The Unity of Theology: The Contribution of Wolfhart Pannenberg

By Theodore James Whapham

Wolfhart Pannenberg is one of the most important theologians of the second half of the twentieth century. This volume offers the first full historical and thematic survey of Pannenberg‘s corpus, from his early work on the theology of revelation and Christology, to his writings on anthropology, theology and the university, and the pivotal achievement of his systematic theology. In the process of this survey, it identifies the broad, consistent development in his work across his career, as well as several significant revisions to his positions. As such, the project makes a significant contribution to the theological assessment of his career and will be a useful text for students and scholars in modern and contemporary theology.
In addition to the historical survey of his career, The Unity of Theology identifies four key themes in Pannenberg‘s theological system and traces their development. These themes of anticipation, interdisciplinarity, public theology, and diversity in unity also help to further articulate the importance of his contribution to contemporary theological approaches in light of the challenges of post-modernity. Pannenberg‘s work is creative in its fidelity to the biblical witnesses and creative in its interaction with the key questions of the day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781451472455

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Acknowledgments

So many have supported this work and made it possible in a variety of ways. It is a great pleasure to be able to reflect on the many who have been a support in the completion of this work, which has been in production for far too long.

First, I would like to thank Emily Holm, Layne Johnson, and Michael Gibson of Fortress Press who have done much to improve the quality and readability of this volume.  It has been a pleasure to work with such a wonderful team. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Gibson, who had the confidence in this project to encourage me in developing a proposal and who stuck with me through extensions and other challenges. I am extremely grateful to him for his support and patience.

The administration of St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, Florida, awarded me two separate research grants that supported the development and research of this manuscript. These funds helped free up time to complete the initial research and writing. Without the intervention of Maria Pascuzzi, Terrence Hogan, and Gregory Chan, these grants would not have been possible.

I also am grateful to the faculty and administration of the University of Dallas, which has been my professional home for the past three years. The enthusiasm and support of all my faculty colleagues has helped inspire my work and opened new insights into Pannenberg’s work. In particular, Dan Luby provided valuable comments in the editing of the manuscript that have assisted to produce a more readable final text. Above all Carol Potter, in her work as a graduate assistant, thoroughly reviewed the manuscript, helped in the development of the index for the book, and revised the bibliography for the work.  Her editorial experience and attention to detail have been an incredible asset.

Several students were also extremely helpful in the development of the text. The students in a seminar on the Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg were particularly helpful in the writing of the third chapter. The members of this class from the spring of 2014 at St. Thomas University include Dwayne Black, Andres Novela, Milly Beltran, Susan Fernandez-Rodriguez, Shaleem Olantunji, Bill McKnight, Jeff Sanchez, Teresita Prieto, Kimberly Stockton, Myrlande Desulme, Jeannie Modroño, Donna Andrews, and Sue Kuesch.

The writing of any book is often filled with blessings—and with challenges.  The current work is certainly no exception.  The five years I have spent working on this manuscript have been far longer and more difficult than I ever anticipated.  In part, this has come as the result of a move and the addition of administrative responsibilities at work.  However, the complications have been infinitely expanded by my middle son’s health challenges.  His first of many hospitalizations came on the day that I received the contract for this work and, in many regards, the story of writing this book has been the story of my son’s struggles.  However, my son’s courage, fortitude and determination in the face of adversity have been a constant example to me. Without this model of resolve, this work would never have been completed.

So, most of all, I would like to thank my family for their support and encouragement in the writing of this book. This period has been a lesson in humility, patience, and trust in God’s good grace. Thanks to Cheryl, T.J., Ricky, and Danny, who have taught me so much and who have always been my biggest fans. I hope that when we all look back on this period in our lives, we will see how God has carried each of us and brought us closer to one another and to our fulfillment in the kingdom.

Introduction

Wolfhart Pannenberg was an extraordinary man who lived at an extraordinary time. Born in Germany during the depression of the 1920s, Pannenberg came of age during the period of the third Reich and received his initial education under the repressive regime of Soviet-occupied West Germany. As a youth, he lived in a time and place where independent thinking was repressed, books were being burned, and university students were executed for disagreeing with the government. Nonetheless, Pannenberg developed his scholarly career out of this historical context with a tremendous amount of creativity and energy.

