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

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from 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

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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.


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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.

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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.


Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Calvinism (Still) Isn't Beautiful. It Sings for Divine Power not for Divine Weakness, Suffering, and Sacrifice


“Young, Restless, No Longer Reformed” a Year Later:
Calvinism (Still) Isn’t Beautiful

A Guest Post by Austin Fischer
by Roger Olson
February 2, 2015

“They’re not going to embrace your theology unless it makes their hearts sing.”[1]

-John Piper

One of the more persistent myths regarding art (broadly defined) is that the artist understands what he or she is creating. It is, as it were, a half-truth. You understand parts of it, catch glimpses of its deeper meaning, shape it toward certain ends. But you certainly do not understand all of it. As Madeline L’Engle says,

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver…each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am. enflesh me. Give birth to me.’”[2]

Two years ago, I started writing. I didn’t intend to write a book so much as [to] document a journey I had taken in and out of Calvinism, with the hope it could help people in my own church who were treading similar paths. It ended up becoming a book and has helped people, and for that I am grateful.

But as I look back—now two years removed from when I started writing and a year removed from its publication—I feel as though I only now understand the deepest intention of the book. Bear with me if this seems indulgent....

 Back when I was a Calvinist, I came across the above quote from John Piper: “They’re not going to embrace your theology unless it makes their hearts sing.” And while I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I knew what it was about. I embraced Calvinism, not just because I found its exegesis and inner logic compelling, but because it made my heart sing. It was true, but also (and perhaps more importantly) good and beautiful.

Christians believe that truth (sic, "being grounded in God") is not only, well, true, but also good and beautiful. Beauty is “a measure of what theology may call true.”[3] Because God is infinitely good and beautiful, theology must be good and beautiful or else it’s not true. When properly understood, the truth invites not only the mind’s assent but the heart’s affection. The truth should make your heart sing.

This notion of the truth’s beauty is not an invention of secular humanism or some other boogey-man, but belongs to the deepest intuition of biblical Christian sensibilities. As the various psalmists never tire of telling us,

“Great is the Lord and highly to be praised,
and his greatness is unsearchable…

The Lord is gracious and merciful;
slow to anger and great in lovingkindness.

The Lord is good to all,
and his mercies are over all his works.”

- Psalm 145:3, 8-9

God is infinite power but also infinite grace, so beauty “qualifies theology’s understanding of divine glory: it shows that glory to be not only holy, powerful, immense, and righteous, but also good and desirable, a gift graciously shared.”[4]

John Piper understands this better than most, and his brilliant attention to the aesthetics of Calvinism (channeling Jonathan Edwards) is one of the (if not the) primary reasons for the tremendous surge of Calvinism among young evangelicals. Simply put, plenty of people have argued Calvinism is true. Piper’s particular genius has been in arguing that Calvinism is also beautiful.

Many young evangelicals have been convinced and their hearts sing for Calvinism. My exodus from Calvinism was set in motion when I came to believe Calvinism was not beautiful—indeed, when I realized that Calvinism (consistent Calvinism at least) was, at best, cold and brutally enigmatic (which is, perhaps, why many cannot be consistent Calvinists).

This realization then forced me to further reconsider its veracity. The heart of the book, then, was a challenge to the aesthetic of the New Calvinism. The New Calvinists attempt to paint a ravishing picture of the manifold excellencies of the self-glorifying, all-determining God of Calvinism, expressed primarily through the doctrines of grace.

  • I say that picture is a false veneer that only works when you ignore the reprobate.
  • I say that picture cannot contain, as its central image, a crucified God who would rather die for sinners than give them what they deserve.

Using the Bible as my measure of beauty, I say Calvinism isn’t beautiful. People have asked if I could ever see myself “going back” to Calvinism—a little less young, a little less restless, and reformed again, perhaps?

It’s a question I occasionally ponder. Depending on my mood, I can still find some of the exegesis and inner rationale for Calvinism compelling. As I’ve stated numerous times, I think Calvinism is one way to make sense of the teachings of the Bible (though as I also always state and many of my Calvinist friends have a hard time hearing, I think there is a better way to make sense of the Bible’s teachings that has far deeper ecumenical and historical roots).

And yet while I suppose I could again entertain the possibility that Calvinism is true, I don’t think I could ever again believe that Calvinism is beautiful. To my mind, calling Calvinism beautiful is to subject the very concept of beauty to so ruthless an equivocation that it loses any intelligible meaning.

So I agree with Piper: theology needs to make our hearts sing. That’s not a “strategic” statement about how to make Christianity more persuasive in its use of pathos. It’s a statement about truth. In terms of a quick (and perhaps overly simplistic) syllogism, I submit:

1 - Christian truth is (by biblical, theological and rational necessity) good and beautiful
     (as measured by the Bible).

