on a pace] with his theology.)

---

New and more determinative for his later theology is its thoroughgoing trinitarian character. In a way similar to some other recent theologians—most notably, in their different ways, Karl Rahner and Karl Barth—Pannenberg does not begin with a discussion of God as one and of the divine attributes, both understood without reference to God as triune, but begins with God as Trinity and allows that understanding to frame both the presentation of God’s unity and the elaboration of the divine attributes. Against that background, God’s act of creation is presented as analogous to the differentiation of the Son from the Father (hence, creation is through the Word) and salvation is participation in the life of the Trinity (an idea more familiar to Catholic than to modern Protestant theology).

In most of these themes—the centrality of eschatology, a renewed interest in the church as theological locus, Trinity as determinative for all that is said about God, salvation as participation—Pannenberg is in line with much recent theology. The way he elaborates them is at times idiosyncratic (for example, his understanding of the divinity that the persons of the Trinity share as analogous to a force field), but he shares these themes with many other theologians.

Distinctive in his theology is the commitment to the claim that the Christian metanarrative, the all-encompassing, eschatologically focused story, is the key to the meaning of each and every thing. Theology backs up that claim by presenting a comprehensive, systematic account of reality in which all other knowledge can find a home. Pannenberg’s project required that his works culminate in a systematic theology. The revelation of God in Christ is either the one truth in relation to which all things makes sense, or it is false. If that revelation is true, then “[e]very single reality should prove incomprehensible (at least in its depth) without recourse to God.” The theologian’s task is to make that truth evident by showing, at least illustratively, the explanatory power of the Christian perspective.

---

Pannenberg’s project is breathtaking in its audacity. The theologian must stand ready, at least in principle, to discuss every topic. “A doctrine of God touches upon everything else. Therefore, it is necessary to explore every field of knowledge in order to speak of God reasonably.” Theology so understood seems to require a universal genius, a Leibniz or a Newton. Pannenberg’s range of knowledge is so extensive, one is tempted to believe the job possible. As Placher noted, “It’s hard to think of anything he doesn’t know.” But does the project succeed?

Doubts inevitably creep in. Perhaps because he views history as the final context of all meaning, Pannenberg tends to begin any topic in the Systematic Theology with a brief history of its discussion. These histories are a monument of learning, but even Pannenberg cannot be an expert on everything and the specialist scholar spots mistakes, small and sometimes not so small.

The greater limitation in Pannenberg’s work is its continuing orientation to the German philosophical and cultural context. When Pannenberg began his career, the German dominance of Protestant theology, dating back to Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was still firmly established. That dominance has since faded. Pannenberg has been far more open than most of his generation of German theologians to the wider world, but he engages that world from the perspective of a German tradition increasingly foreign to American readers. Pannenberg’s relation to that German Protestant tradition tells us much about how his theology does and does not point toward new possibilities.

The succession of German Protestant theology that runs from Kant through Schleiermacher and Hegel, Ritschl and Harnack, Barth and Bultmann represents a great intellectual achievement. Pannenberg seems to stand at the end of this tradition; no figures from the generation following him in Germany seem to be working at the same level. Pannenberg has not simply continued this tradition, however; he has also called it into question. His ambiguous relation to this tradition tells us much and ironically links him to his least favorite teacher, Karl Barth.

A driving force in this tradition has been the philosophical “turn to the subject,” a shift of focus from the thing known to the knower who knows it. Kant set the problem with his argument against any knowledge of the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, and Schleiermacher represents the first great attempt to accept that turn and still talk about God in a meaningful way. For Schleiermacher, theology is not directly about God, but about us, and most immediately about our faith. Faith (or, precisely, feeling) is the point where God dwells in the self, and so, it is claimed, by speaking about faith, we can in fact speak about God. In varying ways, most liberal Protestant theology after Schleiermacher followed his lead. The anthropology changed, but the path through humanity to God remained constant. The danger of a reduction of God to an aspect of humanity and its religiosity has always lurked in the background, however, and all too often taken over the foreground.

Pannenberg, like Barth, challenges the dominance of the “turn to the subject” [as established by Schleiermacher]. This challenge became explicit in a revealing interchange that occurred in 1989 between Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel of Tübingen, his most ponderable German Protestant contemporary. Jüngel wrote an extended essay-review of the first volume of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology in which, while praising his achievement, he raised some fundamental objections to his program. The title of his essay points to his most basic question: “Nihil divinitatis, ubi non fides: Is Christian Dogmatics in a Purely Theoretical Perspective Possible?” (the Latin phrase, which translates as “Nothing of God where there is no faith,” is a quotation from Luther). Jüngel’s question is about the relation between the content of faith, that which is believed, and the act of faith. He agrees with Pannenberg that the content of faith is foundational for the act of faith, and not vice versa; what we believe is more important than our act of believing it.

But Jüngel also insists that in explicating the content of faith, the theologian must make clear that the content of faith can only be the content of faith (Jüngel uses just this pattern of italics). The gospel, revelation, God in Christ, are not just there for the knowing. There is a theoretical knowledge of the content of faith, but it is inseparable from a practical knowledge, a transformation of the knowing self in the very act of knowing. There can be no true knowledge of God without a radically altered human self-understanding. [This] new knowledge of God and the new knowledge of the self are, he insists, “co-original.” Quoting Luther’s commentary on Galatians, he writes that “God and faith belong together so inseparably that one cannot avoid saying: ‘Outside faith God loses his righteousness, glory, abundance, etc, and there is nothing of majesty, of divinity where there is no faith.’” It is [in] this existential dimension of the content of faith that [Jüngel] misses in Pannenberg’s dogmatics.

Pannenberg’s response, entitled “To Grasp and Understand Faith in Itself: An Answer,” grants Jüngel’s point that true knowledge of God is impossible apart from faith, but counters that when Jüngel makes knowledge of God and a new self-understanding “co-original,” he endangers the priority of God to the human response of faith, the priority of the content of faith to the act of faith.

Behind this somewhat obscure dispute lie basic questions about the character of theology.

Theology is about God, but God is not an object of investigation and knowledge simply there for human scrutiny. How does theology reflect God’s sovereignty even in being known? In the 1960s the Protestant theologian Otto Hermann Pesch characterized the theological styles of Luther and Aquinas as “existential” and “sapiential.” Luther’s theology seeks to stay close to the perspective of the self addressed by God’s words of judgment and promise; Aquinas’ theology seeks to view all things as much as possible from the viewpoint of God’s all-encompassing wisdom, in which the human mind is allowed to participate. Much German Protestant theology since the early twentieth century has, in this sense, been programmatically “existential.” [That is,] the turn to the subject influences the way theology speaks.

Since the early twentieth century, German Protestant theology has sought forms in which first-person confession and second-person address, or, in other words, witness and proclamation, can shape the exposition of Christian theology. In this way, theology can talk about God while its form of discourse shows that God is known only as he gives himself to be known by faith. Theology must not only say that, it must show it by the way it speaks. Thus, for example, the quasi-homiletical rhetoric of Barth’s Church Dogmaticsis not “mere style” but a sign of the inseparability of theology from witness and proclamation.

The “existential dimension” is what Jüngel cannot find in Pannenberg’s theology. And he is right. Pannenberg’s theology is more sapiential than existential. In turning away from the “existential” mode, however, Pannenberg has done more than choose a different style of language. His turn to a public history and a shared reason oriented to that history is the most significant attempt in his generation of German Protestant theology to break with the turn to the subject that has been so determinative for over two hundred years. He represents a sort of new objectivity. In this regard, his turn to history shares much, at least in intention, with Barth’s turn to a Word of God who creates its own conditions of being known. Barth and Pannenberg represent the two figures in the German Protestant tradition over the last century who point beyond the focus on the human that has proven so inadequate.

---

This objectivity, this strong sense that theology is about God first and foremost and only then, because of what God does, about us and our religiosity, sets Pannenberg apart from much theology as done among mainline Protestants, both in Europe and North America. This objectivity gives Pannenberg’s writing, especially his Systematic Theology, a scholastic tone, in the best sense of the word, the slightly old-fashioned air I referred to at the outset. He analyzes issues, makes distinctions, discusses the options, entertains objections. One senses that the subject matter at hand is determinative. This quality makes Pannenberg’s work attractive as a conversation partner for Catholic and Evangelical theologians.

