Pannenberg: A Guide for the Perplexed (review)

Timothy Bradshaw’s Pannenberg: A Guide to the Perplexed seeks to be a concise and sympathetic introduction to the great German systematician’s whole theological project, and it succeeds. Bradshaw ably traces Pannenberg’s influences (e.g., the goal to “out-Hegel Hegel”), and he presents, in as systematic a fashion as Pannenberg himself, the main building blocks of his theology.

How is one to summarize Pannenberg’s massive vision? Bradshaw does this well. In the early writings, Pannenberg acknowledged that revelation itself had a history culminating in the orientation of the Hebrew tradition toward the future. Likewise, the human being is best characterized by an “openness to the world.” Pannenberg goes on to argue that the resurrection of Jesus inaugurates and anticipates the arrival of the coming kingdom of God. Understanding the grand Christian message requires a hermeneutic in which meaning inheres in events themselves, residing as they do in histories-of-effects. Indeed, all traditions that are bound to events point forward to that final day when the totality of history will be visible. So humans in their essentially open religiosity are ready to hear of Jesus, who emerges, as a result of a historical-critical reading of the New Testament, as the one whose self offering to the Father even unto death corresponds to the coming God’s Trinitarian self-giving into history. For Pannenberg, the Christian dialogue with science helps us to describe God’s nature as a field of interpersonal life. We are invited to participate in that self-giving until that day when all creation will do what it was made for, a free, worshipful offering to its creator God.

Pannenberg today does not receive the attention or respect he deserves. Reinhard Huetter wittily remarked that the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg’s great response to modernity, was published just in time for it be irrelevant to the postmodern project and age. Pannenberg brought much of this on himself, with his early bravado about a theology accessible without any prior claim to faith, and the occasional use of words like proof or foundation, to which postmodern ears are so allergic. But his project may well age better than many suppose. The challenge of atheism, the need to reckon with the religions, the task of a serious dialogue with science—have these matters really faded in our postmodern moment? Though Bradshaw does not say so, the truth is that Pannenberg’s magnum opus, after its prolegomenal throat-clearing, spends most of its time expounding the grammar of the faith on its own terms with the help of his massive erudition.

Pannenberg is the most systematic of theologians in the sense that one organizing vision shows up right on time to resolve the question over each and every theological locus. Bradshaw aptly refers to this as “the future perfect tense.” God has submitted himself to history; for now the world seems little redeemed; the truth of faith is controverted. But at the eschaton God will be shown to be the Lord, and so also to have been Lord all along, retrospectively. It is not easy to reckon exactly with what we are being told here. Pannenberg means to renegotiate the relation of time and eternity but also to protect the concept of God from real vulnerability to change, such as one might find in process theology. One worries that the sheet, pulled to the chin, leaves the feet cold. If the truth of the Christian God turns out always to be so and to have been so, how much has Pannenberg in fact reworked the time–eternity relation?

Bradshaw does pose questions in his final chapter, but the book’s goal is really more exposition than challenge. For my part I would describe the “future perfect tense” in this way: if Thomas Aquinas had an “analogy of being,” and Barth an “analogy of faith,” Pannenberg has an “analogy of the future.” That is, Pannenberg uses the term future not...