Understanding Pannenberg: Landmark Theologian of the Twentieth Century by Anthony C. Thiselton (review)

Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) was one of the foremost Lutheran systematicians of the twentieth century. Thiselton, Emeritus Professor at Nottingham, offers a compact summary of Pannenberg's thought, a kind of mini-dogmatics, beholden to Pannenberg's three-volume Systematic Theology but also incorporating other works that show how Pannenberg arrived at his conclusions. The book starts with a brief presentation of Pannenberg's life and then explicates Pannenberg's views of theological prolegomena, the doctrine of the trinity, Christology, theological anthropology, the Holy Spirit and the church, eschatology, and hermeneutics. This book is highly accessible and does an excellent job situating Pannenberg in relation to other German theologians as well as British theologians, who, as Thiselton notes, Pannenberg sometimes overlooked.

Pannenberg's trademark is to situate theological truth as an expression of history, the "most comprehensive horizon of Christian theology: all theological questions and answers are meaningful only within the framework of history that God has with humanity and through humanity with all creation" (7). For Pannenberg, history is an "indirect self-revelation of God." History's meaning will only be established at its telos, its "totality" (9). Even so, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the clue that anticipates that totality, and so discloses the purpose of God's plan for the cosmos, the fulfillment of the totality of reality (20).

Countering the existentialist trends of mid-twentieth-century theology, Pannenberg rehabilitates traditional metaphysical arguments for God's existence insofar as they can be updated for modern people. He also seriously engages the world religions as offering glimpses of transcendence. For Pannenberg, Christian faith cannot flee into some existentialist ghetto. The appreciation for a new approach to metaphysics which incorporates history as a way to understand created reality as both temporal and directed towards an outcome, not merely a binary between eternity and time, can help us better articulate the significance of Jesus Christ. Understanding the unity between Jesus and God is achieved precisely by maintaining a strict differentiation within God's life between Jesus who manifests the eternal Logos and God the Father (54). In contrast to Bultmann, Pannenberg affirms the facticity of Jesus' resurrection (75). Jesus' resurrection means that, in a sense, the "end of the world has begun" (72).

Pannenberg retrieves Hegel's concept of personhood as constituted through mutual reciprocity and acknowledgment between others as a way to solve the disagreement between Antiochene Christologies for which the unity of Jesus with God is a problem and Alexandrine Christologies for which the difference between Jesus and God is a problem. The answer for a proper approach to Christology is to be found neither in distinguishing nor amalgamating the divine and the human natures in Jesus but instead to acknowledge the mutual interpenetration or perichoresis between the two (87). In Jesus, the divinity of the Logos saturates Jesus' humanity much like fire makes iron glow (88).

Pannenberg's view of theodicy (defense of God in the face of evil) is that evil is not beyond meaning but its purpose will be disclosed only at the Last Day (110). This view is similar, I think, to Luther's perspective about the "light of glory" in the Bondage of the Will. While acknowledging the work of the Mannermaa school emphasizing the indwelling of Christ in believers, justification by grace alone is, for Pannenberg, properly a verdict, an imputation of forgiveness, and so a means of receiving God's love (132). The Lord's Supper offers Christ's real presence but in an anamnetic way, bringing the past into the present through the agency of the Spirit (138). The truth of the Christian faith will only be established at the end of history, but even now the resurrection of Jesus Christ anticipates "proleptically" the truth of the unification of all historical reality in the consummation (184).

This is an accessible and durable introduction to Pannenberg whose work merits attention since he aimed to present a sound Lutheran perspective...