But a certain ambiguity haunts Pannenberg’s work. While he calls the recent German Protestant tradition into question in some respects, he stands firmly within it in others. A curse of recent theology has been the cult of the virtuoso theologian, the creative mind who recasts the field, the Schleiermachers and Barths of the discipline, Promethean figures who blaze the path others are to follow. Much academic work in modern theology seems less the study of God or of the Christian message about God, and more the study of the creativity of great theologians.

When Pannenberg broke onto the scene in the 1960s, he was treated as the new candidate for these laurels, the latest thing from Germany, the land of giants. His program of a thoroughgoing interpretation of the Christian message under the rubrics of history and eschatology looked like another interpretive tour de force, another exercise in killing the Oedipal father (or fathers, in the form of Barth and Bultmann) so that the children are free to pursue their own projects. The actual shape of Pannenberg’s achievement has been somewhat different. The quasi-scholastic tone points at least to a different intent, a more humble subjection to the subject matter.

Nevertheless, the manner of the virtuoso has never quite disappeared, no more than it disappeared from the work of Barth. The unique interpretive vision rooted in eschatology continues to color all that is said. As a friend has noted, what Pannenberg will not do is outline the tradition on a theological topic and then simply conclude that the tradition got it right and move on. The subject needs to be reshaped by the unique perspective of the system, like the pianist who insists that somehow, somewhere, his/her own unique interpretation must shine through.

Are great theologians always good things? Should we bemoan that there are no giants of the field around today? Certainly, mediocrity is not to be celebrated. Theology must be more than simply cataloging the answers provided by our forebears. But the enterprise of systematic theology is inherently dubious. It necessarily elevates the theologian to systematizer, to master of a subject matter that should not be mastered.

This critique is not new. Barth himself insisted that “systematic theology” is an oxymoron on a par with “wooden iron.” More searching questions need to be asked. What are the historical, institutional, and ecclesial factors that foster the cult of the great theologian? What is the connection between the rise within Protestantism of the idea of the heroic theologian over the last two hundred years and the decline within Protestantism of a stable doctrinal tradition that could guide thought and practice? Are the unique and comprehensive perspectives of a Pannenberg or a Barth (or a Schleiermacher or a Luther) called upon to perform a function that should be performed by a normative communal sense of the faith?

What is theology called to do in the life of the Church? The vocation of the theologian does not exist in a vacuum. The needs, the strengths and deficiencies of the concrete church being served, will shape that vocation, and the individual theologian can break out of the resultant mold only with difficulty. (The Protestant theologian who broke out of the mold most thoroughly, Kierkegaard, is proof of the difficulty and the cost.) A critique of the sort of theology that fits the cult of the great theologian must inevitably be a critique of the ecclesial life that produces the cult. Theology can accomplish much, but it cannot make up for essential deficits in the life of the church it serves.

Wolfhart Pannenberg has produced an impressive range of work that is learned, intelligent, and faithful. His ambiguous relation to his time is itself instructive. It should make us think about what theology is, what it is called to do, and how theology and church inevitably reflect one another.

Pannenberg is now well into his eighties and we can expect that his theological work is complete. From the beginning of his career, he has employed his formidable intelligence and scholarship in the service of careful thought and writing about the God present in Christ and the Spirit. Lives and talents so spent are blessings.

*Michael Root is professor of theology at the Catholic University of America.


* * * * * * * * * * * *


Wikipedia's List of Authorial Writings

Books by Pannenberg in English

1968. Revelation As History (edited volume). New York: The Macmillan Company.
1968. Jesus: God and Man. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
1969. Basic Questions in Theology. Westminster Press
1969. Theology and the Kingdom of God. Westminster Press.
1970. What Is Man? Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
1972. The Apostles' Creed in Light of Today's Questions. Westminster Press.
1976. Theology and the Philosophy of Science. Westminster Press.
1977. Faith and Reality. Westminster Press.
1985. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. T&T Clark
1988–1994. Systematic Theology. T & T Clark
1996. "Theologie und Philosophie. Ihr Verhältnis im Lichte ihrer gemeinsamen Geschichte". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Online writings

"God of the Philosophers," First Things, June/July 2007.
"Letter from Germany," First Things, March 2003.
"Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," First Things, August/September 2002.
"Review of Robert W. Jenson's Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II," First Things, May 2000.
"When Everything is Permitted," First Things, February 1998.
"The Pope in Germany," First Things, December 1996.
"How to Think About Secularism," First Things, June/July 1996.
"Christianity and the West: Ambiguous Past, Uncertain Future," First Things, December 1994.
"The Present and Future Church," First Things, November 1991.
"God's Presence in History," Christian Century (11 March 1981): 260–63.

Further reading

Bradshaw, Timothy, 1988. Trinity and ontology: a comparative study of the theologies of Karl Barth and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books.

Case, Jonathan P (2004), "The Death of Jesus and the Truth of the Triune God in Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel", Journal for Christian Theological Research 9: 1–13.

Fukai, Tomoaki, 1996, Paradox und Prolepsis: Geschichtstheologie bei Reinhold Niebuhr und Wolfhart Pannenberg (in German), Marburg.

Grenz, Stanley J (1990), Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, New York: Oxford.

——— (30 September 1987), "Pannenberg on Marxism: Insights and Generalizations", The Christian Century (Religion online): 824–26.

——— (14–21 September 1988), "Wolfhart Pannenberg's Quest for Ultimate Truth", The Christian Century (Religion online): 795–98.

Lischer, Richard, "An Old/New Theology of History," The Christian Century (13 March 1974): 288–90.

Don H. Olive, 1973. Wolfhart Pannenberg-Makers of the Modern Mind. Word Incorporated, Waco, Texas.

Page, James S., 2003, "Critical Realism and the Theological Science of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Exploring the Commonalities," Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Theology, History and Science 10(1/2): 71–84.

Schwarz, Hans, 2012. 'Wolfhart Pannenberg' in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity J.B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (eds.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Shults, F. LeRon, 1999. The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Tipler, Frank J (1989), "The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg's Questions for Scientists", Zygon 24: 217–53. Followed by Pannenberg's comments, 255–71.

——— (1994), The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York: Doubleday.

——— (2007), The Physics of Christianity, New York: Doubleday.

Tupper, E. F., 1973. The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Philadelphia: Westminster press.

Woo, B. Hoon (2012). "Pannenberg’s Understanding of the Natural Law". Studies in Christian Ethics 25 (3): 346–66. doi:10.1177/0953946812444686.

* * * * * * * * * * * *


Wolfhart Pannenberg in 1983

Wikipedia Biography of Wolfhart Pannenberg

Wolfhart Pannenberg (2 October 1928 – 4 September 2014)[1] was a German theologian. He has made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the Resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.

Life and views

Pannenberg was born on 2 October 1928 in Stettin, Germany, now Szczecin, Poland. He was baptized as an infant into the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, but otherwise had virtually no contact with the church in his early years. At about the age of sixteen, however, he had an intensely religious experience he later called his "light experience." Seeking to understand this experience, he began to search through the works of great philosophers and religious thinkers. A high school literature teacher who had been a part of the Confessing Church during World War II encouraged him to take a hard look at Christianity, which resulted in Pannenberg's "intellectual conversion," in which he concluded that Christianity was the best available religious option. This propelled him into his vocation as a theologian.

Pannenberg studied in Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg and Basel. In Basel, Pannenberg studied under Karl Barth. His doctoral thesis at Heidelberg was on Edmund Schlink's views on predestination in the works of Duns Scotus, which he submitted in 1953 and published a year later. His Habilitationsschrift in 1955 dealt with the relationship between analogy and revelation, especially the concept of analogy in the teaching of God's knowledge.

Pannenberg's epistemology, explained clearly in his shorter essays, is crucial to his theological project. It is heavily influenced by Schlink, who proposed a distinction between analogical truth, i.e. a descriptive truth or model, and doxological truth, or truth as immanent in worship. In this way of thinking, theology tries to express doxological truth. As such it is a response to God's self-revelation. Schlink was also instrumental in shaping Pannenberg's approach to theology as an ecumenical enterprise – an emphasis which has remained constant throughout his career.

