Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God: The Realisation of Divine Love (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781409463382, 9781315599342, 1409463389

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Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God examines a much-neglected aspect of the theological thought of one of the most original contemporary German theologians, Wolfhart Pannenberg: his theological and philosophical understanding of evil and its relationship to the love of God. The book seeks to correct a widely held misconception that in his theology, Pannenberg has neglected the darker side of the world, concentrating instead on an optimistic picture of the future. This book argues that questions of evil hold a central place throughout Pannenberg’s writing and seeks to draw out the implications of his wrestling with these issues. The Introduction sets the scene by considering the nature of the question of evil and argues that a theological response must be made as part of a global view of the world and not in isolation from other themes. The succeeding chapters develop this theme through a reading of Pannenberg’s theology.

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars spanning the breadth of religious studies, theology and biblical studies, this openended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Other Recently Published Titles in the Series: Averroes and Hegel on Philosophy and Religion Catarina Belo Cassian’s Conferences Scriptural Interpretation and the Monastic Ideal Christopher J. Kelly Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality Testing Religious Truth-claims R. Scott Smith Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation Titus Chung Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism Keith Hebden Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities Sustenance and Sustainability Pankaj Jain Piety and Responsibility Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika John N. Sheveland Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness Christopher B. Barnett

Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God The Realisation of Divine Love

Mark Hocknull University of Lincoln, UK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Mark Hocknull 2014 Mark Hocknull has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Hocknull, Mark. Pannenberg on evil, love, and God : the realisation of divine love / by Mark Hocknull. pages cm. – (Ashgate new critical thinking in religion, theology, and biblical studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6338-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 1928– 2. Good and evil. 3. God (Christianity)–Love. I. Title. BX4827.P3H63 2014 231’.8092–dc23 2013023948 ISBN 9781409463382 (hbk) ISBN 9781315599342 (ebk)

To Kate, who has taught me much about love, forgiveness and reconciliation

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Contents Introduction  

1

1

Pannenberg, Evil and the Task of Theology  

7

2

Reconsidering Evil  

41

3

Can Sin Be Original?  

71

4

The Power of Love  

99

5

The Realisation of Divine Love  

127

6

Eschatology and the Present  

159

Bibliography   Index  

181 197

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Introduction This book is about evil and love. It is not an attempt at theodicy, that is, an attempt to justify the ways of God to the world. It is, rather, an attempt to grapple with the thought of one particular contemporary theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg, as a means to answering the question ‘can we love God in the face of evil?’ A second related question is ‘can we be sure, in the face of evil, that God loves us?’ In reality, these are two sides of the same question and hence there is a play on words in my title. God’s love is realised both in the sense of being recognised by human beings and in the sense of being made actual, real and concrete in the world, by God, through God’s action in the world. At the beginning of this book, it is important to set out clearly the rationale for choosing to examine Pannenberg’s theology of evil; the more so since it has been pointed out that the themes of sin and evil are not prominent in Pannenberg’s theology.1 Alister McGrath suggests that it ‘is the opinion of many scholars’, both German and North American, that the German theological tradition is coming to a natural end.2 The reasons he cites for this are associated with a shift in theological emphasis, away from the Enlightenment agenda, with which he believes the German theological tradition is heavily associated, towards a different agenda, which he sees as associated more with North America. It is not clear immediately which scholars McGrath has in mind, nor is it clear what he thinks is the content of this new agenda. The examples he cites – ‘feminism’, ‘postliberalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ – suggest that what he has in mind is a more pluriform, perhaps relativistic, methodological landscape which stresses the importance of context and starting-point, as well as political ideologies as key factors in speaking theologically. The assumption is, then, that the intellectual landscape has shifted irrevocably, leaving the German theological tradition behind, so that its debates are as remote from us and our concerns as were the mediaeval theological debates from the Enlightenment itself. McGrath comments, ‘The Enlightenment vision of a single rational worldview has, quite simply, perished.’3 For Pannenberg, who stands in direct opposition to this statement, all truth, ultimately, must be a unity: it is a logical impossibility for truth, as distinct from truth claims, to contradict itself. Pannenberg understands this

  E. Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Philadelphia, PA 1974),

1

p. 300.

2   Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology 1750–1990 (Eugene, OR 1994 ), p. 9. 3   Ibid.

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unity of truth as an eschatological reality.4 He stands at the end of a long and noble tradition of theological reflection. If we take McGrath’s view of the theological mood of the times, Pannenberg is destined to become of little more than historical interest, the last flowering of a once vibrant tradition. Yet, in contrast to this view, the young Pannenberg, when he burst onto the theological scene, was hailed as the founder of a ‘new school of theology’.5 Subsequently, Pannenberg’s theology has attracted praise and criticism in almost equal measure, and, more than forty years on from Robinson’s remark, it is not easy to see the flourishing of the ‘Pannenberg School’, though he continues to attract a number of advocates around the world. A persistent criticism has been that Pannenberg is too wedded to an Enlightenment agenda and fails to give due weight to the importance of the situatedness of the theologian in his methodology. Certainly Pannenberg is no postmodernist, but the recent work of F. LeRon Shults on Pannenberg’s methodology demonstrates Pannenberg’s affinity for postfoundationalism. Shults’s work has received a warm reception from Pannenberg, who contributed a forward to Shults’s book, writing that Shults is ‘correct in placing me neither in the foundationalist camp nor among certain forms of non-foundationalism that surrender the rational quest for truth’.6 Pannenberg then, though clearly rooted in the German theological and philosophical tradition, is seeking to develop that tradition in the light of criticism of Modernist thought, whilst continuing to hold on to the notion of a ‘rational quest for truth’. This alone makes Pannenberg an interesting theologian to study. The topic of evil provides a suitable tool with which to test Pannenberg’s theology. First, throughout the twentieth century, there has been a major shift in theological approaches to evil, and the topic has been given considerable prominence by some contemporary theologians. Most notably, Moltmann makes the claim that ‘there can be no theology after Auschwitz until there can be a theology in Auschwitz.’7 On this view, evil becomes the definitive test of our ability to speak theologically at all. Secondly, there has been little attention paid to the theology of evil in Pannenberg’s thought. It has been a major criticism of his theology that Pannenberg is far too optimistic in his outlook and fails to take the problem of evil seriously, a criticism which this book will argue may have been valid for the early flowering of Pannenberg’s theological project, but cannot be applied to his mature theology and therefore to his theology as a whole. More than this, Pannenberg’s rootedness in the tradition and his innovative approach, combined with his focus 4   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology (3 vols) (London 1970–73), Volume 1, p. 27; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology ET (3 vols) (Grand Rapids, MI 1991–98), Volume 1, p. 16. 5   James M. Robinson, ‘Revelation as Word and as History’, in Theology as History, eds James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York 1967), p. 12. 6   F. LeRon Shults, The Post-Foundational Task of Theology. Wolfhart Pannenberg and the new theological rationality (Grand Rapids, MI 1999), p. ix. 7   Jurgen Moltmann, ‘Theodicy’, in New Dictionary of Christian Theology, eds Alan Richardson and John Bowden (London 1983), pp. 564–6, at p. 565.

Introduction

3

on fundamental issues, suggests that a careful consideration of his thought might yield insights into the question of evil which contemporary theology, with its emphasis on situatedness, is in danger of missing. I have in mind here, specifically, Augustine’s treatment of evil as an ontological issue primarily. For Augustine, evil is a privation of good, a lack of being, and this approach stands in marked contrast to contemporary approaches which regard evil as an existential or psychological phenomenon. Whilst we cannot revert to an Augustinian conceptualisation, it is possible that Pannenberg’s focus on fundamental issues may yield a different way of considering evil which in turn may prove beneficial in dealing with evil in the world today. In this book, then, I am arguing the case for two interrelated things. The first is that Pannenberg’s theological method, far from being the last flowering of a dying tradition is, in fact, a development of that tradition which has new insights and understandings to offer. The second is that one of the areas where Pannenberg has insight to offer is in our understanding of evil in the world and that this insight can help us to deal with specific manifestations of evil in the world today. Structure of the Argument The theological problem of evil is that of how we can go on loving and trusting God and be sure of God’s love toward us in the face of evil. An answer to this question can be found only from within a systematic theological account of God and God’s relationship to the whole of reality. It is argued that Pannenberg’s systematic thought provides one such account. Moreover, because of the nature of the challenge evil poses to theology, the challenge can be used as a hermeneutical tool, a test case, with which to probe Pannenberg’s entire system. Chapter 1 takes up this issue through an examination of Pannenberg’s theological method and the place of evil within his thought. It reviews the search for a hermeneutic key and grundprinzip for Pannenberg’s thought, and develops the concept of a research programme as a series of interlocking hypotheses, taken from Imre Lakatos’ philosophy of science, arguing that this is the best way of understanding Pannenberg’s theology. From there, the chapter assesses the place of evil in Pannenberg’s thinking, and argues that though this is minimal, to the point of neglect, in the early theology, Pannenberg’s way of dealing with evil takes us to the heart of his thought, and thus provides a potentially useful hermeneutic tool with which to engage Pannenberg’s programme. The chapter also discusses Pannenberg’s notion of intersubjectivity as a means of overcoming Lyotard’s notion of incommensurate narratives. Chapter 2 picks up on the notion, introduced in this opening chapter, that, in contrast to Augustine’s ontological understanding of evil, much of modern discourse on evil simply takes it for granted that evil is a moral, existential problem. The chapter develops the argument that Augustine paved the way, via Kant, for modern psychological-philosophical understandings of evil. Pannenberg’s systematic account of evil is introduced as a meta-account of evil which has similarities to

4

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that of Augustine but which also contains some major differences. According to Pannenberg, God’s will for the creation is that it has independent existence in fellowship with God. This can only be achieved if the creation evolves and enters freely into this fellowship. It will be shown that Pannenberg, in common with some others, equates evil with the thermodynamic concept of entropy. Entropy is a key concept in understanding the biophysics of evolution. Based on this view, it will be argued that evil is a necessary part of creation. The ontological nullity of evil is developed in terms of Pannenberg’s ontology of the future, and there is a reversal of the order of natural and moral evil in Pannenberg’s thought compared with Augustine. Meta-explanations, such as that developed in Chapter 2, run the grave risk of seeming to be little more than stories, myths, with little command to assent. In the contemporary world, anthropology has become a significant philosophical arena and standard for judging truth claims. Chapter 3 examines the grounding of sin in human ontology offered by Pannenberg’s thought. The question of original sin is discussed. Several strands are woven together in this chapter. Human beings are understood as exocentric beings, who have a destiny to be in the image of God, but who are alienated presently from the world, themselves and ultimately from God. This, however, is described in terms of the ontology of human being rather than as an existential reality. This alienation is the ground of human sin. As with the previous chapter, the argument draws upon Augustinian notions of original sin and reverses the order of sin. It is alienation from the self that gives rise to alienation from God. Chapter 4 engages the understanding of divine love and power in Pannenberg’s theology, and relates these to the question of God’s permission of evil in the world God has created ex nihilo. The main dialogue partner here is process theology. A key issue is that of freedom and determinism. Key issues are the nature of divine power and love, and the question of human freedom. Pannenberg’s construal of freedom is in terms of human beings having not a freedom of choice as such, but rather a freedom to actualise or reject their destiny for communion with God. The discussion is related once again to Pannenberg’s ontology of the future. The chapter concludes with a consideration of divine responsibility for evil, arguing for human responsibility for human actions but nevertheless recognising that, in a world created ex nihilo, there must also be recognition of divine responsibility for evil. Responsibility is to be distinguished from culpability. The discussion leads into the next chapter on overcoming evil. In Chapter 5, Pannenberg’s doctrine of the cross and his discussion of eschatology are engaged from the perspective of overcoming evil. It is argued that the cross is God’s act of self-revelation, in which divine responsibility for evil is embraced and through which evil is overcome proleptically. The main dialogue partner here is Jürgen Moltmann and the question of divine suffering is engaged. It is argued that there is a significant difference between the two theologians over the nature of divine suffering. Whilst Moltmann predicts suffering of God in God’s essence, for Pannenberg, God suffers only in the incarnation, and suffering can

Introduction

5

have no eternal application or meaning in the divine essence. A second dialogue partner is Dostoyevsky. Pannenberg’s account of overcoming evil is firmly eschatological and this raises the question of the morality of the act of creation raised in The Brothers Karamazov. It is argued that the logic of Pannenberg’s theology is strongly universal in soteriological terms. This project grew out of an individual, pastoral experience, and was begun with the events of September 11, 2001 very much to the fore. Chapter 6 attempts to bring the various strands of the discussion together, and attempts to assess the value of such a discussion in the face of political rhetoric involving the language of good and evil, as well as the individual’s attempts at displacement of responsibility for evil or sin committed. Amongst other things, it is argued that one of the values of theological accounts of evil is that they offer the hope that evil can be overcome; a hope that philosophical theories of evil are unable to offer because they ground evil in human being.

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Chapter 1

Pannenberg, Evil and the Task of Theology For Pannenberg, systematic theology has a fundamentally apologetic or explanatory task. He defines succinctly what it means to be a Christian believer: ‘To confess to Jesus Christ that in him God has been active to restore and reconcile the human race and through the human race his entire creation’.1 Whilst it may be a little unfair to regard a sentence lifted from a short work, intended as a teaching aid, as programmatic for an entire life’s work, this quotation does shed some remarkable light on Pannenberg’s whole theological programme. In particular, we should note two things from it. First, for Pannenberg, Christian belief involves the recognition that there is something wrong with the world. If God has been active in restoring the world, then it must need restoring, that is, in some sense it must be broken. Pannenberg seems to be saying that there is something structurally wrong with the creation. The second point to note is that the world needs reconciling to God. The structural fault, whatever it is, brings about an alienation of the world from God. The Christian confession, as Pannenberg defines it, affirms that God has been active to heal this breach and to restore the creation’s fellowship with him in his Son Jesus Christ. Whether or not one should make this confession depends on the question of its truth. Ultimately, the only reason for committing oneself to the Christian confession is because one accepts it as true. Pannenberg devotes much energy and expertise to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian truth claims. In particular, he has been concerned to meet the challenge of Ludwig Feuerbach, that religion is merely a human projection. Most readings of Pannenberg in the secondary literature engage with this aspect of his thought. There is, however, another challenge to the reasonableness of the Christian faith in the form of the protest atheism of Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov. In a well-worn quotation, Ivan says to his younger brother Aloysha: I don’t want harmony. From love of humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am

1   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Introduction to Systematic Theology (Edinburgh 1991), p. 4. This and all subsequent quotations from this work © Wolfhart Pannenberg, 1991 and Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God

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bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It is not God that I don’t accept, Aloysha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.2

For Ivan, any moral person could not accept eternal happiness at the cost of even one instance of innocent suffering. It is quite simply impossible to love God. It is important to note that Ivan’s objection goes beyond the question of truth, for even if Ivan were to be proved wrong, that is, if it could be proved to him that God really does exist, he would still refuse to accept God and be reconciled to him. Ivan’s problem, like that of Irenaeus, is the problem of how to love God, to be reconciled with God in the face of the presence of evil in the world. In the past, Pannenberg has been criticised for not taking the argument from evil seriously enough.3 It is my contention that, though this may have been a serious failing of Pannenberg’s early work, this has been corrected in the mature theological reflections of the Systematic Theology, and a response to the argument from evil runs as an underlying theme throughout Pannenberg’s system. Whilst this chapter is intended as a review of the secondary literature on Pannenberg, it reviews that literature from this perspective, concluding with a delineation of the dimensions of Pannenberg’s answer to the question of how God responds to the presence of evil in his creation through the incarnation, life, death and Resurrection of the Son. In the course of the argument, it will become clear that, for Pannenberg, evil is not only a threat to human beings but is also a threat to the very deity of God. There is a sharp contrast in the theology of Pannenberg and that of his contemporary Jürgen Moltmann in the space devoted to the whole question of evil. It can be demonstrated easily that for Moltmann the problem of evil is one of the main driving forces of his theological development. Moltmann has described his own journey to faith in several places.4 Having lost interest in the sciences, he links his own experiences of suffering as a youth towards the end of the Second World War and the suffering inflicted by the Nazis in the Holocaust as the impetus for his search for a new certainty: My experiences of death at the end of the war, the depression into which the guilt of my people plunged me, and the inner perils of utter resignation behind barbed wire: these were the places where my theology was born. They were my first locus theologicus, and at the deepest level of my soul they have remained so.5

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (London 1976) p. 226.   Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 300. 4   Jürgen Moltmann, History and the Triune God, trans. J. Bowden (London 1991), 2 3

p. 166; idem., Experiences in Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London 2000), pp. 3–9; idem., ‘A Lived Theology’, in Shaping a Theological Mind, ed. Darren Marks (Aldershot 2002), pp. 87–95. 5   Moltmann, Experiences in Theology, p. 4.

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Doubtless there are other factors which drive the development of Moltmann’s theology, but this quotation taken from his own self-reflections indicates the absolutely fundamental place that questions of evil have for Moltmann. The confession that the experiences of death, depression, collective guilt and despair were the places where Moltmann first began to ask theological questions about the nature of God and the world may be no more than an historical fact. It was as a matter of history these experiences which turned Moltmann’s attention away from the natural sciences and to theology. However, the second sentence of the quotation seems to suggest something much deeper in addition to this. It suggests that the need to provide answers to or understanding of the presence of evil in the world is the underlying ground of Moltmann’s continuing theological development and exploration. Pannenberg, two years younger than Moltmann, makes no comparable statement, and for him the problem seems to be much less important, and is certainly not a driving force in the development of his theological programme. One could go further and note Pannenberg’s deep antipathy towards the topic of theodicy. If this term means the human justification of God in the face of evil, then Pannenberg rejects it completely: only God can give an answer to the problem of evil.6 Some justification therefore needs to be offered for the study of Pannenberg’s response to the problem of evil. The first justification lies in Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task. This justification is two-fold. First, there is the sheer scale and scope of Pannenberg’s theological project. Pannenberg is attempting nothing less than a re-conceptualisation of the whole of reality. Perhaps this is seen most clearly in Pannenberg’s willingness to engage in genuine dialogue with the natural sciences. Such is his confidence in the value of theological explanations of the world that Pannenberg seeks not simply to incorporate scientific insights into his theology, but is also willing to challenge the natural sciences with theological questions – questions which are intended not simply to challenge scientific claims to truth but which aim at a genuine mutual search for truth. Its sheer scope has caused one interpreter of Pannenberg’s theological project to describe it as ‘breath-taking’.7 The experience of evil is part of reality and, therefore, if nothing else, if that experience is not accounted for in a theological account of reality, it constitutes an omission detrimental to the claim to universality. A related point is that Pannenberg’s principle that God is to be found in the particulars of history must at least raise the question of evil, given that so much of history seems so contrary to the active presence of God. The second justification arises from a preliminary or preparatory study of Pannenberg’s theology. Though Pannenberg is suspicious of the subject of theodicy and has been criticised for his failure to acknowledge the issue of evil sufficiently, he does take the issue seriously, and deals with it throughout his theology and particularly in his Systematic Theology. However,   Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 304.   Philip Hefner, ‘Theological Reflection’, Una Sancta 25(3) (1997): 32–51, at p. 32.

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he offers no systematic treatment of theodicy, but deals with evil in the various contexts in which it arises in his theology. The issue of evil, then, might be a useful hermeneutical tool with which to probe the content of Pannenberg’s theology. This book seeks to move beyond the debate which has preoccupied much of the secondary literature on Pannenberg which has focused upon methodological issues or issues of ‘fundamental theology’. Many of the issues of fundamental theology have been discussed and laid to rest in the publication of the work of F. LeRon Shults, and this opens up the possibility of engaging more fully with the substance of Pannenberg’s theology.8 Shults reviews the secondary literature on Pannenberg from the perspective of fundamental theology. He discusses a number of attempts to isolate Pannenberg’s key concept or grundprinzip, the controlling methodological presupposition which shapes Pannenberg’s entire approach to the theological enterprise. Ultimately, Shults rejects the candidates put forward for the grundprinzip in favour of his own understanding of it as Pannenberg’s attempt to understand the whole of reality in its relation to God. Shults’s analysis of the secondary literature is penetrating, and his case for seeing the grundprinzip as understanding all things in their relation to God is a strong one. Nevertheless, it does not persuade finally, and it will be worthwhile to revisit Shults’s analysis and to evaluate his own contribution, in an attempt to develop an alternative understanding of Pannenberg. Pannenberg is a remarkably consistent theologian. This is not to say that there has been no development in Pannenberg’s thought during his theological career, but rather to recognise the fact that there has been no fundamental shift in his theological perspective since the publication of Redemptive Event and History in 1959. One of the earliest English language treatments of Pannenberg’s thought delivered the assessment that Pannenberg defies ready-made theological labels.9 In 1967, James M. Robinson was proclaiming confidently the launch of a new theological school.10 The authors of three English introductions to Pannenberg published in 1973 all agreed that, even if Pannenberg had not launched a new theological school, he had certainly introduced a new way of doing theology.11 Subsequent work on Pannenberg has, however, failed to reach a consensus on what is the key feature of this new theological school. In the literature, four principal candidates for what constitutes Pannenberg’s new approach to theology have emerged: history, reason, a cluster of terms centring on Pannenberg’s concept of prolepsis, and, finally, Pannenberg’s quest to understand all things in relation to God, sub ratione Dei. Reginald Nnamdi saw Pannenberg’s theology in the light   Shults, The Post-Foundational Task of Theology.   Carl E. Braaten, ‘The Current Controversy in Revelation: Pannenberg and His

8 9

Critics’, Journal of Religion 45 (1965): 225–37, at p. 234. 10   Robinson, ‘Revelation as Word and as History’, p. 12. 11   Allan D. Galloway, Wolfhart Pannenberg (London 1973); Don H. Olive, Wolfhart Pannenberg (Waco, TX 1973); Langdon Gilkey, ‘Pannenberg’s Basic Questions in Theology: A Review Article’, Perspective 14 (1973): 34–56.

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of hermeneutics, describing Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task as reflecting on the human condition in the light of revelation. Theology’s task is, then, to interpret human life in relation to God.12 Pannenberg’s Theological Method The secondary literature can be read as an attempt to discover the hermeneutical key to Pannenberg’s theology. The purpose of this section is to review this secondary literature and to propose an alternative way of conceiving Pannenberg’s understanding of the theological task. A chronological analysis of the secondary literature on Pannenberg reveals three distinct groupings. There was a flurry of early contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, responding to Pannenberg’s early work. This was followed by a period of relative quiet, until the publication of an American Festschrift in 1988 in honour of Pannenberg’s sixtieth birthday. A similar break in the German secondary literature was brought to an end with the publication of Sebastian Greiner’s assessment of Pannenberg’s work from a Catholic perspective, also in 1988. This second chronological grouping reflects on the way Pannenberg had developed his thinking prior to the publication of his Systematic Theology. Stanley Grenz’s 1990 book Reason for Hope is a concise but comprehensive introduction to Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, based on Volume 1 of the Systematic Theology, which was published in 1988 in German, and on notes from Pannenberg’s Munich lectures which became the subsequent volumes of the Systematic Theology.13 Grenz’s work constitutes a link to the third chronological grouping in the secondary literature: Cornelius Buller, F. LeRon Shults and Christiaan Mostert.14 This final group appeared after the completion of the Systematic Theology, and begin to offer more substantive assessments of Pannenberg’s method. Much of the secondary literature has been preoccupied with Pannenberg’s theological method. Four broad approaches can be identified. There are readings which take Pannenberg to make history as the primary focus for theological thinking. Others, who usually read him as a foundationalist, take him to be basing his thought on reason. A third group of interpreters identify Pannenberg’s emphasis on the future as the key interpretive concept in his thought. The final approach sees Pannenberg’s system as an attempt to comprehend all things in their relation to God, sub ratione Dei. The idea of seeing all things sub ratione Dei is a recent innovation in the secondary literature, belonging exclusively to the third chronological group, but interestingly, the other three candidates for Pannenberg’s   Reginald Nnamdi, Offenbarung und Geschichte: Zur hermeneutischen Bestimmung der Theologie Wolfhart Pannenbergs (Frankfurt am Main 1993), pp. 15–19. 13   Stanley Grenz, Reason for Hope (Oxford 1990). 14   Cornelius Buller, The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology (Lanham, MD 1996); Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (Edinburgh 2002); Shults, The Post-Foundational Task of Theology. 12

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organising principle are found in all three periods and were identified in the first doctoral thesis to be published on Pannenberg’s thought.15 Redemptive Event and History begins with the programmatic statement: History is the most comprehensive horizon of Christian theology. All theological questions and answers are meaningful only within the framework of the history which God has with humanity and through humanity with his whole creation – the history moving toward a future still hidden from the world but already revealed in Jesus Christ.16

This is a remarkable statement for any theologian to have written: it set the young Pannenberg against both the dominant schools of theological thought of the time, and, perhaps more remarkably, it was penned just 14 years after the end of the war in Europe had disclosed the event which has come to signify for many the end of the possibility of the belief that God was to be found in God’s history with humanity, and through humanity, the whole of creation. It is not surprising, then, that Pannenberg’s theological output, particularly his early work, generated a significant quantity of secondary literature that regarded Pannenberg’s understanding of history as the key concept of his theology, around which all else was organised. From the early period, Allan Galloway and Frank Tupper both accord primary significance to history in Pannenberg’s thought. According to Galloway, history for Pannenberg, is a ‘source of confidence rather than doubt and theology becomes a credible philosophy of history’.17 Similar assessments of the significance of history can be found in the German secondary literature of the period, as well as in the literature from the middle period. Indeed, theology as history has been the major preoccupation of Pannenberg’s German-speaking interpreters, constituting the major interpretive lens of several German authors.18 History is also assigned central significance in some of the English-language postSystematic Theology secondary literature. Cornelius Buller argued, ‘universal history is the key category by which to understand reality and this history is the process of realizing the eschatological Kingdom of God.’19 There is certainly   Wentzel J. van Huyssteen, Theologie van die Rede: Die funksie van die rasionele in die denke van Wolfhart Pannenberg (Kampen 1970). 16   Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology 1, p. 15. 17   Galloway, Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 11. 18   Gunther Klein Theologie des Wortes Gottes und die Hypothese der Universalgeschichte. Zur Auseinandersetzung mit W Pannenberg (Munich 1964); Ingace Berten, Geschichte, Offenbarung, Glaube: eine Einfuhrung in die Theologie Wolfhart Pannenberg (Munich 1970); Krzystof Gózdz, Jesus Christus als Sinn der Geschichte bei Wolfhart Pannenberg (Regensburg 1988); Kurt Koch, Der Gott der Geschichte: Theologie der Geschichte bei Wolfhart Pannenberg als Paradigma einer Philosophischen Theologie in okumenischer Perspektive (Mainz 1988), and Nnamdi, Offenbarung und Geschichte. 19   Buller, The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology, p. 21. 15

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considerable truth in the view of history as the out-working towards fulfilment of the Kingdom of God in Pannenberg’s thought. Nevertheless, with regard to the place of the concept of history in Pannenberg’s thought, F. LeRon Shults is surely right in his assessment: ‘While I agree that an emphasis on history must be incorporated in any valid interpretation of Pannenberg, I believe that there is something going on in his theology even deeper than his commitment to revelation as history.’20 Reason is sometimes read as Pannenberg’s central principle, particularly by English-speaking workers, who take Pannenberg to be grounding faith in reason. Don Olive’s monograph was published in 1973, along with those of Galloway and Tupper. Olive agrees that history is important for Pannenberg, but places a much stronger emphasis on the role of reason in Pannenberg’s thought than either of the other two. For Olive, Pannenberg ‘restores reason to a determinative place within the Christian faith’.21 This results in the very real gain, thinks Olive, of enabling theology to engage in dialogue with and inform every aspect of human life, but only at the cost of the certainty of faith, for Pannenberg’s stress on reason, believes Olive, means that faith can never be more than historically probable.22 Stanley Grenz holds that the public nature of theology means that, for Pannenberg, reason must hold a key place in theology and argues that the Systematic Theology is constructed around the twin themes of hope and reason.23 Grenz understands faith, for Pannenberg, as trust in the eschatological fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, and reason serves this hope by grounding it, or explicating it, so that hope does not become blind faith or trust. I think that this is a correct assessment of the place of reason in Pannenberg’s methodology. Reason is also seen as the key concept in Pannenberg’s theology by a number of contributors to a symposium on the first volume of the Systematic Theology, sponsored by the Canadian Theological Society.24 This symposium shows a preoccupation with Pannenberg’s epistemological foundations. Rory Hinton, for example, thinks that Pannenberg grounds his theology in reason and that the ‘overtly rational character’ of Pannenberg’s theology is in need of correction. Stanley Grenz also contributed to the symposium, and while he is a much more sympathetic critic than Hinton, Grenz too feels that Pannenberg does not show enough awareness of the situation of the theologian and is concerned about Pannenberg’s ‘thoroughgoing rationalism’.25

    22   23   24  

Shults, The Post-Foundational Task of Theology, p. 90. Olive, Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 98. Ibid., pp. 97–8. Grenz, Reason for Hope. Papers from the symposium were published in 1992 in the Calvin Theological Journal (vol. 27). 25   Stanley Grenz, ‘The Irrelevancy of Theology: Pannenberg and the Quest for Truth’, Calvin Theological Journal 27 (1992): 307–11, at p. 310. 20 21

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Other reviewers of the first volume of the Systematic Theology regard Pannenberg as hopelessly modernist with respect to reason. Reinhold Hütter sees him as firmly wedded to an Enlightenment view at the precise moment in history when this is crumbling.26 Meanwhile, Paul Stroble views Pannenberg as seeking a ‘context-neutral’ perspective.27 Gabriel Fackre and Faye Schott both think that Pannenberg’s claim for universal rationality is weakened by his failure to engage feminist and other liberation theologies.28 In a similar vein, David Holwerda (1983) finds Pannenberg to be too optimistic about the autonomous reason of the individual, suggesting that Pannenberg’s central thesis is that reason precedes faith and provides the foundation upon which faith rests.29 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza believes that ‘Pannenberg takes the approach of a more foundationalist scientific model of rationality’.30 If by this he meant that reason plays the same role in Pannenberg’s theology as it does in science, he would not have been far from the truth. For Pannenberg, reason does function in theology in a similar way to the way it functions in science, but neither theology nor science is grounded in reason. The grounding of both academic enterprises is found in the conviction that the world makes sense. Reason is a tool that is used to arrive at the best possible explanation of the world. As such, though reason is an important concept for Pannenberg, it is not a foundation upon which his theological edifice is erected. The third candidate for Pannenberg’s key concept is termed variously by different writers as ‘anticipation’, ‘prolepsis’, or ‘eschatological epistemology’. The cluster is an attempt to come to terms with Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future, which he first began to develop through his reflections on the logic of the Resurrection. In the year following the German publication of his Christology, Pannenberg contributed to a Festschrift for Ernst Bloch, in which his notion of the futurity of God is generalised for the first time.31 This way of reading Pannenberg has representatives on both sides of the Atlantic. As noted above, history is usually seen as the key concept by Pannenberg’s German interpreters. However, both Sebastian Greiner and Eberhard Jüngel