Perhaps it was because of the remarkable period of German history during which he lived that his scholarly career would also be marked by reasserting the importance of history as a theological category. In fact, when other theologians were retreating from the historical claims of Christianity because of the challenges of enlightenment thinking, Pannenberg—like Paul of Tarsus, Luke the Evangelist, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and numerous others before him—asserted that the essence of Christianity revealed a God who was active in the events of history. It may even be the case that Pannenberg provided the most important theology of history produced in the modern period.

Pannenberg’s work, however, is not easily accessible. His broad perspective, his interaction with scholarship across the spectrum of academic disciplines, his depth of analysis, and the complexity of his creative, contemporary reinterpretation of Christianity make his work slow and challenging reading. Over the past thirty years, a number  of  texts  have  been  published  to  help  students  access Pannenberg’s theological contributions. The first of these texts were published in the middle of his significant career; these volumes provide valuable insight into the development of his thought and are frequent conversation partners through which he nuanced and clarified the presentation of his ideas. Another important group of secondary treatments of his theology appeared after the publication of his three-volume Systematic Theology. This work is clearly the crowning achievement of Pannenberg’s career and is likely to be his most lasting contribution to the history of theology. The secondary works from this period largely focus on plumbing the depths of this work and entering into critical conversation with it. However, it was only with Pannenberg’s death in October 2015 that it became possible to assess the development of his career as whole. It is to that task that the present volume seeks to contribute.

Biography

Wolfhart Pannenberg was born October 2, 1928, in Stettin, Germany. The hometown of his youth was badly damaged at the end of World War II and is among the Northwestern cities that Germany lost to Poland in the war. He was not raised in a religious home and confessed that many of his ideas about Christianity were influenced by his encountering the works of Friedrich Nietzsche during the spring of 1944 after his home had been destroyed in an American bombing raid. As a child, he was very interested in reading, particularly historical novels set in the medieval or early modern periods. He also took a strong interest in music and at a young age fancied that he would become a concert pianist or conductor.

Pannenberg traced the roots of his conversion to Christianity to a particularly memorable episode that occurred on January 6, 1945, when he was sixteen. During a long walk home from his music lessons in the neighboring town, an extraordinary event occurred in which I found myself absorbed into the light of the setting sun and for one eternal moment dissolved into the light of the setting sun in the light surrounding me.[1] He reported, 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.[2] However, the exigencies of war prevented him from immediately unpacking the significance of this event. Later that year, he was called to service in the German army and was sent to a northern hospital, where he was captured in the early spring of 1945. He spent the next few months in a British POW camp and was released in the early summer.

Returning to Stettin, Germany, Pannenberg resumed his studies under the brutal conditions of life in the Soviet zone of Allied-occupied Germany. The first two years after the war would prove crucial to his intellectual development. It was during this period that he first encountered philosophy; while looking for a work on music, he stumbled across the writings of Immanuel Kant and became absorbed. He also met a particularly influential teacher by the name of Dr. Lange. A lively instructor interested in Goethe, Lange provided the young Pannenberg with a distinctly different impression of religion than he had received through his study of Nietzsche. He was particularly struck by the contrast between the dour asceticism Nietzsche ascribed to Christians and the lived expression of the faith articulated by his teacher amid the challenging circumstances of post-War Germany. Pannenberg was so persuaded by his example that in the spring of 1947, he took up philosophy and theology at the newly reopened University of Berlin.[3]

As a young university student, Pannenberg had the opportunity to study with several prominent philosophers and theologians and grow in the life of the mind. Among the most influential of his teachers were Karl Barth, Gerhard von Rad, and Karl Löwith. Pannenberg confesses to a great admiration for Barth, with whom he studied for a semester in 1949, that lasted his whole life. In fact, he describes the discussions that led to the publication of Revelation as History as a critical engagement with the work of Barth in light of the exegetical vision of Gerhard von Rad and Löwith’s philosophy of history. Von Rad’s work was particularly influential in his presentation of the human reality of the ancient Israelite men and women in their relation with their God and his thesis that the God of Ancient Israel was a God of history showing himself to be the ‘God who acts.’[4]

Early in his career, however, Pannenberg pursued medieval theology rather than systematic theology. His doctoral research under the tutelage of Hans Joachim Iwand—who was also an important early influence on Jürgen Moltmann—was a study of the roots of Luther’s voluntarism in Duns Scotus’s understanding of divine and human freedom;[5] in 1954, an expanded version of this dissertation was accepted by Edmund Schlink at Heidelberg University. He then went on to complete a second dissertation (Habilitationschrift) also under Schlink on the history of analogy up to Duns Scotus.[6] From Schlink, Pannenberg developed both an appreciation for the importance of ecumenical work in the life of the church and the significance of interdisciplinary study with the natural and social sciences.