Pannenberg's understanding of revelation is strongly conditioned by his reading of Karl Barth and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as by a sympathetic reading of Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature. The Hegelian concept of history as an unfolding process in which Spirit and freedom are revealed combines with a Barthian notion of revelation occurring "vertically from above". While Pannenberg adopts a Hegelian understanding of History itself as God's self-revelation, he strongly asserts the Resurrection of Christ as a proleptic revelation of what history is unfolding. Despite its obvious Barthian reference, this approach met with a mainly hostile response from both neo-Orthodox and liberal, Bultmannian theologians in the 1960s, a response which Pannenberg claims surprised him and his associates.[2] A more nuanced, mainly implied, critique came from Jürgen Moltmann, whose philosophical roots lay in the Left Hegelians, Karl Marx and Ernst Bloch, and who proposed and elaborated a Theology of Hope, rather than of prolepsis, as a distinctively Christian response to History.

As disciple of Karl Löwith, Pannenberg has continued the debate against Hans Blumenberg in the so-called 'theorem of secularization'.[3] "Blumenberg targets Löwith's argument that progress is the secularization of Hebrew and Christian beliefs and argues to the contrary that the modern age, including its belief in progress, grew out of a new secular self-affirmation of culture against the Christian tradition."[4]

Pannenberg is perhaps best known for Jesus: God and Man in which he constructs a Christology "from below," deriving his dogmatic claims from a critical examination of the life and particularly the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is his programmatic statement of the notion of "History as Revelation". He rejects traditional Chalcedonian "two-natures" Christology, preferring to view the person of Christ dynamically in light of the resurrection. This focus on the resurrection as the key to Christ's identity has led Pannenberg to defend its historicity, stressing the experience of the risen Christ in the history of the early Church rather than the empty tomb.

Central to Pannenberg's theological career was his defence of theology as a rigorous academic discipline, one capable of critical interaction with philosophy, history, and most of all, the natural sciences. Pannenberg has also defended the theology of American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory[5][6][7].

Pannenberg was an outspoken critic of the approval of homosexual relations by the Evangelical Church in Germany, going so far as to say that a church which approves of homosexual practice is no longer a true church. He returned his Federal Order of Merit after the decoration was awarded to a lesbian activist.[8]

Pannenberg speaking at a CDUconference in Bonn, 1983

Career

Pannenberg was a professor on the faculties of several universities consistently, after 1958. Between the years of 1958 and 1961 he was the Professor of Systematic Theology at theKirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal. Between 1961 and 1968 he was a professor in Mainz. He has had several visiting professorships at the University of Chicago (1963), Harvard (1966), and at the Claremont School of Theology (1967), and since 1968 had been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich.[9] He retired in 1993, and died at age 85 in 2014.[10]

Throughout his career Pannenberg remained a prolific writer. As of December 2008, his "publication page" on the University of Munich's website lists 645 academic publications to his name.[11]

References


Pannenberg, Wolfhart (11 March 1981), "God’s Presence in History", The Christian Century: 260–63.

Pannenberg, Wolfhart (1973) [1968]. "Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age". The Idea of God and Human Freedom 3. London: Westminster Press. pp. 178–91. ISBN 978-06-6420-971-1.


Tipler 1989.

Tipler 1994.

Tipler 2007.

Root, Michael (March 2012). "The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg".First Things.

Brief biography (in German), University of Munich.

Roger Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology, 479

Pannenberg, Publications, University of Munich.


Friday, September 12, 2014

Remembering Wolfhart Pannenberg (Reflections & Articles by Philip Clayton and Others)


Wolfhart Pannenberg in 1983

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014)
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/09/07/wolfhart-pannenberg-1928-2014/

by Tony Jones
September 7, 2014

Wolfhart Pannenberg—In Memoriam

by Philip Clayton

Wolfhart Pannenberg has often been called the greatest theologians of the second half of the 20th century. With his death Friday, September 5, 2014, the world has lost a brilliant interpreter of Christianity, and I have lost the mentor who molded me as a scholar, theologian, and person.

In the 1950s, when Pannenberg was a doctoral student in Heidelberg, Karl Barth dominated the theological stage. In order to counteract Barth’s overemphasis on salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), Pannenberg redefined revelation as “universal history” (Universalgeschichte). A few years later he published a major Christology (Jesus—God and Man) that established him as the world’s leading defender of “theology from below.”

Over the next 30 years, Pannenberg extended this program to philosophy, the religion/science debate, the dialogue across the world religions, and to every corner of theology. He had the most encyclopedic mind I have ever encountered. You need only to read around a bit in his multi-volume Basic Questions in Theology to be stunned by the range and depth of his scholarship. John Cobb once quipped,

“I saw that Pannenberg was able to encompass the entire range of knowledge within
his own mind. Realizing that I could never match this achievement, I decided it would
take a lifetime of working with my doctoral students to cover as many topics.”

Pannenberg’s staunch defense of the historicity of the resurrection made him a champion among American evangelicals. His extensive involvement in the ecumenical movement and his unsurpassed knowledge of the history of theology were crucial to the most important ecumenical breakthroughs in the World Council of Churches. Taken together, Pannenberg’s extensive writings, including his three-volume systematic theology, offer a theological program unrivaled its comprehensiveness, depth, and rigor.

Yet Pannenberg’s influence extended far beyond the evangelical and ecumenical worlds. His early statement that “in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist”caught the attention of process theologians and involved him in a multi-year dialogue with John Cobb (who studied with Pannenberg in Mainz in 1963), Lewis Ford, and others. He met regularly with scientists, stressing contingency and natural law as openings for constructive engagement between science and theology. Pannenberg traveled widely around the world, was a guest professor at Harvard and Claremont, and hosted many professors and doctoral students from the United States and elsewhere during his decades of teaching at the University of Munich.

I was one of those students. While still at Fuller Seminary, I met Pannenberg (at Claremont, ironically) and asked him for his permission to begin my doctorate work under his guidance. A two-year scholarship from DAAD funded [my] stay in Munich, and I wrote the first 200 pages of [my] dissertation under his direction. Although I completed my doctoral studies at Yale, I always considered Pannenberg the true mentor of the dissertation. From him I learned the importance of Gründlichkeit, rigorousness — a virtue that I have sought to impart to my classes and doctoral students throughout my career.

Thanks to Fulbright and Humboldt professorships, I returned for two further years of study under him; our relationship, and his influence on me, deepened in those years. I remember, for example, a birthday celebration at our small apartment that lasted (in good old-German fashion) for five hours of eating and conversation. As all who knew him will attest, Pannenberg’s success had much to do with his indomitable wife, who guided his days and decisions better than any executive coach you’ve ever met. I have watched her disperse a group of intensely debating professors as if they were bowling pins: “Excuse me, you must all go home now. My husband needs some rest; he has a busy day tomorrow.”

Pannenberg set unimaginable standards for himself and others. Each workday he would write from 5-10 am. On Tuesdays and Fridays he would catch the commuter train to the University of Munich and present the new material in that day’s lecture. If you asked him a question on virtually any theological topic, you would be treated to an extemporaneous five-minute answer, running from biblical texts to biblical theology to Patristics, Scholastics, Reformation thinkers, and modern theology, with detailed treatments of what secular philosophers, historians, and scientists had written on the subject. Once, when he was writing his anthropology, I asked him why he looked so tired. “Herr Clayton,” he said, “the literature on this topic is uferlos, unbounded. I have been reading 500 pages-a-day, now I have switched to reading 1000 pages-a-day in order to master all of it.”

What many people don’t realize is that Pannenberg modified his “theology from below” stance early in his career. By the time of the “Afterword” to Jesus—God and Man (1970), he had already developed a method that combined theology from below and theology from above. The brilliant debates on the nature of the Trinity in the 1970s—especially the back-and-forths with Jürgen Moltmann—show this method in action. Miroslav Volf and I were both studying in Germany in the 1980s, he under Moltmann in Tübingen and I under Pannenberg in München. We and our wives would meet multiple times each year, taking long walks in the forest and debating the merits of our respective Doktorväter until late into the night. (It is no coincidence that in the German system your dissertation advisor is your “doctor-father”; the relationship is close, life-long, and affects every fiber of your being.)