  Reinhold Hütter, Review of Systematic Theology I by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Modern Theology 9 (January 1993): 90–93. 27   Paul Stroble, Review of Systematic Theology I by W. Pannenberg, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61 (Summer 1993): 375–7. 28   Gabriel Fackre, Review of Systematic Theology I by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Interpretation 47 (July 1993): 304–6, and Faye Schott, ‘Comparing Eberhard Jungel and Wolfhart Pannenberg on Theological Method and Pluralism’, Dialog (1992): 129–35. 29   David Holwerda, ‘Faith, Reason and the Resurrection in the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg’, in Faith and Rationality, eds Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN 1993), p. 304. 30   Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, ‘Review Essay: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, Volume 1’, Pro Ecclesia 2 (1993): 231–9. 31   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, pp. 234–49. 26

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regard prolepsis as the key concept.32 In the United States, it is the view of Phillip Clayton, who sees anticipation as the heart of Pannenberg’s theological method seeing some sort of ‘eschatological ontology’ as basic to Pannenberg’s entire theology.33 Clayton is highly critical of Pannenberg’s insistence that the future has ontological as well as epistemological significance. David Polk also contributed to the American Festschrift, and later published his doctoral dissertation on Pannenberg. He too is critical of Pannenberg’s concept of the ontological priority of the future. As a process theologian, Polk regards this as merely determinism by the future.34 Though Pannenberg refutes the charge, it is not uncommon. As early as 1973, Langdon Gilkey thought Pannenberg guilty of adopting ‘a kind of Calvinism in reverse gear’.35 Chapter 5 discusses, amongst other things, the power of God in detail and refutes the claims of Gilkey and others. Christiaan Mostert’s book God and the Future may mark a watershed in the secondary literature on Pannenberg’s work. This is the first book-length treatment of a single doctrine in Pannenberg’s theology. For Mostert, too, the notion of prolepsis is pivotal. Two aspects of Pannenberg’s theology strike Mostert: ‘the fact that the whole range of Christian doctrine must be considered as an expanded doctrine of God and that eschatology must also have a decisive influence on the doctrine of God in the narrower sense’.36 Pannenberg’s concepts of anticipation and the ontological priority of the future must indeed rate highly in the table of his contributions to theological debate; they are certainly amongst the most perplexing of his contributions and will be discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the ontology of evil, and in Chapter 4 in relation to the power and love of God. For now, we need only note that, like history and reason, these concepts are not organising principles but serve some other ultimate concept of theology. Mostert notes that the form of his own book owes much to the work of F. LeRon Shults, who engages Pannenberg in discussion with a number of epistemological issues and overturns much of the popular conception of Pannenberg as a modernist theologian in an increasingly postmodern world. In the course of his discussion, Shults proposes the most convincing case for Pannenberg’s hermeneutical key yet published. For Shults, the key is Pannenberg’s attempt to understand all things in relation to God.   Sebastian Greiner, Die Theologie Wolfhart Pannenbergs (Wurzburg 1988); Eberhard Jüngel, Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes’ Unterwegs zur Sache (München 1972). 33   Philip Clayton, ‘The God of History and the Presence of the Future’, Journal of Religion 65 (1)(1985): 98–108, at p. 103; idem., ‘Anticipation and Theological Method’, in eds Carl Braaten and idem., The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Twelve American Critiques, with an Autobiographical Essay and Response (Minneapolis, MI 1988), p. 128. 34   David P. Polk, ‘The All-Determining God and the Peril of Determinism’, in eds Braaten and Clayton, Twelve American Critiques, pp. 167ff. 35   Langdon Gilkey, ‘Pannenberg’s Basic Questions in Theology: A Review Article’, Perspective 14 (1973): 34–56, at 53ff. 36   Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (Edinburgh 2002), p. xi. 32

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Shults’s 1999 book, in opposition to much discussion in the secondary literature, seeks to show that Pannenberg is not wedded to an Enlightenment model of knowledge and understanding, but that his work can legitimately be read as seeking to find a middle way between foundationalism and forms of nonfoundationalism that surrender claims to truth. In the foreword to Shults’s book, Pannenberg acknowledges that this is indeed his intention.37 Shults marshals an impressive array of textual evidence for the importance of the theme of sub ratione Dei from Pannenberg’s published work throughout his career. It first emerges explicitly in 1967 in Pannenberg’s response to the discussion in Robinson and Cobb’s collection of essays Theology as History, where Pannenberg argues that it is the task of theology to speak of God in critical thought, but ‘the divinity of God can only be conceived in relation to the whole of reality.’38 Shults, however, believes that he has detected the embryonic form as early as 1958.39 Pannenberg himself credits Thomas Aquinas as the originator of the concept, but notes that Thomas was unable to make the relation genuine with respect to God.40 This is because of Thomas’s appropriation of Aristotelian philosophy which views relation as an accident and not as an essential element of the category of substance.41 Centuries of philosophical debate and development, however, have led to a radically different understanding. Thus, while Kant held that substance was subordinate to relation, Hegel, in the nineteenth century, took things further still, so that essence itself is a relational concept. Shults terms this development ‘the relational turn’, and points out that this has enabled Pannenberg to develop a concept of God in which God is distinct from, but intrinsically related to, the world.42 For Shults, it seems, it is only God as God is related to all things that can be spoken of theologically in Pannenberg’s view. There is certainly textual support for this reading of Pannenberg. Shults quotes a particularly apposite passage from the preface of Volume 1 of Basic Questions in Theology: … the question of the theology of history, in the last analysis, has to do with the one theme of all theology which is, quite properly, built into its name. To say that the revelation of God is not a supernatural event which breaks into history perpendicularly from above but rather that it is the theme of history itself, the power that moves in its deepest dimension, is to say something about God and

  Shults, The Post-foundational Task of Theology, p. ix.   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Response to the Discussion’, in eds James M. Robinson and

37 38

John B. Cobb, Theology as History (New York 1967), p. 241. 39   Shults, The Post-foundational Task of Theology, p. 93. 40   Pannenberg, Introduction to Systematic Theology, p. 13. 41   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 362. 42   Shults, The Post-foundational Task of Theology, p. 97.

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his relation to the world … The studies of truth, reason, and faith [in BQT II] trace the roots of these themes to a relation to the eschatological future.43

The passage is quoted exactly as it appears in Shults, with his emphases preserved, which link together the highlighted clauses, thus the one theme of all theology is God and his relation to the world. It is by no means clear, however, that this is Pannenberg’s intention. The one theme of theology, built into its name is God: ‘God and nothing else’.44 Elsewhere, as Shults notes, Pannenberg does say that God can only be spoken of in relation to the whole of reality.45 Pannenberg’s point in this essay, Kerygma and History, is that the reality of God is never demonstrated conclusively or definitively revealed in any one historical event or state of affairs, but only in the whole of temporal reality. This is a necessary condition, because God is the author of all things and all events, and only as such is God worthy of the name God. Necessarily, this means that the reality of God is eschatologically orientated. It encompasses that part of reality, which from the perspective of the present, has not yet come into being. The real point here is that God is the only proper subject for theological reflection, but part of the concept of God is that all other existent realities and states of affairs are explained better in relation to God than they are independently of God. As Shults recognises, the concept of seeing all things sub ratione Dei is developed most clearly in Theology and the Philosophy of Science.46 To understand its role in this work and in Pannenberg’s entire theological corpus, we need to understand the purpose that lies behind Pannenberg’s writing the book. The programmatic purpose of Theology and the Philosophy of Science is given clearly at the beginning of the book: The institutional base of theology in the university is extremely precarious when it rests on no more than existing practice. This institutional position is derived ultimately from the medieval view of the university and the system of the sciences. Even then the existence of theology in the university depended on the fact that it could be shown to have a place in the totality of the sciences (Wissenschaften).47

  Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology 1, p. xv, quoted in Shults, The Postfoundational Task of Theology, p. 93. 44   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 59. 45   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 1, p. 94, n. 20; Shults, The Post-foundational Task, p. 93, n. 31. 46   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. F. McDonagh (Philadelphia, PA 1976), in German Wissenschaftstheorie und Theologie (Frankfurt am Main 1973). 47   Ibid., p. 4. 43

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The medieval view of science and theology no longer holds sway, and the presence of theology in the university has become, in Pannenberg’s words, ‘merely a matter of fact’, something that simply is the case and arguably something of an anomaly. The whole book is concerned with just one fundamental question: how can theology justify its claim to scientific status and hence its place in the university as opposed to the theological training college? Before discussing Pannenberg’s answer to this and its implications for Shults’s reading of Pannenberg, we need to be clear at the outset about the meaning of the term Wissenschaft in German. Quite correctly, the word is translated invariably ‘science’ in English. The two words, however, carry slightly different cultural meanings. In contemporary English, the word ‘science’ conveys the meaning of natural science: a particular, usually experimental, method of studying the natural world. It denotes the disciplines covered by the titles ‘physics’, ‘chemistry’ and ‘biology’ and their related disciplines, such as medicine, and engineering. Wissenschaft has a much broader meaning; the equivalent English is ‘critical inquiry’. Thus Phillip Clayton translates Pannenberg’s Wissenschaft in Metaphysics and the Idea of God as ‘inquiry’.48 The key question, then, is in what sense theology is a form of critical inquiry. Pannenberg develops his understanding in dialogue with Heinrich Scholz, who developed three minimal criteria for determining the scientific status of an academic discipline. The first of the minimal criteria is the postulate of propositions. According to this, any science contains, in addition to questions and definitions, only propositions: that is, statements which are making a truth claim. The proposition is the equivalent of the assertion in philosophy. Pannenberg points out that this postulate also includes the principle of non-contradiction. Allowing contradiction would mean that all propositions are equally allowable, and truth seeking becomes meaningless, since the distinction between truth and untruth disappears. Theological statements, then, have the character of hypotheses, putative explanations of reality. Scholz’s second postulate is that of coherence which states that all propositions must be related to a single field of study. It is in connection with this postulate that the concept of understanding all things sub ratione Dei is important, for it enables theology to address legitimately a variety of disparate subjects, whilst retaining its unity. If theology can only be about one thing – God – then all else can be a topic of theological investigation only as it relates to God. This means, to quote Shults’s report of his conversation with Pannenberg that sub ratione Dei ‘is more fundamental than the other key concepts of reason, history and prolepsis’, but that still does not make it the grundprinzip that Shults would like it to be. This must lie still deeper in Pannenberg’s theology.49 The third minimal criterion is the postulate of control. This holds that the truth claims made by propositions must be subject to testing. This is the most problematic postulate in terms of theology’s claim to be a form of critical inquiry.   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God (Edinburgh 1990), p. 12.   Shults, The Post-foundational Task, p. 93, n. 29.

48 49

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Scholz held that general verification of a theological proposition is impossible, and concerned himself instead with the intelligibility of theological propositions, with a declaration of the critical principle used.50 For example, one can test the claim of a particular theology to be an Anglican theology by reference to a definition, if one were available, or at least an understanding of the term ‘Anglican’. The particular theology would either match the definition, and hence qualify as an Anglican theology, or it would not match the understanding, and not be considered Anglican. This third postulate is crucial, for if theology cannot be shown to fulfil it, theology cannot claim to be a form of critical inquiry, but merely ‘personal confession of faith in the most decided sense of the word exempt from all earthly questioning’.51 I am suggesting that the concept of sub ratione Dei, though more fundamental in Pannenberg’s theology than the other three key concepts of history, reason and prolepsis, is still not the grundprinzip for which much of the secondary literature is searching. It is, rather, a methodological assumption, which is made on the basis of the nature of God who, as the all-determining reality, is related to the whole of reality in a unique way as Lord. It accounts for and allows the legitimate consideration of topics other than God from a theological perspective: Our assumption that the unity of theology’s field of study follows from the fact that it is concerned with all reality sub ratione Dei now turns out to be itself dependent on the possibility of distinguishing God as the object of theology from religious and theological statements about him. The only way in which this possibility can be established is if the reality of God (if it is to be asserted) is shown to be implicit, as the all-determining reality, in all finite reality and in particular in the contexts for meaning of all events and states of affairs which are made explicit in the anticipatory experiences of the totality of reality.52

Four things follow from this quotation. First, as suggested above, sub ratione Dei is an assumption permitting the theological consideration of subjects other than God. Secondly, this assumption is methodologically necessary to account for theology’s broad field of interest, whilst maintaining the unity of its field of interest. This is essential if theology is to be considered a form of critical inquiry. Third, the assumption is also necessitated theologically on the basis that God, in order to be to be God, must be the one who determines all other reality. I will discuss the meaning of Pannenberg’s conception of God as all-determining reality in Chapter 4. Fourth, and crucially, more fundamental than the sub ratione Dei motif is the hypothesis that the world makes better sense if it is explained on the basis of its being the creation of God than it does on the basis of a purely   Heinrich Scholz, Zwischen den Zeiten (Tubingen 1946), p. 48; Pannenberg, TPS,

50

p. 271.

  Scholz, Zwischen, p. 48; Pannenberg, TPS, p. 271.   Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 329–30.

51 52

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materialistic interpretation. This drives right to the heart of Pannenberg’s theology. All of the other themes in Pannenberg’s theology are subordinated to this one hypothesis, and everything is designed to support its claim to truth. This points to a different way of understanding Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task: that of seeing it as a research programme. The aim of this programme is to explain reality, and, in so doing, it competes with rival research programmes and competing truth claims. More specifically, Pannenberg’s theological method involves the assumption of a theological dimension concealed in the depths of all other descriptions of reality. The point is made specifically in response to the anthropological disciplines: The aim is to lay claim to the human phenomena described in the anthropological disciplines. To this end the secular description is accepted as simply a provisional version of objective reality, a version that needs to be expanded and deepened by showing that the anthropological datum itself contains a further theologically relevant dimension.53

This claim that there is a theological dimension, hidden or implicit, in all descriptions of reality, is a significant breakthrough in Pannenberg’s thinking, for it provides a ground for intersubjectivity and a means of opening up genuine dialogue between theology and other disciplines. More fundamentally still, it provides a means of overcoming a weakness in Lyotard’s account of knowledge: that of the incommensurability of narrative-based language games and the unavailability of universally applicable criteria for judging between competing narrative accounts of reality. This gives rise to one of the real problems of postmodernity which Lyotard describes as ‘the problem of legitimation’.54 Rejecting the possibility of universally valid, external, criteria for truth, which it seems we must, seems to condemn us to the problem of incommensurability and the inability to judge between competing narrative truth claims. Pannenberg’s suggestion, however, is that because there is a theological dimension to all disciplines, criteria can be evolved which are internal to the discipline and therefore do not breach Lyotard’s strictures against meta-narratives. For Pannenberg, truth is not static but dynamic. This conception is, he argues, congruent with the Hebraic biblical concept of truth, emeth.55 Emeth is more akin to the idea of faithfulness or reliability than the Greek notion of aletheia, which is a constant lying behind the flux of events in the world. The concept of truth as emeth means that what is true is that which proves itself again and again in the process   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia, PA 1985), pp. 19–20. This and all subsequent quotations from this work © Wolfhart Pannenberg, 1985 and Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 54   Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Manchester 1986), p. 8. 55   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, pp. 1–27. 53

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of history. It is impossible on the basis of our present knowledge of truth to dismiss earlier conceptions of reality as simply untrue. Similarly, given what Pannenberg calls the ‘radical historicness of human thought’, one cannot dismiss concepts of reality and hence of truth arising from different socio-historical contexts.56 To do so is to raise one’s own concept of reality from the status of provisional understanding to being universal and fixed. Every absolutisation of contemporary truth would at once misunderstand the historical multiplicity of pictures of the truth. Truth is itself an historical process, and historical change must be thought of as the essence of truth if its unity is to be maintained.57 Nevertheless, reference to the unity of everything that is real is essential to truth. Hence, Hegel thought that the truth of the whole would be visible at the end of history. Pannenberg agrees with Hegel, but sees in Hegel the fundamental flaw that he saw his own position as the end of history. Hegel, says Pannenberg, no longer had an open future before him, he had no eschatology, and it was this that led to the collapse of his thought. In Hegel’s system, future truth has been excluded, and this means that not all truth has been incorporated into his dialectical system, and so the unity of truth remains uncomprehended. Pannenberg’s solution, once again lies, in his understanding of the fate of Jesus as an anticipation of the still, for us, open future. The Resurrection of Jesus is the dawning of the end of history. By this event, Jesus is confirmed in his claim that the final destiny of human beings is determined by their stand in relation to his message. However, the Resurrection has happened only to Jesus. For everyone else, it is still a future and unknowable event: the Resurrection has been achieved anticipatively only in Jesus. It is precisely in this, however, that the possibility for everyone else to share in this future is grounded. Thus, the proleptic character of the destiny of Jesus is for us the basis of openness to the future. This understanding of the destiny of Jesus was, Pannenberg argues, the overwhelming understanding of primitive Christianity and supremely of Paul. Whether we can make it our own understanding rests on two presuppositions. First, there is the question of whether the apocalyptic hope of Resurrection still contains truth for us, that is, whether it can still be reproduced within our understanding of human being in the world. Pannenberg’s assessment of this is that it can, because it belongs to human beings to question beyond death, and because it is only in terms of bodily life that it is possible to understand such questioning, even if that bodily existence is utterly different from that which is experienced before death.58 Secondly, the Resurrection of Jesus must be understood as an historical event which happened at a specific time as a reality and is not a mere hallucination, even though it can be represented only by means of images.59 The Resurrection of Jesus must be viewed as a reality in the sense that the disciples were overwhelmed by a     58   59   56 57

Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., pp. 220–21. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 26.

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reality which confronted them and for which the only explanation is symbolic talk about a Resurrection from the dead. If we accept the validity of these two presuppositions, then the proleptic revelation of God in Jesus offers the solution to Hegel’s problem of the exclusion of the future from his system. The proleptic character of the revelation of Jesus protects the openness of the future and the contingence of events, and holds fast to the ultimacy of what appeared in Jesus, which makes possible the unity of truth. Proof of this rests solely in the demonstration of the truth of the Christian message. There can be no unity of truth, and hence no truth, without presupposing the reality of God. In this regard, there is no actual knowledge of God. There is only an open question. Every representation of God must be tested as to whether it permits understanding reality as a whole and thereby satisfies the unity of truth.60 The decision over Pannenberg’s twin propositions is a matter of faith. Faith, for Pannenberg, means primarily trust and, in the context of understanding theology as true, this trust means finding that the theological explanation is reliable in terms of its explanatory power. Faith, in other words, for Pannenberg is based logically on knowledge. It is not a blind or mysterious decision on the basis of which knowledge of God is given. It is, rather, a rational decision made on grounds that are open to all to examine. Revelation, thus, first reaches its goal where it effects faith and so becomes manifest in someone, though it reaches its true goal only with the glorification of believers in the future of Jesus Christ.61 Faith is trust for the future. Faith, like the Resurrection of Christ, has a proleptic structure, and it is for this reason that only in faith can the Resurrection be received in a way appropriate to its character. Knowledge of God takes place in trust, in anticipation of the ultimate proof of its truth through the onset of the end of the world itself.62 In the absence of proof, then, the question that arises is how we can be sure that this knowledge is just that: the self-disclosure of God and not, as Feuerbach claimed, a human projection. Pannenberg’s answer is that, though there is no proof, it can be shown that only the theological argument can guarantee the unity of truth. There are sound reasons, therefore, for accepting it as true and hence accepting the existence of God as true. God is the guarantor of the unity of truth. Without God, there is no possibility of truth: there is only relativism and incommensurability. The final criterion of truth is coherence. Whatever is true must be consistent finally with all other truth. Truth is one all-embracing reality, closely related to the concept of the one God.63 Theology is then an effort in constructive thought aimed at showing how God can be understood as the creator of all reality. The theological task, thus, necessarily must take account of the insight gained from other disciplines into questions of nature, human life and history. For Pannenberg, it is only by such an integration of secular insight into theological constructions that the truth claims     62   63   60 61

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., pp. 28–45, esp. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Pannenberg, Introduction to Systemic Theology, p. 6.

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of the traditional doctrines can be demonstrated.64 This incorporation is to be achieved not by the appropriation of isolated insights from particular disciplines, but by a careful, systematic, critical reflection upon the methodologies of secular disciplines. Theology can, thus, engage in genuine dialogue with other disciplines and not merely be forced to accept their findings as facts. Theological criticism of secular disciplines is valid, but it is accountable within the standards normative within those secular disciplines. Pannenberg’s epistemology is a development of the hermeneutical theory of Gadamer. Like Gadamer, Pannenberg views knowledge as understanding. Pannenberg’s incorporation of the future into hermeneutical theory is a major contribution to theological epistemology. Indeed, according to Thiselton, this is one of Pannenberg’s most significant achievements.65 The central concept in Pannenberg’s hermeneutical epistemology is that of anticipation. Molnar takes issue with this, arguing that Pannenberg’s use of this concept results in subjectivism. For Molnar, Pannenberg’s assertion that speaking of God and speaking about the whole of reality are mutually related, and the consequence that God’s action (and also revelation) is in history, results in the grounding of theology in philosophy, because history, in a Pannenbergian perspective, is a result of human experience and reflection. The substance of Molnar’s argument lies in what he sees as Pannenberg’s use of Augustine’s argument that the claim that God is truth is founded on the observation of the unity and relatedness of all things. Molnar thinks that Pannenberg has substituted the observation of unity for the unity itself. He writes: Here a subtle shift in logic has taken place. Instead of saying that the thought that God is truth is and remains grounded in God alone, Pannenberg argues that this truth is grounded in the perception of coherence and the unity of all that is true. Theology shifts away from God (and the need for faith) to our perceptions and then discovers God as the locus of this presupposed unity.66

Stewart agrees, saying that Molnar has identified here a set of relationships that lie behind all of Pannenberg’s arguments, namely the priority he gives to the perception of unity in history.67 She understands Pannenberg to be making two assumptions: first, that there is a fundamental unity to truth, and secondly, that this unity must be demonstrable. The concern here seems to be that, because Pannenberg makes coherence a prior assumption, different understandings of truth might become distorted in a Procrustean attempt to fulfil the criterion of unity. This misses the whole point of the eschatological dimension in Pannenberg’s thinking, which is that truth and knowledge that is not partial and incomplete is   Ibid., pp. 18–19.   Anthony Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Glasgow 1992), p. 338. 66   P. Molnar, ‘Some Problems with Pannenberg’s solution to Barth’s “Faith 64 65

Subjectivism”’, Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1995): 315–39, at 322. 67   J.A. Stewart, Reconstructing Science and Theology in Postmodernity: Pannenberg, ethics and the human sciences (Aldershot 2000), pp. 144–5.

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possible only from the perspective of the eschaton. Knowledge is possible now in anticipation of that end through an appropriation of the Resurrection of Jesus through faith. Such knowledge is, however, always broken and determined by its context, even if it is not relativistic. Unity is something towards which theology is working. It is something that is always future. Pannenberg sees the danger of superficial treatments of other disciplines, or of premature incorporation of insights into a theological scheme, as an ever-present danger that must be guarded against by making theology publicly accountable. The excitement of systematically exploring the truth must not be mistaken for having that truth itself at our disposal.68 It belongs to each generation to think afresh the tradition, and to formulate its own answers to the theological questions that are posed in its time and context. In so doing, each generation makes its own contribution towards the unity of truth. It may be the case that Pannenberg has made mistakes in his understanding of secular disciplines, particularly that of biology, as Stewart claims, but these can be assessed by the internal standards of the discipline concerned.69 This process is built into Pannenberg’s epistemology. The errors to which Stewart refers are errors of interpretation, of application, not errors resulting from a fundamental flaw in the epistemological theory itself. Likewise to be rejected is Moltmann’s claim, which Tupper numbers among his list of illegitimate criticisms of Pannenberg, that Pannenberg intends to replace a Greek cosmic theology with a theology of history which argues back from the unity of ‘reality as history’ to the one God of history. Pannenberg rejects such a procedure of inference as well as the analogy between God and the world that it presupposes.70 Both Moltmann and Pannenberg stress the importance of eschatology and promise and the possibility of creative novelty in history. But, whereas Moltmann draws from this praxis of liberation, Pannenberg is concerned primarily with epistemological questions.71 More problematical is the model of reality that Pannenberg’s epistemology seems to suggest. His stress on the ontological priority of the future could be taken to suggest that the history of ideas records a simple progress in the development of human understanding. While many philosophers of science have seen this as a reasonable description of science, in more recent times the work of T.S. Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend has challenged this image of rational progress.72 In theology, the notion of progress has a dubious history. The idea of the development of doctrine was developed by Newman, partly to justify his stance in a confessional dispute,

  Pannenberg, Introduction to Systematic Theology, p. 19.   Stewart, Reconstructing Science and Theology, p. 145 and Chapter 3. 70   Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden 68

69

(London 1965), p. 77; Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 259. 71   Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics, p. 336. 72   T.S. Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edn) (Chicago, IL and London 1996); P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London 1975).

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though Barth traces the idea of progress in theology to Anselm.73 To use the idea of development is to run the risk of imposing the needs of the present on one’s conception of the theological task. It is, in other words, to deny the priority of the future in the name of that priority in order to serve the needs of the present. Yet it seems impossible to conceive theology without some idea of progress or development. The potential problem with Pannenberg’s epistemology is that it suggests a too simplistic notion of development or progress. Tupper points out that this is a result of Pannenberg’s tendency to interpret history from the standpoint of God.74 This results in two related tendencies. The first of these is that Pannenberg plays down the role of human creativity in the making of history, and the second, related tendency is that, particularly in the early theology, he overlooks the brokenness of knowledge and the destruction and brokenness to which history bears witness. As Tupper has said, Pannenberg’s theology all too frequently reflects an unqualified optimism that lends credence to the charges of Christianised idealism or historical monism.75 The roots of a solution to this problem actually lie within Pannenberg’s theology itself with the concept of prolepsis, which implies a brokenness and incompleteness of knowledge. A related problem is the existence of evil and suffering in the world. The theme of theodicy was, frankly, peripheral in Pannenberg’s early theology. While his arguments against Feuerbach’s projection metaphysics of atheism are forceful and penetrating, the moral argument against the existence of God is just as crucial as the atheism of freedom. The problem of evil also reinforces the idea that God is an illusion, a mere human projection. The question is, does Pannenberg’s emphasis on the unity of all reality in God allow him to take the destructiveness and opposition of evil with sufficient seriousness? Seeing the problem of evil as one of human sinfulness, Pannenberg contends that it does.76 Here, the issue will turn on whether Pannenberg can connect his concept of human sinfulness with his concept of the unity of all reality in God. The problem can be posed in another way, however. Why does the God who is future delay in the consummation of his Kingdom? Why does God delay in gaining the victory over evil that is the heart of the eschatological hope? Christian theology cannot, of course, offer a conclusive answer to such a question, but it must take account of it. In his early theology, Pannenberg took too little account of it. In the Systematic Theology, there are signs that he has attempted to deal with this issue more thoroughly. To date, there has been no sustained attempt to evaluate Pannenberg’s theology from this perspective. The issue that is raised is not so much concerned with problems in Pannenberg’s epistemology directly, but rather with the kind   Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of his Theological Scheme (London 1960), p. 32. 74   Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 301. 75   Ibid., p. 301. 76   Ibid., p. 304; Walter Pannenberg, What Is Man?, trans. Duane Priebe (Philadelphia, PA 1970), pp. 54–67; idem., Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia, PA 1985), pp. 80–153, and idem., Systematic Theology 2, pp. 231–75. 73

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of theological solutions to which the epistemology gives rise. However, if the epistemology cannot give rise to a theology that can explain reality adequately, it must be rejected as unsound, on Pannenberg’s terms. Where Pannenberg’s epistemology is directly vulnerable, however, is in the theory of truth, which underpins it. Pannenberg explicitly uses a coherence theory of truth. Truth claims are to be decided (rationally) on the basis that they must cohere with everything else that is reckoned as true. The problem here is not, as Molnar claimed, that Pannenberg thus grounds knowledge of God in a philosophical concept of truth.77 Pannenberg’s conviction of the unity of truth arises from theological assumptions. He shows that the unity of truth can only be posited on the basis that God, who is both Creator and Lord, exists. The issue is whether coherence can provide an adequate criterion of truth. There are different kinds of coherence theories of truth.78 There is what we might term a metaphysical theory: that is, a theory of truth that sees coherence as a constitutive element of the truth. The metaphysical theory of truth seeks to demonstrate that it belongs to the essence of truth that it coheres with all other truth. There is also what might be termed the justification theory of coherence. Proponents of coherence justification theories are not concerned with what truth is: they are concerned with the basis on which we are justified in holding a particular belief or set of beliefs to be true. The original version of the coherence theory of truth was intended as a theory of justification.79 Its aim was to differentiate between the concept of truth, understood as correspondence to an independently existing state of affairs, and the criteria of truth, that is, what counts as justification for the acceptance of a particular truth claim. Agreement with everything else that is reckoned as true becomes the criterion of the truth of truth claims, in the sense of correspondence with their object. The problem here is that it is not obvious immediately that this necessarily need be the case. If we believe that there is a world independent of our thoughts, then no proposition which purports to describe that world can be considered true if it is inconsistent with that world, no matter how well it coheres with other propositions. Moreover, if it does express that world accurately, then it cannot be false, no matter how much it fails to cohere with other beliefs that are reckoned to be true. On a realist ontology, which Pannenberg certainly holds, it is hard to deny that coherence is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for truth. Our judgement that a cat is in the garden is true if it is true, by the cat’s being in the garden. The issue of how other people would judge does not enter into the issue. Neither is the question of whether the belief that it is would enter into any

  Mostert, God and the Future, p. 316.   R.L. Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, MA and

77 78

London 1995). 79   N. Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford 1973).

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proposed system of belief. We do not look either sideways at other people or to systems of belief. We look at the cat and the garden.80 Blanshard sought to overcome this by making coherence not merely a criterion of truth but also a constitutive element of the truth itself. The unbroken coherence of all that is true is part of the concept, the essence of truth.81 Blanshard’s theory is based on an idealist, or possibly ‘quasi-realist’, ontology. He believed that if reality is conceived of as something completely external to the human mind, no theory of justification could work. There would be no way of having knowledge except by chance: we would be forced into scepticism. The problem with Blanshard’s theory is that criteria of truth become circular: whatever is true is coherent and whatever is coherent is true. Coherence or consistency can only be described in terms of truth, but truth can only be described in terms of consistency or coherence. A second objection follows closely from this. It seems, at least theoretically, possible that there could be two complete pictures of the world, each of which is coherent, but which are inconsistent with each other. If coherence is the criterion of truth, there is no way to decide rationally between the two world pictures. Pannenberg seeks to overcome this problem by giving truth as coherence a realist ontological grounding, by relating truth to the being of the one God. God is one, all truth is God’s truth, and thus all truth is one.82 This gives rise to another problem of circularity. Pannenberg holds that truth is coherent because it must ultimately be a unity. However, it turns out that in Pannenberg’s view, the only way to ground this belief is in the existence of the creator God. Now the existence of God guarantees the unity of truth, but, conversely, the unity of truth is evidence for the existence of God. Thus it is far from clear that Pannenberg has indeed overcome the problem of faith subjectivism. The only thing that can break the circularity is the final unity of all things in the eschaton. In the meantime, apprehension of meaning is available to us through a fore-conception (Vorgriff) of the final future, in which the true meaning of every individual event first becomes expressible in a valid way.83 Heidegger’s existential philosophy, of course, maintains that the endpoint from which significance can be viewed was death. Pannenberg, however, points out that even in death the individual human life remains a fragment, and so the fore-conception of the final future must point beyond the death of the individual to something that embraces the totality of the human race and indeed all reality.84 Reason, like Revelation, thus offers a knowledge that is anticipatory and subject to constant re-evaluation and revision against the eschatological horizon. All of this places theology in a unique position, because of its subject matter, amongst the disciplines. This is not meant to be a return to the mediaeval notion     82   83   84   80

81

S. Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford 1984), pp. 247–8. B. Blanshard, The Nature of Thought, Vol. 2 (New York 1941). Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, pp. 52–3. Pannenberg, Basic Questions 1, p. 62. Ibid.

