Creatures of Truth

CREATURES OF TRUTH ]ACK BoNSOR St. Patrick's Seminary Menlo Park, California IN HIS RECENT essay Philip Clayton enters into a conversation with Wolfhart Pannenberg about the latter's notion of being. Clayton's work is a welcome contribution on the thought of an important contemporary theologian. The essay not only sets forth Pannenberg's position with clarity, but raises some significant questions about his ontology, e.g. the temporal character of being and the proleptic nature of truth. Clayton thinks with Pannenberg about these issues, questioning elements of Pannenberg's ontology and suggesting alternative ways to pursue the basic direction of his thought.1 In the following essay I intend to continue the conversation initiated by Clayton, focusing on Pannenberg's conception of truth. Clayton correctly indicates the importance of Martin Heidegger for Pannenberg's thought. Heidegger's understanding of human existence as temporality, and the relationship of temporality to truth and being, have directly influenced Pannenberg . Heidegger's thought also reaches deeply into Pannenberg's notions of truth and being through his retrieval of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The relationship between Heidegger, Gadamer, and Pannenberg on the nature of truth is my central topic.2 Pannenberg conceives of truth as the whole of history. He de1 Philip Qayton, "Being and One Theologian", The Thomist 52 (1988): 645-671. 2 For the sake of brevity I assume in this essay the basic relationship between Gadamer's thought and that of Heidegger, i.e. that Gadamer's hermeneutic has its foundation in Heidegger's philosophical anthropology. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 225-234. 647 648 JACK BONSOR velops what Clayton calls an eschatological ontology " in which all being is dependent on the final completion of history." 3 Critical to this ontology is Pannenberg's notion of the history of the transmission of traditions. Pannenberg takes over this notion developed by form criticism. Using Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutic, he understands the history of the transmission of traditions ontologically. Specifically, Pannenberg holds that the truth of Christian texts occurs in their on-going appropriation within history. The truth of classic Christian texts (e.g. Scripture , dogma) will only fully occur at the end of history when each text finds its final meaning within universal history. In the first section of the following essay I set forth how Pannenberg uses Gadamer's thought in order to ontologize the history of the transmission of traditions. But Pannenberg's eschatological ontology, his conception of truth as universal history , is very different from that of Gadamer and Heidegger. Section one attempts to clarify this difference, indicating why Gadamer and Heidegger insist on the radically historical and finite nature of truth, rejecting any move to universal history. In section two I take up Pannenberg's suggestion that we think of the history of the transmission of traditions in Gadamerian fashion, i.e. as an ontological process. But I do so without Pannenberg 's move to universal history. In other words, I attempt to think about the history of Christian truth from within the historicist perspective suggested by the thought of Heidegger and Gadamer. Rejecting Pannenberg's move to universal history avoids elements of his thought (e.g. the proleptic nature of truth and the introduction of temporality into God) which Clayton finds problematic.4 It does so, of course, by thinking about history and Christian truth in a fundamentally different way from that suggested by Clayton. It seems to me that this different way of thinking about Christian truth offers rich possibilities for contemporary theology. s Clayton, 658. 4 Clayton, 656-667. CREATURES OF TRUTH I A) Pannenberg, Truth, and the Transmission of Traditions 649 Gadamer's thought plays a critical role in the development of Pannenberg's theological hermeneutic. In turn, this theological hermeneutic is an essential element in Pannenberg's conception of truth as universal history. Pannenberg addresses two familiar hermeneutical questions raised by historical consciousness. First, the world views intrinsic to canonical texts are frequently strange and troublesome to modern believers. The uncovering of Jesus' apocalyptic message by historical-critical scholars is a classic example of how strange and troublesome historical consciousness can be. A good deal...