Pannenberg’s conservativism on political and social issues—for example, on feminism and gay rights—set him at odds with many theologians. He wrote a demanding and uncompromising form of theology in the very years when pastors and the public began to prefer more informal, journalistic, and experience-based theologies.Pannenberg was no popularist.

Yet without question he has had a profound influence on some of the greatest theological minds of our generation: John Cobb and Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson in the early years, the famous fiery debates with Moltmann and Jüngel, the religion-and-science discussions with John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke and others, and my fellow students in Munich, such as Stan Grenz and Roger Olson and E. Frank Tupper and TedPeters. In the dozens and dozens of lectures in the United States over some 40 years, Pannenberg engaged in intense exchanges with virtually every great intellectual personality of our age. In this fiery furnace— or in direct opposition to it!—many of the greatest theological breakthroughs of the last decades were forged.

Two hundred years from now, historians of theology will describe the work of Karl Barth and Wolfhart Pannenberg as the two theological giants of the mid-20thcentury. But I want to make sure that the record also includes Pannenberg’s warmth as a personhis quick smile, the way his eyes sparkled when he told a joke, his enduring friendships, and his deep commitment to mentoring and supporting his students.

Pannenberg has been called a rationalist. Before you accept this epitaph, you should read his theological autobiography in the American Festschrift that Carl Braaten and I co-edited,The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Twelve American Critiques. In fact, his theology grew out of a dramatic conversion experience and a continual sense of the real presence of God’s Spirit.

For all his wrestling with philosophy and science, Pannenberg was in the end a man of deep, abiding faith. He believed that the richness and immensity of God call for the most profound study and reflection that our minds are capable of

…that theology should meet and exceed the highest standards that philosophers set for themselves

…and that we never need to compromise as we wrestle to understand as much of the divine nature as we can grasp through every source available to us.

---

Philip Clayton studied under Wolfhart Pannenberg for four years and continued to work with him for most of his career. Clayton is Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Munich, and has written or edited 25 books and some 250 articles in theology, philosophy, religion-and-science, and comparative religious thought.

Here also is a new Homebrewed Christianity episode in which Philip talks about Pannenberg with Tripp Fuller.


* * * * * * * * * * * *


Wolfhart Pannenberg, 1928-2014

Remembering Wolfhart Pannenberg
(A Roundup of Reflections and Articles)
http://moltmanniac.com/remembering-wolfhart-pannenberg/

by Ben
September 9, 2014

Wolfhart Pannenberg has died. He truly was one of the greatest theological minds of his generation, and has been fast becoming one of my favorite theologians.

A number of people who know a thing or two about him (or even knew him personally!) have shared some excellent reflections in the days since his passing. Here is a roundup of articles and media on Pannenberg in remembrance. I’ll try to add more to this post as I become aware of them:


Here are some other older articles / blog posts that have been shared in the last few days:


There have also been a few Pannenberg-related posts here on the Moltmanniac in the last few months:



A Tribute to Wolfhart Pannenbergy by Roger Olson


German Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg


Wolfhart Pannenberg (2 October 1928 – 5 September 2014) was a German theologian.
He has made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including
his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the Resurrection of Christ,
which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as
by non-Christian thinkers. - Wikipedia


Wolfhart Pannenberg R.I.P.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/09/wolfhart-pannenberg-r-i-p/

by Roger Olson
September 8, 2014

One of the last theological giants passed away September 5 (2014). Wolfhart Pannenberg was without doubt one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. He was born in Stettin, Germany (now part of Poland) in 1928. He was in poor health for the past several years.

I had the privilege of studying with Pannenberg in Munich, where he taught theology at the University of Munich, during the year 1981-1982. I wrote a major part of my Rice University Ph.D. dissertation under his supervision during that year. (I finished it back in the U.S. and received my Ph.D. in 1984. The dissertation is entitled “Trinity and Eschatology: The Historical Being of God in the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg.”)

Pannenberg, of course, was noted for his life-long opposition to “subjectivism” in theology. He believed that existentialism and Pietism were diseases of Christian theology, especially modern Protestantism, and needed correction. He opposed dialectical theology, eschewing what he called “special pleading” for theological conclusions. He wanted theology to be “Wissenschaftlich” (scientific) and thus engaged in “Fundamental Theology” (not fundamentalism but a type of natural theology rooted in human experiences such as “exocentrism”).

Many people, such as Pannenberg’s student Philip Clayton (whose obituary of Pannenberg you can read at Tony Jones’s blog), will describe Pannenberg’s theology in more detail. My friend Stanley Grenz (d. 2005) wrote one major book about Pannenberg’s theology which remains, I believe, one of the best.

Here I will instead tell stories about Pannenberg the man. I not only knew him well during the year I studied under him in Munich but also served as his “agent” for two lecture tours around the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I had many one-on-one conversations with him in restaurants, in my home and his, and elsewhere. Sometimes others were present, too.

Pannenberg was not an easy man to know. He was, by most accounts, a typical German professor–a bit distant and aloof. Sometimes he could be sharp but never snarky or mean. My first personal experience of him was in his office in Munich in the late summer of 1981. I talked with him about my dissertation project. I had planned to compare his theology of the Trinity with Moltmann’s. Pannenberg told me to drop the comparison with Moltmann and just write about his own theology, so I did.

During that year, which was a most beautiful time for me, my wife, and our four year old daughter, I had many conversations with Pannenberg. Often they took place during the “Pause” in the middle of his 90 minute lectures. He would ask me to walk with him and I tried to keep up as he walked quickly around the building’s large lobby area. He spoke German to me and I spoke English to him (he said my German wasn’t good enough yet. I was fine with that).

During one of those ten-to-fifteen minute walks I asked him about paradox. He was generally critical of theological reliance on paradox and yet certain points in his own theology seemed paradoxical (such as his “eschatological ontology”). He told me that certain paradoxes were unavoidable but that they always remained “tasks for further thought.” In other words, never settle comfortably with them.

During that year Pannenberg was lecturing on the material that became the first volume of his Systematic Theology. I also sat in on two of his seminars—one of them an evening ecumenical discussion between himself and a Catholic professor and their students. The topic of discussion was the “Reformation anathemas” (Catholic against Luther and his followers) and whether they could be lifted. Eventually, of course, they were.

There were other American students studying with Pannenberg the year I was there–Phil Clayton and George Garin. We had many good times together—often discussing Pannenberg’s theology. One time we hatched a plan to invite Pannenberg to lunch to ask him what he meant by “the future ‘bestimmt’ the present.” (Bestimmen can mean either “define” or “determine.”) We agreed that I would pose the question, so I did. His answer didn’t surprise me: “Both, of course.” In other words, at least at that time, he believed that the future kingdom of God, the reign of God, determines the past retroactively–an ontological and not merely hermeneutical idea.

---

[R.E. Slater, "...this idea would be in opposition to open theism's assertion that the future is always open and therefore neither defined nor determined. However, in another sense, apart from open theism itself, one could assert from a sociological perspective that the "all the present is affected by a society's expectations of the future, and in this sense the future does affect the present based upon a society's existential expectations of it. Finally, in the scientific sense of time, time is always linear and is never pre-defined. The physics of the dilemma bears this out even in quantum mechanics however complicated the calculations and conjectures. Of course this presents a real problem for the biblical idea of prophecy. Is prophecy a 'fore-telling' of an event or is it a 'forth-telling' of an event? If God cannot know the future because the future is open and neither closed or determined per His divine fiats in creation-past, then can there be such a thing as Christian expectation? Then again, since our Creator is also Redeemer may we expect His will of redemption to become real and present through all eternity? It is in this sense, at the barest of minimums where every Christian must agree. And it is in this sense as well that the Christian faith has an expectation of the future where or not God can know it or not. That our expectations of the future can be one of anticipating recurring redemption towards finality within a free will creation of both atoms and man."]