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of theology as the senior subject, the ‘queen of the sciences’: the relationship between theology and other disciplines is envisaged as being one of equals, with each respecting the integrity of the other, and neither claiming to be able to lay full claim to the truth, and both accepting the provisionality of their accounts. The value of Pannenberg’s conceptualisation of the theological task lies in the fact that the theological dimension of accounts of reality is internal to the account, and thus provides a link between otherwise incommensurable narratives, to use Lyotard’s terminology. Theology is a ‘bridging discipline’; linking separate narratives and deepening our understanding of reality. Pannenberg’s Theology as a Research Programme The concept of a research programme was first developed by Imre Lakatos in his work in the philosophy of science published in 1978. Lakatos’ work is by no means uncontested amongst philosophers of science, but his main objection to Popper’s conception of the scientific enterprise as a bilateral contest between theory and the world is straightforward and generally uncontroversial. He writes: (1) a test is – or must be made – a two-cornered fight between theory and experiment so that in the final confrontation only these two face each other; and (2) the only interesting outcome of such a confrontation is (conclusive) falsification: ‘the only genuine discoveries are refutations of scientific hypotheses.’ However, history of science suggests that (1’) tests are – at least – three-cornered fights between rival theories and experiments and (2’) some of the most interesting experiments result, prima facie, in confirmation rather than falsification.85

Lakatos rightly points out that the history of science reveals that theories are not jettisoned simply because they make predictions which subsequently cannot be demonstrated. To do this would, in fact, subvert the entire scientific enterprise. If science were really as Popper envisaged, then the world would always be the inevitable victor in the two-cornered fight. No scientific theory, no matter how great its explanatory power, has not generated some anomalies during its life. In any event, the mere generation of anomalies is not grounds for rejecting a theory: a theory with anomalies is better than no theory at all as a basis from which to design experiments. Moreover, science rarely proceeds on the basis of one simple theory about a phenomenon being investigated. Experiments are more often designed or data is collected to test rival theories about a phenomenon. Even then, the rejection of a theory is a serious business in science, and Lakatos suggests rightly that a theory T is not to be rejected in favour of an alternative, perhaps better and entirely 85   Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, eds John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge 1978), p. 31.

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different, theory T’, before the possibility that some modification of the original theory T would produce a theory that is better than either T or T’. This, too, is entirely uncontroversial, but it leads Lakatos to the contested view that the unit of appraisal should not be the single theory, but a sequence of theories in which each new theory is generated by modifying its predecessor. Lakatos designates such a sequence a ‘Scientific Research Programme’ and uses the term ‘theory’ for a particular system of assertions. Any alteration in these assertions produces a different theory within the same research programme. A ‘Scientific Research Programme’ consists of three components: the hard core, the negative heuristic and the positive heuristic. The hard core consists of a family of assertions which form the basis of the assumptions for any theory which is part of the research programme. Any theory which is part of the research programme must share the assumptions of the hard core. Such theories constitute a belt of auxiliary hypotheses around the hard core. The negative heuristic is a ‘methodological principle’, stipulating that the components of the hardcore are not abandoned in the face of anomalies.86 By means of it, the tensions generated in the research programme can be eased, either by a modification of the auxiliary hypotheses, or by a reconsideration of the experimental data, or by a refinement of the conditions under which the research programme applies. Guidance on what to do in the face of anomalies is given by the positive heuristic which ‘consists of a partially articulated set of suggestions or hints on how to change, develop the “refutable variants” of the research programme, how to modify, sophisticate, the refutable protective belt’.87 No theory on its own generates a testable prediction. A theory consists of a set of postulates, together with their deductive consequences. To obtain testable predictions, the initial conditions of the system and auxiliary hypotheses must also be considered. In practice, this means that what is tested in scientific work is the theory plus its auxiliary belt. So when an experiment generates data for which the theory is unable to account, the most reasonable thing to do may well be to modify the auxiliary belt around the hard core. Lakatos offers the example of the Newtonian theory of gravitation as a research programme.88 The hard core consists of the three laws of dynamics and the law of universal gravitation. The positive heuristic consists of a plan for developing increasingly sophisticated models of the Sun’s planetary system. The first of these models has a single pointlike Sun and a single point-like planet. This is replaced subsequently with a model describing both the Sun and the planet revolving around their common centre of gravity. In turn, the model is replaced by one consisting of more than one planet. Further developments would include the treatment of the Sun and the planets as extended, symmetrical masses rather than points. Eventually, interplanetary forces are introduced, and the masses are allowed to be non-symmetrical. Unfortunately,   W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (London, 1981), p. 79.   Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 50. 88   Ibid., p. 48f. 86

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there is some historical distortion involved here because there is no evidence that Newton proposed these models in turn and revised them. Lakatos’ description is a description simply of the possible thought process whereby Newton arrived at a theory of planetary motion.89 Nevertheless, two important facets of scientific procedure are here brought to light by Lakatos. First, scientists have sufficient faith in their basic theoretical postulates, the hard core of a research programme, that anomalies are explained away rather than reject the hard core. Anomalies, however, must still be accounted for, and Lakatos’ second insight is that scientists may have some general guiding ideas about how one should try to cope.90 For Lakatos, the positive heuristic, to borrow Newton-Smith’s phrases, is meant to be much more than a ‘vague idea’, offering only ‘very general guidance’.91 It is intended to be formulated very precisely in advance, giving specific advice on how to handle anomalies. Lakatos expends considerable energy on the positive heuristic. This is because it is the positive heuristic that makes a research programme work. It is the positive heuristic that enables research programmes to evolve an ever-increasing verisimilitude. Lakatos’ emphasis upon the positive heuristic is due to his conviction that ‘the central problem in the philosophy of science is the normative appraisal of scientific theories; and in particular, the problem of stating universal conditions under which a theory is scientific.’92 The existence of such well-formulated positive heuristics is doubtful, to say the least. It is simultaneously the weakest part of Lakatos’ formulation of scientific method and also its most important part. It does not follow, however, that the entire programme of Lakatos must be abandoned. If it can be shown that science is in a similar position to the humanities in terms of its apprehension of meaning, then the absence of clearly specified heuristics for modifying scientific understandings may not be fatal to Lakatos’ description of the scientific enterprise. What would be needed is a convincing demonstration of the hermeneutical nature of science. Such a case can be made, I believe, and Pannenberg’s own work could provide significant resources for such a project. In any event, this weakness in Lakatos’ formulation is not fatal to the understanding of Pannenberg’s theology as a ‘research programme’. Pannenberg originally published Theology and the Philosophy of Science (TPS) in 1973 and so, clearly, Lakatos’ work was unavailable to him. In TPS, Pannenberg engages with the two then most recent philosophies of science available: those of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. There have been two attempts to reconstruct Pannenberg’s theological method in Lakatosian terms, both published in 1997.93     91   92   93  

Newton-Smith The Rationality of Science Rationality, p. 81. Ibid. Ibid. Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, p. 168. Nancey Murphy, ‘A Lakatosian Reconstruction of Pannenberg’s Program’, in eds Carol R. Albright and Joel Haugen, Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart 89

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Pannenberg responds to these attempted reconstructions in the same volume, saying that he has ‘no problems with such a description’, and that he could have used the description himself had it been available to him at the time.94 Pannenberg’s endorsement of the term, however, is not to be taken as a wholesale embracing of Lakatos’ philosophy. Pannenberg writes: Some of the more specific ideas of Lakatos were of course not explicitly present in my account of theological explanation. This applies especially to Lakatos’ distinction between the hard core and auxiliary hypotheses. I do not know whether I could have offered such a description, because I would tend to emphasize more strongly the unity of elements in a systematic interpretation. In a metaphysical consideration, the content of both kinds of theory is clearly related. But … I have no objection to Hefner’s attempt at restructuring my way of organising systematic theology in terms of Lakatos’ research program.95

Pannenberg’s hesitation then focuses upon Lakatos’ distinction between the hard core and the auxiliary hypotheses. The hard core is the crucial aspect in identifying individual research programmes, but, unfortunately, Lakatos does not provide rules that help identify what kinds of thing might constitute the hard core of research programmes. As Newton-Smith points out, Lakatos’ own example of the hard core suggest that it consists of the basic theoretical postulates or axioms of a theory.96 They are, in non-technical terms, the basic tenets of a particular worldview, a particular way of looking at and understanding the world. The scientist believes the hard core to be true, or at least to have some truth in it. Initially this belief may not be well founded: it may be little more than an intuition. However, as the research programme develops and has explanatory success, the scientist comes to have reasons for her or his belief in the hard core. There is, on this view, a certain degree of abstraction in the hard core, which consists not so much of theories or hypotheses in the conventional sense of those words but in commitments to a particular understanding of the world. Lakatos’ broad point, I think, is that the hard core is not verifiable or falsifiable directly, but stands or falls with the auxiliary hypotheses. The question, then, is what would constitute Pannenberg’s hard core and can it be understood in such a way as to meet Pannenberg’s concerns noted above? Of the two published Lakatosian reconstructions of Pannenberg’s theological method, Phillip Hefner’s is closest to Lakatos’ original intentions, at least as Pannenberg (Chicago, IL 1997), pp. 409–21; Philip Heffner, ‘The Role of Science in Pannenberg’s Theological Thinking’, in eds Albright and Haugen, Beginning with the End, pp. 97–115. 94   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Theological Appropriation of Scientific Understandings: Response to Hefner, Wicken, Eaves and Tipler, in eds Albright and Haugen, Beginning with the End, pp. 425–43, at p. 430. 95   Ibid., p. 430. 96   Newton-Smith The Rationality of Science. p. 82.

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disclosed in his examples. According to Hefner, Pannenberg’s hard core consists of three components: 1. God is the all-determining reality which constitutes the field in which everything that exists derives its being and in which all the contingencies of nature and history have their origin. 2. The medium in which God’s all-determining work (both as creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua) has been cast is that of an eschatological historical continuum wherein the meaning is in the as-yet-uncompleted totality of reality. Within this continuum, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a revelation of that meaning. 3. Included in God’s all-determining work is the fulfilment of the eschatological continuum.97 These three are highly sophisticated, complex notions, which contain some highly developed concepts such as creatio ex nihilo or creatio continua, which presuppose a particular notion of God’s action in the world. Such concepts have, in their own right, the status of assertions or hypotheses about the world which are generated on the basis of some more fundamental understanding of the world. Though they are an accurate depiction of Pannenberg’s theology, I think that these notions are better cast in the role of Lakatosian auxiliary hypotheses. For the hard core, as discussed in this chapter, something much more basic or fundamental is required which could be regarded as generating Hefner’s three hard core components as some of its auxiliaries. Nancey Murphy comes close to this with her attempt at defining Pannenberg’s hard core, as ‘the God of Jesus Christ is the all-determining reality’.98 To get to Pannenberg’s hard core, we should look right back to the beginning of his theological career. Pannenberg burst onto the theological scene with his concept of indirect revelation, developed in his days with the ‘working circle’ in Heidelberg. This understanding, that God does not reveal himself directly to the human mind but through God’s activity in history, gives rise to Pannenberg’s understanding of the intersubjectivity of theology. Theology does not have the monopoly upon revelation: other human activities that aim at comprehending the world can throw light on the God who created the world. It is also this that gives rise to Pannenberg’s eschatological understanding of God, for if God is revealed indirectly through history, it is only the whole of temporal reality that can be said finally to be the definitive revelation of God. In turn, this gives rise to the concept of prolepsis in Pannenberg’s thought. If the final revelation of God appears only at the eschaton, there is no way of judging before that event how accurate are our interpretations of the indirect revelations we have in time. What is needed is some form of criterion against which to judge our interpretations. For Pannenberg, such a criterion is forthcoming in the form of Christ. Anthony Thiselton has discussed   Heffner, ‘The Role of Science in Pannenberg’s Theological Thinking’, pp. 110–11.   Murphy, ‘A Lakatosian Reconstruction of Pannenberg’s Program’, p. 415.

97 98

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the role of Christ as hermeneutical key to reality in Pannenberg’s thought.99 Christ’s fate on earth is an anticipated enactment of the fate of the creation. That is, beyond the pain and suffering that are part of temporal existence, God’s will is for the life of the creation. I shall have more to say on this aspect of Pannenberg’s theology in Chapter 5, when considering Pannenberg’s understanding of God’s action to overcome evil. For now, we should note that there is something even more fundamental than indirect revelation in Pannenberg’s theology. The very concept of revelation assumes that there is a God who is revealed, and this brings us to Pannenberg’s hard core, which as a formal statement, is extremely straightforward. Pannenberg’s hard core is the hypothesis that the world makes better sense if it is explained as the creation, ex nihilo, of the God of the Bible than if it is explained in exclusively materialistic terms. Everything else now becomes part of the auxiliary belt of this single theological assertion. The concept of prolepsis is necessary to provide a means of gaining provisional understandings of God and reality in anticipation of the final and complete understanding of the eschaton. God’s revelation occurs through the medium of God’s acts in history. That God is related to all things is entailed in the definition of God as the creator of all things. If God is related to all things, in turn this leads to the intersubjectivity of theology, for revelation of God can be discerned through the work of other disciplines besides theology and also accounts for the role of reason in Pannenberg’s theology. Reason can lead to faith, trust in God, without being its ground which always remains God and God alone. This way of understanding the structure of Pannenberg’s theological research programme overcomes his objections to previous attempts to characterise his theology in Lakatosian terminology, in that it restricts the hard core to one fundamental assertion and allows all other theological assertions to be understood as the auxiliary belt, which is meant to be taken together to both explain and defend the hard core. The auxiliary belt removes the hard core from the field of testing. Instead, the hard core stands or falls with the auxiliaries, which do the work of supporting the hard core, and are held in a unity, with no one auxiliary hypothesis being assigned primacy over the others. They become hypotheses about the hard-core hypothesis. Evil as a Test Case for Pannenberg’s Research Programme There has been scant attention given to Pannenberg’s consideration of evil by the secondary literature, which may be a reflection of the view that the question holds little theological significance for Pannenberg. Of the most recent book-length expositions of Pannenberg’s thought, Shults and Mostert make no reference to evil at all. Cornelius Buller does make reference to Pannenberg’s discussions of evil but believes that Pannenberg prefers to maintain a doctrine of creatio ex   Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics, pp. 331–8.

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nihilo at the expense of an understanding of the problem of evil. Pannenberg, says Buller, ‘finds it more compelling to admit that the problem of evil is beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend than to accept a limitation of God – a limitation that implies the existence of other powers that are in some way equal to and independent of God’.100 It is certainly true that Pannenberg could not accept the existence of such powers, but Buller’s claim of abdication on the part of Pannenberg of the responsibility of the theologian to grapple with the problem of evil does not ring true. An early and brief consideration of the place of the problem of evil in Christian thought is found in Pannenberg’s essay Christianity and the Legitimacy of the Modern Age.101 This essay was occasioned by the publication of Hans Blumenberg’s book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, originally in 1966, which takes the theme of theodicy as the key to understanding the development of the Christian tradition. Pannenberg regards this procedure as ‘extremely questionable’.102 It is, in Blumenberg’s view, the inadequacy of Christian attempts to grapple with the problem of evil that demonstrates the legitimacy and superiority of a secular worldview. The modern age overcomes evil, which Blumenberg understands as the deficiencies of nature, by transforming nature constantly through human activity. According to Blumenberg, progress takes the ‘vanished role of theodicy’.103 Blumenberg’s specific charge against the Christian tradition’s response to evil is that it has sought to place the responsibility for the presence of evil in the world solely and squarely with human beings and to absolve God of any responsibility for the presence of evil in the world. Pannenberg flatly denies that the question of theodicy ever had such a simple significance for the Christian tradition, arguing instead that the theme of reconciliation in the face of evil is much more fundamental in Christianity’s response to evil than seeking to shift responsibility for evil away from God.104 Giving an appraisal of Pannenberg’s early theology, E. Frank Tupper suggested that its insufficient treatment of the problem of evil was a serious failing in Pannenberg’s project.105 Pannenberg acknowledged freely that in his early work, the themes of sin, evil, suffering, destruction and brokenness in human history had not yet received extensive treatment. The clear implication is that Pannenberg takes these themes very seriously indeed, but was seeking a secure theological foundation from which to address them. In other words, Pannenberg agrees basically with the contention that a convincing interpretation of the human situation must take into account the negative aspects of human experience and behaviour. Confirmation of this is to be found in Volume 2 of Systematic Theology,     102   103   104   105   100 101

Buller, The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology, p. 55. Pannenberg, Basic Questions 3, pp. 178–91. Ibid., p. 184, n. 4. Hans Blumemberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge 1985), p. 37. Pannenberg, Basic Questions 3, pp. 183–5. Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 300.

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where Pannenberg, echoing Dostoyevsky, agrees that the suffering and death of children is a powerful argument against belief in a loving Creator God.106 On this basis, one can reasonably expect to find the themes of sin, evil and suffering in the later development of Pannenberg’s theology. However, a qualification of this expectation must be made. In his response to Tupper’s work, Pannenberg also wrote: As to the problem of theodicy I do not think that it is the task of theology to exculpate God theoretically for the evil in the world. In the face of the horrors of evil, every theoretical theodicy would function as an ideological device. There can be only one valid answer to the reality of evil: the eschatological reconciliation of God with his world by that glorification of his suffering creatures which alone will finally prove his true divinity.107

Combining these two points, it is reasonable to infer that one will find serious engagement with the problem of evil in Pannenberg’s later theology, that is, in his Systematic Theology. These issues will not, however, be found grouped together in a systematic treatment of theodicy because, as the quotation above indicates, Pannenberg is deeply suspicious of theodicy as a subject. Indeed, the notion of theodicy, with its implicit theme of the justification of God and of God’s action in the face of evil, runs counter to Pannenberg’s theological programme. One of Pannenberg’s fears here is that apologetic argument can prove counter-productive. He cites in particular Leibniz’s ‘Best Possible World’ theodicy, which Pannenberg believes has done more harm than good. The task of theology, as Pannenberg understands it, is to show the reasonableness of faith, by which he means that reflection on the nature of reality in the light of faith can give a coherent interpretation of that reality. This will involve developing an understanding of evil and its relation to God, but not a theodicy in the traditional sense. Because of this, the subject of evil and its related themes constitutes an underlying theme of Pannenberg’s theological programme, which surfaces at various points throughout the Systematic Theology. Pannenberg’s doctrine of evil will be found interwoven with every major doctrine with which he deals. Thus, in order to understand it, we must be willing to engage with his whole theology. Dimensions of Pannenberg’s Doctrine of Evil Taking his point of departure from Schelling and the German idealists, Pannenberg views the whole of theology as a demonstration of the overcoming of evil by God. Anything else would be to trivialise what Pannenberg, echoing Barth, calls the shadow side of reality.108 Schelling’s Of Human Freedom argued that the theme of   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 164.   In Tupper, Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 304. 108   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 164. 106 107

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overcoming evil and God’s self-realisation was the theme of the whole of history.109 In philosophical terms, this view of history and philosophy reached its zenith with Hegel, who took seriously the whole mass of evil set before us in history, but argued that the thinking spirit could be reconciled to this by the recognition of the goal of history, and that this goal would be achieved. Pannenberg is critical of certain themes within idealistic philosophy, for example, what he sees as its tendency to sacrifice the good of the individual to the good of the whole. However, he takes from German Idealism one important insight that is key to understanding his doctrine of evil: this theme cannot be mastered merely by theoretical clarifications; the real history of reconciliation is also needed. Pannenberg offers an explicitly Christian interpretation of this, for it is God alone who can give a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil. It is through the history of his acts in the world, and especially through their consummation with the establishment of his kingdom in creation, that God gives this answer. From a Christian perspective, the point at issue is not the matter of becoming reconciled with evil, or the negative as Hegel argued, but of being reconciled to God, despite the negative things that take place in the world that God created. The discussion takes Pannenberg from the question of the wisdom of God in first deciding to create a world such as ours where evil is able to proliferate, through the doctrine of creation and a discussion of the origin of evil in the necessary finitude of creation, and onward via anthropology, Christology and atonement to eschatology, and the final completion and consummation of creation and the realisation of the divine love for his creation. The Divine Responsibility for Evil A particular concern throughout Pannenberg’s discussion is not to make any attempt to absolve God from the responsibility for evil entering the creation. Pannenberg will have occasion to discuss free will in relation to the origin of evil. The fact that evil can be said to enter the world through the free choice of God’s creatures, however, does not mean that God is not responsible for the evil in the world, for it was God who made his creatures free and independent, knowing that evil would be the inevitable consequence of this. As indicated, Pannenberg regards the attempt to exculpate God theoretically from this responsibility as a major mistake in the tradition of theodicy.110 Rather, he argues that the acts of God in history reveal God not only recognising his responsibility for the evil in the world, but also accepting this responsibility supremely in the events of the cross. Whereas for Barth, it could be said that evil was a human responsibility but God’s affair, for Pannenberg, evil is both God’s responsibility and God’s affair.111   F.W.J. Schelling, Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gutmann (Chicago, IL 1936).   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 166. 111   Scott Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York 1997), 109 110

pp. 11–14.

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Pannenberg stands firmly in a line from Origen, through Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, which sees God as not only not preventing the operation of evil in the creation but of giving it permission to operate. This must not be taken to mean that God wills evil. He does not, and takes no pleasure in it. Evil is merely an accompanying phenomenon and not an object of God’s will. Here, Pannenberg shows that he holds a non-quiddity view of evil, though not on Platonic grounds. Evil is ontologically null and void, because it is neither a work of the divine will nor an object of his pleasure. Of course, this view of the ontological nullity of evil does not imply that evil is not a dangerous reality for the creature. Evil is real and costly for both God and creature alike, but this does not prevent evil from being a condition of the realising of God’s purposes for the creature. As such, evil comes under divine world government, which can bring good out of evil. Pannenberg is here using the word ‘condition’ in the sense with which Leibniz employed it with respect to evil in his Theodicy.112 Leibniz argued that the evil permitted by God was an object of God’s will, not as an end or a means but only as a condition.113 The ontological nullity of evil is sealed only by the victory of God in the event of reconciliation on the cross, and in the eschatological consummation of creation. The Inevitability and Origin of Evil The usual objection to this line of thought is that an omnipotent God could have created a world where evil is not possible. The theological tradition has met this challenge usually with the counter-argument that God could not do this. Appeal is made here to the ontological constitution of created reality. That which has the freedom to turn from God will at some point really do so.114 Building from the Augustinian view that the mutability of creation was a sign of ontological weakness, Leibniz argued that there was an original imperfection in the creature, because the creature is ontologically and epistemologically limited. The creature, therefore, may be mistaken and can thus be guilty of other failings. Leibniz understood limitation as a metaphysical problem, not a moral one. Limitation is a necessary part of creaturehood, in so far as every creature is different from God and his perfection. God could not give the creature all things without making it a god. Because limitation or finitude is a necessary part of creation, the presence of evil is an inevitable consequence of the divine decision to create. Leibniz was, thus, able to avoid Augustine’s Neoplatonic explanation that creaturely imperfection is a consequence of creatio ex nihilo. Finitude is not in itself evil, but it provides the occasion for evil. Pannenberg is critical of Leibniz’s view, because it can only account for evil in moral terms. Evil is the result of error on the part of the finite creature. For Pannenberg, to   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 167, n. 459.   G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and

112 113

the Origin of Evil, trans. E.M. Huggard (Chicago, IL 1985), pp. 189–90. 114   Acquinas, Summa Theologica 1.48.2c.

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be congruent with the biblical tradition, the origin of evil must be accounted for in terms of fall from God and the related illusion of being god-like. Pannenberg locates the origin of evil in the revolt against finitude, the refusal of the creature to accept its own finitude. Pannenberg develops this in terms of a concept of independence (die Selbständigkeit), for which creatures were originally made. In this way, Pannenberg is able to understand the relationship between creaturehood and evil in a sharper light than has been previously possible in the Christian tradition. In Pannenberg’s thought, the concept of independence is a somewhat ambiguous one. The fact that the creation is capable of being explained without reference to God makes it possible for the creature to question the existence of God and to assert its independence in a way that leads to the entry of evil into the creation. True independence, true freedom, for the creature is the recognition of its finitude and dependence upon God and responding to this by submitting oneself freely to the love and will of God. This is the creaturely counterpart of the relationships that exist between the three persons of the Trinity. The Trinity is a community of love and mutual submission. God’s purpose for the creation is for it to enter into this web of relationships. Evil enters the creation by the creature’s refusal to accept this and to assert its own independence. In so doing, the creature moves from independence (Selbständigkeit) to what Pannenberg terms self-independence (Verselbständigung). The evil that results in the move to self-independence Pannenberg describes as ‘latent evil’, in that while it remains hidden from view, it gives rise to the manifestations of evil in the forms of physical evil, which Pannenberg links with the concept of entropy and moral evil, which is closely allied to Pannenberg’s development of the doctrine of sin.115 Latent evil does not always manifest itself in its absolute form, which Pannenberg understands as the destroying and profaning of human life, including the soul, for no obvious reason. This, in turn, can give rise to the view that evil is a marginal phenomenon in the world. The fact that evil is a more fundamental problem is revealed by our attempts to eliminate it. Eliminating evil is not just a matter of eliminating its perpetrators, for the more radically this is done, the more evil proliferates, even in what is supposed to be good, and especially in the apparatus established to combat evil. Here Pannenberg is following Christof Gestrich.116 The move from independence to self-independence constitutes a three-fold theological problem. In the first place, it conceals the creatures’ dependence upon God in a way analogous to the way in which the independence of natural processes conceals their origin in God from the scientist who studies them. Secondly, the results of creaturely autonomy, in the form of suffering and iniquity, seem to refute belief in a loving Creator God. Third, our turning from God makes the problem of evil and its overcoming more severe, because it means that we alone and not the Creator are responsible for the evil in   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 237.   C. Gestrich, Die Wiederkehr des Glanzes Welt: die christliche Lehre von der Sünde

115 116

und ihrer Vergebung in gegenwärtiger Verantwortung (Tübigen 1989), p. 186.

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the world and for the victory over it which we have failed to achieve. Typically, the blame for evil is placed externally either on to other individuals or groups or onto anonymous social structures and pressures. Pannenberg contends that the public recovery of the Christian doctrine of sin would serve the positive purpose of preventing such scapegoating by revealing the universality of evil, not just in others, but also in us. By way of a conclusion at the end of this chapter we can say that Shults’s assessment of Pannenberg as no foundationalist is thus exactly right. Pannenberg, despite those readings of him to the contrary, is not seeking a retreat into a sure foundation for knowledge about God, whether this is reason, history, or revelation. On this reading of Pannenberg’s theological method, Pannenberg is seen to be responding to the failures of three major schools of philosophical discourse in the twentieth century: German Idealism, Existentialism and Postmodernism. He offers the concepts of the eschatological unity of truth, prolepsis and the notion of indirect revelation, which leads him to the notion of a theological dimension to all understandings of reality, as a means for establishing theology as a means of discourse which bridges the otherwise incommensurability of different discourses on reality. Evil as a theological topic is well placed to probe this method and the reading of it proposed here, and it is to Pannenberg’s account of evil that we turn in the next two chapters.

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Chapter 2

Reconsidering Evil The Problem of Physical Evil Writing in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre suggested that the discipline of moral philosophy was in a fragmented state. He argued that though we retain the language of moral philosophy, we have lost much of the structure of beliefs that provide the context for understanding moral concepts, and this has led to what appears to be an element of arbitrariness in the application of moral concepts. Analytical philosophy is of no help in overcoming this difficulty, says MacIntyre, because the techniques of analytical philosophy analyse language in its present usage. Phenomenology, or existentialism, is likewise impotent, dealing as it does with the structures of intentionality now.1 Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of MacIntyre’s argument with respect to moral philosophy, it is the thesis of this chapter that our conceptual understanding of evil in the twenty-first century is deeply fragmented and although we continue to use the language of evil, we have lost much of the conceptual framework for considering evil that gave meaning to this language. Paul Ricoeur neatly summarises the problem when he notes that, at least in the western Judaeo-Christian tradition, we subsume quite different phenomena, including sin, suffering and death, under the one heading of evil.2 In much of the contemporary discussion of evil, it is assumed simply that the word ‘evil’ equates to suffering. This has the effect of separating out evil undergone from evil perpetrated – that is, sin. Strictly speaking moral evil, sin, is that which renders human action an object of accusation or reprimand.3 By contrast, suffering emphasises the passivity of the human subject: it is something undergone which the sufferer does not make happen. Yet there are similarities also in the pathologies of sin and suffering, for both result in a diminution of our spiritual, psychological, or physical well-being. Moreover, it is something of a cliché, though not too far off the mark, to say that whilst suffering is considered to be evil, sin is often explained away as error or as resulting from external pressures. Thus both sin and suffering can be thought of as having external causes, making the human subject the passive victim in both cases. 1   Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London 1985), pp. 1–2. 2   Paul Ricoeur, Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology (London 2007), p. 35. 3   Ibid.

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Yet this misses the point. Mary Midgley makes a pertinent analogy between infection and wickedness.4 An infection by a bacterial or viral agent may result in illness, but only because we have a certain physiological make-up. So likewise vices such as spite, greed, envy and cruelty may indeed be brought into being by external events, but, like the illness that results from infection only because we have a particular constitution, these vices develop only because we are prone to them. There is something in our human nature that allows these things to be expressed. Likewise, suffering may have a whole variety of causes including sickness, the weakness of the body or mind, grief, our own sense of worthlessness, or the prospect of our own mortality. Yet these things only affect us because we are prone to them. So I am suggesting here that both moral evil and suffering are the result of an underlying constitutional ground. That is, I am suggesting that moral evil has as its ground natural evil. Natural evil is generally considered to consist in earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, as well as in disease and unavoidable human disasters. By contrast, moral evil or wickedness is generally considered to be deliberate action on the part of human beings. The conceptual link between natural evil and wickedness was forged by Augustine in his synthesis of a philosophical or ontological understanding of evil as privatio boni and a theological understanding of wickedness as rebellion against God. The synthesis, which understood natural evil as divine, just punishment for moral evil, was broken largely by the shift in thinking and the ‘turn to the subject’ during the Enlightenment. However, Pierre Bayle in his Dictionary had already proved to be an eloquent and devastating critic of the synthesis with some carefully chosen analogies. Bayle’s fundamental criticism was that the synthesis preserves the power of God at the expense of both the benevolence and love of God and the trustworthiness of God. Bayle argues that ‘common sense’ dictates that if God even suspected that human beings would abuse their freedom so as to seal their eternal damnation, God should have withheld the gift of freedom for the sake of those God loved. The Augustinian synthesis thus raises questions about the nature of God. If God is as the synthesis suggests, then God cannot be trusted. Even if we point to God’s saving action, Bayle has a retort, for then we seem to be saying that God is like a doctor who breaks his patients’ limbs in order to show his skill in setting broken bones.5 More than anything else, however, one event in history stands out as symbolic and paradigmatic of the split between morality and nature: the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. The final comprehension of the earthquake as an event that should not have happened, but did, is a key intellectual shift in the birth of modernity, and accepting it as such is a ‘minimal sign of maturity’.6 Natural events have   Mary Midgley, Wickedness A Philosophical Essay (London 1986), p. 3.   Pierre Bayle,. Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections, translated with an

4 5

introduction and notes by Richard Popkin (London 1965), p. 76. 6   Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ 2002), p. 267.

