Pannenberg - Systematic Theology, Vol. 1

Front 1

Pannenberg (who)

Back 1

German theologian influenced by Schlink, Barth, Hegel, and early Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature.

Studied at U. of Berlin, Göttengen, Basel (studied under Barth), and completed his dissertation on the predestination doctrine of Duns Scotus at Hiedelberg under Edmund Schlink.

Teaching:
Kirchliche Hochschule at Wuppertal (1958-61) as a colleague of Jürgen Moltmann,
University of Mainz (1961-8),
University of Munich, where he was also director of the Ecumenical Institute until 1993

German Lutheran theologian
Edmund Schlink is his mentor
taught by Gerhard von Rad
studied under Barth
worked as Schlink's assistant at his eccumenical institute
Taught at various schools in Germany
"The single most important experience occurred in early January 1945, when I was 16 years old. On a lonely two-hour walk home from my piano lesson, seeing an otherwise ordinary sunset, I was suddenly flooded by light and absorbed in a sea of light which, although it did not extinguish the humble awareness of my finite existence, overflowed the barriers that normally separate us from the surrounding world. Several months earlier I had narrowly escaped an American bombardment at Berlin; a few weeks later my family would have to leave our East German home because of the Russian offensive. I did not know at the time that January 6 was the day of Epiphany, nor did I realize that in that moment Jesus Christ had claimed my life as a witness to the transfiguration of this world in the illuminating power and judgment of his glory. But there began a period of craving to understand the meaning of life, and since philosophy did not seem to offer the ultimate answers to such a quest, I finally decided to probe the Christian tradition more seriously than I had considered worthwhile before."
-from God's Presence in History

Front 2

Pannenberg (important works)

Back 2

Jesus: God and Man (1968)
Revelation as History (1968)
Systematic Theology (1988-1994)

Front 3

Pannenberg (epistemology)

Back 3

Pannenberg's epistemology, explained clearly in his shorter essays, is crucial to his theological project. It is heavily influenced by that of one mentor, Edmund 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.

Front 4

Pannenberg (revelation)

Back 4

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.

Front 5

Pannenberg (resurrection)

Back 5

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.

Front 6

Pannenberg (speculative theology)

Back 6

In post-Rischlian theology, Pannenberg reintroduced cross-disciplinary tools (e.g., philosophy, natural sciences, etc.) in theological method.

Front 7

Pannenberg (history and revelation)

Back 7

God known through the great acts in history--with Israel, and most importantly, with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Content of Revelation: indirect and temporal (unlike Barth--direct and a-temporal) self-disclosure of God himself (like Barth).

Public: The distinctively Christian understanding of revelation for Pannenberg lies in the way in which publicly available events are interpreted. Pannenberg reasserts the importance of historicity in revelation of God. The resurrection of Jesus is a publicly accessible, objective event in history for Pannenberg. Through the resurrection all people have indirect knowledge of God. Part of the reason for the indirection in Pannenberg’s historical program is his eschatological orientation which asserts that the church will not know God directly until the consummation.

History = revelation (P.); "dialectical presence" = revelation (B.)

Both Pannenberg and Barth provide constructive alternatives to the two revelatory options of their day. The most recent understanding of revelation was "inner experience" as expressed in Schleiermacher’s focus on God-consciousness. Doctrine as revelation is the more traditional model, whether they be the "timeless truths" of only the Scripture (traditional Lutheran theology) or of church doctrine (the Catholic theology of Trent) or a blend of the two (as in Vatican 2). Pannenberg’s proposal is interesting because he is truly to get beyond the impasse of Schleiermacher’s subjective pietism and Barth’s "revelational positivism".

Increasingly it seemed to me inconsistent with that assumption that Barth presented God’s revelation as if God had entered a foreign country instead of "his home," as the Gospel of John tells us (1:11). Therefore, I felt that" my philosophy and theology should not be permitted to separate, but that within their unity it should be possible to affirm the awe-inspiring otherness of God even more uncompromisingly than Barth had done, since he returned to reasoning by analogy....I came to realize that history presents that aspect of the world of our experience which, according to Jewish and Christian faith, reveals God’s presence in his creation."
-from God's Presence in History
p 257 "[history's] claim to reveal the one God who is the world's creator, reconciler, and redeemer is open to future verification in history, which is as yet incomplete, and which is still exposed, therefore, to the question of its truth"

Front 8

Pannenberg (science)

Back 8

Rejected Barth's disdain for natural theology. P. believed that, like history, science is open to scrutiny for all to see.

Science and theology are distinct disciplines, but they interact with one another. E.g., the laws of nature are provisional until theological analysis can place natural laws on a firmer theoretical foundation.

Front 9

Pannenberg (theology and truth)

Back 9

Theological discourse needs be evaluated against metaphysical in order to be deemed true. Metaphysical claims about God, therefore, are the fundaments of theology. History as revelation constitutes the data for metaphysical reflection.

Eschatological realist (23-24). Truth as correspondence. Yet, truth is indisputably known looking back from the eschaton. Therefore, all theological statements are hypothetical. Nevertheless, the end is known proleptically in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Front 10

Pannenberg (universe of scholarship)

Back 10

Pannenberg is well situated among the great contemporary Protestant theologians. On the one hand, he is clearly a confessional Lutheran "Word of God" theologian. Yet, on the other hand, from a methodological point of view he is a post-Enlightenment liberal. His attempt to bring together Lutheran tradition with a contemporary method is what makes his theology so interesting and compelling.