---

One idea that came out clearly in his lectures, that I had not paid attention to before, was what I later labled “Pannenberg’s Principle”–that “God’s deity is his rule.” So we also asked him during that lunch if he would still say, then as before, that “God does not yet exist.” He said “Yes, with the proper qualifications.”

Several times I heard Pannenberg say “There is one thing I am not–a Pietist.” Since I was (and am) a Pietist (hopefully in the best and truest sense) I did not find Pannenberg’s approach to faith and spirituality especially agreeable. In my opinion, he tended to reduce faith to assent to what is reasonable [R.E. Slater, "An appeal to logic or reason"]. While I agree that Christian belief is (at its best) reasonable, I do not think reason is the basis for what is believed. Pannenberg’s spirituality was, by his own admission, “sacramental spirituality,” so our approaches to many things about Christianity were at cross purposes.

In spite of that, I owe a real debt of gratitude to Pannenberg for inviting me into his lectures and seminars and for giving me full access to the Protestant faculty library at the University of Munich and for taking time to have many conversations with me.

Overall, and in general, I would say, my theological journey has been shaped more by Moltmann than by Pannenberg. Still and nevertheless, it was a great privilege to study under him and to get to know him. His departure from this life is a great loss especially to the scholarly and academic side of Christian theology.



An Interview with Wolfhart Pannenberg by Thomas Jay Oord


German Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg

Pannenberg Dies; An Interview
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/pannenberg_dies_an_interview/#.VBLqF_ldVfc

by Thomas Jay Oord
September 8, 2014

One of the most influential theologians in the latter half of the 20th century, Wolfhart Pannenberg, has died. I sat down with Pannenberg a decade or so ago to talk about his life and thought. For the first time in print, here's my full-length interview with him.

It was a joy to sit and talk shop -- theology -- with such a brilliant man. As the interview below indicates, I asked about his influences and his thoughts about the future of theology.

But I also pressed him -- and sometimes disagreed with him -- on some of his key theological ideas. In the end, I left our 3-hour conversation with a deeper sense of appreciation for him and his work. But I also left our pleasant chat with a clearer sense on those topics where we differ.

A portion of this interview was published not long after I sat down with Pannenberg. But I don't believe the full interview has ever been made available. Upon hearing of his death, I wondered why I had waited so long to put it in print somewhere!

I explored a wide range of topics -- science, eschatology, [the physicist and now Anglican Priest, John] Polkinghorne, resurrection, process theology, etc. -- in my interview. The result is a long narrative! Because of the diversity of topics and the length, I've bolded my questions in the text below. I'm expecting readers to skip to questions they find most interesting.

The Interview

Thomas Jay Oord: As you enter the latter stages of your career, you've probably reflected some on your contributions as a scholar. What experiences in your childhood or youth do you now see as particularly influential in shaping these contributions?

Wolfhart Pannenberg: As you may know, I was not raised in a Christian family. Although I was baptized as a child, I did not have a Christian education.

But in 1945, I had a visionary experience at the occasion of a sunset. Light flooded all around and through myself, and I don't know where I was or how long it lasted. It may have lasted for an eternity. Afterwards, I found myself a humble human being and was just puzzled.

I thought I had to come to terms with that event and what it really meant to me. It happened on the sixth of January, 1945. I didn't know at the time that the sixth of January is the feast of Christ's glorification of epiphany. Later on, I thought it was significant that it was on this particular day I became, so to speak, metaphysically awakened. But I didn't yet know the purpose of this awakening.

I had read from Nietzsche and Kant before I was sixteen -- even before I had read the first line of the Bible. By my reading of Nietzsche, I thought that I was perfectly informed about what I should think about Christianity. But I met some people who didn't fit in that specter of guilt or obsessed parrotism. I met some Christians who seemed to be quite jolly and joyous human beings, and I was puzzled as to how that could be so. This contributed to my decision to find out about Christianity by studying theology.

So, I started studying theology in 1945. I was increasingly attracted to the content of the Christian message and the profound nature of Christian doctrine. I soon came to the conclusion that what happened to me on the sixth of January, 1945 was really the light of Christ.

---

Oord: Much has been made of Karl Barth and Gerhard von Rad's influence upon your theology. On what areas of your thought do you see them as having the greatest influence?

Pannenberg: Karl Barth was a towering figure in theology right after the war. In my early years as a student, I read through all the volumes of his Church Dogmatics. In 1950, I went to Basel to hear his lectures. I got some very good recommendations from one of Barth's former students, so I was received by Karl Barth very personally and invited to his home. I was impressed by his person and by his teaching.

But, in the second semester I spent at Basel, there was a small group that would come together in Barth’s home to discuss some of his thoughts. We discussed one of his smaller works called, The Community of Christians and the State. There he developed some analogical reasoning, including some conclusions for politics from Christology.

One of these conclusions was that there should be no secret diplomacy as a consequence of our belief that Christ is alive. I didn't find this particularly persuasive. I thought that, perhaps, the world of politics would profit from some more secret diplomacy. So, I criticized Karl Barth. Karl Barth just didn't like criticism. And, so, my relationship with Karl Barth got considerably cooler.

But, I always remained impressed by his emphasis that God has to come first in theology, and that the same should be said about Jesus Christ. God, as revealed as Jesus Christ, comes first and should not be replaced by anything else. So, to this extent, I am still influenced by Karl Barth.

Now to von Rad. One of the weaknesses of Karl Barth was that Barth didn't have a real appreciation of Biblical exegesis, especially critical exegesis. Of course, he used the scripture quite a bit. But he had a very personal way of interpreting the Bible. I found by involving myself in historical critical exegesis of biblical writings that this wouldn't do. Theology should be based on the scriptures, of course, but it should be based upon a reading of the scriptures through historical interpretation. After all, the scriptures are historical documents, notwithstanding their being the word of God. Even that has to be settled upon their content as historical documents.

I was most impressed by Gerhard von Rad's approach, because he interprets the scriptures, not only as a historian, but as a theologian. He was able to speak of the stories of the Old Testament as if they were about real life -- much more real than the secular life that we experience otherwise. The Old Testament has become an experience of reality for me through the teachings of Gerhard von Rad. His thesis, that God is acting with Israel and with all humanity in history, and that history is constituted by the acts of God, has influenced me more than any other thing that I learned as a student.

---

Oord: Early in your career, it was not uncommon for scholars to point out similarities between your thought and the process thought of people such as John Cobb and Schubert Ogden. This practice is much less common today. Were you misunderstood early on, or have your views changed?

Pannenberg: I think this affinity to process thought, which was propelled by some of my American friends, was due to the fact that I emphasized history as the field of God's revelation and even as belonging to God himself.

We cannot speak about God's nature by disregarding God's action. God's nature and God's action have to be kept together. We know about God's nature only through God's action in history. My understanding of God as involved in the history of humanity was considered to have some relationship to process concerns. To this extent, this was true.

I also had to concern myself with the philosophy of Whitehead when I came to Chicago in 1963. This was my first experience in the United States as somebody who is expected to teach theology. At Chicago, you couldn't survive intellectually at that time without having read everything of Whitehead.

I was greatly impressed by Whitehead, but I was also critical of Whitehead. I never understood how my dear friend, John Cobb, could reconcile Whitehead's philosophy with a Christian doctrine of creation. After all, Whitehead explicitly denies that his philosophical God is the Creator of the world. He sees God and world in correspondence. I believe that everything comes from God in such a way that God could have been God without creating the world. This is not something that Whitehead could have accepted. Thus, I have always had some reservations with regard to Whiteheadian philosophy. [R.E. Slater - this is the process side of "pan-en-theism" (not pantheism that teaches God is all and All is God, sic Oprah Winfrey). I have argued for a kind of panentheism within process thought that sees the world as an expression of God, and in some sense, the birth of God for creation itself which had no existence until it was brought into existence by God. (Although the argument could be made that creation has always been around in existence, just not in form - sic Moltmann's creatio continua - as supported by today's cosmological sciences making the latter point moot). However, were there no world or creation there still would be a God... just not for us (as existential expressions of a creationless eternity). However, these observations can become somewhat involved so I will leave off for now until another time.)