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no meaning; they are not signs, portents, or messages of judgement calling forth repentance and fear of the Lord. Natural objects are no longer seen as objects of moral judgement, and we no longer expect natural objects and events to reflect or harmonise with moral judgements. The split between natural and moral evil is as complete as it could possibly be. So complete is the split, in fact, that the term ‘evil’, as applied to the physical world, hardly seems credible at all. Nature is not evil, it simply is. Consequently, the term ‘evil’, in the modern period, has become simply an alternative word for wickedness, and more recently, also human suffering. That is, the word evil now largely denotes an existential phenomenon. Thus Levinas understands evil as suffering.7 The two words are synonyms denoting the same phenomenon: Suffering is surely a given in consciousness, a certain ‘psychological content,’ like the lived experience of colour, of sound, of contact, or like any sensation. But in this ‘content’ itself, it is in – spite of – consciousness, unassumable. It is unassumable and unassumability. ‘Unassumability’ does not result from the excessive intensity of a sensation, from some sort of quantitative ‘too much,’ surpassing the measure of our sensibility and our means of grasping and holding. It results from an excess, a ‘too much,’ which is inscribed in the sensorial content, penetrating as suffering the dimensions of meaning which seem to be opened and grafted onto it.8

Suffering, as evil, is connected in some way with meaning: it is an existential, psychological phenomenon. As a moral or existential category, evil is connected with the intentionality of human actions and intentionality has been removed from the natural world. The modern distinction between natural and moral evil is, of course, a useful and entirely appropriate distinction, but, as Mary Midgley points out, it also obscures an area between the two; moral evil itself has a ‘natural history – a set of given ways in which it tends to occur in a given species’.9 Not every kind of misconduct is either possible or psychologically tempting for a given kind of being. Even within the list of vices to which we might be prone, some are psychologically more powerful and dangerous than others. One of the consequences of the move to ground moral evil in physical evil, if it can be maintained, is to re-set the question of moral evil, as well as the question of suffering, as ontological questions rather than existential questions. I shall consider the nature of the grounding of moral evil in the ontological structure of human being in the next chapter, but in this chapter I want to pursue the consequences of the move for understanding the ontology of evil in the world. 7   Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Useless Suffering’, in eds Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other (London 1988). 8   Ibid., p. 156. 9   Midgley, Wickedness, p. 12, original emphasis.

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Viewing moral evil as grounded in natural evil marks the reversal of the traditional Augustinian synthesis. It will be recalled that, for Augustine, the first evil was moral evil, sin, a turning away from God towards the things of the world. It was rebellion against God, and natural evil was understood as the just punishment and consequence of this sin. The fact that we have reversed the order of evil, however, does not mean that we need abandon Augustine altogether. The order of moral evil and physical evil in Augustine is connected with his discussion of the origin of evil in the universe. In and of itself, however, it says nothing of Augustine’s understanding of the ontology of evil and it is precisely this aspect of his discussion of evil that is of enduring significance for western discussions of evil. In the Confessions, Augustine describes his conversion experience as his heart being flooded with the confidence of light.10 Gillian Evans comments: In a sentence he gives us the principle which solved for him the problem of evil. Where light shines there cannot be darkness. When light comes, darkness proves to have been simply the absence of light. Where there is good, evil is driven out; it proves to have been simply the absence of good.11

Evil is no positively existing thing; it is simply the absence of good. This idea was not, by any means, Augustine’s own original idea, but in his hands it became an idea of great explanatory power. Evil is an absence of some good that is proper to a particular order of being. It is a failure to fulfil one’s telos. As a privation of good, evil can have no positive existence. If the word ‘evil’ is a noun, it names the absence of some good, not a positively existing thing. Thus, for example, human beings may exhibit great courage from time to time. This is a positively existing attribute, but failure to act courageously, cowardice, is just that: a failure to act with courage. It is not the result of the existence of the attribute of cowardice. Likewise, meanness is not something that exists in and of itself: rather, it is the result of the absence of generosity. Viewing evil in this way also helps us to understand how it can be that a great deal of evil is done simply by the failure to act in a particular way, or through neglect. This is the nub of Hannah Arendt’s characterisation of the banality of evil. Adolf Eichmann was no evil monster, she claimed, but great evil resulted from Eichmann’s failure to think: Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of ‘the banality of evil,’ and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps an extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could

  Augustine, Confessions VIII xii.29.   G.R. Evans, Augustine and Evil (Cambridge 1982), pp. 1–2.

10 11

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detect … was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.12

It is important to grasp what Arendt means by this inability to think. By it she does not mean stupidity, for the very intelligent can also fail to think.13 For Arendt, Eichmann lived in the surface world of cliché, stock phrases and adherence to the conventional. Of course this is something we all do, for such things protect us against the claim made on our energies by all events and facts: not to do so would soon lead to exhaustion and breakdown. For Arendt, the key difference with Eichmann was that he knew of no such claim. Under the Nazis, he did what he was told was his duty. At his trial, observed Arendt, with no difficulty whatsoever he accepted that this duty was now considered to be a war crime. The rules had changed and according to Arendt, ‘he accepted this as though it were no more than another language rule.’14 In the next chapter, I shall argue that this self-reflection is part of what it means to be human, that is, self-reflection is part of the ontological structure of human being, and so Eichmann’s failure to think is a failure to be human. However, for now, we need to address another issue raised by the claim that evil is ontologically nothing at all. This is the thought that understanding evil in this way trivialises it and denies its power. Neither of these is true, I believe, but they are very serious objections and answering them will lead us a long way down the path of understanding the psychological or existential power of evil. That evil can be both ontologically negative and simultaneously powerful is a paradox that exercised considerably the mind of Augustine. The Ground of Evil In seeking to ground the possibility of wickedness in ontology, I am attempting to re-interpret the conceptual link made between evil and finitude in both Kant and Leibniz. Leibniz understood limitation as a metaphysical problem, not a moral one.15 Limitation is a necessary part of creaturehood, in so far as every creature is different from God and his perfection. God could not give the creature all things without making it a god. Because limitation or finitude is a necessary part of creation, the presence of evil is an inevitable consequence of the divine decision to create. Thus Leibniz was able to avoid Augustine’s Neoplatonic explanation that creaturely imperfection is a consequence of creatio ex nihilo. Nevertheless,   Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: a Lecture’, Social Research 38 (1971), reprinted in Amèlie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives (London 2001), pp. 65–269, at p. 265. 13   Ibid. 14   Ibid. 15   G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. E.M. Huggard (Chicago, IL 1985), p. 136. 12

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seeing finitude as the point of entry of evil into the universe means that evil can only be accounted for finally in moral terms. Evil is the result of error on the part of the finite, limited, creature. It is at this point in the discussion that Pannenberg proves useful for, whilst recognising that there is some truth in Leibniz’ view of the origin of evil in the finitude of the created order, he is critical of Leibniz at this point.16 Moreover, part of Pannenberg’s theological rationale is the need to overcome Feuerbach’s arguments regarding an inherent human capacity to transcend finitude. For Pannenberg, locating the origin of evil in the finitude of created being not only fails to account properly for evil, but it provides no way through the Feuerbachian impasse. For if evil is connected with finitude, then it is only by transcending finitude that evil can be overcome. Herein also lie in part the philosophical roots of Pannenberg’s insistence that overcoming evil is a divine affair. According to Pannenberg, one must probe deeper into the (Hegelian) concepts that Feuerbach used and show where his use and development of them is in error. Therefore, Pannenberg seeks to locate the source of evil not in finitude as such, but in the concept of independence, which is God’s aim in creation and which underlies the existence of finite created being. Here Pannenberg is more akin to the philosophical understanding of Schelling who locates the origin of evil in (human) freedom. Pannenberg’s Language of Evil The German language contains two words, which can be translated as ‘evil’ in the English language. These words are das Böse and das Übel. Das Böse can also mean ‘wickedness’. Das Böse can also have the meaning of ‘bad’, for example, the phrase im Bösen auseinandergehen means ‘to part on bad terms,’ or it can mean ‘angry’ or simply, naughty.’ Das Böse is usually used when concrete or specific evil is being named. By contrast, das Übel always means ‘evil’ and never ‘wickedness’, though Übel, without the definite article can be used in the sense of wickedness and hence overlaps with the use of das Böse. Generally speaking, das Übel is an abstract noun. It is rarely used in connection with expressions of evil. Nevertheless, the history of the two words is complex, and there is considerable overlap in the use of the two words, with different authors using the words in different ways. Kant attempted to use the two words in a more precise way, using das Übel to mean ‘ill-being’ and contrasting it with das Wohl or ‘well-being’. Only das Böse had moral significance for Kant and was contrasted with das Gute, the good and in the German, Kant’s term ‘radical evil’ is ‘radikalische Böse’.17 Fichte, on the other hand, rejects Kant’s distinction, holding that it is failure to reflect   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 171.   Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. H.W. Cassirer; eds G. Heath

16 17

King and Ronald Weitzman; with an introduction by D.M. MacKinnon (Milwaukee, WI 1998), p. 52.

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and to act on this reflection which is the real ‘radical-ill’ (radikalische Übel) in humanity.18 Likewise, Leibniz does not use the word das Böse, preferring instead the term ‘Moralische Übel’. His term ‘metaphysical evil’ (das Metaphysiche Übel) is an ontological concept, which Leibniz links with Augustine’s concept of evil as a privation.19 It is the ontological ground of moral evil. Thus Gestrich holds that das Böse comes from within human beings, but das Übel comes from without.20 Pannenberg’s preferred term for ‘evil’ is das Böse, though very often he uses the words das Böse and das Übel as a pair, and always in that order. This is shown in the English translation of the Systematische Theologie with the use of the words wickedness (das Böse) and evil (das Übel). When das Böse is used alone, it is usually translated as ‘evil’. His preference for das Böse indicates that, when discussing evil, Pannenberg usually has in mind concrete expressions of evil, rather than evil in the abstract. Das Übel is used predominantly in the section of the Systematische Theologie dealing with evil in the abstract: its origins and its relation to the concept of entropy. An exception to this is when Pannenberg is discussing Leibniz’s concept of moral evil (Moralische Übel) when he uses Leibniz’s term.21 However, he quickly reverts to das Böse when he is putting forward his own view of the subject of moral evil. Das Übel as understood by Pannenberg is not in any sense the result of sin or in any sense caused by human acts. In one place, Pannenberg notes that failures (Verfehlungen) result in evil (das Übel), but there Pannenberg is thinking of evil in the abstract rather than of any particular manifestation of evil.22 The grounding of evil in independence takes two forms in Pannenberg’s thought. First, through a discussion of the conditions necessary to make the independent existence of created being possible, Pannenberg develops an understanding of das Übel as part of the created structure of the world. Secondly, in the course of his discussion of anthropology, he locates das Böse in the radicalisation of created independence. Thus Pannenberg locates the origin of moral evil in the creaturely revolt against finitude, the refusal of the creature to accept its own finitude: There is some truth in the tracking back of evil (Übel), including the moral evil (Übel) of sin, to the conditions of existence bound up with creatureliness. Nevertheless, it is not enough to advance the limitation of creatures as a reason for the possibility of evil (Böse) … the limit of finitude is not yet evil (Böse) and if evil came from it, then we must define evil as error and not as fall from God … We are to seek the root of evil (Böse), rather in the revolt against finitude. We thus need to reconstruct the thought that would see the possibility

  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics (Cambridge 2005), p. 189.   Leibniz, Theodicy I, p. 32. 20   C. Gestrich, Die Wiederkehr des Glanzes Welt: die christliche Lehre von der Sünde 18 19

und ihrer Vergebung in gegenwärtiger Verantwortung (Tübigen 1989), p. 173. 21   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, pp. 170–74. 22   Ibid., p. 58.

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of evil in the very nature of creaturehood. Not limitation but the independence (Selbständigkeit) for which creatures were made forms the basis of the possibility of evil (Bösen) … The source of suffering (Leidens) and evil (Bösen) lies in the transition from God-given independence (Selbständigkeit) to self-independence (Verslebständigung).23

In Pannenberg’s thought, independence, die Selbständigkeit, is a positive concept. It is the creator’s will that the creation has an independent existence. There is, nevertheless, a certain ambiguity resulting from this God-given creaturely independence. The fact that creation is capable of being explained without reference to God makes it possible for the creature to question the existence of God and to assert its independence in a way that leads to the entry of evil into the creation. Evil (das Böse) enters the world through the creature’s radicalisation of its divinely grounded independence. Pannenberg conceptualises this in a shift of nouns from die Selbständigkeit to die Verselbständigung. This is a difficult word to translate into English. In normal German, it means simply the gaining or achievement of independence. It may be used of children coming of age and thus gaining formal independence from their parents. The related reflexive verb Verselbständigen can be used, for example, of a newly autonomous scientific discipline. Indeed, Pannenberg himself uses Verselbständigung in this way when speaking of the emergence of the Christian faith as a separate faith from its roots in Judaism.24 A literalistic translation of the concept embedded in the verb Verselbständigen, and hence the noun would be ‘to make oneself independent’. This captures something of Pannenberg’s theological use of the terms, for in Pannenberg’s thought, Verselbständigung is an entirely negative concept. An attempt to capture this in English is made by the various ways in which the word is translated in the English translation of the Systematische Theologie, for example, self-independence or radical independence. The nouns die Selbständigkeit and die Verselbständigung are also translated as ‘autonomy’ and ‘total autonomy’.25 Such translations capture the dynamic behind Pannenberg’s use of the German nouns, but they conceal the continuity of the language that he employs. Thus, for example, whilst the noun die Selbständigkeit appears some 53 times in the index of the Systematische Theologie Bd 2 and Bd 3, the word ‘independence’ makes just five appearances in Volume 3 of the English translation. Pannenberg uses the noun die Verselbständigung to denote a turning-away from the creator and the creator’s will, and an assertion of the creature’s own existence. The concrete expression of this turning-away, which Pannenberg describes in traditional terms of rebellion against God, involves denying the proper place of   Ibid., pp. 171–2.   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Die Rationalitat der Theologie’, in eds M. Kessler,

23 24

W. Pannenberg, and H.J. Pottmeyer, Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Beitrage zur Fundamentaltheologie (Tubingen 1992), p. 533. 25   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 49.

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the divine and the relationship which ought to exist and be celebrated between creature and God. For this reason, the term ‘self-independence’ is to be preferred as a rendering in English of Pannenberg’s die Verselbständigung. True independence, the independence which is desired by God for the creation, is for the creature, the recognition of its finitude and dependence upon God and its response to this by freely submitting itself to the love and will of God. This is the creaturely counterpart of the relationships that exist between the three persons of the Trinity. The Trinity is a community of love and mutual submission. God’s purpose for the creation is for it to enter into this web of relationships: As creatures accept the finite existence God has given them, they live it out as an existence that is not grounded in itself, but owed to another. As they thank God for their existence even in their perishing, in transcendence of their finitude they are in relation to the eternal will of God as Creator, and herein they participate in God’s imperishable glory.26

Evil (das Böse) enters the creation by the creature’s refusal to accept this and to assert its own independence. In Pannenberg’s thought, the independence (die Selbständigkeit) of the creation is grounded in the relationships that exist between the members of the Trinity. More precisely, die Selbständigkeit is grounded in the self-distinction (die Selbunterscheiden) of the Son from the Father. This self-distinction is rooted in God’s desire for the independent existence of the other, and becomes the ground for the Trinitarian work of creation. The act of creation is thus a repetition in time of the eternal relationships between the members of the Trinity. In order to understand fully Pannenberg’s concepts of die Selbständigkeit and die Verselbständigung, it will be necessary first to consider his concept of (mutual) self-distinction within the Trinity, and how this forms the basis of the creation in Pannenberg’s understanding of it. It is worth noting in passing also that herein lies the theological grounding of Pannenberg’s hermeneutical epistemology, for it is precisely because the creation is a repetition in time of the eternal Trinitarian relationships that history can become a vehicle for knowledge of God. Thus, in seeking to understand Pannenberg’s related concepts of self-distinction, independence and self-independence, we are dealing with the theological and philosophical concepts at the very centre of his thought and which form the unifying structure to his theology. Natural Evil as a Necessary Part of the Structure of Created Reality One of Pannenberg’s contributions to the doctrine of God is his understanding of the origin and relationships of the members of the Trinity. In his engagement with the theological tradition of both East and West, he seeks to move beyond the   Ibid., pp. 173–4.

26

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traditional understandings of the terms ‘begetting of the Son’ and ‘spiration of the Spirit.’ One of his concerns is that these traditional terms inescapably lead to a hierarchical view of the relationships between the members of the Trinity. Instead, Pannenberg is concerned to demonstrate the mutuality and dynamic nature of these relationships. His approach to the doctrine of the Trinity is to establish the full divinity of the three persons, first from the revelation of Scripture and then to move from there to establish the unity of the three. Scripture bears witness to a ‘richly structured nexus’ of active relations between the members of the Trinity, and for Pannenberg, it is insufficient to treat these simply as constitutive for their identity in terms of relationships of origin.27 Following orthodox Trinitarian theology from the time of Athanasius, whom Pannenberg discusses extensively in his historical survey of Trinitarian theology, Pannenberg views the intra-trinitarian relations as constitutive for the distinction of the persons. He writes, ‘The persons are simply what they are in their relations to one another, which both distinguish them from one another and bring them into communion. Yet the persons cannot be reduced to individual relations, as is done especially in the theology of the West.28 Here, we see two key aspects of Pannenberg’s concept of the self-distinction of the persons of the Trinity. First, the relations distinguish the persons: they reveal their other-ness from each other. Secondly, the relationships hold the three in communion with each other: in other words, they reveal the essential unity of the three. The intra-trinitarian relationships are to be understood as reciprocal. Christiaan Mostert has expressed the view that this constitutes Pannenberg’s greatest contribution to the discussion of the Trinity.29 The idea of self-distinction has been used in Trinitarian theology since the nineteenth century, but almost always to express the sense of the origin of the second and third members of the Trinity in the first. Pannenberg uses the term differently: the one who distinguishes himself from another also defines himself as dependent upon that other. Distinction belongs to the very essence of God and it is this distinction-in-unity which not only forms the basis of the relationships between the members of the Trinity, but is also the basis and model of the relations which should exist within the creation and between the creation and God. Pannenberg holds that the traditional view – that the Father alone is without origin and is the source of both Son and Spirit – seems to rule out the possibility of genuine mutuality in the traditionally conceived intra-trinitarian relationships. These relationships of origin are irreversible, unidirectional. Taking the argument of Athanasius against the Arians, that the Father could not be Father without the Son, Pannenberg argues that there is a dependence of the Father on both the Son and the Spirit, advancing the view that the deity of the Father must be dependent   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 320.   Ibid., p. 320. 29   Christiaan Mostert, ‘From Eschatology to Trinity Pannenberg’s Doctrine of God’, 27

28

Pacifica 10 (1997): 71–83, at 71.

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upon the Son, though not in the same way that the deity of the Son is dependent upon the Father. He develops this in terms of the lordship of God and in the process draws out the role of the Spirit also. Pannenberg agrees with Barth that the lordship of God is the same as his essence or deity.30 He notes that Athanasius also regarded kingship as belonging to both the Father and the Son. Olson calls this identity of lordship or kingdom and divine essence ‘Pannenberg’s principle’.31 Thus the reciprocity of the intratrinitarian relationships is to be understood in terms of the Father handing over his lordship to the Son. This makes the Father’s deity dependent upon the Son, whose task Pannenberg describes, with a quotation from Paul, as to rule until all that opposes God is brought into subjection.32 The Son is thus not merely the representative of the rule (and hence the deity) of the Father: he also executes that lordship (deity). The Spirit’s task Pannenberg understands as the eschatological consummation of the Son’s rule: the final consummation of all creation under the rule of the Son. When the Spirit completes his task and the Son’s rule is complete, he freely hands back his rule to the Father. He subjects himself to the Father so that God may be all in all: By the handing over of Lordship to the Son, the Father makes his kingship dependent upon whether the Son glorifies him and fulfils his lordship by fulfilling his mission. The self-distinction of the Father from the Son is not just that he begets the Son, but that he hands over all things to him, so that his kingdom and his own deity are now dependent upon the Son.33

For his part, the Son freely subjects himself to the lordship of the Father and is thus still dependent upon him. In turn, both are dependent upon the Spirit and the completion of his task: the eschatological fulfilment of God’s rule and hence of God’s essence. It is not the purpose of this chapter to offer an exhaustive critique of Pannenberg’s contribution to thought on the Trinity, but rather to delineate the way in which this forms the basis and model for the relationship between God and the creation in Pannenberg’s thought. This is important and of interest not only for its own sake, but also for two quite specific reasons which bear upon the subject of evil in Pannenberg’s thought. First, God’s granting of independence to the finite creation forms the basis for the entry of evil into the creation, and secondly, because God as Trinity deals with evil in such a way as to preserve and restore these relationships to their proper order.   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: 1936–69), I/1 p. 349, cf II/1 p. 461.   Olson, Roger E., ‘Wolfhart Pannenberg’s doctrine of the Trinity: “Rahner’s rule”

30 31

and “Pannenberg’s principle”’, Scottish Journal of Theology 43 (1990): 175–206, at 175. 32   1 Corinthians 15:21–5, 28. 33   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 313.

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Drawing on Karl Rahner’s insight that revelation reveals not merely propositions about God, but God himself, and that, therefore, the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity, Pannenberg views the relationships between the persons of the Trinity revealed in Scripture as expressing the reality of God within himself.34 That is, God really is within himself a nexus of relationships between the three members of the Trinity. These relationships are not uni-directional, but they are experienced differently by the different members of the Trinity. In this way, Pannenberg is able to maintain the traditional view that the Father alone is the source of God-head, for the deity of the other two members of the Trinity derives from the Father’s desire for the existence of the other. The Father, whilst always remaining the Father, also makes himself dependent upon the Son and the Spirit in fulfilling the universal lordship that constitutes his deity. Distinction and dependency thus belong to the nature of God. It is this aspect of the nature of God that constitutes the ground of creation. This is important, because it shows that, for Pannenberg, the creation does not spring from the love of God strictly speaking but from the Trinitarian nature of self-distinction and dependency: Creation is a free act of God as an expression of the freedom of the Son in his self-distinction from the Father, and of the freedom of fatherly goodness that in the Son accepts the possibility and the existence of a creation distinct from himself and of the freedom of the Spirit who links the two in free agreement.35

It is true that these intra-trinitarian relationships take the form of love, but for Pannenberg, the act of creation is an act of the will and power of God. The divine love expressed between the members of the Trinity is then worked out or realised in the process of time. There is at least one aspect of this view that is a source of interest here. Speaking in terms of the temporal order, we may say that God is in the process of realising himself through the creation. There is thus a derived sense in which God has made his deity dependent upon the creation. Pannenberg is not a process theologian; nevertheless, he can sound very like one when he speaks of God as always future. Similarly, Pannenberg’s equation of God’s essence with his kingdom, which is in the process of being realised fully in time, might be construed as an indication of Pannenberg’s hidden process theology. Balanced against this is Pannenberg’s absolute assertion that there can be no becoming in God: ‘Refuted herewith is the idea of a divine becoming in history, as though the trinitarian God were the result of history and achieved reality only with its eschatological consummation.’36 As with many aspects of Pannenberg’s theology, the key to understanding this apparent contradiction is Pannenberg’s complex notion of the relationship between time and eternity. For Pannenberg, God’s deity, his future in time, is guaranteed   Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, 4 (London 1966), p. 94.   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 30. 36   Ibid., p. 331. 34

35

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because God’s eternity is not time-lessness, but time-fullness. Thus, in eternity, which contains the fullness of time, God is fully realised. Nevertheless, within time, God’s deity is dependent, because God has made it dependent, upon the creation being in a proper relationship with him. Pannenberg is here drawing on the work of Jüngel, whom Pannenberg views as the first person to have worked out the dependence of God upon the creation.37 Moltmann too makes God’s deity dependent upon the process of history, for it is God’s deity that is at stake on the cross.38 The roots of this concept of God’s dependence upon the creation in Pannenberg’s thought can be traced back to the essay Der Gott der Geschichte.39 In Pannenberg’s thought, the Son shows the form in which this relationship between created reality and God should be expressed, by freely surrendering his freedom and submitting himself to the lordship of the Father. In this free submission lies not only the identity of the Son, but also his own deity and his freedom. That the creation should, likewise, freely submit itself to the lordship of God and thus discover its true identity is indeed the divine goal in the act of creation. The Independence of the Creation Independence (die Selbständigkeit) is the divinely bestowed creaturely corollary of divine self-distinction (Selbunterschienden). The former is dependent upon the latter. For the independence (die Selbständigkeit) and the distinction (unterschiedenes) of creatures relative to God goes back to the self-distinction (die Selbunterschiedung) of the Son, but the Spirit is the element of the fellowship of the creatures with God and their participation in his life, not withstanding their distinction from him.40 Thus, just as the Spirit is the divine agent who links the Father and the Son together in freedom, so, also, is he the agent through which creation participates in the divine. The independence of the creation in Pannenberg’s thought must not be read as meaning that the creation can exist without God’s preservation of it. It is the will of God in creation that the creation has continual existence, and the preservation of the creation is the work of the Son. Without this preservation, creaturely reality would be ‘no more than the emergence and extinction of a tiny light in God’s eternity’.41   Eberhard Jüngel, Vom Tod des lebendigen Gottes’ Unterwegs zur Sache (München 1972), p. 119, cf. Eberhard. Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Edinburgh 1983), pp. 104f, 169f. 38   Jürgen Moltmann., The Crucified God: The Cross as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (London 1974), pp. 187f, 227f. 39   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie: Gesammelte Aufsatze, Band II (Göttingen 1980), pp. 112–28, esp. 124–5. 40   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 32. 41   Ibid. 37

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Clearly, Pannenberg has in mind here not merely temporal existence but eternal existence also. It is this continued existence of creaturely reality in eternity that is the goal of God’s creative act.42 Pannenberg’s word for creature here is Geschöpfe, ‘created being’, rather than the more general word Kreatur. Buller notes that this is often Pannenberg’s preferred word in the German for ‘creature’, and suggests that this indicates that what Pannenberg has primarily in mind is the human creation.43 It is not that Pannenberg considers human beings in isolation from the rest of the creation. Humans are part of created reality, but they best represent the independence of the creation and are best capable of bringing this to its proper expression in the creaturely recognition of God as God. This is necessary, in Pannenberg’s view, because creaturely reality is different from the divine reality. First, divine reality is self-grounded, whereas creaturely reality is contingent. It can neither call itself into existence nor preserve itself; it is utterly dependent upon God. Secondly, created being finds its fulfilment in the transcendence of its own finitude in the Spirit-based participation in God.44 Here, Pannenberg shows his concern to overcome Feuerbach’s rejection of Christianity as a projection of the human capacity for self-transcendence onto a (for Feuerbach) non-existent divine figure. This delineates an important dimension of Pannenberg’s concept of die Selbständigkeit. The independence of the creation is not so much one of existence, for the creation cannot exist alone, and of itself it is totally dependent upon God’s continual preservation of it. Rather, the independence of the creation is one of freedom of action. Pannenberg develops this concept of independence of action in the context of a discussion of the doctrine of divine concursus – the creature’s need for the cooperation of God in order to act.45 In order to act, the creature is dependent upon God’s preservation of its existence, for without existence the creature cannot act. Thus, the creature continually stands in need of God’s cooperation in its actions. This does not, thereby, set aside the principle of creaturely independence, because the creature is still free to act in ways contrary to divine intention: ‘Divine cooperation does not have to be responsible for deviations from the intentions of God’s providence. At the same time, the sin and evil (das Böse) in creaturely acts serve the aims of divine providence.’46 Again, the use of das Böse in the German and the word ‘sin’ indicate that Pannenberg once more has human beings primarily in mind here. Originally, the aim of the doctrine of divine concursus was to preserve creaturely independence so that sin could be ascribed to them as acting agents and not to God. Pannenberg notes that, by the mid-seventeenth century, the theological focus had shifted and   Ibid.   Cornelius Buller, The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology

42 43

(Lanham, MD 1996), p. 48. 44   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 33. 45   Ibid., pp. 48f. 46   Ibid., pp. 37.

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the theological need became not so much to show how creaturely independence from God could be properly maintained, as to prevent this independence from becoming total, in the light of the philosophical views being advanced by Spinoza and others. The English translation of Systematic Theology at this point uses the words ‘autonomy’, and ‘total autonomy’, to translate the German die Selbständigkeit and die Verselbständigung.47 Pannenberg rejects Spinoza’s conception of the world’s self-preservation in terms of inertia, on the grounds that inertia is connected with the maintenance of things as they are, whereas the problem of continuing existence is one of dealing with contingency and constant change. Spinoza thought to disprove the notion of creaturely dependence upon God, but his very notion of self-preservation is rooted in the same problem of the continued existence of the world. ‘That which has to preserve itself has to realise that it never has its absolute basis in itself’, says Pannenberg.48 The continuing existence of the world is an issue for philosophy and theology alike, because that existence is contingent. Thus, for Pannenberg, the preserving work of God makes possible the independent existence of creatures: ‘God’s work of preservation is in the service of the independent (Selbständigkeit) existence of creatures (Geschöpfe), and his cooperation with their development is in the service of their independence in action.’49 This raises the question of divine responsibility for the presence of evil in the world; however consideration of this question must be delayed until the end of Chapter 5 and the consideration of the nature of divine power. A finite being can act, and thus manifest itself as the centre of its own activity, only in the process of time. Thus, independence for the creature with respect to God and to other creatures is conditional upon succession in the sequence of time. After the creature has won (gewonnen) its independence, it can be preserved or renewed as it participates in God’s eternity. For this, a created being needs the conditions of becoming and perishing in time. Thus since God’s aim is for the independent existence of created being, he willed time as the form of their existence.50 From the creature’s perspective, God’s eternity is future, and so the creature is referred to the future for the good that gives it duration and identity. Seen in this light, the future is a positive thing for the creature: it is the creature’s guarantee of independent existence. That future independent existence is experienced in the present as an anticipation of the future reality.51 Despite this, from the perspective of the finite creature, the future appears ambivalent. While it represents the preservation, development and consummation of their nature, the future is also experienced as a threat to the creature, because     49   50   51   47

Ibid., pp. 49. Ibid., pp. 57. Ibid., pp. 52. Ibid., pp. 96. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. P. Clayton (Edinburgh 1991), p. 91. 48

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it threatens their end and, thus, the dissolution of their independent form. In other words, independence opens up the threat of evil. We can go further and say that, in Pannenberg’s thought; evil is part of the structure of the created order necessary to bring about the independent existence of creaturely forms: ‘It is precisely because of their creaturely independence, and the related distinction from their origin in creation, that all creatures are exposed to the fate of the dissolution of their form.’52 Pannenberg sees God as subjecting creation to the power of corruptibility in the very act of creation. He supports this from Romans 8:20, drawing on Wilckens who interprets the verse as meaning that God subjects the creation to corruptibility.53 Pannenberg finds an expression of this in the thermodynamic principle of increasing entropy. Evil and Entropy Entropy, like energy, is a concept that does not yield readily to a simple definition. The second law of thermodynamics holds that in a closed system, that is, one in which energy is neither supplied nor removed, entropy always increases. The increase in entropy within a physical system always entails the dissemination of energy, in the form of heat from the system. Entropy is, thus, a measure of wastefulness or inefficiency. Several writers on science and theology have made a conceptual link between evil and entropy. Understanding entropy as a measure of disorder, these writers have made the further connection with chaos, and have sought to offer an understanding of the relationship between entropy and evil in terms of process philosophy and theology. This is the case particularly with Phillip Heffner, whose 1984 paper God and Chaos: the demiurge versus the Ungrund seeks to re-evaluate the negative conception of entropy by attempting to find a place for entropy within God.54 Robert John Russell is more conventional, and frames his discussion in terms of the Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies described by John Hick.55 Nevertheless, Russell also equates entropy with disorder and tends towards a process view. Jeffrey S. Wicken frames his discussion in terms of Eastern mysticism, but he likewise shows a similar disposition.56 The conceptual link between disorder or chaos and entropy derives largely from the work of Sir Arthur Eddington, who, as well as being a highly regarded

  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 96.   Ulrich Wilckens, Römer, 3 vols (Zürich 1978–82), vol. 2 (1980), p. 154. 54   Philip Hefner, ‘God and Chaos: the Demiurge versus the Ungrund’, Zygon 19(4) 52

53

(1984): 469–85. 55   Robert John Russell, ‘Entropy and Evil’, Zygon 19(4) (1984): 449–68; John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London 1968). 56   Jeffrey S. Wicken, ‘The Cosmic Breath: Reflections on the Thermodynamics of Creation’, Zygon 19(4) (1984): 487–505.

