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THE ORIGINS and LIMITATIONS of PANNENBERG's ESCHATOLOGY David J. Zehnder

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THE ORIGINS and LIMITATIONS of PANNENBERG's ESCHATOLOGY David J. Zehnder JETS 53/1 (March 2010) 117–31 THE ORIGINS AND LIMITATIONS OF PANNENBERG’S ESCHATOLOGY david j. zehnder* With the close of the twentieth century and opening of the twenty-first, time is opportune for theologians to shore up the last century’s results and determine their value for today’s theology. Because of his importance to late twentieth-century theology, this essay discusses Wolfhart Pannenberg and his rather novel contribution to eschatology in which he conceived the entire truth of God. Despite pressures to relegate theological insight to subjective values, Pannenberg uniquely substantiated Christianity’s historical truth in an ambitious defense of universal, public theology.1 In contrast, Protestant theology in Germany’s modernity had largely taken flight and hid its truth from critical dissenters within academic science. The scrutiny of reason and science against religion precipitated a series of hid- ing techniques with which theologians have shielded religion. Kant placed it within the limits of ethics; Friedrich Schleiermacher placed the truth of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence (das Gefühl schlechthiniger Abhängigkeit) or “God-consciousness.”2 Later, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bult- mann, in their peculiar ways, hid God in his transcendent otherness, denying natural theology, while Paul Tillich hid God in the mystery of Being (Sein) itself and nearly forfeited claims to Christian particularism. With this legacy behind him, Pannenberg’s attempt to uphold traditional Christian claims against competing gods and worldviews is, for all of its subtlety of presen- tation, audacious. But he sees universality as constitutive of theology itself and cannot imagine talk of God—the creator and source of all life—without these absolute claims. His system requires a specific understanding of world history as the history of God’s reign. Because time still marches on and God’s reign is not yet consummated, knowledge of him is incomplete. But God is still accessible from the context of history’s end. Indeed, the future is the theme in Pannen- berg I wish to scrutinize because it is a unique, last-century idea whose use- fulness is still unclear for the current century. Pannenberg maintains that all true knowledge of God flows from the context of universal history as completed * David Zehnder is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Pl., St. Louis, MO 63105-3196. 1 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (3 vols.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991–1997) 1:1–62. 2 Beginning in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube: Nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange Dargestellt (Bd. 1; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960) 28. 118 journal of the evangelical theological society in the future. To explain this concept, I found it necessary to trace its de- velopment within the formative years of his thinking, only there comprehend- ing his thesis that the future is an indispensable category for systematic theology. This essay takes an historical form, tracing the future’s herme- neutical function in early essays and how its function later broadened toward ontologically basic significance. This ontological use of the future, we will see, was an unfortunate development because it compromised the coherence of Pannenberg’s system, but the hermeneutical significance of the future re- mains a strong insight for theology today. i. revelation and the future’s appearance From his earliest days as a professional theologian, Pannenberg showed interest in the doctrine of God, its implications for theological language, and revelation. In 1959, he published an article on the “Philosophical Concept of God,” where he traced Greek influence in the history of theology and ex- pressed the need to reinterpret the doctrine of God “even in the face of the modern crisis of metaphysics.”3 The final outcome of this concern (in Pannen- berg’s full Systematic Theology) shows that he never abandoned this early task to find an adequate God. But to get to the harmony of his later system, Pannenberg first had to tangle with the problems that plague all modern theology: to find a sturdy concept of revelation, which he determined could only be grounded in the history of God’s worldly presence. In January of 1959, Pannenberg argued that revelation is based in actual, biblical history (Geschichte) rather than other foundations, be they reason, experience, or supernatural incursion from above.4 To defend his claim, he had to reckon with world history as the ultimate context for interpreting events and ultimately the truth of God. Thus, before Pannenberg set about writing systematic theology, he considered the entire span of world history (from Genesis to Revelation) first and only from there interpreted Jesus, God’s kingdom, and the future’s significance. While this approach might be conge- nial to American theology, it offered a decisive break with Europe’s tradition. Nineteenth-century theology had no apocalyptic eschatology, and twentieth- century theology was blind to God’s future. Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) had spun the Enlightenment notion of progress into a version of God’s kingdom on earth.5 He propounded ethical progress without apocalyptics, which many modern thinkers either ignored or, as in David Strauss’s case, discarded as primitive mythology.6 Kant’s idea of progress was not central to his whole philosophy and probably demonstrates simply his latching on to the current Zeitgeist on the knife’s blade between 3 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Philosophical Concept of God,” in Basic Questions in Theology: Collected Essays (trans. George Kehm; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970–1971), 2:183 (here- after BQT). 4 Pannenberg, “Redemptive Events and History,” in BQT 1:15–80. 5 Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (New York: Cambridge, 2001) 318ff. 6 See David Strauss, The Life of Jesus (trans. George Eliot; 4th ed.; London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1902) 39ff. One Line Long the origins and limitations of pannenberg’s eschatology 119 Rationalism and Romanticism, but it testifies to a lasting trend in German thought. Similarly, Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology, could not open the church to God’s future, and the kingdom-on-earth motif only gained speed to reach Albrecht Ritschl’s great system.7 God’s kingdom there mirrored an ethical community thriving in civilization by mutual love, and Ritschl fully expected the future to bring about a unified body of peoples through human ethical striving.8 There was little room, then, for a deity to direct the course of history toward his own creative ends. By the next century, theology began to awaken to God’s eschatological action through the work of Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss.9 Schweitzer was unable to accept Jesus’ preaching precisely because he felt that it failed to predict the world’s imminent end. Jesus was a radical sectarian prophet, he felt, who is far too obscure to have direct relevance for religion today. Weiss would have agreed. Although approaching eschatology from the kingdom’s standpoint and not Jesus’ person, Weiss prefigured Schweitzer’s work by demonstrating, contra Adolf von Harnack, that the NT idea of the kingdom is an apocalyptic manifestation that God alone is responsible for manifesting. At least, such was primitive Christianity’s understanding. His view repudiated the kingdom-on-earth notion that was much more a product of the Enlighten- ment than of the Bible, but he and Schweitzer stranded eschatological think- ing in the NT era. These reactions to early modern theology laid the groundwork for Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Friedrich Gogarten to emphasize the Bible’s pervasively eschatological meaning, but they still were unable to break free of their context. They all emphasized eschatology at the expense of the future.10 Barth saw the biblical statements of future eschatology as fulfilled already in Jesus Christ, making his parousia (“coming”) an event of revelation in which God appears to his church but not an historically future event. Simi- larly, Bultmann viewed eschatology as a kind of ethical stamp on life. He proposed that Christian existence offers already the kind of liberation that the NT typically portrays as future. Eschatology furnishes an indicative (of one’s identity), which comprises an imperative (how one lives courageously into the future’s uncertainties), but any future-pointing verses suffered de- mythologizing and reinterpretation within the consciousness of the person’s subject. Pannenberg, in contrast, found both of the above approaches unsatisfac- tory. The kingdom-on-earth view was shattered both by NT research and two world wars, and Barth and Bultmann’s de-historicized account not only failed 7 Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay; Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, 1966). 8 Ibid. chap. 2. 9 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (ed. Richard Neuhaus; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969) 52. 10 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (trans. Edwyn Hoskyns; 6th ed.; New York: Oxford Press, 1968) 499–500. Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper, 1957) 151. Friedrich Gogarten, Demythologizing and History (trans. Neville Smith; London: Camelot, 1955). 120 journal of the evangelical theological society to honor the Bible’s claim to future eschatology but also led to the subjective retreat of theological claims, relegating them primarily into ethics and not universal knowledge of the world and its destiny. Contemporary theology, Pannenberg contended, must be debatable in a public forum and therefore must concern history as an objectively accessible arena of inquiry. Therefore, in his 1959 lecture, he directly countered Bultmann, Gogarten, and then Martin Kähler, who hid the truth of Christianity in a supra-historical plane of meaning visible to faith but not historical research.11 He stepped back from the NT discussion of revelation and turned to the OT, with its promise- fulfillment motif.
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