Of course, process thought is much broader than Whitehead. I often asked my friend John Cobb why the process thinkers should be so exclusively focused on Whitehead while disregarding, and even not knowing about, Henri Bergson and Samuel Alexander. These are two great process thinkers before Whitehead who also offer alternative views in process thought. There should be some discussion about what one should prefer within the camp of process thought. I also would like to see process thought in the greater horizon of the development of metaphysical issues in modern philosophy - especially the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

---

Oord: Many scholars were impressed by your early arguments concerning the actual historical resurrection of Jesus. In what ways have your views on that issue changed over the years?

Pannenberg: There was no reason to change my views, actually. I haven't seen alternative explanations with regards to the Christian Easter tradition that would not be less plausible than the biblical accounts themselves.

I used to tell my students that you have to study the biblical texts critically, as you study other historical documents. But, please, be also critical of the critics. There are many students who take their teacher's authority, especially when they are so bold and critical with regards to the biblical texts. So, I prefer to be critical of the critics. Sometimes, alternative reconstructions are almost ridiculous.

I never understood how, at Jerusalem, the place of Jesus crucifixion, a Christian congregation could be established a few weeks after that event, proclaiming his resurrection, without firmly and truly being assured about the fact that the tomb was empty. Of course, critics have different explanations for that fact. But, with regard to the tomb of Jesus being empty, the Christian proclamation couldn't have persisted one day in Jerusalem. I often wonder why there are so many scholars whose imagination doesn't suggest to them that this would be possible.

---

Oord: Early in your career, you insisted on the importance of doing theology against the background of the history of religions. How do you reconcile the universal revelation of God in Christ with a world in which India, after 2000 years, remains largely Hindu and likely will remain so for some time.

Pannenberg: Well, the Christian affirmation of the relation between God and Jesus Christ is constituted by anticipation of the final outcome of all history. This is anticipation of what theologians call, "eschatology," i.e., the last future, when God's kingdom will be definitively realized and Christ will come again and all the dead will raise. This was anticipated in the resurrection of Christ, according to the early Christian proclamation. We have a claim to universal revelation, but this claim too will be finally vindicated only in the future. Until that happens, there is room for different opinions, and some people think otherwise.

---

Oord: Some contemporary theologians, adopting the label "narrative theologians," emphasize the church as the primary source of, and audience for, the stories of theology, thereby minimizing theology's place in public endeavor. What role should public theology have today?

Pannenberg: Let me first comment on the concept of "narrative theology." The biblical stories are narrative. But you have many kinds of narration, of narrative types, and some of the biblical narratives make historical claims. To speak of narratives without mentioning that means to bypass these historical claims. It seems awkward to some theologians to raise these truth questions that are connected to the Christian message. This is replaced by taking recourse to the role of the church, the social context of the Christian message, and so on.

I think that, if Christianity had not dealt with truth questions, Christianity would never have become a world religion. Christianity developed a universal mission to all human beings, because it raised universal truth claims concerning the God of Israel as Creator of the world and as manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christianity has to continue in defending these universal truth claims that have been essential for Christianity and especially Christian missions from the very beginning.

---

Oord: One could interpret volume three of your systematic theology as a more Protestant (read "individualistic") view of the church than a Catholic (read "communitarian") view. Would this be a fair reading?

Pannenberg: This might be a Roman Catholic reading. My Protestant critics say otherwise -- that I place far too much importance on the concept of the church. [R.E. Slater - It should be noted that the American theologican from Duke University, Stanley Hauerwas, does so as well.] But Christian theology has to keep these two aspects together.

The church is indispensable -- not only important -- but indispensable, because the tradition of the faith and the ongoing proclamation of the gospel to new generations takes place only in the church. The church is commissioned with this responsibility.

But the individual believer is not completely dependent upon the authority of the church and its ministry. By the service of the church's proclamation, the believer is led into an immediate relationship with the God that is proclaimed in the Christian gospel. That immediate relationship is what we enjoy in faith.

The mediating role of the church is indispensable, but, still, each faithful Christian believer should have a relationship of immediacy with God, sharing in Jesus own relationship with the father. I think this is Christian mysticism that we share in the inner Trinitarian communion of the Son with the Father. Paul himself said so in Romans chapter eight.

So, this concern for immediacy is very important, but it is not an alternative to the mediation of the gospel through the services and institutions of the church. The individual Christian believer also cannot exist without communion with the other Christians who share the same body of Christ in receiving his sacraments.

---

Oord: What does it mean to say, "God is love?" And, is God free not to love?

Pannenberg: This central affirmation of the Bible in the Johannine letters is often misunderstood today. It is thought, "We know what love is, and God has to be loving. Otherwise, we wouldn't accept him." This is a great mistake.

God, first of all, is the mystery that constitutes everything, surrounds us from all sides, and surpasses understanding. Especially in experience, we can't understand this God who surpasses our understanding.

The Bible is full of sentences that speak of God's wrath and judgment. Why do people tend to overlook that fact? The judgment of God on human injustice is more evident than the love of God. The prophets of the Old Testament have expressed this. The Jewish people had to wrestle with this. This is not a thing of the past, it continues throughout time, through all of history.

It was not a matter of fact statement when Jesus proclaims this God to be the loving Father. It was, rather, a paradox. It is the center of Jesus’ message that God's true nature, the true nature of this mystery that surrounds our lives, is Fatherly love.

This was closely connected with his proclamation of the imminent kingdom of God that opens up to every believer, even now, the presence of God, which means serving for all eternity. This was what was meant when Jesus spoke of God's love. We should learn about love from the Bible. We shouldn't turn the Bible around into what we think is love.

---

Oord: If the kingdom of God has been universally and definitively established, as you've argued, why does evil still persist as the most embarrassing reality the Christian gospel confronts?

Pannenberg: In Jesus’ message, the kingdom was, first of all, future. It is an immanent future, in the sense of urgency, that makes everything else a secondary concern. That was the point of Jesus’ message.

But the starting point isn't "the kingdom is future." Jesus also said, in a small number of words, that this future becomes already present where God is accepted as King in the heart of the believer. When the message of the kingdom is accepted, God becomes King in the heart of the believer now. But God is not King in the broad reality of the world, of political institutions, of social structures, and so on. This hasn't changed, basically, since the time of Jesus' teaching.

Therefore, we still have evil persisting as an embarrassing reality. We expect that, finally, evil will be overcome by the fulfillment of God's kingdom, the fulfillment of human history, the second coming of Christ, and the day of the last judgment.

---

Oord: How do you correlate divinely initiated and sanctioned violence in the Old Testament with the nonviolence of Jesus in the New Testament? Is God violent?

Pannenberg: Like I said before, God is not that meekly love that many people say He should be. In the Old Testament, God is one who elected Israel, and this did not always include peaceful relationship with other people. We see, at present, what the problems are in that respect. That God elected Israel and that this would entail violence in relation to other nations was not the final aim of all of God's actions. But God had elected Israel to become a witness of God's will to righteousness for all human beings. Violence is not the last word. The last word of God will be the reconciliation and love.

Looking at our present world, it is difficult to understand that this is so. This is an experience that should prompt us, again and again, to adore the mystery of God that surpasses our understanding. Following Jesus, we should believe against the experiences that occur. We should believe that, finally, God will be the God of reconciliation and love. It will be finally evident that this is so.

---

Oord: Given your doctrine of eternity, to what extent is God essentially affected by historical occurrences? Does it just seem to us that God is affected by history? Or is God essentially affected by what occurs?

Pannenberg: I emphasize that eternity is not only the opposition to time, but it comprises the wholeness of life as possessed in one present that is not going away. Eternity comprises time, but it is distinct from time. In the course of temporal events, some are already passed, they are no more, and some are not yet. In eternity, the whole of life is possessed in one present that is not to be passed over by anything else.

Given this view of eternity, it is not difficult to understand that the eternal God also is engaged in the temporal process. God didn't have to create a world. But, after He decided to create a world, He was bound to that decision. Given the fact that the created world exists, God's divine nature is bound up with His kingdom over this world. Therefore, the final outcome of the processes of this world is constitutive in our experience for the fact that the God we believe in really is the eternal God and creator of the world.