2- Calvinism is not beautiful.

3- Calvinism is not true.

I’d imagine my Calvinist friends would accept premise one (unless they adhere to an extreme voluntarism and absolute equivocation between God’s aesthetic and/or moral sensibilities and ours) and reject premise two, arguing that Calvinism is indeed beautiful, but sin has crippled our aesthetic sensibilities to the point that we wouldn’t know beauty if we saw it. And of course I agree.

That’s precisely what Isaiah says in his cryptic words about the suffering servant: the beauty of God is not something we naturally appreciate (53:1-3). We’re far too intoxicated with power and status to appreciate the unforeseen majesty of deity suffering and despised.

But it is the very measure of beauty given us by the Bible (gratuitously aggressive and kenotic, self-giving love) that threatens to burst the wineskins of Calvinism. The good news of God’s beauty is too good and beautiful for Calvinism to contain. And it is the very intoxication with raw power that blinds us to God’s true beauty that fits so snugly within the Calvinist vision of God.

So instead of retreating to shopworn quips (“Well if you just trusted the Bible more than your ‘feelings’ and ‘aesthetic sensibilities’ then none of this would be a problem”), I hope more of the New Calvinists will allow themselves to grasp the gravity of the dilemma Calvinism faces when it comes to biblical, Christian aesthetics. It is not a blemish of the surface, but a chilling abyss at the very heart of God.



[2] Madeline L’Engle, Walking on Water, 18.

[3] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 3.

[4] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 17.



Discussion on Calvinism & Arminianism by Dr. Roger Olson


Here's is an excellent discussion on the what and why and how of Arminianism (today's modern day Wesleyanism) led my Dr. Roger Olson whom we follow at Relevancy22. It is a rather long discussion so get out your notepad and listen to this theologian review his concerns and insights from a lifetime of reading, writing, teaching, and speaking. It'll be well worth the time spent.

R.E. Slater
February 11, 2014



Let's Talk Forum: Calvinism & Arminianism - by City On A Hill Church


Hosted by Pastor Russell Korets of City on a Hill Church in Federal Way, WA






Roger's Blog site can be found here at Patheos


Roger E. Olson

Roger E. Olson (born 1952) is Professor of Theology, George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, USA.

Olson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and studied at Open Bible College in Des Moines, North American Baptist Seminary, and Rice University.

He is also an ordained Baptist minister. He is married with two children.

He is a five-point arminianist and wrote a book (Against Calvinism, 2011) arguing for this school of theology.

He is noted for a broad view of what constitutes Protestant "orthodoxy." For example on annihilationism he commented that some evangelical theologians have "resurrected the old polemical labels of heresy and aberrational teaching" in order to marginalize other evangelicals holding the view (The mosaic of Christian belief, 2002). Olson is one of the writers who sees two "loose coalitions" developing in evangelical theology.

Olson coined the label "Pannenberg's Principle" for Wolfhart Pannenberg's argument (1969) that God's deity is his rule - "The divinity of God and the reign of God in the world are inseparable."


Bibliography: A Short List from Roger Olson

The Journey of Modern Theology: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction(2013) ISBN 0-8308-4021-4

Against Calvinism (2011) ISBN 0-310-32467-X

God in Dispute: "Conversations" among Great Christian Thinkers (2009) ISBN 0-8010-3639-9

Finding God in the Shack: Seeking Truth in a Story of Evil and Redemption (2009) ISBN 0-8308-3708-6

How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative (2008) ISBN 0-310-28338-8

Questions to All Your Answers: A Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith (2007) ISBN 0-310-27336-6

Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology (Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology) (2007) ISBN 0-0-8010-3169-9

Pocket History of Evangelical Theology (The Pocket IVP Reference (2007) ISBN 0-8308-2706-4

Arminian Theology: Myths And Realities (2006) ISBN 0-8308-2841-9

Pocket History of Theology (The IVP Pocket Reference) - (Olson & English) (2005) ISBN 0-8308-6709-0

The Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology (Westminster Handbooks to Christian Theology) (2004) ISBN 0-664-22464-4

The Trinity (Guides to Theology) - (Olson & Hall) (2002) ISBN 0-8028-4827-3

The Mosaic of Christian Beliefs: Twenty Centuries of Unity & Diversity (2002) ISBN 0-8308-2695-5

The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform (1999) ISBN 0-8308-1505-8

20th-Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age - (Olson & Grenz) (1997) ISBN 0-8308-1525-2

Who Needs Theology?: An Invitation to the Study of God's Word - (Olson & Grenz) (1996) ISBN 0-8308-1878-2


Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Homebrewed Christianity Online Class - Paul: Rupture, Revelation, Revolution




Announcement

It's been a busy morning. Join with me for another High Gravity course (the fourth in 2 years) to be held on Monday's from March 2 to April 13, 2015. Our hosts will be the Homebrewed crowd as they wax eloquent on the Apostle of Apostles, our own dear Apostle Paul, servant of the King.

