Kindle Notes & Highlights
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June 29 - November 26, 2018
As a result, Pannenberg views the life of the family as key to a proper understanding of society and the foundation for individual religious experience.[72] He is particularly concerned about social and cultural trends that erode the religious foundations of monogamy.
Nonetheless, Pannenberg sees the separation of church and state as necessary to provide for the well-being of individuals. Religions, then, ought not to serve to legitimate political powers, which are always changing, but rather orient all society to its proper ground and destiny.
Olson, for example, finds his arguments that the notions of the image of God and sin are supported by general anthropological studies convincing. Despite his concerns with the specifics of these presentations, Olson finds Pannenberg’s discussion of human exocentricity helpful in that help to establish conversations about religious themes in a more public intellectual conversation.[75] Olson also praises Pannenberg for arguing that the alienation that can be found in modern society is a result of the privatization of religion and the denial of a general religious impulse in humanity.
Ultimately, however, humanity must look to its ultimate fulfillment in the work of the Spirit in history and the nature of divine providence that will guide humanity to its fulfillment. Such a solution is challenging because it is wary of the ready-made answers of both the political right and left—a wariness that seems completely appropriate given Pannenberg’s personal experience with both the national socialist movement and communism in his youth—and asks us to provide provisional answers today in anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s kingdom.
The central thesis of the work is that religion is not simply a social construct to control the masses. Rather the inclination to reach out beyond one’s own immediate context is a central feature the evolution of human beings that allows them to suppress their instinctual desires. This same feature, which is the root of objective reasoning, is also the basis for all religious experience.
Pannenberg argues that religion and culture share a common foundation in openness to the world. This capacity for self-transcendence forms the basis for the creation of a shared world among individuals and the creations of culture. Thus Pannenberg suggests that it is not only religion that seeks the fulfillment of humanity in the divine, but all of culture is properly oriented to this task. If he is right in this claim, there can be no ultimate ground for a distinction between religious and secular realty, since the very structure of the human person is directed to fulfillment in relation to
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it is necessary to point out here that it is only after he has established a rational foundation for religious experience apart from revelation that he can argue for the truth of Christian doctrine in a way that may have a broad-based appeal.
He argues that individuals only actualize their full identity and personhood through an ecstatic relation to the other. A key aspect of this argument is that the imago Dei is best understood as a call to future fulfillment rather than as being locked in a pre-established and unchanging substance.
Nonetheless, the simultaneous now-and-not-yet of his doctrine of anticipation allows him to explain how humans are already in possession of the divine image but only in an imperfect and limited way. Humans become more truly themselves through their loving relationship to God and others.
Pannenberg holds that the fulfillment of all of creation is taken up in proper relations between humans, their environment, and God. Thus he is able to argue that both the church and broader society offer a foretaste of heaven. The church is the anticipation of the eschatological fulfillment of the kingdom of God, and social structures outside the church have an important role to play in leading humanity to its future fulfillment.
He holds that it is only in relation to others that humans develop their identity and grow into the imago Dei. However, he insists that the dynamic interplay between individuals and society, cultures and history, parts and wholes can only be understood as mutually conditioning—priority cannot be given to one over the other.
Pannenberg’s response to this fundamental question that every believer and nonbeliever must face is equally simple. The Christian faith should be believed because it is true.
However, Pannenberg contends this modern secular bias against religious language and the insights of religion fails to take seriously the fact that religion has always been a part of human culture and society or the idea that religious experience is fundamental to what it means to be human.
First, in response to an increasingly secular view of the world, Pannenberg reasserts the philosophical and theological indispensability of God. For him, God as the ground of all being is the ultimate foundation of all truth, and the ultimate value of truth claims can only be measured in relation to this ultimate goal.
coherence and consensus.[10]
However, the ultimate verification or falsification of truth claims can only be evaluated at the end of human history. In the present, all that is possible is an anticipatory apprehension of the ultimate truth.
In fact, this topic is so central to the internal structure of the Systematic Theology that the doctrine of the Trinity should be considered as the central theme of the work that can be seen in each of its chapters.
In that context the key argument is that religion is constitutive of human nature at both the individual and social level. As such, it is directed to human questions regarding the ground and unity of all existence. It is fundamentally oriented to the perception of the whole.
Despite Pannenberg’s insistence that reason alone is insufficient to establish the existence of God and that God’s existence can only ultimately be verified through his eschatological appearance, he argues that religious experience is able to apprehend a provisional notion of the origin and goal of human existence.