If the final completion of the kingdom of God did not occur, we would have been in error for believing in this God. But from the perspective of the eternal God Himself, that is not a problem! From the perspective of the eternal God, the reality of the world has to be considered as one process which is complete from the end.

---

Oord: You have long sought to bring theology and science into a mutually illuminating conversation. How would you assess the current state of that conversation?

Pannenberg: I was involved in these conversations since the 50's and 60's in Germany. At that time, there was an important center of such a conversation with some of the leading German physicists, like Heisenberg and von Weiszacker, were involved.

Since that time, the center of these conversations has moved to this country. America, with centers of dialogue between science and theology at Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton, and also in other places, is now the center of the whole movement that brings science and religion, but especially science and Christian theology, closer together.

---

Oord: Your eschatological vision of the God of the Future has influenced several leaders in the science and religion dialogue. Does this surprise you? Or is this something that you would expect?

Pannenberg: When you write something, especially if you write something that is not common knowledge and opinion before you publish it, you can never expect that people will believe it! So, to that extent I am rather surprised that I didn't receive rejection only but received some positive response.

---

Oord: What do you view as the assets and liabilities of John Polkinghorne's theology of science?

Pannenberg: I think John Polkinghorne is a noted physicist and a remarkable person. His turning, as a physicist, to theology, not only in terms of personal interest but becoming a priest of the Anglican church, is remarkable. He is very serious in his determination to bring science and theology together.

The problem with Polkinghorne is that he has no philosophical education. He admits that. It is difficult to do theology without philosophy. In all the history of Christian theology, the close cooperation between philosophy and theology -- though there were often tensions between the two -- has been essential. Without that, Christian theology could never have made its universal claims concerning God. Justifying these universal claims should not start with science, as it sometimes does in our day. Justifying universal claims started with philosophy, and it continues with philosophy. The dialogue between science and theology is possible only on the basis of philosophy. Therefore, it is regrettable that John Polkinghorne, for all his commitment to the dialogue between theology and science, has no appropriate philosophical education.

---

Oord: Your theology has been described as interdisciplinary. Do you find this description accurate?

Pannenberg: Because God is the creator of everything and will be the redeemer of everything, theology has to be concerned with everything. This doesn't make theology interdisciplinary in a superficial sense. It is interdisciplinary because theology is concerned with only one thing, and that is God.

---

Oord: Do recent developments in biology, especially the prospect of human cloning, pose new challenges to a Christian understanding of the human person as laid out, for example, in your Anthropology in Theological Perspective?

Pannenberg: There are serious reasons against allowing the cloning of human beings. Nevertheless, it is a question of limited importance, because the identity of the human person is constituted by the unique life history of each individual person, starting only from his or her birth. This would not change even by the cloning of human beings.

We have the example of identical twins who have the same genetic constitution. But even those persons have different life experiences. They are different individuals because of their different life history. This must also apply to individuals that were produced through cloning. Therefore, the significance of cloning is limited concerning the concept of the human person. There would still be a uniqueness of each human person with regard to the life history that constitutes this or another person’s identity.

---

Oord: Is there any analogy between (1) the divine field of relations in Trinity and (2) various physical fields found in natural science, for example, the electromagnetic field?

Pannenberg: There is an analogy, certainly, but no identity. I always emphasize this. There are some anxieties, expressed by physicists as well as theologians, that I would confound physics and theology in applying the field concept to theology by appropriating field theory for the language of theology. But I am not identifying the divine reality as a field concept with the fields as described by physics. That would amount to idolatry.

God as a Creator is working in His creation through His creatures. This doesn't distract from the immediacy of the relationship between the Creator and His creatures. God always used creatures to bring about other things.

Think of the function of the earth in the first part of Genesis. The earth is addressed by God to assist in His act of creation. First, the earth is addressed to bring about vegetation. So we may wonder, “How can the earth, an inorganic reality, bring about an organic reality, vegetation, and then bring about the self organization of organisms from inorganic materials?” Yet, this is the Christian creation story.

The second address of the earth is even bolder than that! God addresses the earth to bring about animals. And the text means higher animals. Such boldness does not really characterize even Darwin's theory of evolution. Darwin wouldn't have dreamed to have higher animals spring immediately from the earth, from inorganic matter. Darwin is much more moderate than that. In criticizing the doctrine of evolution, our creationist friends among Christian theologians should read their Bibles more closely.

---

Oord: Would you call yourself a theistic evolutionist?

Pannenberg: I would call myself a Trinitarian evolutionist.

---

Oord: Toward what direction would you like to see the science and religion dialogue go?

Pannenberg: Ernan McMullin, the philosopher from Notre Dame, whom I highly regard for his contribution to the science and theology dialogue, said that we should look for consonance, not for mutual support, but for consonance. Consonance also means support, because, if there were no consonance with the description of the reality of our world, then our faith in creation would become empty. That would endanger our faith in God. Our faith in God is essentially founded in the notion that He is the creator of everything, and that He has power over everything. God would not have this power if He were not the creator of everything.

The consonance between science and theology, in some way, also supports the Christian affirmations -- but not in the sense that theology should be modeled after scientific findings, efforts, and so on. Theology moves on its own level of method. This is what McMullin had in mind, and I am in complete agreement with him here. I would hope that there would be increasing consonance between science and theology.

For many scientists, there is already too much consonance because of the Big Bang cosmology of science. Many scientists of a secularist or atheist persuasion have felt that this is too close to theology, and that they should develop alternative theories. If the world had a beginning that was almost like creation, they think that's terrible. But the Big Bang theory is a standard theory of scientific cosmology, and here there is a degree of consonance. As McMullin said, the Big Bang theory doesn't prove the existence of God as a creator. In that sense, it doesn't support theology. But it does describe the universe in such a way that theologians should expect from science if there is a Creator. I think that's a good example.

The Creator is always interfering with the process of the world, however, and this has to be clarified to a greater degree than it has been generally. I used to discuss this under the title of the contingency of events as a medium of God's actions in the world. We have to reach more agreement on this in the dialogue between theology and science. [R.E. Slater - I prefer the concept of "partnering" with the world...].

And there is the question of the future of the universe, which is considered quite differently in theology than in science. A degree of exception to this difference is found in the cosmology of my friend, Frank Tippler, from New Orleans. Tippler is not readily accepted by most of his scientist colleagues, and his views are not completely acceptable to the theologian either. But I admire his daring proposition concerning the future of the universe as a beginning of the dialogue between scientists and theologians about the future of the universe. This is a most difficult area, but we can hope that there will be more progress in the future.

---

Oord: Figuring prominently in your earlier work is the statement that the future possesses an ontological priority, and, in a limited but important sense, God does not yet exist. In your later years, your theology remains concerned with the future, but you seem to express more interest in what it means for God to be present here and now. Would you still say with the same energy what you once said, namely, that there is an ontological priority of the future, and that, in a limited but important sense, God does not yet exist?

Pannenberg: I always affirm that God does exist at present as He did in eternity. If God, in the definitive sense, did not yet exist, then how could He be the eternal God?

The ontological priority of the future means two things. First of all, events occur contingently. This is what we have to learn from quantum physics. The basic information of quantum physics is the contingency of all events. This also applies on a macrophysical level and has now become more commonly accepted by the development of chaos theory. All processes in history, which are basically irreversible, are characterized by contingency.

Contingency is not opposed to the application of natural law. The sequence of contingent events shows degrees of uniformity. This uniformity is the object of the description of nature by natural laws. So descriptions of natural laws and the basic contingency of natural events are not opposed to each other.

The laws themselves - all the laws of mathematical formulas having application in nature -- emerge from the irreversible process of the universe. Sometimes physicists believe the laws of nature to be eternal. This belief is not as prevalent, but some still hold to it. The source of contingency is not the past, that's the very notion of contingency. Contingent events can form an unknown future to encounter.

