The Unity of Theology: The Contribution of Wolfhart Pannenberg

by Theodore James Whapham

Pannenberg’s philosophical system, which is implicit in his understanding of the resurrection, works differently. It starts not from certain knowledge of what a thing is but rather with the process of how humans come to know a thing. In this way, Pannenberg builds his Christology around the way that Jesus’s divinity is revealed through the flow of history into the future. Thus, we have seen Pannenberg’s constant emphasis on Jesus’s resurrection establishing the knowledge of his unity with the Father only at the end of his life. On the other hand, Pannenberg insists that the ontological reality that is finally established at the end of Jesus’s life history is present throughout the unity of his entire person and thus must be declared as ontologically present from the earliest moment of his existence. In other words, the truth of a thing is established for Pannenberg over its life history, and it is only at the end of a person’s life that its deepest ontological status is established.