For you theological nerds out there this will be a classic throwdown and fun!

R.E. Slater
February 10, 2015



The class is titled, "Paul: Rupture, Revelation, Revolution." In this High Gravity course Peter Rollins and Tripp Fuller will tackle Paul by engaging 4 different philosophers along with contemporary Biblical scholarship and theological interpretations all packed into 12 hours of soul-boggling content.

Each session will focus on the thinker of the week with downloadable readings. In order to cover all the material we are going to have four 90 minute sessions covering an individual philosopher and two "teach-ins" over 2-1/2 hours - the first on the Bible and the second on Theology.

To open the March 2 course theologian Daniel Kirk of Fuller Seminary will be the first speaker to discuss Paul. Then, over the following weeks, philosophers will be discussed such as Heidegger, Badiou, and Zizek , amongst others.

There will be a moderate cost for these classes.

Join us!



 





A LiveStream Event. March 13-14, 2015. "The Church in an Age of Postmodernism"




Join me at the free Livestream event, March 13-14,  2015, sponsored by Homebrewed Christianity from Villanova University. Guest speakers will be John Caputo, Merold Westphal, Jeff Robbins, and Aaron SimmonsThe topic will speak to "The Church in an age of Postmodernism" - a topic I've covered relentlessly the past 4 years at Relevancy22.

R.E. Slater
February 10, 2015

* * * * * * * * * *


"For some, postmodern thought signals the end of religion. For others, religion and postmodernism stand in a complimentary relationship- each deepening the other. The End of Religion? Faith in a Postmodern Age seeks to address the relationship between religious life and postmodern thought.

Villanova University's Theology Institute presents an opportunity to hear and interact with four distinguished scholars. Speakers John Caputo, Merold Westphal, Jeff Robbins, and Aaron Simmons will give lectures and answer live Q&A during panel discussions. Food and drink will be provided! Come eat, drink, and think with some of the leading scholars in postmodern philosophy of religion. This event is free and open to the public." - Homebrewed Christianity







Monday, February 9, 2015

Peter Enns - Is There A Resurrection from the Dead in the Old Testament?

brief Bible thought: is there resurrection from the dead in the Old Testament?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/02/brief-bible-thought-is-there-resurrection-from-the-dead-in-the-old-testament/
TBTMS
Is there resurrection from the dead in the Old Testament?