After his ordination in 1955 and the completion his Habilitationschrift in 1958, Pannenberg secured his first academic post at the Lutheran seminary at Wuppertal where Jürgen Moltmann was already teaching. In 1961, he then moved to the University of Mainz, where he was asked to teach the entire cycle of dogmatic theology. Organizing all the themes of Christian doctrine into a coherent whole initially presented a major challenge, one that Pannenberg later said took him years to accomplish to his satisfaction.[7] In particular, he felt the doctrine of God was the most difficult subject to deal with and that it was the last to take shape. Perhaps it is for this reason that Stanely Grenz, a Baptist theologian and one of his former students, reported that Pannenberg had always intended the doctrine of the Trinity to be the final chapter of his Systematic Theology. This challenging task also helps to explain why Pannenberg felt it essential to write major works on revelation, Christology, theological method, and anthropology prior to the publication of his Systematics. During his early teaching career, Pannenberg intended to focus his scholarship on medieval theology. He reports that because he was the only young Lutheran theologian studying medieval theology in Germany at the time and because of his fascination with the topic, he would have been satisfied to concentrate exclusively on the subject. However, after the publication of Revelation as History in 1961, the focus of his research and publication changed direction. The work engendered such a fervent discussion that he felt the need to first engage his critics and later expand the insights of this work in a number of areas. Beginning in 1963, he began to receive regular invitations to the United States, where he offered courses at the University of Chicago, Harvard Divinity School, and Claremont School of Theology. In 1968, he moved from Mainz to the newly founded Evangelsich-Theologischen Fakultät in Munich, where he remained until his retirement from regular teaching duties in 1994.[8]

Pannenberg’s was also highly involved in ecumenical dialogue. His ecumenical activity began in the 1950s when he joined the Jaeger-Stählin Circle upon the invitation of his Doktorvater. While in Munich, Pannenberg helped establish the center for ecumenical research in collaboration with the Catholic faculty at Munich and the Institute for Orthodox Theology. In 1975, Pannenberg was invited to serve as a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC), a research arm of the council that serves as a global think tank for addressing the theological challenges of ecumenism. Within the work of this commission, Pannenberg is credited with playing a particularly important role in the formation of the 1982 Lima Text and the 1996 study document Towards Sharing the One Faith. Pannenberg’s ecumenical activity formed an important theme of his career. Nonetheless, little has been published in English on this aspect of his work.[9]

In 1993, two years after the publication of the final volume of Systematic Theology, Pannenberg retired from his post on the Evangelical Lutheran Theology faculty at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München. He remained active in publishing for and in the World Council of Churches until 2009. This work included the publication of two additional monographs not treated in this volume: one a treatment of the history of German Evangelical theology from Schleiermacher to Barth and Tillich published in 1997, and the other a historical look at the relationship between theology and philosophy in Germany published in 1998. Pannenberg died on September 4, 2014, at the age of eighty-five.

Over the course of his career Pannenberg published over six hundred titles, many of which have been translated into English. His work also generated countless dissertations and secondary research. A bibliography of his publications can be accessed in two significant secondary treatments of his work.[10] Pannenberg’s influence can also be seen in the success of his students and theologians who have been deeply influenced by his work. Philip Clayton, Carl Braaten, Stanley Grenz, F. Le Ron Shults, Robert Jenson, Gunter Wenz, Roger Olson, and William Lane Craig are among the well-known theologians that were students of Pannenberg.

Purpose and Structure of the Work

While a number of secondary treatments of Pannenberg’s work are available in print, the majority of these focus primarily on his Systematic Theology in structure and content. These volumes provide a helpful presentation of Pannenberg’s mature work but do not often look to the development of his ideas over time. The goal of this volume is to provide a basic introduction to Pannenberg’s theological career with special attention given to its key themes and chronological development.