Therefore, the ontological priority of the future means, in the first place, that the future is a source of contingent events. You need this idea if you do not isolate the particular contingent events. If you look at the fact that all new contingent events occur in the perspective of the wholeness of the universe, the future is a source of contingency.

The future is also the source of possible completion of the identity of creatures. This is assisted by the efficacy of natural laws. But natural laws do not exhaust this issue, because reality is basically historical. There is an open future. So the achievement of wholeness -- the final achievement of the identity of creatures -- is dependent on the future. As Plotinus said, it is the wholeness of life that God enjoys in His eternity that is longed for by creatures. They strive for their wholeness, for their identity.

I referred to the theological side of this issue when I said that, when God created the world, He took a risk. He could not be the eternal God and Creator without His kingdom being established in this world. Therefore, we say that, in the eschatological future, it will be established that the God in whom we believe really is the King of the universe and the eternal God and Creator of the world. Because God looks at His creation from the point of view of its final fulfillment, this is already settled. But, from the perspective of the world, this is not settled.

---

Oord: How does the future affect the present determinatively? And, is that future already determined?

Pannenberg: We have to be very careful in discussing this issue. Determinism, as it has been discussed in philosophy and theology in past centuries, is concerned with determination from the past by some past state of affairs or by some past decisions that anticipate the future and determine it. If some past decisions or some past conditions in the development of the universe would completely determine the further process of the universe, we would have a completely deterministic system of nature.

The determination or, let's say, the influence of the future in the course of the history is of a different kind. It doesn't make sense to talk about determinism in the way that we talk about determinism of the influence of past influences and conditions that will come later.

Concerning the question whether the future is already determinate, this is certainly true with regard to God's eternity. But it is true with regard to the final future of this world, because the eternal God is the final future of this world. One should not say that the future is already determinate at some point at the beginning of the process of the world, because that would do away with the concept of eternity.

Some people envision the Creator standing at the beginning of the world and making plans for the future of the world's history. That is a conception that forgets about the eternity of God. It looks upon God as if He were a human being looking ahead to a future that is different from Himself and making plans for influencing that future. God has no need of doing that, because He is eternal.

[R.E. Slater - for more on this subject see my notes on "time" in Roger Olson's preceeding article on Pannenberg here.]

---

Oord: One scholar understands your future God as part of an Hegelian metaphysics, in which all is ultimately enveloped in God. Is this characterization accurate?

Pannenberg: In some areas of discussion, and maybe especially in this country, there is a lot of mythology concerning Hegel. It is almost comparable to the mythology concerning Christianity in a secularized world: the less you know about it, the more your prejudices have free rein.

There is no Future God in Hegel. The future was not an important part of Hegel's philosophy, and that is one of the serious limitations of Hegel's thought. When I talk about God as the power of the future, that is certainly not Hegelian influence on my thought!

---

Oord: Some have used your eschatological vision to support doctrines of divine predestination. Do you think this use is warranted?

Pannenberg: The problem with predestination in the history of Christian thought is that people tend, again and again, to look upon God and His relation to the world as if He is the Creator who would stand at the beginning and look ahead to a future that is distant for Him. Predestination also tends to become deterministic.

But if we take into consideration God’s eternity -- that He is the Lord of the future -- then He relates to the process of the universe in one moment. When Paul speaks of predestination in Romans 8, the meaning is that our Christian calling is rooted in eternity, in the eternal God. He doesn’t mean this kind of determinism from the beginning of the world.

There is predestination in the sense that God’s relation, and also the Christian calling for each one of us, is rooted in God’s eternity. This is an essential affirmation of the Christian faith. But it need not be understood and should not be understood in a deterministic way, as if, from the beginnings of the process of the universe, everything has been determined by God.

---

Oord: In your book, Theology and the Kingdom of God, you allude to the fact that, in moment by moment decisions, creatures cooperate with, or resist, the coming kingdom. How can the present moment be the appearance of the future as the incoming kingdom of God, and yet each moment also be constituted by each creature’s free decision?

Pannenberg: Human beings certainly have choices. This is the basic characteristic of the place of human beings in the world, and choice is what distinguishes human beings from other creatures. We need not respond immediately to the influences we get from the outside or to what our senses tell us about the outside world. We can delay our reaction. We can deliberate and, then, act according to our deliberation. That is what it means to make choices.

The Bible does not consider that as freedom. There is no natural freedom, and making choices does not yet guarantee our freedom. In John 8, we have this conversation between Jesus and his Jewish partners who are proud of being free-born and not slaves. Jesus tells them, “If you sin, you are a slave. You will be free when the Son makes you free.” This is very important.

Christian proclamation should have criticized the Western ideology of freedom by telling the public that having choices doesn’t mean freedom. The alcohol-addicted person or the drug-addicted person is also making choices. The problem is that he or she always makes the same choice -- to take the drug or drink the bottle -- again and again. Having choices doesn’t yet guarantee freedom.

But, Nietzsche said (and no one is suspicious that he is prejudiced in favor of Christianity) when he talked about the production of his book, Also Spake Zarathustra, that he wrote it under the pressure of inspiration. He said that a human being is free in inspiration. I think he is correct. Inspiration and freedom, i.e., inspiration as the spirit of God and freedom, do not contradict each other. To the contrary, we are freer the more we are lifted beyond ourselves by divine inspiration. We still have choices -- we have a broader range of choices -- but we also choose the right thing.

---

Oord: Some claim that your place in history will be greatly affected by whether or not deconstructive postmodernism wins the day. Would you agree? And, how would you characterize your conceptual relationship to deconstructive postmodernism?

Pannenberg: I’m not a particular friend of the deconstructionism. I don’t think that is a good way of philosophy. I am confident that people will find out, sooner or later, that deconstructionism has been a fad that has had its time. But that the time will be limited.

There are some truths to deconstructionism postmodernism. Reality is not as rational as some of the enlightenment thinkers thought it was.

The great philosopher John Locke was not of this persuasion though, because he had a deep respect for the mysterious character of all reality, not only religion but also the world of nature. Reality is always surpassing our knowledge and our understanding of it. If the enlightenment had always followed this concept of reason, postmodernism wouldn’t have been necessary. The overestimation of the rationalist argument, especially in science, brought about postmodernism. In this way, postmodernism has its element of truth.

But we should not give up on reason. The Pope has published a beautiful encyclical on faith and reason. He emphasized that the Christian faith should continue to stick to the alliance of faith and reason that has been essential for Christian truth claims and for Christian mission since the first centuries. We should understand reason in the sense of John Locke, not necessarily in the sense of his empiricist philosophy, but in the sense of his basic intuition that reality surpasses our rational concepts. If we do not, progress in science will be impossible. We hope for progress in science in the next century and maybe even in the century after this one. In that sense, I think we should continue to have high regard for reason. It is rational to acknowledge the fact that reality is greater than what we already know of it.

---

Oord: As you look to the future, what trends in contemporary philosophy do you see as most promising, and what trends do you find to be most threatening?

Pannenberg: Well, some things that are called “philosophy,” I see as entertainment, for instance, the philosophy of Richard Rorty. But there is also serious philosophy in this country. Take, for instance, the philosophy of Nicholas Rescher. I only mention these as examples.

I hope that philosophy will not be identified exclusively with language analysis, as it has been in past decades in this country. I hope that philosophy will pick up again the great tradition of philosophical thought and the history of metaphysics. I hope that philosophy will develop new approaches to these subjects of philosophical reflection.

---

Oord: What is your greatest concern for the church as it moves into the next 25 years?

Pannenberg: My greatest concern for the church is that it continue to preach the Gospel and not adapt to secular standards and concerns. Some churches and many church ministers think they have to adapt to the secular concerns of people in order to reach them. I think that the opposite is true. If people were to hear in church only what they also get on television and read in the papers, there would be no need for going to church.

The church has to proclaim a different thing: the hope for eternal life. It must proclaim participation with the crucified Christ through baptism by faith. My concern for the church is that it sticks to that message rather than adapting, lowering, or watering it down by adapting it to secular concerns. It requires some strength to oppose the spirit of the culture. My concern for the church, my hope for the church, is that it will receive constantly that strength for opposing the culture by this message. [Amen and Amen. - R.E. Slater]