This claim stands in marked contrast to the approach of many philosophers of religion. It also contrasts with Barth’s approach to the notion of religion as a human endeavor and its relation to revelation. Barth viewed religion as a purely human projection and thus only capable of producing an idolatrous worship that is flawed in its ability to reveal God’s Word. Pannenberg instead sees religion as an expression of the openness to the world that is part of the natural conditions of human existence and that provides humanity with a translucent, if imprecise, notion of the divine. This
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The diversity of religions, then, is the product of a natural human longing for the divine. World religions make competing claims regarding the nature of the divine and all things in relation to it.
Furthermore, Pannenberg believes the greater distinction in approaches to religion and the unity of experience lies in the separation between religion and atheism. Both traditions seek to explain the unity of human existence, but they differ fundamentally in finding the unity of all things either within human subjectivity or outside the human subject in the divine.
Because all religious claims are essentially assertions about the unity of all human experience, religious statements take the form of hypotheses that must be tested and ultimately either verified or falsified.
“The gods of the religions must show in our experience of the world that they are the powers which they claim to be. They must confirm themselves by the implications of meaning in this experience so that its content can be understood as an expression of the power of God and not his weakness.”[13]
If the divine reality that religious experience points to is to be confirmed, the power of the divine to impact history needs to be tested and confirmed. For Christianity, the truth and power of God is revealed in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth.
In his Systematic Theology, the initial concern is to demonstrate that the concept of revelation grows out of the history of religions and that it is not a concept that is foreign or disputed. In particular, he looks to the multiplicity of understandings of revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures. These competing concepts of revelation culminate in apocalyptic literature, which provides the background for Jesus’s preaching of the kingdom of God.
It is also clear in this context that Pannenberg is demonstrating how his concept of revelation in history relates to his philosophy of religion and how it is the product of competition among religious ideas.
First, he argues that it is possible to make historical claims based on the testimony of Scripture and that historical questions are essential.
Second, Pannenberg is critical of the emphasis placed on a propositional understanding of the Word of God in the writings of Barth, Jüngel, and Ebeling.
Where others place emphasis on the work of the Logos in God’s self-manifestation in history, Pannenberg also includes as essential the activity of the Spirit in history, not as a separate and special manifestation that is open only to those with the eyes of faith.[15]
The concepts of anticipation and prolepsis in Pannenberg’s theology of revelation give all knowledge of God a provisional and hypothetical quality. This explains why doubts regarding even the existence of God and the Christian understanding of salvation persist, even among the Christian faithful.
Pannenberg joins Barth and Rahner in arguing that one of the major shortcomings of the classical construction of the doctrine of God in the Western tradition is that the Trinity, subordinated to the unitary essence, is treated as an afterthought rather than as essential to the Christian notion of God.
As a result, he is mindful that ultimately the truth of God’s existence has still only been established in anticipation of its consummation. This consummation will take place when the fullness of the kingdom of God has been established by the Spirit and handed over to the Son—who will in turn glorify the Father by handing over the kingdom in its ultimate fulfillment. In this sense, Pannenberg speaks of the history of God and the establishment of the lordship of God in time.
Instead, Pannenberg claims with Rahner that God is known through the activity of the divine persons in history. He also goes beyond Rahner in asserting that the deity of the Trinity is caught up in the economic mission of Son and the Spirit. He asserts that God’s very deity is at risk in the act of creation, and that the deity of the Father is confirmed and in a sense established in God’s lordship over creation.[23]
One specific area worthy of expanded discussion is Pannenberg’s treatment of field theory as a valuable insight into the nature of reality.
In his discussion of the doctrine of creation, Pannenberg draws upon field theory to describe the work of the Spirit in animating and binding together all of creation. In particular, he uses the concept of the Spirit as the field in which all of creation takes place as a way to describe both the way in which God is able to make space for creation through participation in God’s very being and to describe the pull of providence that guides creation to its eschatological completion.[25]
As has been observed, Pannenberg’s goal in the Systematics is to argue for the truth claims of Christian teaching in a way that is able to account for the insights of contemporary experience (including and especially a modern scientific framework) and thus to demonstrate the reasonableness of the Christian faith. In particular, Pannenberg’s treatment of the rationality of the Christian faith focuses on the warrants for the Christian doctrine of God as the Trinity. Each treatise following his initial presentation of the doctrine of God, then, takes the form of working out the
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Pannenberg argues that a denial of Jesus’s role as the cause of salvation is not so much toleration of religious pluralism as it is indifference.[26] He agrees with John Hick and others who argue that the rejection of Jesus’s function as the unique cause of salvation is closely tied to the notion of his identity as the incarnate Son of God. However, he differs from them in asserting that the unique divinity of Christ is an essential and irreducible truth claim of Christianity—its falsification, for Pannenberg, means that Christianity is irrational and untenable.