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physicist in his time, was also an extremely able populariser of science.57 There may be some truth and merit in the association, but, as Michael Lockwood points out, it is far from helpful and may even be misleading.58 We can see what Lockwood means through a little imaginative exercise. Imagine a gas contained in a sealed container. It is possible to conceive of the space inside the container as consisting of a number of individual cells. Maximum entropy would occur when each of these cells is occupied by a single molecule of the gas. In Lockwood’s words, to describe such a state of affairs as disordered, ‘would be an abuse of language!’59 Moreover, the only respect in which the state could be described as random would be that it had arisen by chance as the result of random processes. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines entropy as a noun which names ‘a measure of the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, in some contexts interpreted as a measure of the degree of disorder or randomness in the system’.60 This dictionary definition accurately summarises the pioneering work of two nineteenth-century physicists: Nicolas Carnot and Rudolph Clausius. Carnot realised that whilst it was theoretically possible to convert all of the mechanical energy of a system into thermal energy, the reverse is not true; it is theoretically impossible to convert all of a system’s thermal energy into mechanical energy. In effect, what this means is that, within a closed system, the mechanical energy of the system will be converted to thermal energy and the entropy of the system will increase until it reaches equilibrium. This notion can be generalised and applied to any system where energy is exchanged, regardless of the form of energy or type of system involved. Clausius coined the term ‘entropy’, and gave the world the second law of thermodynamics: in a closed system, entropy always increases to its maximum allowable state. I suggest that the key element in the linking of entropy and evil is not disorder but the futility of all systems, which the principle of entropy implies. As entropy increases, so the available energy in the system decreases; the future is always one of depletion of energy and the cessation of all useful, positive activity. Entropy then speaks of a world with no future other than that of a gradual winding-down. This, it seems to me, is a much more profound link between evil and entropy than is suggested by those who make the link in terms of chaos and disorder. It also points, as we shall see, to a new way of conceiving the ontology of evil, but for the moment let us stay with the notion of futility and explore its application to evil and entropy a little.

  A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge 1928), ch. 15.   Michael Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe (Oxford

57 58

2007), p. 222. 59   Ibid. 60   Concise Oxford English Dictionary, rev. and eds C. Soanes and A. Stevenson (Oxford 2006).

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In the Confessions, Augustine describes a trivial boyhood act – stealing pears – which, for him, becomes an incident that sheds light on the mystery of evil.61 There was, he says, no point to the theft other than the enjoyment of the act of stealing, for the pears were of no great quality and were in fact inferior to pears growing on his family’s own trees. Neither did he need the pears, for, once stolen, they were thrown to a herd of pigs. The theft of the pears was a meaningless act, he says: he gained pleasure out of nothing. An ascription of futility seems to fit well with Augustine’s description of the event, but can such a description be applied to other less trivial acts in human history? I believe it can, even though, to some, it might appear offensive. The Nazi Entlosung, the Final Solution, can be considered utterly senseless and futile. Even within its own twisted logic, it failed to secure any of its goals: it neither eliminated the Jewish population from the Third Reich nor provided that Reich with a secure future. To describe the Holocaust as futile, senseless and meaningless is by no means to undermine the sheer scale of human suffering and degradation that it entails. If anything, it brings this into even sharper focus and renders the Holocaust even more evil, if such were possible, by exposing its utter pointlessness. There is no redeeming feature of those events, nothing that could possibly even begin to justify them. There is no positive outcome which could be said to have been unachievable had the Holocaust not happened. The Holocaust stands as a senseless event in human history. Its utter senselessness and its futility mark the real depth of the evil of the period: conceiving evil as utterly futile forces us to an even starker evaluation of human suffering. The motivation for evil human acts is nothing other than evil or wickedness itself, according to Augustine: ‘I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself … I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means but shame for its own sake.’62 Here is one of Augustine’s most profound insights into evil: its sheer irrationality. Augustine goes onto to argue that evil has no causal ground. As a privation, it is a failure to act properly. Nevertheless, his insight here solved the problem for him of how evil, as privation, could be such a powerful psychological force. Its power derives from the pleasure or enjoyment taken in evil. For Augustine, this was the final resting-point. However, I think we should pursue the point a little further beyond where Augustine was compelled to stop and ask the question why this should be the case, why should it be that human beings are the kind of beings capable of enjoying evil? Recall here Mary Midgley’s insight that vices develop because we have a constitution, an ontological structure, which is prone to them. It is legitimate to ask the question why this should be the case. Why are we prone to this enjoyment of evil? The question is particularly stark for Augustine, who conceived of human beings as created in a perfect state in communion with God: a state they freely, wilfully rejected.

  Augustine, Confessions II iv 9.   Ibid.

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In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul writes of the whole of creation being subjected to futility (mataioteti) by God.63 For Augustine, such subjection was the result of the Fall: the direct result of human sin, inflicted as just punishment for that sin. However, it is far from clear that this is Paul’s meaning. According to Wilckens, Paul has in mind that the subjection of the creation to futility by God presses beyond any human activity to the will of God in creation itself.64 Several other commentators on Romans take a similar view. Thus Karl Barth sees the futility or vanity to which the creation is subjected in connection with createdness itself, rather than with any particular ‘pain or abomination or absence of beauty’.65 Cranfield notes that the majority of instances of the Greek word ‘mataioteti’ occur in the LXX in Ecclesiastes, where it denotes the ‘futility, disorder and sheer absurdity of things’.66 It denotes the ineffectiveness of that which fails to reach its goal. So, according to Cranfield, the most straightforward interpretation of the word is that the creation is unable to fulfil its divinely appointed purpose.67 Barth’s interpretation is in line with this, for he sees the vanity of createdness as a manifestation of its lack of direct life and unsatisfied hope of Resurrection. It is, in Pannenberg’s terminology, a manifestation of the self-independence of the creation. In contrast to Wilckens and Barth, Cranfield and Gaugler trace the creation’s subjection to futility back to the penalty imposed upon it as a consequence of Adam’s sin in Genesis 3:17–19.68 However, Paul nowhere indicates that this was in his mind in writing this passage of Romans, and the interpretation though a significant strand in the tradition would seem not to be supported from the text itself. It comes rather through the interpretive lens of Augustine. The point, then, is that creation is subject to futility and corruptibility from the beginning. Human beings, being part of the creation are also subject to such futility and corruptibility. The human capacity for taking pleasure in evil – in nothing, in Augustine’s terminology – goes right back to their creation. Chapter 3 will consider this point in detail. The key point here is that, in Pannenberg’s thought, natural evil (physiche Übel), understood as entropy, cannot be attributed to or linked with human sin. It is part of the divine ordering of creation, which in the hands of the creator is a means to bringing forth new forms of created being: ‘If we link it (the entropy principle) to evil (dem Übel), we can not regard it as a result of human sin. It is part of the cost of the development of independent creaturely forms within the natural order that regulates the general process of the universe.’69     65   66   67   68   69   63 64

Romans 8:20 Wilckens, Römer 2, p. 154. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford 1968), p. 413. C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans 1 (Edinburgh 1975), p. 413. Ibid., p. 414. Ibid., p. 413; Ernst Gaugler, Der Römerbrief (Zurich 1958), Vol. 1, p. 303. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 97.

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Immediately, there is a break with the Augustinian tradition, which traces even natural evil back to human moral failure. This raises an interesting question with regard to the place of evil in the created order in Pannenberg’s thought. On the one hand, evil seems to be a necessary part of the created order, for without it, independent forms could not emerge. On the other hand evil is contingent because the world is contingent. For Pannenberg, then, it seems that das Übel is a necessary part of the structure of this contingent world. Entropy and, hence, das Übel are the downside of openness to the future. Without the phenomena described by the second law of thermodynamics, the only changes that would be possible in the world would be simple reversible changes.70 This may not sound much, until it is realised that even as simple a process as that of the coming to a common temperature of a hot and a cold glass of water when mixed together is irreversible, leading to an increase in entropy. Biochemical processes utterly depend upon the second law of thermodynamics; growth and evolution are not possible without an increase in entropy. Modern thermodynamics has developed beyond the study of closed systems of classical thermodynamics to the study of non-equilibrium or open systems. Such systems model much more accurately the situations that pertain in real life. Classically, entropy is associated with the running-down of systems to a stable equilibrium. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics reveals that the increase in entropy can be associated with the emergence of complex structures in open systems. This is achieved in open systems because the energy required can be imported from outside the system This can be done, however, only at the cost of increasing entropy outside the system and hence an overall increase in entropy. Thus the second law of thermodynamics remains unbroken. Examples of ‘complex structures’ that can be generated in this way include biological life forms. So it is possible to think of biological life as existing and remaining alive at the expense of an overall increase in entropy. Life is possible only at the cost of the continual generation of entropy. The more positive side of all of this is that the future is also ‘the field of the possible’, through which the creative work of the Spirit is expressed.71 The future is the basis of consummation of created being and is thus the source of what is new. Pannenberg’s understanding of the future consummation of created being, worked out in time, might lead to the view that he sees this process as one of continual progress. Consummation for Pannenberg is indeed completion of created reality, but such completion does not happen in a straightforward manner. In a very short, but none the less significant sentence, omitted from the English translation of the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg acknowledges that ‘the new is not always better.’72 History shows no steady, unhindered progress towards its final consummation. One can not simply equate the passage of time with progress   Edward Desloge, Thermal Physics (New York 1968), pp. 27–30.   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 97. 72   The German of the Systematische Theologie 2, p. 156 has ‘Auch das Neue ist nicht 70 71

immer das Bessere.’

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towards future consummation. This is an important point. The reason that the Holocaust stands as the paradigmatic symbol of evil in the contemporary era is not because some new form of evil arose there. It is, rather, that it marks the end of the Enlightenment view of human progress overcoming evil and the end of human optimism in human moral progress. The Holocaust reveals the instruments and power of progress, technology, being pressed into the service of evil and destruction. In just the same way that the Lisbon earthquake came to mark the end of one means of understanding evil, so the Holocaust comes to stand for the abandonment of human optimism and progress. Herein lies the real significance of the symbolic power of the Holocaust and not in the suggestion that it marks the emergence of a new form of evil. Entropy and evil are parasitic upon the process of consummation. Russell sees here an analogy with Augustine’s view of evil as privatio boni.73 He sees the link between evil and entropy in analogical terms, though Russell uses the word ‘metaphorical’. He notes certain surface similarities between the concepts of evil and entropy – three similarities in particular. First, evil is linked to disorder, dysfunction, obstruction to growth, or an imperfection in being; entropy is a measure of disorder. Secondly, evil is parasitic on existence and entropy is a function of the processes of nature and parasitic upon them, not a participant in them. Finally, Russell believes that, in closed systems, both entropy and evil always increase and never decrease. I have already argued that the link between entropy and evil lies not in disorder, but in the idea of futility. Russell’s theologically constructive observation is that in general the theological tradition has underestimated the cost of life and evolution.74 Life and evolutionary processes run counter to the natural course of the increase in entropy in a closed system and as such are constantly under threat. Having discussed these similarities, Russell moves to a straightforward assimilation of the notion of entropy into received Christian tradition, linking it directly to Augustine’s ontological conception of evil as privatio boni.75 The ontology of evil to be derived from Pannenberg’s thought is, however, not one of privatio boni. The fact that evil is part of the cost which God is willing to bear for creating independent creatures must not be taken to mean that God wills evil. He does not, and takes no pleasure in it. Evil is merely an accompanying phenomenon and not an object of God’s will. Evil is ontologically null and void because it is neither a work of the divine will nor an object of his pleasure. Of course, this view of the ontological nullity of evil does not imply that evil is not a dangerous reality for the creature. Evil is real and costly for both God and creature alike, but this does not prevent evil from being a condition of the realizing of God’s purposes for the creature. The ontological nullity of evil arises from the future of evil. It is sealed only by the victory of God in the event of reconciliation on the cross and in the eschatological consummation of creation. According to   Russell, ‘Entropy and Evil’, p. 458.   Ibid., p. 459. 75   Ibid., p. 457. 73 74

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Pannenberg’s ontology, the future determines reality and therefore evil has no reality, because in eternity it will not exist. It has no future. This, however, does not mean that evil is not experienced as a real force within the temporal order. The subjection of the creation to futility, of which both physics and theology speak, is not to be interpreted as divine punishment for sin but as an expression of the continued dependence of the creation upon God. In Pannenberg’s thought, God is associated with the future: God meets us in the future and maintains us in the present. Without God there is no future, there is merely futility and decay to nothing. Evil and Ontology Three concepts dominate Pannenberg’s ontological thought: power, unity and the future. In the Systematic Theology, the theme of the future, though remaining important, becomes subsumed within the concept of eternity. It is a well-remarked upon feature of Pannenberg’s thought that he assigns ontological priority to the future, that is, it is the future of a thing which determines ultimately what it actually is. As we shall see, Pannenberg means more by the phrase, the ‘ontological priority of the future’, than simply that the future reveals what a thing is. He deploys the phrase to express the idea that the future determines what the thing is. That is, the future has more than epistemological or existential power: it has ontological power to determine what a thing is. It is this feature of Pannenberg’s thought perhaps more than any other that has occasioned the most controversy in the literature. It is almost without doubt the most perplexing aspect of his system. The concept did not arise in Pannenberg’s thinking from any thought about evil, but nevertheless it has significant implications for the project of understanding evil once more in metaphysical, ontological terms. To anticipate the conclusion of the argument, evil can be said to be ontologically null because it has no future, and it is a thing’s future that determines ultimately what the thing is, its final ontological status. The idea that evil has no future follows logically from Pannenberg’s equation of the deity of God with God’s rule in the eschatological kingdom of God. Pannenberg gained early notoriety with the remark that ‘in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist.’76 He seems to have meant by this that God’s rule is not yet complete in the world, but that the completion or fulfilment of this rule is a condition of God’s deity. The key point for our purposes is that this incompleteness of divine rule opens up a space in the world for evil. However, in the eschatological kingdom where God’s reign is fully realised, this space will have been closed up: all will be subject to divine rule. So significant is the idea of the ontological priority of the future that Philip Hefner comments rightly that the

76   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia, PA 1969), pp. 55–6.

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viability of Pannenberg’s whole project stands or falls with it.77 For this reason, it is essential to consider Pannenberg’s ontology in a little more depth. Unlike his contemporary Jürgen Moltmann, it seems that Pannenberg was not at all influenced by the Marxist philosophy of hope of Ernst Bloch. As Frank Tupper remarks, there is what is best described as a ‘provocative convergence of ideas’, between Pannenberg and Bloch, with Pannenberg reading Bloch only after he had begun to develop his ontological thought.78 Though David Polk suggests that Pannenberg found in Bloch the germ of an idea which he developed in his own way.79 Be that as it may, the crucial difference between Bloch and Pannenberg lies in Bloch’s concept of the ‘not-yet’, which for Pannenberg does not go far enough.80 Bloch’s concept is, Pannenberg believes, insufficiently grounded and can be little more than wish or fantasy for the future. Bloch, like Marx before him, sought the replacement of religious hope with anthropology. For Bloch, we project what we long for into the future, and this drives us to work for its fulfilment. Whilst Bloch has some sympathy for messianic thinking, he believes that the only hope of fulfilment of such ideas is this anthropological version.81 The ground of Pannenberg’s difference from Bloch is, I think, his very different evaluation of the human condition. This has parallels with his divergence from the philosophical anthropology of J.G. Herder, which is discussed in Chapter 4. For Pannenberg, both Bloch and Herder fail to take sufficient account of the reality of human sin and weakness that all too easily could result, not in the atheistic fulfilment of a religious utopia, but in the oppression and exploitation of some parts of humanity by others. Moreover, Bloch’s concept of the ‘not-yet’, is in actual fact a projection from the present and Pannenberg wants to assert the ontological priority of the future over all present reality, including above all psychological states.82 Nevertheless, the positive contribution which Pannenberg believes Bloch has made to theological thought is that it opens up an intellectual space for discussion of God in the contemporary world. Schubert Ogden has noted that modern philosophical discourse forces theology to choose between either sacrificing all notions of time to God’s eternity or abandoning any notion of God’s infinity in favour of maintaining human temporality and freedom.83 Ogden bemoans the lack of a third option, but it is this that Pannenberg is seeking to develop.84   Philip Hefner, ‘Theological Reflection’, Una Sancta 25 (1968), p. 44.   E.F.Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Philadelphia, PA 1974), p. 26. 79   David Polk, On the Way to God: An Exploration into the Theology of Wolfhart 77 78

Pannenberg (Lanham, MD 1989), p. 255. 80   Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology 2, pp. 238–40. 81   E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice and P. Knight (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 82   Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology 2, p. 240. 83   Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God (London 1967), p. 160. 84   Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (Edinburgh 2002), p. 106.

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It has to be admitted frankly that there is no ‘knock-down’, winning, or irrefutable argument within the Pannenberg corpus for the ontological priority of the future. In keeping with the notion of Pannenberg’s system as a research programme, the ontological priority of the future takes its place as part of the interlocking series of hypotheses, which taken together, offer an account of reality. Nevertheless, the notion is developed and argued for on the basis of two fundamental and ongoing philosophical debates: the relationship between being and appearance, or essence and existence, and the twin concepts of contingency and freedom. The relationship between the existence of an object (that is, what it appears to be to us), and its essence (that is, what it is in and of itself) is a puzzle that has long exercised philosophical thinking. Classical philosophy gave priority to essence, arguing that the self-sufficient ideas were ontologically prior to the world of sense experience. Kant made the decisive shift, however, by giving priority to the phenomenological world, thus shifting the emphasis to appearance. Seeing the two as inseparable, what Pannenberg seeks to do is to explore the implication of taking seriously temporality for understanding the relationship between appearance (existence) and essence.85 For it is clear that though the two are inseparable, existence and essence are not identical and, moreover, appearance does not exhaust essence: a thing is always more than it appears to be, though appearance is a realisation of essence and therefore has ontological significance. Thus, while much modern philosophy has focused on appearance, phenomenology, following the post-Kantian stress on the importance of cognition and imagination in shaping experience (appearance), Pannenberg seeks to take seriously the implications for a thing’s essence the fact that our experience and therefore a thing’s appearance changes with time. In other words, Pannenberg wants to find a way of reintegrating existential and ontological realities. In constructing his argument, Pannenberg claims that the notion of the ontological priority of the future is already implicit in classical philosophy. The Platonic quest for the Good, suggests Pannenberg, is just that: a quest. The Good is not an object that is possessed, but something that is sought and therefore in the future. Likewise, Aristotle’s notion that the essence of a thing is its goal implies future, Pannenberg suggests.86 In considering the relationship between appearance and essence in the context of temporality, we are faced with two options. We could, following classical philosophy, take essence to be fixed. There are, however, two weaknesses to this approach. First, it underestimates the importance of our experience of reality, and secondly, it implies that essence is timeless. The alternative option, argues Pannenberg, is to see appearance as the arrival in the present of what is future. This takes seriously our changing experience of the thing, but also implies that, as our experience of the thing changes – that is, as its appearance changes – so does its essence, in the present at least. For Pannenberg, the Kantian stress on the   Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, p. 131.   Ibid., pp. 137–9.

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imagination suggests that the knowing subject goes beyond the given and alters it, either through technology or imaginative construction. The leap that he makes is to see this as something more than simply a projection. Such technological or imaginative constructions are a realisation of an object already hidden in the future which comes to be seen – to appear – in the present. What the thing is ultimately, is determined by the future. An analogy is perhaps apposite. When asked the question when was Queen Elizabeth the second born the answer given is, reasonably enough, 21 April 1926. This is perfectly true, but to those present at the birth itself, a baby girl was born who was destined to become a minor part of the British royal family. Only subsequent historical events meant that the baby born on 21 April 1926 would become the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For Pannenberg, essence and time belong together just as indeed existence and essence belong together: Do we not … have to understand the synthetic constructions of the productive imagination … as anticipations of the essential future of what is given in appearance? Is it not only with this pre-supposition that we can possibly understand the miracle of the correspondence to objective reality and of the realisability of spontaneous human construction? 87

In some ways, this is reminiscent of Heidegger’s position adopted in Being and Time (1962). However, there is a crucial difference between Pannenberg and Heidegger. For Heidegger, the horizon against which completeness is assessed is anthropological, existential: it is the individual life which is complete only in the moment of death. For Pannenberg, death does not complete an individual life but fragments, divides, life.88 Pannenberg could be read as attempting to extend Heidegger’s insights to the whole of reality rather than merely human reality. This includes past present and future existence. Thus Pannenberg’s horizon of meaning is eschatological and it is only with the completeness of all that is, that the essence of all things is finally determined. The twin ideas of freedom and contingency are long established in both science and philosophy. Science long ago abandoned any concept of telos in its investigation of the world and has recognised the importance of chance. Classical physical laws predict macroscopic behaviours of matter well under carefully defined conditions, but at the quantum level, individual events have long been thought of as having only statistical predictability: In theological perspective such uniformities … as well as enduring forms of natural reality are considered as contingent products of the creative freedom of

  Ibid., pp. 140–41, original emphasis.   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. P. Clayton (Edinburgh

87 88

1998), p. 87.

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Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God God. The unity of contingency and continuity in the creative activity of God as well as in its products is rooted in God’s faithfulness.89

Theology is at one, then, with science in recognising genuine contingency in the world, but, for Pannenberg, this has serious consequences for ontology. If the new is to be genuinely contingent, then it cannot have had to have come into existence: for the new to be genuinely contingent, it must be due to more than merely antecedent causes. There is some surplus in the existence of the new which cannot be accounted for by antecedent causes: the new is more than the outcome of the past and the present. This surplus, argues Pannenberg, comes from out of the future. For Pannenberg, it seems that contingency, if it is real, implies a reversal of the normal conception of how a thing arises. Rather than seeing the new as arising from the past and present, we should see the thing as being set free from the future and brought, retroactively, into relation with the past and the present, which, in its turn, was received from the future in the same way. If, however, the connection of events is grounded in the faithfulness of the free God, then we do not have to conceive a continuity of something enduring from the past into the future after the manner, say, of a development. Rather, we must think of events which are themselves contingent, as being at the same time linked backward and referred to what has happened: ‘By means of such backward linking, the continuity of history is established … Only in this way, as a backwardreaching incorporation of the contingently new into what has been … can the primary connection of history be conceived without loosing its contingency.’90 The future is thus seen by Pannenberg as the realm of openness and possibility, the realm of the still undecided. So keen is he to press this point that he appears at times to shade over into a determination by the future rather than a genuinely contingent event in the present; ‘in every event … does the future determine the present.’91 In turn, this implies a real power belonging to the future, one that has creative abilities. I will consider the question of determinacy later in Chapter 4, but, for now, I want to focus on the question of the sense in which the future as the realm of possibilities may be said to be powerful. How can possibilities exert power over that which is actual? In many accounts of causation, possibility is not considered. Conventional thought suggests that only the real can have power, and that, therefore, possibilities can have power only to the extent that they are real. Mostert points out that Pannenberg reverses this consideration: possibilities are real because they have power.92 Possibilities can be real – be powerful – without 89   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith (Louisville, KY 1993), p. 37. 90   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 1, pp. 75–6. 91   Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, p. 90, emphasis added. 92   Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (London, 2002), pp. 102–3.

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yet existing. Strictly speaking, of course, the possibility already exists in the present, when it is powerful, and I think that what Mostert takes Pannenberg to mean here is that a possibility can exercise creative power on the present, before the possibility becomes realised or concretised in the present, before it appears, in other words. Pannenberg severs the link between what is real and what presently exists. Something is said to be real (wirklich) if it is effective (wirksam) in the present moment. David Polk has drawn attention to the parallelism in the German that Pannenberg uses:93 What belongs to the future is not yet existent, and yet it already determines the present experience, at least the present experience of beings … who are orientated toward the future and always experience their present and past in the light of a future which they hope for or which they fear. Thus the future is real although it does not yet exist.94

I have attempted to describe Pannenberg’s ontological understanding of the future and particularly his notion of the power of the future without reference at this stage to God. This is the right approach, I believe, since, even though Pannenberg’s ontological thought and his understanding of God are significantly intertwined, his concept of the ontological priority of the future is not developed in a specifically theistic framework. It does not require the concept of God for its coherence. Nevertheless, Mostert is almost certainly correct in his assertion that the ontological priority of the future makes most sense within a theistic context. This is true particularly of the notion of the power of the future which, considering the fact that for Pannenberg God is the power of the future, will be the subject of the discussion of Chapter 4. The ontological nullity of evil follows from understanding evil in relation to God as the power of the future in Pannenberg’s theology. Recall that, for Pannenberg, what is real is connected with what has power. To speak of the ontological nullity of evil refers to its ultimate lack of power. At first sight, this seems absurd, for our everyday experience is that evil does have a concrete power to cause harm and suffering. The key to understanding evil’s lack of power, however, lies in the word ultimate; evil has no power to frustrate the divine purpose for the creation. All of its affects will be overcome but because this final status is just that, a final, eschatological status, it must of necessity remain unclear until the end of history, when the true nature of things is finally established. In the present, however, evil can and does exert considerable existential power. It was noted in the discussion above that the divine will for the creation is that it should enter freely into a loving relationship with God: that is, that the creation should participate in the divine relationships that constitute God as Trinity. If this is to be achieved, and if evil is to be really revealed to be powerless, then nothing can be lost from creation.   Polk, On the Way to God, p. 258.   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 3, p. 110.

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All the damaging affects of evil must finally be overcome. The logic of Pannenberg’s theology in terms of soteriology, therefore, is strongly universal. The insistence that evil will be overcome is a distinctive aspect of Pannenberg’s theological account of evil and stands in marked contrast to accounts of evil which see evil as a human, psychological, or existential problem. Thus, for example, Richard Bernstein, whilst wanting to resist the reification of evil, none the less accepts that whilst we must continue to combat each new specific form of evil that arises in human activity, the fact remains that new forms of evil continue to arise as human history moves on.95 Evil as evil remains a part of the human condition. Evil qua evil as opposed to its specific manifestations cannot be overcome or eliminated. Using the German terms deployed by Pannenberg discussed above, specific instances of wickedness (das Böse) can and must be combated but evil (das Übel) will always be a feature of reality. How evil can be overcome is the subject of Chapter 5. Conclusions In this chapter, then, a conceptual link has been made between entropy and evil in terms of futility, rather than disorder, which is the more usual way that the link has been made in the literature in the past. Understanding the link in this way leads to several insights. First, linking futility to the divine will in creation enables the link between physical evil and moral evil, which was severed by the Enlightenment, to be reforged. Whilst Augustine saw the causal link running from moral to physical evil, a consideration of entropy as futility reverses the causal direction. Moral evil is the result of the subjection of the creation to futility: that is, moral evil is the result of physical evil. Second, the reversal of the relationship between moral and physical evil also makes it possible to discern an underlying structure to the phenomenon of evil, relating physical and moral evil and the suffering that results from these to the underlying structure of the world. Third, the idea of the futility of the world was linked to the loss of future of the world, and expresses the dependence of the creation upon God for its continued existence. Through a consideration of Pannenberg’s notion of the ontological priority of the future, it was suggested that the ontological nullity of evil, described by Augustine as a privation of good, be reformulated in terms of evil’s lack of future. Though the conceptual link with entropy itself suggests this, it offers no hope for any future. The picture of the future which the concept of entropy presents us with is one of steady continual, decline. Small, local reversals of this trend are possible and entirely consistent with the second law of thermodynamics,   Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge 2002),

95

p. 231.

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but such reversals will always be temporary and at the expense of an increase in the entropy of the universe as a whole. There is no prospect for the creation itself of overcoming evil. This conclusion matches the insights on human evil offered by writers such as Bernstein.96 The consideration of evil in terms of entropy has enabled this psychological and philosophical insight to be generalised and applied to the universe as a whole. The fourth insight made possible by linking evil and entropy in terms of futility is to expose twin divine responsibilities in creation. In subjecting creation to futility in its inception, as an integral part of created finite existence, responsibility for evil in the world falls inescapably on the Creator. This is particularly true if the world is thought of as being created out of nothing. Under these circumstances, it seems hardly possible to conceive of ultimate responsibility for the presence of evil in the world as resting anywhere other than with God. It was Augustine’s mistake to seek to absolve God of this responsibility and to seek to place it in the realm of created agents. The relationship between divine and human responsibility for evil will be considered at the end of Chapter 4. The second divine responsibility follows from this and from the consideration of the ontology of evil in terms of the ontological priority of the future, for it is also God’s responsibility to overcome evil in the world. With this idea, the emphasis changes, and the focus shifts away from the concept of evil to the nature of divine love that is considered in Chapters 4 and 5.

  Ibid., p. 230.