This analysis takes its internal structure and logic from Pannenberg’s own description of his intellectual development near the end of his career. In an address delivered to the American Academy of Religion in November 2005, Pannenberg reflected on his life’s work and its major stages.[11] He described the trajectory of his career following the publication of Revelation as History in 1961 up to the publication of Systematic Theology in 1988–1993. Here, Pannenberg described the need to provide major studies in the areas of Christology, theological method, and anthropology before he could provide a full systematic treatment of the truth of Christian doctrine. Taking that description of his career, the current volume looks to each of these major publications to trace Pannenberg’s path with special attention to the ways that his ideas developed and changed over time. In the process, the work seeks to investigate how key themes in these earlier treatments culminated in the publication of Systematic Theology.

Each of the following chapters in this book thereby focus on the chronological development of Pannenberg’s theology in his respective monograph treatments of these major topics. This helps to narrow the focus on the most significant of Pannenberg’s publications, a method of study justified by his own retrospective reflections.

The first chapter delves into Pannenberg’s Revelation as History. This collection of essays is described within the broader historical context of the theology of revelation from the thirteenth century up to Barth, whose theology of the Word provides the immediate background for Pannenberg’s treatment of revelation. The chapter then moves to a discussion of his primary written contributions to the volume: the systematic introduction and his chapter titled Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation. These early writings provide the outline of a theological program that Pannenberg would develop over the next five decades. Finally, the critical reception of Revelation as History is briefly discussed.

The second chapter turns to the publication of Jesus—God and Man as the outgrowth of Pannenberg’s theology of revelation and his focus on history and the resurrection. In laying out the basic argument and development of the treatise, the chapter demonstrates the continuity between this volume and Revelation as History. Particular attention is given to Pannenberg’s discussion of the method of Christological reflection as well as his treatment of the relation between humanity and divinity in Christ. The exposition ends with a discussion of the work’s critical reception, as well as an important theological development in Pannenberg’s Christology from his scholarly engagement with these criticisms.

The third chapter investigates Pannenberg’s theological method and the place of theology among other academic disciplines, which was the subject of his Theology and the Philosophy of Science. This volume came after a period dominated by the composition of essays, both individually and in edited collections. As a result, it demonstrates increasing nuance and maturity in Pannenberg’s theology. The focus of this chapter centers on unpacking the epistemological foundations of his theological system and articulating the ground of Pannenberg’s interdisciplinary approach.

Interdisciplinarity again comes to the fore in the fourth chapter, which covers Pannenberg’s Anthropology in Theological Perspective, wherein he sought to establish the grounds of human religion in the structure of human persons and society. Similar to the work in Theology and the Philosophy of Science, the book attempts to draw primarily upon the secular human sciences to articulate an understanding of the human person that is in keeping with the Christian understanding of humanity and its relation to the divine.

The fifth chapter turns to the publication of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology as the crowning achievement of his career. Rather than unfolding the content of these three volumes, the aim is to address the ways the work reveals developments in Pannenberg’s theology. The chapter asserts two main points. First, there are few significant revisions of earlier positions in Pannenberg’s Systematic; second, the major developments in the work come primarily in his systematic unfolding of the Christian notion of God, which leads him to a comprehensive presentation of the Trinity, creation, ecclesiology, and eschatology in a way that he had not previously undertaken.

The conclusion draws together several themes that were developed implicitly in the previous chapters. These themes are drawn from aspects of Pannenberg’s theological career and his unique contributions to contemporary theology. As a result, each theme advances over the series of Pannenberg’s major publications. These concluding reflections are also offered to clarify the title of the volume and its reference to the unity of theology. This phrase intends to point first of all to Pannenberg’s understanding of the theological enterprise and its relation to the manifestation of God’s glory in history. At the risk of oversimplification, Pannenberg views history as the unfolding of God’s self-demonstration of his divinity to humanity. Theology is a human attempt to understand and articulate this divine  self-disclosure  in  the  form  of  praise.  This  praise—both  in the life  of  individual  Christians  who  dedicate  themselves  to  the contemplation and glorification of God’s being and over the course of salvation history itself—grows increasingly adequate and appropriate over time as the kingdom is drawn towards its eschatological fulfillment. As the preceding chapters aim to show, this progress is not always evident or easy to observe, but through the eyes of faith Pannenberg articulates his reasons for believing in the underlying unity and progress of history toward its divine fulfillment. Understood in this light, the title points to Pannenberg’s own theological career as an embodied attempt to give praise to God through the work of human understanding and articulation. Far from being the last words to be spoken or the crowning achievement of theology, Pannenberg would offer his work first and foremost as an act of worship and secondarily as an attempt to show how the Christian faith can be lived out in a way that is intellectually honest and life giving.