Pannenberg's Systematic Theology has to be understood as the sustained attempt both to defend the truth of the Christian faith in light of its modern critiques and to
reclaim it by integrating the self-understanding of modernity as historical development into a contemporary presentation of the Christian faith.

Front 11

Pannenberg (Jesus)

Back 11

"dynamic Christ"
rejects Chalcedon
note page 4-5 where there is a distinguishment in revelation concerning God and concerning Jesus

http://www.ts.mu.edu/readers/content/pdf/35/35.4/35.4.5.pdf

Jesus is distinct and yet close to God (263)
Jesus claimed God is only to be understood as the heavenly father (264)

Front 12

Pannenberg (Christology)

Back 12

"I became increasingly aware that Christian theology today should not limit itself to some narrowly defined confessional loyalty inherited from the past but should help to build the foundations of a reunited, if to some degree pluralistic, Christian church that should become more and more visible within the foreseeable future... I could never understand the argument that faith was in danger if it was in agreement with the judgment of true reason. I rather suspect that the real danger for faith lurks in its estrangement from rationality. But precisely the concern for rationality induced me to emphasize the provisional character of the knowledge of faith more than I did in earlier days....However, the more insecure the future of a liberal, secular society appears to be, the more confident I feel about the future of religion -- not a future in relation to emancipation and economic and/or political liberation. Much of the enthusiasm in such movements seems to me an unintentional contribution to accelerating the spread of oppressive regimes. But religion in the strict sense of the word can feel more secure today than it has for a long time. It will outlive every ideological regime. And the only serious challenge to Christianity will not be secular society, which is badly in need of religious support in our days, but rival religions."

Front 13

Pannenberg (Trinity)

Back 13

Emphasized the threeness of the Trinity in the vein of the Cappadocians. Each member is revealed in history.

Front 14

Pannenberg (Chapter 1)

Back 14

Truthful discourse about God is discourse that God' s has authorized. Theology is refection on God's revelation.

The truth of Christian doctrine is the presupposition of systematic theology.

Front 15

Pannenberg (Chapter 2)

Back 15

The concept of God is reasonable and unavoidable. Knowledge of God different from natural theology. The latter is reflection on God through rational means and arguments. In the modern context, the concept of God and the use of interdisciplinary approaches is valid.

Front 16

Pannenberg (Chapter 3)

Back 16

In the second chapter Pannenberg develops a theology of religions by maintaining that concrete knowledge of God only becomes explicit in the concrete historical religions. Religious traditions have to be understood as the ongoing interpretation of historical experiences. Pannenberg's understanding of "revelation" plays already a role in this context. The attempt to give a serious theological account of other religions is highly to be welcomed yet it seems in Pannenberg's account that the history of religions becomes the judgement of religions!

Front 17

Pannenberg (Chapter 4)

Back 17

The third chapter, on the concept of divine revelation, maintains the classical understanding of "revelation", namely that "God can be known only if he gives himself to be known. . . . Hence the knowledge of God is possible only by revelation" (p. 189). Yet on the other hand, Pannenberg makes a strong case, especially against Karl Barth's understanding of revelation as the Word of God, that revelation occurs in and through the events of history with an essential openness toward the future: "As the revelation of God in his historical action moves towards the still outstanding future of the consummation of history, its claim to reveal the one God who is the world's Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer is open to future verification in history, which is as yet incomplete, and which is still exposed, therefore, to the question of its truth" (p. 257). This construal allows him to reconcile the religious authenticity of concrete historical religious traditions with the ongoing debatability of religious truth claims. Yet it also means that God seems to act against God-self in the competing and often contradictory experiences and related claims of different religions!

Front 18

Pannenberg (Chapter 5 and 6)

Back 18

Up to this point the chapters summarize Pannenberg's earlier work. Yet in the last two chapters, the first on the doctrine of the Trinity and the subsequent one on the unity and attributes of the divine essence, he makes substantive and highly interesting new moves of great ecumenical importance. Not only does he unfold—
against the mainstream of the Western tradition—the doctrine of the Trinity before the unity of God on the grounds that the Trinity is historically revealed through the New Testament witness, while the unity of God remains a mystery. In addition, by maintaining a strict identity of the economic and the immanent Trinity he can integrate all of history as salvation history into the interrelationship of the three divine persons, which are thought of as three distinct centers of divine activity. Their unity is their co-operation moving toward the "kingdom of God" as the escha- tological consummation of all of history into the life of the Trinity. This eschatological conceptualization of the trinity is undergirded by the innovative use of the field theory of modern physics. With its help Pannenberg attempts to conceptualize God's unity as Trinity. "The deity as field can find equal manifestation in all three persons. . . . The trinitarian persons . . . are simply manifestations and forms — eternal forms—of the one divine essence" (p. 383). Thè Holy Spirit is both one person of the Trinity and the unity of the interaction of the three trinitarian persons. The escha- tological co-activity of the three trinitarian persons is the "field" of the Spirit. The field theory is used in order to maintain an essential unity of the three trinitarian persons without projecting a God "behind" the trinitarian persons, a unified divine agent "behind" the three centers of activity. These constructive suggestions deserve the fullest attention of the ongoing discourse about the Christian doctrine of God, the Trinity, in both the Western and the Eastern traditions. Pannenberg's innovative steps, especially with his critique of the filioque (317ff), point to a truly ecumenical doctrine of the Trinity beyond the millenial impasse between the Western tradition and Eastern Orthodoxy. The subsequent volumes of the Systematic Theology are planned as a further unfolding of this eschatological trinitarianism, the concept of a God whose very being encompasses creation and redemption and whose unity is the omega of all of history.