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Chapter 3

Can Sin Be Original? In the previous chapter, it was argued that evil, understood in terms of entropy, is a structural element of the created order. Since human beings are a part of that created order, it would seem at first glance that Pannenberg is committed to the view that human beings are, by nature, sinful. Writing in 1973, Pannenberg acknowledged this as a potential issue in the interpretation of his theology: … in my radio lectures on anthropology dating back to 1962 (What is Man?), I identified sin as a basic component in the structure of the human organism and behaviour, having the character of self-centeredness which is inescapable though supersedable in human life. I was prepared for someone to charge me with Flacianism, i.e. for identifying sin with the nature of man, but fortunately nobody seems to have meditated on the consequences of that statement for the evaluation of the empirical situation of man.1

Clearly, Pannenberg does not believe that this would be an accurate interpretation of his theology, but we are, nevertheless, left with the question of the relationship between the structural presence of evil in the created order and thus in human ontology and actual human wickedness. This chapter seeks to probe Pannenberg’s theological anthropology in order to answer that question. Traditionally, human evil has been given the label ‘sin’, and the human capacity or bias towards sin has been considered under the heading of original sin. Robert Jenson holds ‘we cannot and must not try to understand how sin is possible.’2 This view follows directly from Jenson’s one-sentence definition of sin, which is taken directly from Barth, as ‘that which God does not want done’.3 Both are very close to Luther: ‘… so deep the corruption of nature that reason cannot understand it. It must be believed because of the revelation in the Scriptures.’4

  ‘Postscript’ in Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (London 1974), pp. 303–5, at p. 304. 2   Robert W Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2: The Works of God (Oxford 1997), p. 134. 3   Ibid., p. 133, cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2 449. 4   Martin Luther, The Book of Concord, trans. and ed. T.G. Tappert (Philadelphia, PA 1959), p. 302. 1

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The consequence of this view is to remove all theological talk of human wickedness from the public realm, a point that is well made by Alistair McFadyen.5 McFadyen realises that for Christian theologians to collude with the removal of the discussion of sin from the public realm is in effect to concede the public sphere altogether: the doctrine of sin becomes something of a test case for the viability of public speech about God. Pannenberg offers an alternative approach to the question of human wickedness that does not concede the public realm to nontheological discourse: Even the theological interpretation of it as a turning from God to the point of hostility to God derives its persuasiveness from the fact that it can be shown to be necessarily implied by the empirical data, even though the radical perversity represented by such behaviour can be grasped only in the light of biblical.6

Human wickedness is a matter of psychological description and observation in the first instance, and a theological description of the phenomenon derives any command for assent that it possesses because of its explanatory power in helping us to understand the psychological data. So against Luther, Barth, Jenson and many others, we must insist that reason inquires into the grounds of human wickedness. Jenson’s definition understands sin in terms of action: it is things done which ought not to be done. Thus Jenson is concerned with sins rather than the human condition of sin. As such, Jenson’s theology of sin is subject to the same ‘basic defect’ that Althaus discerned in Albrecht Ritschl’s view of sin: that it takes its starting-point in actions rather than in the being of a person. The whole point of the doctrine of original sin is that before any action on an individual’s part, before any operation of enticement or action of the environment, all human beings are subject to the ‘power of evil’, regardless of their context, simply by virtue of their humanity.7 Behind Jenson’s disavowal of the search for the cause of sin lies the recognition that sin is no positively willed thing, and as such can have no cause. Nevertheless, the reality of sin, or at least human wickedness, is all too apparent and the question of its cause, or at least its ground, persists and cannot be as easily dismissed as Jenson would like. In this chapter, the human capacity for evil is discussed in terms of Pannenberg’s theological anthropology. The word ‘sin’ declares two things about human evil. In the first instance, it sets human evil apart from natural evil. In the traditional understanding of evil in the world, derived from Augustinian theology, natural evil is understood as a direct consequence of moral evil or sin. However, since the Enlightenment, this scheme has been difficult to maintain and evil has increasingly been understood 5   Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, vol. 6 (Cambridge 2000), p. 4. 6   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell. (Philadelphia, PA 1985), p. 91. 7   Paul Althaus, Die Christliche Wahrheit (Gütersloh 1962), pp. 372–3.

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as a human phenomenon. Things which may once have been considered evil, such as earthquakes and other natural disasters or biological predation, are now considered to be natural phenomena; ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, to use Tennyson’s well-worn phrase. In the discussion of evil as a theological problem in the previous chapter, it was suggested that the traditional relationship between natural and moral evil be reversed: that is, that moral evil be understood as a consequence of the structural evil (Übel) present in the world. This chapter considers the theological anthropology of evil and grounds this new understanding of the relationship between natural and moral evil in anthropology. The argument of this current chapter is meant to serve as an anthropological grounding of the systematic considerations of Chapter 2. The second declaration that use of the word sin makes is to relate human evil to a divine expectation or teleology. As a matter of fact, people can be wicked, but it does not necessarily follow that this wickedness is sin, because there is a relational element to the concept of sin, which defines human wickedness in relation to God. The question of human relatedness to God is for Pannenberg also an anthropological question. For Pannenberg, as we noted earlier, theology has never been able to meet the challenge of Feuerbach – that the idea of God is no more than a projection of human characteristics. For Pannenberg, it is only by moving behind the Hegelian and anthropological concepts that Feuerbach employs that this challenge can be met. Thus it is that in attending to the ontological constitution of human being that both the question of human relatedness to God and the human capacity for evil can be explored. The question of the human capacity for evil thus points in two directions. It raises questions about human relatedness to the world and simultaneously about human relatedness to God. The argument to be pursued here is that the resolution of both of these sets of questions is to be found in a consideration of the structure of human being in the world. The questions of the human capacity for evil and that of the human relationship to God are ontological questions in other words. It will be argued that sin and original sin should be considered in terms of human ontology, and that they are moral terms only in a secondary, derivative sense. Human Wickedness as Sin To designate human wickedness as sin is to assert both the purposefulness of human beings and their relationship to God. Neither of these assertions may be assumed, but must be argued for from reflection upon the nature of human being in the world. Theologically speaking, much rests upon the possibility of grounding these assertions, for if they cannot be maintained, theology forfeits the right to contribute to the public arena as anything other than a curiosity. Alistair McFadyen notes: … the general absence of sin-talk from serious public discussion of human pathologies is not something that may either be passed over in silence or

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enthusiastically embraced by Christians without colluding with the more general retreat of god-talk from public life and discourse … The doctrine of sin is not so much an isolated case of Christian embarrassment concerning anachronistic aspects of Christian faith, as a crucial test case of our ability to speak of God in relation to the world at all.8

The language of sin is necessarily theological language and as such is irreducible to other modes of discourse about human wickedness. Sin cannot be understood solely in moral terms without there being some loss of meaning in the translation. Sin is more than doing wrong things. However, if sin language is to be retained, it must prove itself in terms of its explanatory power with regard to the phenomenon of human evil. Accepting the reality of human wickedness as an empirical fact, it must be shown that the concept of sin offers a stronger explanation of the phenomenon than other non-theological concepts. In order to do this, however, it must be shown that there is a theological dimension inherent in the phenomenon of human wickedness which, if neglected, results in an incomplete account of the phenomenon. This is an application of Pannenberg’s stated theological method with regard to the theological appropriation of anthropological descriptions of human phenomena. Pannenberg writes: The aim is to lay theological claim to the human phenomena described in the anthropological disciplines. To this end, the secular description is accepted as simply a provisional version of reality, a version that needs to be expanded and deepened by showing that the anthropological datum itself contains a further and theologically relevant dimension.9

With regard to sin, if this is to be understood in terms of human ontology and not simply as a matter of moral choices, then it must be shown that the structure of human being in the world implies human relatedness to God. This leads us to the question of original sin and the question of a human bias towards wickedness. The Question of Original Sin The doctrine of original sin occupies a particular place in western theology. McFadyen describes its position as ‘dominant’,10 by which he means that all discussions of the doctrine of sin in western theology are shaped by concepts of original sin. This is true, he suggests, even of those who offer alternative theological constructs, because they do so in conscious opposition to the concept of original sin. True though this undoubtedly is, as Rondet discusses, the doctrine of original   McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 4.   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, pp. 19–20. 10   McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 15. 8 9

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sin has never met with unambiguous acceptance and the Fathers themselves are far from clear on the subject.11 The Augustinian doctrine of original sin consists of two basic components. First, it offers an explanation for the source of sin. This depends upon a literal reading of Genesis 3: sin enters the world through the free decision of particular historical human beings who turn away from God. Secondly, the doctrine insists that all subsequent generations of human beings inherit the consequences of this first sin. By this is meant more than that we simply inherit a bias towards evil. Rather, along with this inherited bias, we inherit also accountability for this inherited sin: the sin of Adam itself is inherited in the form of guilt. McFadyen identifies four key assertions about the nature of sin made by the doctrine. Sin is contingent, that is, it is not inevitable and need not have happened. In this regard, it cannot be understood as a part of the structure of human being, but only as a distortion of that structure. Secondly, sin is radical in that it subsists and endures as a fundamental distortion of human being in the world: ‘There is an underlying, systemic and structural distortion of the conditions of human sociality, of the most basic patterns of disposition which constitute our personal relationships and which underlie our actions.’12 In other words, original sin is not so much an act as a condition. McFadyen uses the word ‘situation’, noting that the term ‘state’, which is often used in preference to ‘act’, is a rather static term.13 I agree with this perception but I have a reservation with the term ‘situation’. This term seems to me to indicate a social setting or a distortion of the context of the individual human being, rather than a distortion of the individual’s own ontological structure; my term ‘condition’ is intended to convey that, in speaking of original sin, I am primarily talking about an ontological distortion of individual human beings, even though this condition is to be understood as universal. This point is borne out in McFadyen’s third point – that as a fundamental distortion of the conditions in which we are called to personhood, original sin is communicable. It arises in the material from which we construct our personhood and so infects us before we are capable of performing morally culpable acts.14 Finally, because it is a distortion of the fundamental structure of human being, original sin is universal. Critics of original sin take issue with the doctrine at two points. First, in the form in which it is traditionally promulgated, the doctrine seems to require an historical fall of the original human pair and thus relies upon the literal historical facticity of Genesis 3. The more interesting point of challenge, however, lies in the notion of an individual human being’s responsibility for their actions. The doctrine is rejected on the grounds that it seems to demand moral responsibility from the individual for something that others have done and for things that the individual 11   Henri Rondet, Original Sin: the Patristic and Theological Background, trans. Cajetan Finegan (Shannon 1972). 12   McFadyen, Bound to Sin, p. 17. 13   Ibid. 14   Ibid.

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has done through their inherited, unavoidable predisposition. Thus Paul Ricoeur describes the doctrine as ‘a monstrous combination of the juridical concept of imputation in order for evil to be voluntary and a biological concept of inheritance in order for it to be involuntary, acquired, contracted’.15 Stripped of its mythic overtones, it seems to me that what the traditional doctrine of original sin is attempting to describe is the universality and unavoidability of sin. Modern critiques of the doctrine take it for granted that sin is a moral category. There is a real grounding of this view in the tradition, because the traditional doctrine is built around the supposed free decision of one historically unique human being. The fact that the supposed universal human condition arises from a decision and act puts the doctrine squarely in the moral paradigm. Kant’s interpretation of the doctrine under the guise of ‘radical evil’ merely develops a theme that is already implicit in the traditional, Augustinian doctrine. It seems to me that so long as we remain in this moral paradigm, the doctrine of original sin is indefensible on both theological and moral grounds. Thus the theological account of human wickedness is shown to be inadequate. If what the doctrine seeks to say about the human condition is to be rescued from this indefensibility, then the doctrine must be reconceived along non-moral lines. In other words, the cause of sin needs to be looked for not in human decisions but in the very structures of human being. The Question of God and the Origin of Human Wickedness as Ontological Questions Pannenberg engages with a number of thinkers, including Irenaeus, Augustine, Kant, Kierkegaard and Althaus, in the development of his theological anthropology. Recently, Kam Ming Wong has discussed Pannenberg’s ‘heavy reliance’ upon the philosophical and theological anthropology of Johann Gottfried Herder in his discussion of the concept of the imago Dei.16 Pannenberg’s use of Herder is a clear indication that his discussion of anthropology is conducted in the context of German anthropology, grounded in the Enlightenment. Herder was for a while Kant’s pupil, though Zammito offers an account of the rivalry that developed between the two as the discipline of anthropology came to birth.17 Herder’s most influential work is the Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, published in translation in 1800. In this work, Herder discusses the idea of the image of God as something which is a potential in human being: something that evolves and is dynamic and is thus orientated to the future rather than something which is static, 15   Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, rev. trans. Charles A. Kelbley; intro. Walter J. Lowe (New York 1986), p. 286. 16   Kam Ming Wong, ‘Image of God as both fount and destiny of humanity: how Herderian is Pannenberg?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 59 (2006): 45–63. 17   John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL 2002).

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once held in full by human beings and now lost. Herder’s work on the imago Dei in human beings sets him apart from his contemporaries, who make no connection between the future destiny of human beings and the imago. It is not difficult to see why Pannenberg is attracted to Herder’s work; however, we should not overplay Herder’s influence on Pannenberg. It would be more accurate to say that Pannenberg develops his theological anthropology in conversation with a number of partners, of whom Herder is one. For the purposes of the present discussion, there are two connected and significant differences between Pannenberg and Herder. For Herder, the focus for the fulfilment of human destiny rests upon human faith in divine providence, whilst for Pannenberg this fulfilment is given a soteriological focus through Christ. This refocusing leads to the second difference between the two; in Pannenberg’s view, Herder failed to take seriously enough the impact of human brokenness, or sin, on the possibility of the fulfilment of human destiny. Wong believes that Herder’s thought is ‘pivotal’ for Pannenberg’s work on anthropology, and indeed it is. However, it would be overstating the case to rank Herder’s influence on Pannenberg alongside that of Hegel. Herder’s work enables Pannenberg to find an anthropological grounding for a number of key theological concepts. Herder’s work on the imago laid the ground for a number of developments in the understanding of the ontological structure of human being, and it is Pannenberg’s appropriation and development of this that enables him ground the concept of the imago Dei more securely than Herder was able to do. It also provides him with the means of dealing with Feuerbach’s challenge to theology, which is a significant issue for Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task. Finally, Pannenberg’s anthropological ontology enables him to give an account of the human capacity for evil in non-moral terms, which in turn provides the grounding for the theological understanding of evil discussed in the previous chapter. German philosophical anthropology roots the consideration of the unique structure of human being in human biology. It locates the difference between human and other animals in the observation that, whilst animals are governed by their instincts, human beings have gained a measure of control of their biological and evolutionary instincts, which in turn gives them a measure of distance from their environment This is Herder’s view of the uniqueness of human beings in the world: ‘It seems assured that man is by far inferior to the animals in the intensity and reliability of his instincts and indeed that he does not have at all what in many species we regard as innate artifactive skills and drives.’18 A distinction is made between the terms ‘environment’ and ‘world’. An animal’s environment is its habitat, the biological milieu to which the animal is adapted and which supplies its physical needs. Human beings, by contrast, are not bound to a particular environment and can have ever ‘new experiences that are different in kind’ and have ‘possibilities for responding to the reality perceived almost without 18   J.G. Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, in J.J. Rousseau and J.G. Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. J.H. Moran and A. Gode (New York 1967), p. 103.

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limit’.19 They are said to be ‘open to the world’. This phrase is intended to convey human conscious awareness of and relatedness to things beyond their immediate biological environment. Openness to the world thus equates to consciousness. Writing in 1950, Arnold Gehlen thought that philosophical anthropology had not advanced beyond Herder’s position.20 By this, he cannot possibly have meant that Herder had said all that it was possible to say about human being. It is demonstrably untrue that philosophical anthropology has said nothing new since 1772, when Herder first published his conception of human being as open to the world. Rather what Gehlen means is that human uniqueness is understood today still in terms of the empirical fact that human beings are far less governed by instinct than is the case with other animals. There is a measure of flexibility and conscious control over the way human beings respond to different stimuli. Rather than being governed by their instincts, human beings are open to the world. Openness to the world has both positive and negative consequences for human beings. Positively, it is the source of all the cultural activity through which human beings have developed. Negatively, it is also the ground of human wickedness: ‘born almost without instinct, we are formed to manhood only by the practice of a whole life, and both the perfectibility and corruptibility of our species depend on it.’21 Herein lies a vital clue to the link between human uniqueness, which the theological tradition has always understood in terms of our being made in the image of God, and the human capacity for evil. On Herder’s view, and as we shall see, Pannenberg’s, human beings are not yet in the image of God but have a predisposition or a destiny towards this. The ground of this predisposition is simultaneously the ground of the human capacity for corruptibility and hence evil. There is a parallel here with Augustine’s view of the ground of evil lying in the fact that human beings are created ex nihilo and hence are corruptible. The advantage of Herder’s conception lies in the fact that we have no recourse to the mythological language that Augustine was compelled to use. By reconfiguring the imago Dei as a destination rather than as something that human beings have lost, we can begin to understand the source of evil in ways that do not depend upon a literal, historical view of the Fall narratives. It also provides a solution to that most perplexing of questions left by the Augustinian paradigm: why perfect human beings should turn from their creator in the first place. This, however, is to take a step too far for the moment, for we have yet to show the link between openness to the world and the question of God. This question is prior, if the corruptibility of the human species is to be understood in terms of sin. For the moment, the line of inquiry to be pursued is that both the human capacity for evil, and human uniqueness, are grounded in the ontological structure of human being and that this can be understood without   Wolfhart Pannenberg, What Is Man?, trans. Duane Priebe (Philadelphia, PA 1970), p. 5.   Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Wiesbaden

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1986), p. 90. 21   Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill in 1800 (New York 1966), p. 226, emphasis added.

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reference to an original state of human perfection. To follow this line, we need to pursue in a little more detail the content of this openness to the world. Openness to the world has become the central concept of German philosophical anthropology, the basic premise of which is that human beings must be understood in terms both of their corporeality and as an expression of a subjective centre. Two broad strands of interpretation of the concept of openness to the world can be discerned in the discipline. Max Scheler understood openness to the world as arising from a direct intervention by ‘spirit’.22 On this view, human uniqueness is not the result of the evolutionary process and, as such, Scheler understood that spirit is opposed to life by which he seems to mean that spirit is opposed to instinctual existence. For Scheler, the concept of God is indispensable. Gehlen, on the other hand, understood the situation without reference to God, replacing the role of spirit in Scheler’s thought with human action. On Gehlen’s view, we become free or open to the world as a direct result of our own individual actions. The feature that these two have in common is that human beings, as human, cannot be accounted for exclusively in evolutionary terms, but are the direct result of intervention in the evolutionary process, either divine or human. Helmuth Plessner, on the other hand, develops an alternative conceptual scheme in terms of human exocentricity. According to Plessner, human beings have a centre outside themselves: that is, they are capable of understanding the world from a perspective outside themselves. In turn, this capacity gives them the capacity for self-reflection. Pannenberg points out that in the final analysis exocentricity, and hence openness to the world, in Plessner’s work reduces to self-consciousness.23 In turn, this is equated in German idealism with ‘spirit’. Thus the two strands of philosophical anthropology are in fact making virtually identical claims. The importance of Plessner’s terminology, however, lies in the fact that the openness to the world that characterises the human way of being in the world can be accounted for solely in evolutionary terms. On Plessner’s understanding, openness to the world does not require external intervention. Rather, it can be understood in terms of a structural modification of life itself at a particular stage of the development of human beings. It also overcomes a particular weakness in Gehlen’s understanding. In order to make room for openness to the world, Gehlen was forced into an understanding of human beings as ‘deficient’.24 This deficiency, according to Gehlen, is the result of the ‘premature birth’ of the human being before the instincts have had time to develop fully.25 According to Gehlen, this means that human instincts are blended with one another and therefore operate in uncertain ways in comparison to animal instincts. The basic task of humanity is to overcome this deficiency, and it is the development of language and culture that makes this task possible. Paradoxically, it is the variety of responses made possible by the     24   25   22 23

Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (Boston, MA 1961). p. 47. Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 37. Gehlen, Der Mensch, p. 109. Ibid.

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ambiguity of the human instinctive structure that gives rise to the possibility of language and culture. Thus the ontological human structure is both the cause of weakness and simultaneously provides the ground for human beings to overcome this weakness. For Gehlen, overcoming this human weakness, or deficiency, is the result of human action. This has significant implications for the way that God may be understood. On Scheler’s original view, human beings are the direct result of, the direct creation of, God. On Gehlen’s view, God and religion are to be understood only as the result of human activity; they are the by-products of the human drive to overcome human deficiency, that is, human beings create themselves in their quest to gain control of their world. Gehlen’s understanding of human being has been criticised on several fronts. Pannenberg identifies two significant points: Gehlen’s negative view of the human biological condition, and the fact that human beings are not open to the world in an unqualified way. Rather, human openness to the world is at best fragmentary and indirect.26 In terms of understanding human uniqueness in relation to the question of God, the concept of openness to the world does not appear to have advanced our understanding at all, for in relation to this question we can adopt two diametrically opposed positions. We can take the view that human beings are as they are as a result of a direct intervention by God from outside the evolutionary process, in which case we are forced to postulate the existence of God as the ground of human being. This is Scheler’s view of the matter. Alternatively, we can view the unique way of human being in the world as having evolved by natural processes without requiring direct divine intervention. This is Gehlen’s view. The question of God thus becomes an irrelevant question. Neither option takes us beyond Feuerbach’s position, though the latter view, if it can be demonstrated beyond doubt would in fact constitute grounds for rejecting the notion of God altogether in favour of a purely naturalistic account of human being. Plessner develops an understanding of human openness to the world in terms of human being having an exocentric structure, and this provides Pannenberg with the terminology he needs in order to resolve this dilemma. The language of exocentricity also supplies the conceptual apparatus necessary for understanding sin in ontological terms. From the beginning, Pannenberg has understood human openness to the world as indicating much more than openness to the world of finite reality. He has held consistently that openness to the world includes in principle openness to what is beyond the world. That is, openness to the world has no finite limits but must include openness to that which bounds the world – the infinite. Whatever understanding our openness to the world has reached, it can always be transcended.27 As David Polk remarks, we are pressed ever onward into the open towards something that ever remains undefined.28 This can be understood straightforwardly as a step into the universal, as the apprehension of the otherness of an object in relation   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 40.   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, p. 217. 28   Polk, On the Way to God, p. 94. 26

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to all other objects, but Pannenberg wants to go further, saying that it is a step that reaches in principle beyond the world of existing things into the eternal and hence divine. The religious thematic of human being is a major sub-theme of Pannenberg’s theology, driven by Feuerbach’s critique of religion: Even when they move beyond all experience or the idea of perceptible objects they continue to be exocentric, related to something other than themselves, but now to an other beyond all objects of their world, an other that at the same time embraces this entire world and thus ensures the possible unification of the life of human beings in the world, despite the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the world’s actions on them.29

This may sound very like an attempt to argue God into existence with an anthropological version of Anselm’s ontological argument: since human beings are exocentrically structured, even beyond the totality of all existing things, there must be something for human beings to be related to, but Pannenberg denies that this is such an argument.30 Nevertheless he continues: In fact when human beings reach out to a very general horizon embracing all the individual objects of actual or possible perception, they are relating themselves exocentrically to a reality prior to them; in this reaching out they are therefore implicitly affirming at the same time the divine reality, even though they have not yet grasped this thematically as such, much less in this or that particular form.31

The critic is justified in asking why ‘in fact’? Why does this have to be the case? Feuerbach’s theory of projection seems just as likely an explanation of the phenomenon. Why not simply stop at the absolute contingency of the world and accept this as the final reality? I think that Pannenberg’s point here is not to provide a conclusive proof of the error in Feuerbach’s projection theory but simply to point out that the religious question, the question of God, is for human beings an open question. The question belongs to our very nature. One answer to the question is certainly that the concept of God is a human projection, but that is not the only answer that is either possible or plausible. Precisely because the question is raised by the structure of human being, it can also be answered plausibly in the affirmative, but there can be no automatic rest in the concept of God because the very notion of human exocentricity means that we can distance ourselves from the concept of God also: it can be relativised to the human perceiving subject as any other object of our perception. Pannenberg agrees with older ideas of human exocentricity, but adds two qualifications. First, when discussing human exocentric behaviour, we are dealing with a real relation to the unconditional or the infinite,   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 69.   Ibid., p. 73. 31   Ibid., p. 69. 29

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and secondly, every attempt to conceptualise this intellectually is always finite and therefore able to be transcended in principle, just as other finite ideas can be transcended.32 There can never be any question of direct access to the infinite and hence to God. Such access will always be indirect. In a sense, this view is at once both the anthropological flowering and ground of Pannenberg’s concept of indirect revelation, which he first published in 1961.33 Theology can never prove conclusively the existence of God, for such an expectation denies the very identity of God as eternal and infinite. God’s reality is thus referred to the completion and perfection of creation and hence is ultimately an eschatological phenomenon. At its core, openness to the world is the capacity to be aware of the otherness of an object in distinction from the self. It is the capacity to grasp an object as an object and for reflection on its otherness. In turn, this awareness of the other generates an awareness of self as distinct from the other.34 Openness to the world then consists of the capacity for knowledge of the world in distinction from the self; the ability to see things from a different, non-self perspective.35 Openness to the world implies at least a degree of self-transcendence. There is, however, always a tension between the perspective of the self and the non-self perspective. Developing Plessner’s language of exocentricity, Pannenberg identifies a two-fold structure in the ontology of human being, in which there is a tension between the objective reality of the world of others and the relativisation of this world to one’s own perspective: ‘In the experience of encounter with others, this world of consciousness is ascribed to one’s own ego and is thus relativised as the world of this ego as distinct from others.’36 This relativisation is inevitable, because even though it belongs to the structure of human being to grasp the world from a perspective outside of oneself, in practice it is not possible for finite human individuals to maintain such a view consistently. In ATP, Pannenberg identifies this fundamental split between the ego and the self as constitutive for human personhood. He derives his understanding of this split in dialogue with G.H. Mead. Following William James, Mead understood human personhood in terms of two egos. The first ego is the ‘spontaneous ego’, the experiencing subject. The second ego is that which is given to the first ego as an object of self-reflection. This is the (embodied) self. It is the tension between the knowing ego and the embodied self which is the source of the human capacity for evil and all the pain that derives from this. The tension between the ego and the self does not follow immediately from the fact of self-consciousness, for in knowing   Ibid., pp. 69–70.   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Revelation as History (London 1969) (original German edn

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1961, rev. 1965). 34   Pannenberg, Anthropology on Theological Perspective, p. 62. 35   Ibid., pp. 61–2. 36   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 193.

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its own embodied self, the ego simultaneously knows the identity between the ego and the self.37 However: Light is shed on this phenomenon only by the fact that exocentricity by its nature means being present to the other; it is then from the vantage point of the other that the ego approaches its own body and, in its body the embodiment of its impulses and strivings for pleasure. In its exocentric self-transcendence the ego is originally present to what is other than its body, but it is in knowing the otherness of the other, which is identical with its body, as distinct from all else, that it knows itself to be distinct from itself. Being present to the other as other opens up the dimension of self consciousness with its distinction from self and unity with self; this dimension remains nonetheless full of contradiction because the ego makes its appearance on both sides of the distinction, being both different from and identical with its body, while in this contradiction which the ego is, its unity too remains open to question.38

In other words, embedded within the ontology of human being, lies a fundamental alienation from self. Self-consciousness brings with it the simultaneous knowledge and experience of our identity and distinctness from our selves. The use of the word ‘alienation’ may give the appearance that we have moved to the level of existential experience, but the point of Pannenberg’s discussion is that this alienation from self is the direct result of the unique structure of the human mode of existence in the world. Deeply rooted, then, in the ontological structure of human being is a radical two-fold alienation from both the world and from the self. It is a non-moral account of the phenomenon that Immanuel Kant defined as radical evil.39 Precisely what Kant meant by his term ‘radical evil’ is not straightforward. He certainly did not mean by it Hannah Arendt’s definition of the term to mean an extreme type of evil that ‘breaks down all standards’, and which renders human beings as human ‘superfluous’.40 What Kant had in mind was more akin to the phenomenon that Arendt found herself confronted with in her reflections on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Arendt published her reflections on the trial first in the New Yorker Magazine and then in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem.41 There she introduced the highly controversial term ‘the banality of evil’, to describe the fact that, in Eichmann, she was not confronted with the monster she had expected or which the prosecution was trying to present. Rather, Eichmann was an ordinary human being who simply, for whatever reason, failed to recognise the   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 84.   Ibid., p. 85, emphasis added. 39   Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other 37 38

Writings, trans. and eds Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge 1988). 40   Hannah Arendt, On the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1968), p. 459. 41   Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London 1994).

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full significance of what he was doing. He placed the state, and arguably his own position within it, above his duty to humanity. He failed to recognise the Jews he was deporting as human. In terms of the exocentric structure of human beings, Eichmann failed to be open to the world and to others, acting only from his own centric perspective. His motivations were not evil in the sense of hatred of the Jews: they were simply the result of the failure to reflect adequately on his own condition as a human being and that of the people he sought to send to the death camps. It was a catastrophic failure but not a monstrous one. Years later, reflecting on the controversy her introduction of the idea of the banality of evil had engendered, Arendt explained the phrase as a ‘failure to think’.42 This seems to imply some sort of shortcoming in Eichmann’s ability to reason. Rogozinski describes the banality of evil in terms of ‘an absence of will’ suggesting that it is a ‘freedom which has renounced itself’.43 Such an interpretation of Arendt is intriguing in the context of the present discussion. Based on the discussion in this chapter, we can agree that Eichmann had renounced his freedom, for as we have seen, for Pannenberg, freedom is the freedom to actualise one’s destiny for communion with God and through this with the world. Nevertheless, Eichmann’s failure to think cannot be equated with an absence of will, for his will was exercised in the pursuit of security within the state bureaucracy. As Staten points out, Rogozinski’s interpretation of Arendt at this point supports the ‘contemporary retreat from the ascription of responsibility’.44 In Kant, the term ‘radical evil’ (radikal Böse) denotes the propensity (Hang) not to do what duty requires, not following the moral law. By adding the adjective ‘radical’, Kant sought to indicate that this propensity is rooted deeply in human nature and he saw this specifically in terms of the corruption of the will (Willkür). In other words, Kant is pointing here to a basic flaw in the structure of human being. There is, as Richard Bernstein notes, no evidence that Kant means anything other than this by the term ‘radical evil’.45 My contention then is that the alienation which Pannenberg finds within the exocentric ontological structure of human being should be regarded along these Kantian lines, but in ontological rather than moral terms. It is appropriate, therefore, to designate this alienation ‘radical alienation’. For Pannenberg, exocentricity is constitutive of personhood: exocentricity can also be predicated of the divine persons. In Pannenberg’s doctrine of the Trinity, he develops the notion of the persons of the Trinity as emerging by mutual self42   Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations: a Lecture’, Social Research 38(3), reprinted in Rorty (ed.), The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspective, pp. 265–69, at p. 265. 43   Jacob Rogozinski, ‘Hell on Earth: Hannah Arendt in the Face of Hitler’, Philosophy Today 37 (1993): 257–74, at 260. 44   Henry Staten, ‘Radical Evil Revived: Hitler, Kant, Luther, Neo-Lacanians’, in ed. Alan D Schrift, Modernity and the Problem of Evil (Bloomington, IN 2005), p. 13. 45   Richard Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation (Cambridge 2000), p. 29.