Major Themes

The key themes that will be discussed in the final chapter of this volume, also provide a second major contribution of the volume beyond the chronological development of Pannenberg’s career. These themes have been drawn from what appear to me to be the undercurrents present throughout his career rather than a presentation of the aspects of Pannenberg’s work that have garnered the most attention. As a result, the end of each chapter of the work will attempt to trace the development of these undercurrents. The final chapter is then offered as an attempt to draw these themes together and demonstrate the inner unity of his theological system. Readers who are primarily interested in one aspect of Pannenberg’s development or career may find it valuable to read individual chapters apart from this thematic development.

Each of these themes—public theology, interdisciplinarity, anticipation, and diversity in unity—is briefly introduced in the following paragraphs. Together these themes contribute to a portrait of a theologian who has made a distinctive contribution to the attempt to understand the Christian faith at the end of modernity. Among the most consistent critiques of Pannenberg’s theological system is that he succumbed to the error of a Hegelian rationalism. Those who read his works through this lens tend to find an intractable confidence in moral and doctrinal statements that seem out of step with the ambiguity and liquidity that characterize the worldviews of many. Against this misinterpretation, the themes of Pannenberg’s career that this work seeks to tease out demonstrate the oversimplification of this position. Instead, they present a portrait of theologian who was deeply engaged in the core philosophical and theological questions of the day and who attempted to articulate the Christian faith in a way that was faithful to the past and open to the future. When viewed through the lens of these themes, Pannenberg’s theology might be seen as an attempt to take seriously the complexity and contingency that characterize postmodern views of the world without falling prey to the relativism and incoherence that frequently accompany such insights.

Public Theology

While Pannenberg’s theology is perhaps best known for his emphasis on a theology of history and its eschatological shape, the fundamental intent is to provide a witness of how Christian faith can be lived in the contemporary world in an intellectually honest and satisfying manner. This theme was present in his work right from the beginning in the form of his insistence that God’s self-revelation in history is open to all rather than the province of a special revelation history only accessible to believers. His christological method and the importance he attaches to contemporary historical Jesus research also manifest the public nature of Pannenberg’s theology. Pannenberg’s philosophy of science and its articulation of the intellectual framework of academic study argue that theology can make a valuable contribution to knowledge, which is essential in modern universities. His anthropology demonstrates the basis for religion in the very structure of human identity and society rather than its being an ancient crutch that humanity once needed and is not ready to put aside. The ultimate expression of the public nature of Pannenberg’s theology is his Systematic Theology, which offers an argument for the truth of Christian doctrine through a demonstration of its internal consistency, the consensus of the witness to the Christian faith over its long history, and the superior explanatory value of the Christian worldview over every other philosophy.

Interdisciplinarity

By the second half of his career, Pannenberg had established a reputation for interdisciplinarity. This desire to engage with all aspects of human knowledge can be seen most clearly in his Theology and the Philosophy of Science and his Anthropology in Theological Perspective, both of which make engagement with scholars from a range of disciplines key to their argumentation. In these volumes, productive dialogue with the human sciences is at the forefront. Pannenberg’s interest in the sciences also comes to the fore in Systematic Theology at several important points. These include his use of field theory to explain the work of the Spirit, his treatise on the doctrines of creation and eschatology, and his understanding of the human person. However, his insistence on the public nature of revelation, which is open to all, found in in his theology of revelation provides the earliest and most fundamental signs of Pannenberg’s emphasis on interdisciplinary dialogue.

Anticipation

Much has been written on Pannenberg’s eschatological theology of history and his doctrine of anticipation.[12] Such an emphasis is only appropriate given that Pannenberg provides a compelling witness to the importance of historical questions for the postmodern mind. At the same time, this treatment of problems of historical consciousness has the merit of taking seriously the New Testament witness to the eschatological concerns of Jesus and the earliest Christian communities. The doctrine of anticipation is first outlined in Revelation as History and then further developed in his Christology, where he addresses the proleptic revelation of the Father through his personal unity with Jesus. In Pannenberg’s philosophy of science, this doctrine of  anticipation  is  developed  into  a  full-blown  theological  anthropology that seeks to address the challenges of the modern mind under the condition of the twin threats of modern positivism and postmodern nihilistic relativism. He argues that genuine truth can be found in the world in a way that