No. Not really. Well, sort of. O.K., yes, but it depends on how you look at it.
Resurrection is pretty central to the New Testament, in case you haven’t noticed. Yet searching for that kind of resurrection it in the Old Testament makes you come up basically empty-handed.
We do have one lengthy passage, Daniel 12, which is an important text for understanding the development of Jewish faith later in the Second Temple period (in the second century BCE) when “resurrection” of individuals was in the air generally within Judaism (more below).
2 Maccabees is another example of a text from roughly the same period and which mentions the future resurrection of the dead as if no one needs it explained to them (e.g., see 2 Maccabees 7:9)
Neither Isaiah 25:7 (the Lord will “swallow up death forever”) or 26:19 (“Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise”) seem to be “resurrection from the dead” texts.
The first seems to echo Canaanite mythology about Baal who hosts a victory banquet after his defeat of the sea god Yamm (representing chaos).
The second is a more likely candidate, but if both of these passages are read in the larger context of Isaiah, it’s hard to escape their metaphorical meaning: deliverance from the “sure death” of foreign oppression/threat. At any rate, even with these texts, the silence of the Old Testament on future resurrection is deafening.
But this brings me to where I think resurrection is very much part of the story of Israel, and it goes like this.
A perspective on the Adam story that I lay out in The Evolution of Adam and The Bible Tells Me So is that Adam represents Israel’s entire epic journey in the Old Testament–Adam is a “preview” of Israel, so to speak.
Just as Adam was created by God out of dust and placed into a Garden paradise, and remaining there was contingent upon obedience (don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge), so, too, Israel was created by God from Egyptian slavery, placed into the paradise-like Canaan, and remaining there was contingent upon obedience (to the covenant, the Law of Moses).
This reading of the Adam story is not mutually exclusive of others, but it has medieval rabbinic precedent (Genesis Rabbah), and you have to admit the parallels are at least worth thinking about. So even if you’re skeptical, work with me here.
Remember that Adam was warned that “on the day” he eats of the the forbidden fruit, he would die (Genesis 2:17). Now, the fact of the matter is that “on the day” Adam and Eve do not die so much as they are banished from the Garden (Genesis 3:22-24).
That banishment bars them from the Tree of Life, their source of immortality, which is only in the Garden. The Lord places two cherubim at the entrance, which is on the east (hold that thought) to stand guard to make sure the doomed couple don’t go do back in and eat from the Tree of Life.
To be in the Garden means access to the Tree of Life. To be banished from the Garden to the east (keep holding that thought) means “death.”
Fast forward to Deuteronomy 30. Here we are at the final stage of Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the desert, and Moses is giving the people his last series of pep talks before they enter Canaan and take over the land as their own.
The whole chapter is worth a closer look, but we get to the real point verses 15-18. There we see that “life” means being in the land, and “death” means exile–the same notion we see in the Adam story.
If Israel will continue to obey God’s commands, the reward is life, which Deuteronomy 30 explains to be prosperity, an increased population, and longevity for the people as a whole (not individuals) in the land.
Likewise, disobedience to God’s commands yields “death and adversity,” i.e., “you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess” (v. 18).
So you see where I’m going with this. Or maybe not quite yet.
Flip to the chapter in the Old Testament that certainly is on most people’s top 10 list of weird passages: Ezekiel 37:1-14 and the “valley of dry bones.”
In a vision, Ezekiel sees a valley with dry bones that miraculously come back to life. Bones will be covered again with sinew and flesh, and God will “put breath” into those bones.
God brings to life through “breath.” Feel free to think of the Adam story here (Genesis 2:7).
Anyway, as weird as Ezekiel is in general, and chapter 37 in particular, at least the meaning of this vision is spelled out for us:
This says the Lord: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel (v. 12).
Death isn’t physical but metaphorical. The dry bones represent Israel in exile (the grave). Where in exile? In Babylon, which is in the east (thank you for holding that thought).
To be in exile, in the east, outside of the land of Canaan, is death. The be in the land is life. The Adam story is 2-chapter summary of Israel’s national plight.
So now we finally get to the resurrection part of all this.
If moving from the land into exile is to move from life to death, returning to the land is (all together now) to be brought back to life, to be raised from the dead (as Ezekiel’s prophecy lays out for us).
And that is where we find “resurrection” in the Old Testament: returning to the land, where God and his temple are, where there is peace and security, the land promsied to Abraham (Genesis 12), the land “flowing with mik and honey.”
Physical resurrection of individuals isn’t the hot topic of conversation in the Old Testament. Revival of a nation is.
So what about physical resurrection in the New Testament? Where does that idea come from? From developments in Judaism after the exile, especially in the 2nd century BCE.
Faithful Jews are being martyred by the Seleucid King Antiochus. 2 Maccabees relays a story that captures the crisis, where seven sones are executed in a gruesome fashion for remaining obedient to the law rather than eat unclean food and reject God. And earlier were several centuries of faithful Jews who might not have been martyred but who died without seeing God fully restore Israel as a nation.
Israel’s exile, though ending in 539 BCE, still continued in a manner of speaking for centuries thereafter. Ezekiel’s “resurrection” was not complete until Israel was “fully” in the land, which meant restoring Jewish independence.
To be sure, God would one day come through for his people. And those who died waiting for the “consolation of Israel” (to borrow Simeon’s phrase in Luke 2:25) would not just miss out but, as an act of divine justice, would be raised to take part in the messianic age.
Fast forward to the Gospels.
It is surely no accident that all 4 Gospels introduce Jesus’s public ministry by citing the opening verses of Isaiah 40, one of the key texts in the Old Testament announcing that God is about to bring the the captives back from Babylon–back home…back to the land of Canaan…back to the place of life, not death.
Why do all 4 Gospels introduce Jesus’s ministry by citing this major “end of exile” announcement? Probably because whatever Jesus is going to do probably has something to do with bringing an end to Israel’s exile/death.
The New Testament twist is that the resurrection of Jesus draws together both the national and individual dimensions while also redefining them.
Jesus’s individual physical resurrection fulfills Israel’s corporate national story by creating a new people, a new nation–a new humanity–where resurrection is a present spiritual reality and a future hope for each one who in “in Christ” (as Paul puts it).
TEA
So, we move from resurrection as nationalistic and metaphorical in the Old Testament, to a resurrection that also includes individuals physically in response to crisis by the 2nd century BCE, to the New Testament, where both are realized and redefined in Jesus.
If anything, this should remind us how New Testament theology is more than a process of back-referencing passages from the Old Testament, but must also include postexilic developments in Jewish thought. The resurrection from the dead in the New Testament isn’t “in” the Old. It grows out of and transforms an Old Testament metaphor, with a middle stage in Second Temple Judaism.