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distinction from one another. Thus the Father is Father only in relation to the Son, and the Son, only Son in relation to the Father, whilst the Spirit is only Spirit in relation to both.46 However, as Ted Peters rightly points out, in the divine persons there is no split between the ego and the self.47 Alienation, which I have been suggesting is the source of human evil, is not therefore constitutive of personhood per se, even though it is grounded radically in the ontological structure of human being. The question naturally arises, therefore, why human beings should be so alienated radically from themselves and their world? The most obvious difference between human personhood and divine personhood is that the former, whilst having a capacity for self-transcendence, is none the less a finite thing, whilst divine personhood is eternal and, because divine, infinite. Thus the place to look for the cause of this radical self-alienation of human beings is human finitude. Peters’ own analysis of the problem is incorrect, for he misreads Pannenberg at a crucial point. According to Peters, Pannenberg understands the distinction between the ego and the self in terms of their non-mediation or mediation through social relationships. Peters’ claim is that Pannenberg makes a distinction between the ego which is originally present, not mediated through social relationships, and the self, which includes a ‘summary of the picture that others have of us’, and is thus mediated to us through our relationships with others.48 This however is not Pannenberg’s position. It is in fact the position of G.H. Mead, who understood the ego as subject and the self as object of self-consciousness, and Pannenberg specifically rejects it.49 For Pannenberg, the ego is always mediated through social relationships. Given the structure of human being outlined above where the ego knows itself only through its reflection on the otherness of the other, it could indeed not be otherwise. This brings to the fore the problem of the conceptual status of the terms ‘ego’ and ‘self’. The theological tradition has been rightly sceptical of the readiness with which some schools of psychology divide the human psyche. The ontological status of such divisions is obscure, to say the least. Symonds, a member of the ‘dynamic school’ of psychology, understands the self as a creation of the ego, seeing it as no more than an idea in the subject’s mind.50 Though, as O’Donovan points out, in principle there is no limit to the conceptual divisions one could make in the psyche, psychologists generally limit themselves to two on the grounds that there is an empirical match between these two and the way people generally view themselves.51 Symonds labels these two as the ‘self as conceived’ and the ‘self to   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 11.   Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville,

46 47

KY 1993), p. 95. 48   Ibid., p. 139. 49   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 189. 50   P.M. Symonds, The Ego and the Self (New York 1951), p. 4. 51   Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self Love in St Augustine (Corvallis, OR 1980), p. 7.

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be realised’.52 For Pannenberg, the problem crystallises around the question of the continued identity of the ego in the dynamics of the lived life. His criticism of Mead and others, and by implication his divergence from Peters’ interpretation of him, seems to be based in the idea of a dynamic ego in which there is continuity in change. Indeed, given that, for Pannenberg, human beings are constituted in such a way that they have a destiny to fulfil, it is hard to see how this could be otherwise. Though Pannenberg does not adopt the terminology of the ‘conceived self’ and the ‘to be realised self’, he continues to use the terms ‘ego’, and ‘self’; I think that it does describe Pannenberg’s understanding of the terms that he uses. Moreover, it makes it possible to understand how the phenomenon of self-alienation can lead to sin. Alienation, even radical self-alienation, is not yet sin. It becomes the occasion for sin through the exocentric structure of human being. In understanding exocentricity in terms of alienation, Pannenberg is following Dieter Wyss, who understood human self-alienation in terms of alienation of the human subject from the products of its actions. Pannenberg, however, understands it in terms of a conflict between fundamental factors in the structure of human existence: it is an expression of a tension between the centralised organisation of human beings and their exocentricity.53 The ego or person is constituted by its exocentric selftranscendence, but, at the same time, in its identity with itself, it places itself over and against the other. In doing so, it denies its own exocentric destiny and focuses in on its self and its own desires. The ego thus denies its exocentric destiny and becomes centrally focused on itself, even though it continues as a matter of fact to be exocentric. In Symonds’ terms, there is a focus on the self-conceived rather than on the self to be realised. There is, in other words, a denial of human destiny and, in theological terms, disavowal of the imago Dei. As noted above, there is no necessity that human beings should do this, but it is a ‘matter of fact … that the ego’s setting of itself against the other – and therefore against its own exocentricity – becomes the organising principle of the unity of the individual’s experience’.54 This is an important point. Pannenberg is not expounding the view here that human beings are by nature sinful: there is no such thing as an evil nature. This is as true for Pannenberg as it was for Augustine.55 Nevertheless, the exocentric structure of human beings now becomes the occasion for self-assertion against the other. In describing the disruption that occurs in human beings in the move from exocentric orientation to a centric orientation, Pannenberg is able to offer an account of original sin in non-moral, ontological terms. It should be noted that Pannenberg does not use the term ‘ontological’ in this context. At one point, he refers to the ‘existential structure’ of human being,     54   55   52

53

Symonds, The Ego and the Self, p. 74. Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 84. Ibid., p. 85. Augustine, City of God XII 8.

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but what is this if it is not a description of human ontology? 56 However, the point is that human beings experience everything from a centric perspective: time as past, present and future is defined by where we are now, by our present moment, and space is described in relation to our position – up, down, right, left, and so on. Hence: It is not at all the case that egocentricity first makes its appearance in the area of moral behaviour; rather it clearly determines the whole way in which we experience the world. If this relatedness of everything to the ego is … the essential element of sin or the failure of human beings in regard to themselves, then sin is not simply or first of all something moral but is closely connected with the natural conditions of our existence.57

There is a careful distinction here between the natural conditions of human being, and human nature. Pannenberg occasionally uses the words ‘by nature’ as a shorthand for the natural conditions of human being. Nature, on the other hand, means what human beings essentially are – their essence, the essential structure of human being as exocentric. This essence is something that has yet to be realised in human beings. It is a destiny awaiting its fulfilment in the future, something that will characterise human life. Thus, for Pannenberg, human beings are sinful by nature in the lived experience of life because of their centric organisation, but they are not sinful in their nature, their nature is not sinful, because their true nature has yet to be realised. Human beings are in possession of their essence only in the form of a task to be completed.58 Our essence or nature is to transcend our natural conditions. There is, however, a moral dimension to sin in that the continued focus on centricity is a direct response of the failure of the will to accept the task of transcending human natural conditions. This raises the question of responsibility for sin. We will, however, delay the discussion of this question until we have considered the question of evil in relation to God in the next chapter. The Christian tradition has understood this disruption of the individual’s relation to the world in terms of concupiscence or, following Paul in Romans 7:7, as covetousness. It is not clear, however, whether concupiscence is in fact a sin, or is itself the consequence of sin. Certainly Augustine seemed to hold both of these understandings of the concept, or at least, he was not entirely consistent in his use of the terms, and so there is a divergence in the tradition of interpretation of Augustine on the point. Pannenberg recognises the presence of both understandings of concupiscence in Augustine’s thought, but finally understands him as seeing concupiscence as the effect of sin: that is, as a sin itself rather than the cause of sin. Underlying the phenomenon of concupiscence and the inversion of the means and   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 108.   Ibid., p. 107. 58   Ibid., p. 108. 56

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ends structure of desires in which it consists, lies something else. This something else was, for Augustine, self-love or pride (superbia): What is it that gives rise to an evil will except pride? For pride is the beginning of all sin. And what is pride but the desire for an illusory greatness? It is a perverse form of greatness to abandon the source to which the soul should cling, in order to become as it were its own source. This is what happens when the one takes excessive satisfaction in oneself.59

In effect, Augustine is describing here the opposition of two forms of life: that which is focused on the individual and that which is focused upon God. It is, of course, the opposition between the two cities: that of Satan and that of God in the City of God. It is, in the conceptual terminology through which the discussion of this chapter is framed, an opposition between a life lived from the perspective of one’s own ego and that which is lived exocentrically in openness to the other. Ultimately this other, as I have argued above, includes the infinite, and hence, God. Thus, Pannenberg understands the denial of human destination, inherent in the ego’s attempt to reorganise itself centrically, as sin, through the phenomenon of self-love which he develops in conversation with Augustinian concept of amor sui. Self-love, amor sui, is for Pannenberg the original sin which underlies all other sin.60 This shift to the ‘conceived self’ from the ‘self to be realised’, or from an exocentric focus to a centric focus is the anthropological or psychophilosophical content of the shift from independence (Selbständigkeit) to autonomy (Verselbständigung) discussed in Chapter 2. Self-love, even for Augustine, is by no means an exclusively negative phenomenon, and within the tradition the phenomenon has been given positive, negative and neutral evaluations. Thomas Aquinas recognised all three evaluations as belonging to the one phenomenon: ‘self love is in one way common to all, in another way proper to good men, in another proper to evil men.’61 John Burnaby identifies the same three evaluations in Augustine, though Hannah Arendt detects only two.62 O’Donovan discusses the ambiguities inherent in the concept of selflove.63 The negative aspect of self-love on which we are about to focus comes not from love of the true self with a destiny to be fulfilled, but from a focus upon the present and present fulfilment and pleasure of the ego in its attempt to structure itself centrically and assert itself over against the other. Augustine is basically right

    61   62  

Augustine, City of God XIV 13. Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 88. Aquinas, Summa Theologica II.2.5.7. John Burnaby, Love and St Augustine (London 1938), p. 117; Hannah Arendt, Der Liebensbegriff bei Augustin Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (Berlin 1929), p. 25. 63   O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, pp. 3–9. 59

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in his analysis, says Pannenberg, but with one important caveat: we must ignore Augustine’s hostility to the body and more specifically to sex.64 The idea of self-love or pride being the underlying sin of all humanity has been challenged in contemporary theology. Most obviously this challenge has come from feminist theology. Valerie Saiving’s programmatic paper, in which she raised the question of the adequacy of the term ‘pride’ in describing the sinful structures of human being, has continued to set the focus for the discussion of sin in feminist theology.65 Feminist theologians have argued that whilst egocentricity may be stereotypically the male sin, it is not stereotypically the characteristic sin of women; their characteristic sin rather is self-abnegation, to use Judith Plaskow’s term.66 Plaskow’s term seems to mean the submergence of the self in relationships to others to the extent that there is a loss of self and identity. In his Systematic Theology, Pannenberg specifically rejects feminist critiques of superbia as a specifically male sin: ‘This view fails to see that in Augustine superbia is not just one form of sin among others but a general structure that underlies all sins … In Kierkegaardian terms, it might be regarded as a despairing not wanting to be oneself.’67 It seems almost that Pannenberg and his feminist critics are speaking at crosspurposes. That is, both are trying in fact to describe the same phenomenon, of a universal distortion of human being, whilst failing to recognise this in the other. It is true that Pannenberg frequently uses the language of egoism and the will to subject all to the self in his exposition of superbia. However, the exposition of Pannenberg’s understanding of human ontology presented in this chapter suggests he means simply that fundamental structural failure of human beings to move towards their destiny as beings in relation to God, in proper relation to other human beings and by implication the world. At heart, I suggest that this is precisely the same diagnosis that feminist theology makes of the condition of women. Pannenberg’s use of the language of superbia is meant, I think, to signify that all human beings are entrapped in ways of being that do not conform to their true identity or to their destiny. For Pannenberg, true identity and destiny are one and the same. In a different context, Pannenberg argues that Jesus’ ‘sonship’ is defining of his universal significance for humanity, male and female: Jesus is the one who brings human destiny to fulfilment.68 In Chapter 6, I discuss how this is achieved, but the point of raising the issue here is that Pannenberg’s theology is self-consciously concerned with ultimate reality that is universal in its connection with human beings. That is, he is concerned with the reality of human being that   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 90.   Valerie Saiving, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, Journal of Religion 40

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(1960): 100–12. 66   Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace; Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD 1980). 67   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 243, n. 233. 68   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man (London 1977), p. 345.

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underlies the different cultural and social expressions and experiences undergone by different people in different societies, and by men and women in the same society. For Pannenberg, it is axiomatic that there is only one such reality, for ultimately truth must be a unity. We can understand the force of his conviction if we consider what would happen if it were allowed that male and female were different in their ultimate reality as opposed to being different simply in their biological, psychological, or social realities. If there were a multiplicity of ultimate realities of human being, then it would mean more than simply different expressions of human being or different ways of being human. It would mean different human being – different beings altogether. The mutual misunderstanding which occurs between Pannenberg and feminist theology arises, I think, from the different methodological approaches each takes to the question of human sin. Feminist theology proceeds from a social critique. It is primarily an ideological critique dealing in the first instance with social realties and only derivatively with individuals. Pannenberg, on the other hand, is seeking consciously to find an understanding of the problem of human evil at the most fundamental, philosophical level. He is seeking an understanding that is universal, and common to all human beings: something that underlies specific, concrete social, manifestations of sin. Pannenberg uses the term ‘pride’ to designate this fundamental human condition, the ‘misery’ of human being. He uses the term with a much broader definition than simple self-assertion, or the will to dominate. In Pannenberg’s hands therefore, ‘pride’ includes what appear to be at first sight very un-pride-like expressions of self-love. They include ‘anxiety’, ‘depression’, ‘despair’ and ‘care’, as well as the more obvious ‘greed’, ‘envy’ and ‘hatred’.69 Anxiety may well engender aggression or defensiveness, but it is grounded itself in lack of self-worth or even self-loathing. All of these fall within the scope of Pannenberg’s use of the term ‘pride’. All alike are manifestations of the same condition: an excessive fixation upon the self, an attempt to seek security of the self without reference to God. It is an attempt to secure one’s destiny for oneself apart from trust in God, through whom alone that destiny can be fulfilled. Fixation on the self cannot be derived from anxiety, since it is already contained in it. But in the situation of temporality, anxiety constantly reproduces the fixation. The uncertainty of the future and the incomplete nature of our identity feed the anxiety. By anxiety we are caught fast in the self. The alternative is confidence in the future and a present life based on such confidence. But if this were not constantly given to us, we would not be capable of it. We also continually close off ourselves against it in anxiety about ourselves.70 In other words, in theological perspective, the fixation on the self which Pannenberg characterises as ‘pride’ is a direct and inevitable consequence of our finitude and temporality. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, these are the very   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 250.   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 251.

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conditions required in order for human beings to grow into true independence in communion with God. Evil and sin are the flip side of human flourishing and there is a similarity here with Leibniz’s concept of metaphysical evil. In one sense, Pannenberg’s diagnosis of the human condition is similar to that of Leibniz, who saw metaphysical evil as the ‘not godliness’ (Nichtgöttlichkeit) of the world. Leibniz, however, was able to account for sin only in terms of error or mistake, and so for all the talk of metaphysical evil, sin is essentially a category of moral evil. In this sense, he had not moved beyond Augustine. Pannenberg has broken out of this bind and has been able to offer an account of sin that is itself an ontological account, without being forced into the error of designating human beings as sinful by nature. This again raises the question of responsibility for sin, and it is to this question that we must now turn. Freedom, Guilt and Responsibility Entailed in the concept of sin are the twin concepts of responsibility and guilt, which in turn imply the notion of human freedom. As Kant found with the concept of radical evil, this generates serious problems for both the idea of original sin and of radical evil seem to imply that human beings are guilty of, and responsible for, their wrongdoing long before they have committed any specific sin, and even though their own ontological constitution means that they could have acted in no other way. Kant’s fundamental insight is that to act morally, a person must act independently of her or his wishes and desires. To do one’s duty is to act in accordance with the universalisable maxim. Whilst our spontaneous wishes and desires may sometimes point in this direction, according to Kant, in order to be moral, it must be the case that we would have acted in the right way regardless of our wishes and desires. Kant is not saying here that in order to be moral the natural inclinations need to be suppressed, merely that, in order to be moral, we must act on the universalisable maxim rather than the private motive. One objection to this that it seems to imply that immoral actions could not be imputed to the agent, for if it is only when we do our duty that we rise above natural causality, it would seem that we cannot be held responsible for acting immorally, since it is our impulses and desires which determine our actions rather than our reason. Reinhold’s challenge then is that Kant must show that human beings are responsible for not allowing (practical) reason to take control of our actions. Kant responded to this challenge in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone by drawing a distinction between the will (Wille) as practical reason; the power to act in accordance with the universalisable maxim, and the will (Willküre) as our power of choice. This made it possible for Kant to argue that individual choices are never determined merely by our desires. Thus, argues Kant, even when we do wrong, we have chosen to allow some particular desire to dictate our action at the cost of the universalisable maxim. We have

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chosen to behave in a self-interested way: human beings are more than creatures helplessly driven by their physical and mental urges, and as such are responsible for their actions. Kant’s doctrine of radical evil is connected with the Willküre. For Kant, we are fully responsible for our actions and, as such, they flow from our moral character. The choice of maxim in a particular instance is governed by a more fundamental underlying maxim, which in turn is governed by an even more fundamental underlying maxim. This regression continues until we reach the inaugural choice of principle, which thus sets the basic tone of our moral character. Thus in dealing with Reinhold’s challenge, Kant comes face to face with a stark choice: in their fundamental character, human beings cannot be neutral with respect to good and evil; they must be either one or the other. As Peter Dews comments, any ‘single incident of backsliding will indicate not simply a dropped stitch, but a rent running through our entire moral fabric’.71 Hence, Kant suggests that all human beings have an innate predisposition to evil, a ‘propensity to evil’, or inclination to ignore the desires of the moral law which may be suppressed but never overcome. Nevertheless, Kant insists that individual actions are still free, since the ground of radical evil is not in the ‘sensuous nature’, for this is not directly related to evil at all.72 Radical evil is a property of the person as a free-acting being, and for which therefore the individual is accountable, ‘despite the fact that this propensity is so deeply rooted in the power of choice that we are forced to say that it is found in man by nature’.73 Now, because of his insistence that radical evil is rooted in the moral structure of human being and not in the ‘sensuous nature’, Kant cannot describe the propensity to evil as innate, since this would merely raise again the problem of our freedom to do wrong which led to the distinction between the Wille and the Willküre in the first place. Hence: Every evil action must be so considered, whenever we seek its rational origin, as if the human being had fallen into it directly from the state of innocence. For whatever his previous behaviour may have been, whatever the natural causes influencing him, whether they are inside or outside him, his action is yet free and not determined through any of these causes … He should have refrained from it, whatever his temporal circumstances and entanglements, for through no cause in the world can he cease to be a free agent. 74

Kant thus becomes entangled in a whole morass of difficulties and it is perhaps not surprising that many of Kant’s philosophical successors have recoiled from the notion of radical evil. Thus, for example, Paul Guyer believes that Kant has gone too far in the direction of the Christian doctrine of original sin, whilst Peter     73   74   71

72

Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil (Oxford 2008), p. 25. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 62.

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Dews bemoans the lack of significant philosophical engagement with the problem of human failure.75 Part of the reason for Kant’s difficulties and those of the subsequent philosophical tradition lies in the fact that responsibility remains firmly wedded to the notion of choice and freedom, conceived as the power of choice. So long as we remain with this understanding of responsibility, it is not possible to give an account of either Kant’s concept of radical evil, or the Christian doctrine of sin a coherent way, without contradiction. Hence Pannenberg: ‘True enough if we had to accept this concept of responsibility, the concept of sin could not, without contradiction be applied to the natural conditions in which human life begins. That for which I am not responsible cannot be imputed to me either as sin or guilt.’76 According to Pannenberg then, we need a deeper understanding of the concept of responsibility. For Pannenberg, the key question is whether or not we are responsible only for what our free choice prefers when an alternative is equally possible. In other words, is responsibility limited exclusively to freedom of choice? Long before Kant, the Church Fathers made this connection in order to overcome the metaphysical dualism with which they found themselves confronted in the form of Gnosticism. The move made it possible to understand the world as the result of the work of the good Creator and to reconcile this with the presence of evil in the world. Supremely, this is Augustine’s solution to the problem: the world was created free and that freedom has resulted in the fact of evil in the world. For Pannenberg, this solution comes at too high a price, and in any event is not the only possible solution to the problem.77 The cost lies in the damage it does to the idea of the goodness of created human being, for the solution pictures human beings, not as good in their creation, but as neutral towards good and evil, which Pannenberg understands to mean that an already existing state of sinfulness exists at creation, since by virtue of their ‘neutrality’, human beings are not good.78 There is, however, an alternative means of understanding responsibility and freedom. We saw above that for Kant, autonomy, freedom, belonged to the very essence of human beings, and that true autonomy and freedom meant the alignment of one’s life with the Moral Law. Pannenberg calls this ‘formal freedom’: the power belonging to the essence of human being to choose between good and evil.79 For Pannenberg, however, the exercise of the will, choosing, does not require a position of neutrality between alternatives: What finds expression in the act of choice is, rather, the native and, for human behaviour, the constitutive phenomenon of a transcendence of the given, in the 75   Paul Guyer ‘Immanuel Kant’, in ed. Edward Craig, The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Oxford 1998), p. 192; Dews, The Idea of Evil, p. 27. 76   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 110. 77   Ibid., p. 110. 78   Ibid., p. 111. 79   Ibid., p. 111.

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sense of a capacity for distancing oneself from impressions and conceptions, turning to others, and thus moving beyond the immediately given. It is not inconsistent with this basic phenomenon that human beings should always have as their starting point an initial natural situation, that is, the natural conditions of their existence, which in the process of self- transcendence they likewise transcend inasmuch as they come back to them and alter them in the light of their experience of the world.80

Once the element of indifference towards alternatives has been removed, responsibility, understood in terms of freedom of choice, can no longer be invoked: an alternative conception of responsibility is required. Etymologically, ‘responsibility’ has a wider meaning than simply accountability for actions and choices made. Heidegger understood responsibility in terms of the self: human beings owe it to their true self to conform to their destiny as human beings.81 Responsibility is connected thus, not with fault in the first instance, but with true human identity; ‘all responsibility is responsibility to the self.’82 It is internal to human beings, and as such, human beings are responsible before God only because their destiny is for communion with God. As we saw above, this destiny is grounded in God and can only be achieved by God’s power. Hence, though the biblical witness recognises a formal human freedom and responsibility, freedom is also seen as the result of ‘the redemptive presence of Christ and his Spirit’.83 Heidegger’s concept of freedom and responsibility is thus deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Hence Aquinas: ‘they are free who exist for their own sakes.’84 Bernard of Clairvaux may have had something similar in mind when he described the final stage of spiritual maturity as ‘love of self for God’s sake’, for, of course, the self in question throughout this discussion is the true self, yet to be realised – the self in communion with God.85 Human responsibility, in the first instance then, is not for choices made between the alternatives with which they are faced, but rather to the self, as a self with a destiny. From this, it also follows that freedom, in the first instance, is not the formal freedom of choice from a position of indifference towards alternatives. Individual choices are manifestations of personal existence, and it is towards this personal existence, as a single whole, that responsibility is directed.86 Thus ‘the call of freedom is always to a harmonization of one’s behaviour with one’s own   Ibid., p. 112, original emphasis.   Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London

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1962), pp. 329f. 82   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 114. 83   Ibid., p. 111; John 8:36; 2 Corinthians 3:17. 84   Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III 112. 85   Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God (Kalamazoo, MI 1995), p. 70. 86   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 115.

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destiny.’87 As such, freedom is a summons not to choose good but to do good. Freedom is the freedom that human beings have to actualise their destiny. Thus there is, in Pannenberg’s view, no freedom against either God or the good. It is true that human beings can, as a matter of fact, close themselves to any notion of the good or to God, but this is due to an epistemological gap; God is rejected because God is thought of as merely a human construct, or even if God is believed to be real, God is rejected because of doubt over whether something is in fact God’s will. For Pannenberg, it is axiomatic that human beings who make a choice do so only because they regard the object of their choice as good.88 This is a view that he shares with the overwhelming majority of the western philosophical and theological traditions. Michael Stocker has challenged this view, arguing that the bad, the not-good, can also be the object of desire. Human beings, he argues, do not always act sub specie boni and do not always choose the not-good merely in the mistaken belief that it is good: something recognised as bad can be attractive. In particular, he cites the desire to cause harm to others and for revenge, which can overwhelm us under certain circumstances.89 In reality, the desire for revenge is a particular instance of the desire to cause harm, in return for (perceived) harm received. Stocker writes that in order ‘to save the thesis that we desire only the (believed) good, it must be maintained that either such harming is (believed) good or that it is not the proper object of the desire’.90 The first of these, Stocker dismisses as ‘implausible’. But is it? In the discussion above in connection with the exchange of trust for security, a grounding of the Nazi Holocaust was suggested in precisely these terms. A similar counter-explanation may be advanced also to Stocker’s second objection to the view that human beings always act sub specie boni. Stocker suggests that in certain psychological states, revenge, or even self-abasement and humiliation, are the proper aims of acting human beings, not merely because they are perceived as good, but precisely because they are recognised as not-good. Such desire and actions may also be rooted in the self’s drive for security; they are expressions of self-love and concupiscence. Even though explanations such as ‘I knew it was wrong but I went ahead anyway’, may be offered for such actions, the underlying, depth meaning is that such actions seek the security of the self, which is perceived as a good. The a posteriori explanation ‘I knew it was wrong but …’ is then to be understood as an understanding that even though the human capacity for self-transcendence is, as a matter of fact, diminished, it is not damaged from the formal standpoint.91 The claim that human beings always act sub specie boni does not mean that they cannot choose what is objectively evil. As Augustine   Ibid., p. 115.   Ibid., p. 117. 89   Michael Stocker, ‘Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology’, Journal of 87 88

Philosophy LXXVI (1979), reprinted in ed. Rorty, The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives, pp. 269–81, 276–7. 90   Ibid., p. 276. 91   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 117.

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noted, human beings can take pleasure in evil.92 However, when it is recognised that this guilty pleasure is always a failure of the self, we are led to the view that it calls forth, not the desire for punishment of guilt, but ‘sadness more than anything else’.93 Moreover, since there is little or nothing that human beings can do to bring about a change in this human capacity, above all what is called for is liberation and redemption.94 Thus a consideration of human responsibility has led to recognition of divine responsibility towards human beings and the world in general in the face of evil. This recognition is the broad topic of the next two chapters. Conclusion The concept of original sin discussed above has some marked differences from the classical conception of original sin which, I suggest, salvage the doctrine from its incoherence in the light of modern critiques. The major difference between Pannenberg’s doctrine and the classical doctrine is that the order of sinning is reversed. According to the classical, Augustinian, doctrine, the first sin is against God. Human beings, that is, are conceived of as being created already in communion with God, but who subsequently turn away from this communion. This is the first, or original, sin. Only once this has happened does sin take effect in the relationships between human beings and between humans and the rest of the created order. On the classical view, alienation from each other and physical evil are the direct consequence of human beings turning from God, and are in some sense to be understood as punishment for this. However, in Pannenberg’s view, as discussed in this chapter, the first sin, the first alienation, is in fact alienation from oneself and one’s destiny, and alienation from the world and from God follow, in that order, as a consequence of this. Self-alienation leads to the desire for security on the part of the self in contrast to the trust in its own destiny for which it was created. In turn, this leads to the self treating the world as a source of security, as an object of use for its own ends, and since ultimately it knows God only indirectly through the world, the self becomes alienated from God also because it is unable, left to itself, to move beyond the world of finite things to trust in the ground of all things. Self-alienation leads to self-assertion against the self’s own openness, which finally closes the self to God. There are some consequences of this reversal of the order of sinning in terms of understanding and renewing the doctrine of original sin. First, in construing original sin in terms of alienation as an ontological phenomenon, it is possible to understand the universality of sin without recourse to an historical fall of an historical first human pair. It is possible, in other words, to reconcile the doctrine of original sin and an evolutionary framework for thinking about the origin of the   Augustine, Confessions II iv 9.   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 118. 94   Ibid., p. 119. 92

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human species. I discussed above Plessner’s understanding of human exocentricity and self-consciousness, in which Plessner was able to give an account of the emergence of human self-consciousness in terms of natural processes without recourse to direct divine intervention in the process of human evolution. As we have seen, self-alienation is a direct result of self-consciousness under the conditions of temporality and finitude. It is therefore universal to human beings, and this leads to the second advantage of Pannenberg’s reconstruction of original sin compared with the classical doctrine: it can account for the universality of sin without needing to suppose that sin is somehow transmitted through sexual intercourse. Third, though we shall return to the vexed question of responsibility for evil at the end of the next chapter, conceiving original sin as alienation along these ontological lines means that we no longer have to think in terms of ‘original guilt’ and the transmission of guilt from the first human being. Each individual is born into the conditions of temporality and finitude that generate alienation. Since, as discussed above, alienation is not yet sin, but only provides the drive to sin when the self asserts itself against the other, it would be better, perhaps, to speak not of original sin or original guilt, but of an original problem. However, even though the first sin is to be understood in terms of the self’s relation to itself rather than to God, it must be remembered that this self-assertion is in reality the rejection of the divinely appointed human destiny for communion with God and as such is to be understood properly as sin. Finally, Pannenberg’s account of original sin overcomes the problem of the disjunction between the supposed state of Adam before the Fall and the condition that he subsequently found himself in along with the rest of humanity. Sin is to be understood as a direct consequence of the conditions of temporality and finitude and not as a free choice of an original human being who lived in perfect communion with the Creator. Pannenberg’s reconstruction of the imago Dei as a destiny, rather than something that has been lost, means that there is no need to posit a sinless state before the fall of humanity, whether this fall is conceived in historical literal terms (Augustine) or in existential terms (Kierkegaard). The reconstruction of the doctrine of original sin discussed in this chapter fulfils the four key assertions about sin, identified by McFadyen, which the classical doctrine makes: contingency, radicalness, universality and communicability. It is contingent because, though sin as alienation has been discussed in terms of human ontology, sin is a distortion of what humanity is meant to be. It is related to the conditions of temporality and finitude, but alienation is not an essential component of personhood. It is radical, because the distortion of alienation occurs within the structure of human being and not merely in the way in which human beings relate to God, to one another and to their world. It is universal, because it is related to the conditions of finitude and temporality under which all human life is lived. Finally, it is communicable because it is a distortion of the very material out of which human beings construct their personhood. A significant component of the understanding of original sin explored in this chapter is that sin is related to the conditions of temporality and the ambiguity

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of the world. It was noted that these conditions are precisely those required for the world to bring forth independent creatures capable of returning the love of God for the creation with the creation’s own love. Since these conditions are intimately connected with the divine purpose for creation, the question of divine responsibility for evil cannot be ignored. This question adds an extra dimension to the question of human responsibility for sin, though it, by no means, absolves humans of that responsibility. In the next chapter, the nature of the power and love of God are discussed in connection with the question of evil. Human freedom is discussed in the light of Pannenberg’s understanding of the relationship between these two, and the chapter will conclude with a consideration of responsibility for evil.

Chapter 4

The Power of Love The previous two chapters have considered the understanding of the place of evil in the world in Pannenberg’s theology. It was argued that evil is a necessary part of the creation, part of the cost entailed in the act of creation. It is a cost that the Creator is willing to accept. Inevitably, this raises questions about the nature of God and the nature of divine love in particular. This and the following chapter seek to address these questions: first, through a discussion of the nature of God as love in this chapter; in Chapter 5, the focus shifts to God’s action in the world through Christ to overcome evil, where it will be argued that the ‘career’ of Christ is the proleptic enactment in time of the eschatological fate of the whole world. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume places into the mouth of his sceptical character Philo the classic formulation of the problem of evil for the Christian theologian. God is either impotent or malevolent.1 Philo, and hence Hume, does not regard these questions and their answers as an argument against the existence of God, but as pointing to an elucidation of the character of God. In this, he is similar to Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.2 Specifically, they challenge the idea of a loving God. Philo’s conclusion from his reflections upon the presence of evil in the world is that the true source of all things is indifferent to the presence of evil in the world.3 This could, of course, be taken to mean that the universe originates from an entirely a-personal source. Philo, however, goes on to challenge the assumption that the moral rectitude of the Supreme Being is analogous to human moral rectitude. This suggests that what Philo has in mind, when he speaks of the indifference of the origin of the universe to the state of the universe is that this origin is indeed personal, but that what this being considers important is of a wholly different order to that of human beings: what is of concern to us is of no consequence to the Creator. This raises a number of questions for the Christian theologian. If the Creator is indeed indifferent to our plight, why was the world created at all? What is the nature of the relationship of the creation to the Creator’s purposes? Is it possible to speak of God’s love at all? If the origin of the universe is indifferent to the universe’s state, then surely the only sensible response is one of indifference to such a Creator. Philo’s triad owes much of its contemporary popularity to

  David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London 1990), pp. 108–9.   Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (London 1976). 3   Hume, Dialogues, p. 109. 1 2

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J.L. Mackie’s 1955 paper ‘Evil and Omnipotence’.4 Three years before Mackie’s paper, W.T. Stace had already declared that Hume was right: Philo’s charge had never been answered and never could be answered.5 However, as the result of the work of Nelson Pike and Alvin Plantinga, most analytical philosophers of religion claim that this so-called ‘logical problem of evil’ has been solved.6 Such a claim, however, is premature, as D.Z. Phillips points out.7 Phillips’ point is not that Stace and Mackie are correct in their use of Philo’s triad but rather that the discussion can never ‘get off the ground’ if we attempt to stay strictly within the bounds of the logical problem of evil. Philosophers of religion who treat the problem of evil do so in an abstract way and thus use terms such as ‘omnipotence’ in ways which bear little if any relationship to the ways in which these concepts are deployed in religious traditions. Phillips’ way forward, beyond Philo’s triad, is to analyse the grammar of the terms deployed in the argument. His response remains fundamentally a philosophical one, albeit in the Wittgensteinian tradition rather than that of analytical philosophy. His critique, however, aligns itself with a much more theological analysis of the problem of evil, in terms of a theological understanding of the power and love of God and the relationship between them. We are justified in seeing Philo’s triad not as a logical knock-out argument but, in Marilyn McCord Adam’s terminology, as an aporia – a puzzle or paradox inviting further thought and analysis.8 Pannenberg would, I think, be comfortable with such an approach to the question, for it invites us first to think carefully about the nature of divine power and divine love, and only then to go on to ask questions about the existence of evil in relation to these. This chapter expounds Pannenberg’s understanding of divine power and love. In effect, the move to taking the problem of evil aporetically removes questions of evil from the arena of challenges to belief in the existence of God. Instead, one brings to questions of evil an already formed understanding of the nature of God that is then used to understand the presence of evil in the world. The first question that will be addressed in this chapter then is that of the ground for belief in a personal God. Philo’s challenge can be read as a challenge to the personal nature of God. Belief in the personal nature of God became philosophically problematical in the eighteenth century with the work of Fichte, and subsequently in the work of Feuerbach in the nineteenth century. To anticipate the argument, Pannenberg’s approach to this question is based on the experience of being confronted by a power beyond ourselves. This then leads to a discussion of the power of God in   J.L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind 64 (1955): 200–12, reprinted in eds Marilyn McCord Adams and Robert Merrihew Adams, The Problem of Evil (Oxford 1990). 5   W.T. Stace, Time and Eternity (Princeton, NJ 1952), p. 56. 6   Nelson Pike, God and Evil (Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1964); Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford 1974). 7   D.Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (London 2004), p. 5. 8   Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (New York 1999), p. 7. 4

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Pannenberg’s theology, which we will see can only be understood ultimately in terms of love. The nature of divine love in Pannenberg’s theology is the topic of consideration in the third stage of the argument of this chapter. The conclusion draws out four implications for the understanding of evil. The Power of God The question of how God is known by human beings was an early preoccupation for Pannenberg. From the beginning, for Pannenberg, knowledge of God is possible only on the condition that God makes it possible to know God. We can know God only to the extent that he reveals himself. The point is made strongly at the beginning of the Systematic Theology: The founding of theology on divine revelation is not a determination that is foreign to its nature, as the later distinction between natural and revealed theology might seem to imply. Instead, the knowledge of God that is made possible by God, and therefore by revelation, is one of the basic conditions of the concept of theology as such. Otherwise the possibility of the knowledge of God is logically inconceivable; it would contradict the very idea of God.9

Such a view is perhaps what one would expect from a Lutheran theologian and a one-time student of Karl Barth. But in his own words, Pannenberg is ‘a rather peculiar Barthian’.10 His understanding of revelation is considerably different from that of Barth. As a postdoctoral student in Heidelberg, Pannenberg had been working for several years with the so-called ‘working circle’, an interdisciplinary group of graduate students, mostly biblical scholars based at the University of Heidelberg, on the problem of revelation in the Bible. They published their only joint work, Offenbarung als Geshichte, in 1961.11 The book was a series of exegetical essays which argued that the Bible knows nothing of knowledge of God given directly by supernatural means. Rather, the Bible records God’s acts in history by which he reveals himself indirectly. God is known indirectly by what he does. As the systematician of the group, Pannenberg both edited the volume, and provided the systematic framework for and development of the concept of indirect revelation. This he did in the form of seven dogmatic theses on revelation, which formed the subheadings to his own contribution to the volume. It is in this work that Pannenberg sets out the issues and concerns which have been the motivating forces behind his theological development. Thesis 3 contains the core of his epistemology: ‘In distinction from special manifestations of the deity,   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2.   Don Olive, Wolfhart Pannenberg (Waco, TX 1973), p. 25. 11   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ed., Revelation as History (London 1969); German edn, 9

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Offenbarung als Geschichte (Göttingen 1961).

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the historical revelation is open to anyone who has eyes to see. It has universal character.’12 Pannenberg disagrees fundamentally with Barth’s conception that revelation is to be understood only within the sphere of God’s grace, totally at the will and discretion of God. For Barth, God must overcome the finitude of the human mind if understanding is to take place. For Pannenberg, the primary cognitive aspect of revelation must lie on the human side of the transaction, or it is not revelation. Certainly, revelation is the self-disclosure of God, but in order to be revelation, it must not lie outside the normal sphere of the human potential for understanding. The most primitive form of this divine self-disclosure, and hence the ground of all subsequent belief in God, is the human experience of being confronted by a power beyond ourselves, a power that not only maintains human life but brings it to fulfilment.13 However, the acknowledgment of such an experience is still far from justifying the equation of this power with God. To make such identification, it is necessary to show that this power is personal, and it is precisely at this point that the classical doctrine of God has foundered under the weight of the criticism of Fichte and, following in Fichte’s wake, Feuerbach. Chorological Developments in Pannenberg’s Doctrine of God An answer to how Pannenberg understands the relationship of the power and love of God must be sought in Pannenberg’s reformulation of the doctrine of God along eschatological lines. From the mid-1960s onwards, Pannenberg began to rethink the classical doctrine of God. Three essays from the 1960s in particular mark out Pannenberg’s intention in terms of ‘God as the power of the future’.14 The 1970s saw considerable development of Pannenberg’s trinitarian thinking.15 In 1988, the same year that the first volume of the Systematic Theology was published in German, he spoke openly about reformulating the doctrine of God on the ‘basis of eschatology’, or ‘from the point of view of Jesus’’ eschatological message.16 However, to anyone who has studied the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, there is a striking difference between the language of the ST and that of the early theology. Whilst in the early theology, there is a great deal of talk of God as ‘the power of the future’, this phrase recedes somewhat into the background in the   Pannenberg, Revelation as History, p. 135.   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, pp. 222–7. 14   The essays are ‘The Question of God’ (Basic Questions 2, pp. 201–33), ‘The God 12 13

of Hope’ (Basic Questions 2, 234–49), and ‘Theology and the Kingdom of God’ (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Göttingen 1969), pp. 51–71). 15   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie: Gesammelte Aufstaze Band II (Göttingen 1980), Chapters 3–7. 16   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Providence, God and Eschatology’, in eds D.W. Musser and J.L. Price, The Whirlwind of Culture: Frontiers in Theology (Bloomington, IN 1988), p. 175.

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ST, and is replaced with talk of God’s eternity. This linguistic shift has gone largely unremarked upon in the literature, the notable exception being Christiaan Mostert in his recent discussion of Pannenberg’s doctrine of God.17 Mostert notes the change, and comments that it does not indicate any fundamental shift away from the concerns of the early theology, even though these concerns are no longer programmatic for Pannenberg. Rather, with the development of his mature doctrine of God, Pannenberg is able to subsume the idea of futurity in God within the concept of God’s eternity. David Polk has tracked the development of the idea of eternity as timefulness in Pannenberg’s thought.18 Eternity is an attribute of God that it is proper to predict of God on the basis of the concept of God, in a way that futurity is not. However, eternity for Pannenberg is a somewhat different concept from classical formulations of it. For Pannenberg, the eternity of God does not imply God’s being outside time, his being timelessly present to all reality. Rather, eternity contains time – all time past, present and future – simultaneously. This means that the experience of time is real for God. God’s eternity contains what, from the perspective of time, is future. From the perspective of this book, this is important because, as we shall see, it is eternity’s enfolding of time that guarantees the future as God’s future and thus guarantees the overcoming of evil and the fulfilment of the kingdom of God. What from the perspective of time is a future reality, from the perspective of eternity is an already completed reality. An important hermeneutical point for the understanding of Pannenberg’s concept of the power of God across his theology is that the early theology must be understood within the context of the whole of Pannenberg’s theology. This, indeed, is an application of Pannenberg’s own eschatological epistemology, where a present reality can be understood fully only when its place in the total of all that is real, past, present and future is known. Divine Power and Human Freedom Since the beginning of the third century, the Christian tradition has associated the problem of evil with the misuse of divinely granted human freedom. Clement of Alexandria deals specifically with an argument which he says is advanced against Christianity from every side, that ‘anyone who does not prevent something which they are able to prevent is causally guilty of it.’19 Against this, Clement asserts only the doer is guilty, and in the case of evil, no blame for the evil actions of human beings can attach to God: not to prevent something is not to do something. God 17   Christiaan Mostert, God and the Future: Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (Edinburgh 2002). 18   David Polk, On the Way to God: An Exploration into the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Lanham, MD 1989), pp. 265–70. 19   Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I 82ff.

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only permitted evil: he allowed it but did not will it. Given the claimed superior power of God in the Christian tradition, this has seemed to some to be a lame argument, but it has not prevented it from becoming the basis of the dominant way in which western theological thought has dealt with the problem of evil since the time of Augustine. An omnipotent God could have chosen to prevent the creation from falling into sin, but chose not to. The tradition’s explanation of this has been that God places an extremely high value upon the freedom of his creation. For Augustine, God gave humanity freedom in order to provide the possibility of doing right, but, of course, there comes with this possibility also the possibility of doing wrong. Throughout the Christian tradition, many have supported and developed the free-will defence. However, J.L. Mackie insists that all forms of the free-will defence fail. For God to create Adam and Eve, he observes, was ‘a hell of a risk’, especially when divine foreknowledge would tell what would (possibly) occur. A more restricted freedom would have ensured conditions for ‘right action’, with less risk.20 Others, such Nietzsche and Sartre, argue that the very notion of human freedom excludes the possibility of God altogether, and therefore we must postulate the non-existence of God for the sake of human freedom. Either way, the prospects for understanding God’s permission for evil in terms of human freedom seem unpromising. For either we must admit plainly that God created knowing what inevitably would happen in the Creation, or we must deny the very possibility of God in order to preserve human freedom. In this section, I want to consider the relationship between God’s omnipotence and the existence of evil that can be drawn from Pannenberg’s theology. The first consideration is the origin of one of Pannenberg’s main designations for God as ‘the all-determining reality’. Precisely what Pannenberg means by this is discussed in relation to the concept of divine power developed in process theology. Next, I want to consider how this designation of God can be read in a non-deterministic way, allowing freedom to the created order. I will argue that Pannenberg is a compatabilist in terms of human freedom in relation to divine power. This will involve us in a brief outline of one of the most distinctive features of Pannenberg’s theology: his emphasis on the ontological priority of the future. I will then argue that Pannenberg is understood properly as making space for created freedom and that his theology is non-deterministic. God as All-determining Reality Very early in his theological career, Pannenberg settled upon the notion of God as ‘all-determining reality’ (alles bestimmende Wirklichkeit): ‘Anyone who tries to speak of God today can no longer count on being immediately understood –

  J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford 1982), pp. 162–76.

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at least not if he has in mind the living God of the Bible as the reality which determines everything, as the creator of the world.’21 Christiaan Mostert describes this phrase as ‘Pannenberg’s working definition of God’.22 Although Pannenberg does not deploy the definition frequently in his Systematic Theology, he does endorse it as an accurate description of God and God’s relationship to the Creation.23 This working definition dates from 1965, but earlier ‘working definitions’ of God begin to throw light on what Pannenberg means by the phrase ‘all-determining reality’. In Grundzüge Der Christologie, Pannenberg uses the phrase ‘die alles umgreifende Macht’ ‘the all-embracing power’.24 David Polk points out that this phrase was used in an earlier version of the essay ‘The Crisis of the Scripture Principle’ which appeared in 1963, but that the later version of this essay in Basic Questions in Theology reflects the shift in Pannenberg’s terminology to describing God as the ‘all-determining reality’.25 Pannenberg is careful to ensure that this power over everything is understood correctly. He has avoided consistently discussing the power of God in formal, abstract terms. For Pannenberg, God exercises power in faithfulness to his free decision to create. God maintains the cosmos at every moment, and will bring it to perfection. The only proper way to consider God’s omnipotence, for Pannenberg, is in the context of God as Creator.26 Cornelius Buller understands Pannenberg to mean by the phrase ‘alldetermining reality’ that God is the ‘source and end of all existence and that God is to be reckoned with in all that happens’.27 Buller is here setting out his own case for reading a unity of history and nature in Pannenberg’s theology. Buller’s case is problematical at a number of points, but he is right to draw attention to the fact that God’s power is comprehended through its action in history and not in formal abstract terms. God’s faithfulness and, by extension, God’s power is God’s constancy to the actual world, and this refers both to creation and redemption. The Creation will reach its eschatological completion through the faithful exercise of the power of God. This conception of God as the all-determining reality sets Pannenberg’s theology in sharp contrast to process theology’s understanding of God. Underlying the designation of God as the all-determining reality is the conviction that power, understood as the ability to create, belongs exclusively to God. Power is proper

  Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, p. 201.   Christiaan Mostert, ‘From Eschatology to Trinity: Pannenberg’s Doctrine of God’

21 22

Pacifica 10 (1997): 71–83, at 75. 23   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 159. 24   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundzüge Der Christologie (Gutersloh 1964), p. 43. 25   Polk, On the Way to God, p. 307, n. 172. 26   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 420. 27   Cornelius Buller, The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg’s Theology (Lanham, MD 1996), p. 32.

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to the being of God.28 Augustine makes a similar point throughout his writings: that which exists derives exclusively from God and from nothing else. This sets up an apparent paradox in Pannenberg’s theology, in which evil seems to be being designated as originating in the will of God. Augustine’s theology faced a similar paradox, but Augustine resolved this through a careful and nuanced consideration of the ontology of evil. For Augustine, evil is not a thing at all but a privation, a lack. Evil, says Augustine, ‘is nothing else than corruption’.29 It is not the result of a creative force at all, but of a falling short or failure. Process theology avoids the paradox of divine power and the presence of evil by shifting the balance of power between God and the cosmos. On a process view, the cosmos, the material world, has its own inherent power that is not derived from God. Process theology, then, goes beyond anything that classical Christian theology has wanted to say about God’s power with regard to the presence of evil in the world. For process theology, it is not just that God wills to limit himself in some way in order to make room for created freedom, but rather that God is limited metaphysically. There is an actual world which necessarily exists and which has an intrinsic creative power of its own which God cannot override. It is this understanding of evil that lies behind Hick’s early designation of process theology as ‘dualist’.30 This move on the part of process theology has significant implications for the understanding of evil in the world, for it indicates a fundamental shift in the understanding of the ontology of evil. Evil, on a process view, must be considered as a positively existing force of resistance to the divine will, which God is unable to override without the cooperation of the creation. According to process philosophy, actual occasions, which are the fundamental units of the cosmos, have the power of self-determination with respect to God. A.N Whitehead writes, ‘all actual entities share with God this character of self-causation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristics of transcending all other actual entities, including God.’31 It is not immediately clear what Whitehead means by the assertion that every actual entity, along with God, has the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities. Nevertheless, the basic point about evil is clear enough: evil is the result of the cosmos’ exercise of its own inherent power of self-determination. Whitehead makes an explicit link with the problem of evil, noting that if the creation is grounded in the will of God as God’s creation ex nihilo: ‘there can be no alternative except to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well of all good. He is then the supreme author of the play, and to Him must therefore be ascribed its shortcomings as well as its success.’32     30   31   32   28

29

Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, pp. 244f. Augustine, De Natura Boni, chapter 4. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (London 1968), pp. 136–41. A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (Cambridge 1929), p. 339. Ibid., p. 258.

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Whitehead is surely right here, and Pannenberg would not disagree, but it is not the task of theology to redefine the doctrine of God in such way as to dissolve the implications of this. Whitehead and those who follow him seem determined to protect the goodness and perfection of God, but if God is really God, that is not something that lies within the human sphere. This is certainly Pannenberg’s own view: ‘I do not think that it is the task of theology to exculpate God theoretically for the evil in the world.’33 God is perfectly capable of looking after God’s own goodness. The task of theology is to seek to understand how God does this. In other words, the central issues thrown up by the presence of evil in the world are why is it present (how, if at all, does it relate to God’s purpose(s)?) and what does God intend to do about it? In other words, they are issues of creation and redemption. I will postpone the discussion of the divine responsibility for evil until the end of this chapter, where I will argue that Pannenberg does not shrink from the assertion of such responsibility, provided that it is properly understood and that, in particular, responsibility is distinguished from culpability or blame. Pannenberg regards the attempt to exculpate God theoretically from this responsibility as a major mistake in the tradition of theodicy.34 Rather, he argues that the acts of God in history reveal God not only recognising his responsibility for the evil in the world, but also accepting this responsibility supremely in the events of the Cross. Rodin argues that for Barth, it could be said that evil was a human responsibility but God’s affair.35 For Pannenberg, evil is both God’s responsibility and God’s affair. Pannenberg’s theology and process theology thus offer incommensurable understandings of the nature of divine power. For process theology, divine power is persuasive. Process theologians mean by this not merely that God seeks to use divine power in such a way that seeks the cooperation of the creation but rather that the very nature of divine power is persuasive. God can do nothing other than seek to persuade the creation to follow God’s prompting. The metaphysical nature of divine power is such that God cannot impose unilaterally God’s will upon creation. God is the supreme, but not the only, embodiment of creativity. God, thus never has the monopoly of power.36 God influences every event or actual occasion, but cannot control how any event will use its creativity and its own power. The creativity of the finite realm is inherent, not bestowed by God, and therefore it cannot be withdrawn or overridden. Power, in the sense of self-determination or creativity, necessarily is shared between God and the world; metaphysically, God is limited.

  In Tupper, ‘Postscript’, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, p. 304.   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 66. 35   R. Scott Rodin, Evil and Theodicy in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York 1997), 33

34

p. 3.

36   David Ray Griffin, God and the Power of Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia, PA 1976), p. 122.

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Process writers have pointed to an impressive array of biblical support for this view of divine power.37 For Pannenberg, on the other hand, while there is some truth in the process view that God acts by persuasion, this cannot do justice finally to the biblical witness to God, and ultimately it provides no real answer to the problem of evil.38 The truth contained in the process view, according to Pannenberg, is that God does indeed act by persuasion, not out of necessity, but rather out of love for the creation and in humility. The greater truth, attested to by the biblical witness according to Pannenberg, is that God does retain ultimate power in the universe. Thus, the biblical authors prefer to trace back evil to God rather than acknowledge an independently existing force of evil. For Pannenberg, the cosmos does not exist necessarily, but contingently, through God’s exercise of power.39 The cosmos exists because of the divine free choice to create. This means that divine power must be more than simply persuasive. To put it crudely, even God could not persuade that which does not exist into existence. The world remains utterly dependent upon God, and has no inherent power of its own. This does not mean, however, that God exercises power in the universe by sheer brute force. Rather, God exercises power through love and in accordance with the divine purpose for the creation. With regard to evil, the choice between these two incommensurable understandings of divine power reduces to the question of trust. On the process view, God might be able to persuade the world of finite reality always to choose God’s initial aim for a particular actual occasion, but there is no guarantee that God will be able to do this. There is, in principle, no guarantee that God can overcome evil. Indeed, one could go further and argue that, because on a process view the capacity for evil is an inherent property of independently existing events, evil can never be overcome. It thus becomes irrational to trust the process God to overcome evil. Only on the view that God is the ultimate power in the universe does it become rational to trust this God to overcome evil. The question that arises from this is whether it is possible to ascribe freedom to the created order, if the will of God will be brought finally to fulfilment. Pannenberg, clearly, holds that freedom of the creation and the fulfilment of the divine will are compatible. An early defence of Luther’s doctrine of predestination was concerned with defending Luther against the charge of freedom-denying predeterminism.40 Accordingly. Pannenberg’s phrases ‘the power over everything’ and ‘the all-determining reality’ are intended by him to convey the idea of God’s power as guaranteeing created freedom:   Lewis S. Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (Philadelphia, PA 1978), pp. 20ff; John Cobb, God and the World (Philadelphia, PA 1969), pp. 42–66; John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia, PA 1976). 38   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 16. 39   Ibid. 40   Wolfhart Pannenberg, ‘Der Einfluß der Anfechtungserfahrung auf den Prädestinationsbegriff Luthers’, Kerygma and Dogma III (1957): 109–39. 37

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Only the ground of all reality, or better, the power over all reality, is able to guarantee a security that cannot be destroyed by any other power. Therefore man inquires after a ground which can support himself and all reality, which as the power over all reality is also able to carry him beyond the limits of his own present existence, and which therefore supports him precisely in the openness of his freedom.41

The understanding of God’s power which begins to emerge then in Pannenberg’s theology, is that it is power over everything, which is exercised in such a way as to guarantee created freedom, rather than in a unilateral deterministic way. If this can be maintained, it would certainly open a way of reconciling God’s almighty power with the existence of evil, but precisely how this can be achieved if God is the all-determining reality is a more difficult question. Pannenberg’s Future Ontology Pannenberg’s own answer to the paradox of the apparent origin of evil in God comes through perhaps the most startling aspect of his entire theology: the ontological priority of the future. Determinism is the view that whatever happens in the world is the result of antecedent causes or conditions. The future is fixed in advance by the conditions of the past and the present. Naturally, the situation is more complex than this. So-called ‘soft determinists’ hold that freedom of action is compatible with some forms of determinism, whilst hard determinism denies this. The debate is complex and I do not wish to enter into it here, except to note that even those who hold soft-deterministic views tend to erode the concept of freedom to meaning something like ‘free to choose in accordance with the agent’s desires or character’. Pannenberg’s solution to the problem of determinism is to identify God and the power of God with the future. On purely grammatical grounds, one can see how this shift might be of value. There must, however, be more to Pannenberg’s identity of God and the future than this grammatical sleight of hand. If there were not, then Pannenberg would indeed be guilty of the charge laid at his door by Langdon Gilkey of adopting ‘a kind of Calvinism in reverse gear’.42 As Mostert notes, the genesis of this idea in Pannenberg’s thought is complex.43 It certainly did not arise in Pannenberg’s thinking in the context of the need to provide an answer to the moral argument against the existence of God. The basic idea, however, seems clear enough: if the new is genuinely contingent, genuinely free, it cannot have had to come into being. The new is to be accounted for by something more than antecedent causes: it is received from the future and   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 2, p. 223.   Langdon Gilkey, ‘Pannenberg’s Basic Questions in Theology: A Review Article’,

41 42

Perspective 14 (1973): 34–56, at 53. 43   Mostert, God and the Future, p. 89–93.

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brought into relation with past events that have come into being in the same way. Pannenberg understands the future as having ontological priority over the past and the present. We have to distinguish here between the ordinary use of the word ‘future’ and Pannenberg’s theological use of the word (in German, Zukunft – to come). Ordinarily, the future is seen as an extension of the past and present. Pannenberg, however, wants to emphasise its novelty. In 1952, Friedrich Gogarten drew a distinction between the future which merely arises out of the past and the present, and that which comes to us as new. The former Gogarten labelled ‘das Futurum/das Futur’, and the latter ‘das Zukünftige’.44 The distinction became very important for Moltmann, who distinguishes between das Futurum which is extrapolated from the processes of the past and the present, and Adventus which is the coming of an Other, or the new, which cannot be extrapolated from the past or the present. Adventus breaks into the present with new possibilities from beyond. However, the distinction is far from clear in Moltmann’s thought, for he can write, ‘Historical activity for the Zukunft arises from an alliance of what man knows with what man hopes, what he can do with what he wants to do. Therefore, it makes good sense that our word Zukunft encompasses extrapolation and anticipation, Futurum and Adventus.’45 Understandably, Gerhard Sauter finds little of significance in the distinction between Futurum and Adventus, seeing them as merging into one another indistinguishably in Moltmann’s thought.46 Pannenberg does not adopt the distinction. He uses the German die Zukunft when he is talking about the ultimate future, and when he is speaking of the natural development of events. The reason for this is not difficult to fathom. Moltmann works with a traditional ontology of time, with the past and the present having ontological priority over the future. The hope of Christian faith lies in the contradiction, and hence fulfilment, of the processes of time. He can then distinguish between a future which the world might choose freely as distinct from God’s future for the world. No such distinction is possible in Pannenberg’s theology, because God creates from the future. The present is released from the ultimate future. The world may choose to reject this future, but there is no other ultimate future available to the world apart from that which God releases. For Pannenberg, the future confronts and runs counter to the world. This notion of the priority of the future is counter-intuitive. Our everyday perception is that the future is not quite real: it exists only in thought and imagination. Since it has not happened yet, it is thought not yet to exist. This, Pannenberg contends, is the result of our necessarily limited, finite perspective. The future is bound to appear like this from the perspective of time. However, if 44   Friedrich Gogarten, Der Mensch Zwischen Gott und der Welt (Stuttgart 1956), pp. 389f. 45   Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (London 1967), p. 212. 46   Gerhard Sauter, Zukunft und Verheissung: Das Problem di Zukunf in erdgegenwertigen un philosophie (Göttingen 1965), p. 131.

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we were able to gain a perspective outside of time, from eternity, things would appear very differently. For Pannenberg, eternity is the fullness of time. Eternity contains time, and so from the perspective of eternity, past, present and future are simultaneously present. If I can put it crudely, the future is the part of eternity not yet released into time. The point is that Pannenberg is able to ascribe a reality and power to the future. In Theology and the Kingdom of God, Pannenberg argues for a view of the future that is concrete and existential, not abstract and formal. The future is actually experienced as a power, he says, and confronts us sometimes as ‘a dark uncertain power’, sometimes as ‘a power that promises fulfilment’.47 Pannenberg’s understanding of the future as powerful and ontologically prior to the present and the past is a vast subject of its own. Chapter 3 of Mostert’s work is an accessible analysis of Pannenberg’s ontology.48 As interpreters of Pannenberg are quick to point out, the everyday perception of the future is challenged, not just from a theological perspective, but also from the perspective of quantum physics. This aspect of the concept of the ontology of the future was considered in Chapter 2. Here, I want to pursue one further aspect of the subject: how this ontology and power of the future escapes becoming deterministic. The issue can be put as follows. In the essay, Der Einfluss, on Luther’s doctrine of predestination, Pannenberg argues for a view of God’s unchangeableness in terms of God’s constancy to his promises.49 What God has promised, God will bring to completion. So, for example, when God promises to save Israel, because God has power over all things, because God is the all-determining reality, this promise will be brought to fulfilment by God. In other words, the future is not ultimately open, as, for example, in many forms of process thought. Rather, the ultimate future is closed, in the sense that there is a very definite goal in which God’s will certainly wins out. This view of God’s ultimate triumph seems to me to be an essential element of Christian faith, for without it, our hope is no longer certain but a mere wish or desire. This issue is at the heart of Pannenberg’s brief argument with Bloch, and is the reason why Bloch was never the influence upon Pannenberg that he was on Moltmann. The Determinist Bind There are two possible ways in which we can understand God’s future as the alldetermining reality. Polk designates them soft and hard determinism respectively, but these terms carry meanings of their own within theology and philosophy of religion.50 These meanings are slightly different to the way Polk uses them in connection with Pannenberg’s thought, and I have thought it best to adopt a     49   50   47 48

Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom, p. 56. Mostert, God and the Future, pp. 55–88. Pannenberg, Der Einfluß der Anfechtungserfahrung. Polk, On the Way to God, pp. 271–2.

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different nomenclature. I will designate these two possibilities ‘weak determinism’ and ‘strong determinism’. Pannenberg could mean by his working definition no more than that the future will reveal what will turn out to be the case. It is the ultimate future that decides, determines, what the becoming events in the world actually mean. In other words, the future has power to the extent that it fixes our understanding of what is happening in the world. This is ‘weak determinism’. The future has the power of dis-covering, of establishing, the true character of all reality. There is some support for this view in Pannenberg’s corpus: ‘Only the future will show what is to survive; and hence only the future will also decide what is the enduring essence of things.’51 This is David MacKenzie’s final understanding of Pannenberg’s ontology of the future.52 MacKenzie can find no ‘adequate explanation of the power of the future’, and views ‘the bulk of Pannenberg’s work’ as pointing to the understanding that the future determines present reality ‘only in that it shows the essence of the present’, and not in the mode of actually exercising influence over the course of events.53 It is certainly the case that Pannenberg deploys his working definition on a number of occasions without any clear indication of a specific intent which would allow an interpretation as limited as MacKenzie’s.54 Strong determinism, on the other hand, understands Pannenberg to mean that God as the power of the future is more than a revelatory force. On this second view, Pannenberg means nothing less than that the power of the future is a genuine force of creativity, out of which history is fully and concretely constituted. Pannenberg typically can refer to the power of God which ‘dominates all’ and is ‘master over all’.55 He can describe God as having ‘constitutive’ (konstituierend) significance over all history.56 The impression that such language conveys is that God solely is accountable for what emerges in every historical present. On this view, God would be responsible specifically for every concrete expression of evil. The point of view is made strongly in Theology and the Kingdom of God: In every event the infinite future separates itself from the finite events which until then had been hidden in this future but are now released into existence. The future lets go of itself to bring into being our present. And every new present is

  Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Apostles’ Creed in the Light of Today’s Questions, trans Margaret Kohl (Philadelphia, PA 1972), p. 38, emphasis added; cf. Theology and the Kingdom, p. 60. 52   David MacKenzie, ‘Pannenberg on God and Freedom’, Journal of Religion 60 (1980): 307–29. 53   Ibid., p. 322. 54   See, for example, Pannenberg, Basic Questions 3, pp. 107f. 55   Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom, p. 55. 56   Basic Questions 1, pp. 157, 158. 51

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again confronted by a dark and mysterious future out of which certain relevant events will be released. Thus does the future determine the present.57

The process theologian Lewis Ford, in dialogue with Pannenberg, suggests that what Pannenberg actually means by this is that only the possibility of an event is released into existence by the future, so that there remains a degree of selfdetermination with regard to the event’s concrete historical reality. Ford sees Pannenberg as understanding God as the ‘ultimate’ power of the future, which keeps the world from degenerating into chaos by the ‘relentless provision of ever new creative possibilities’. However, according to Ford, these possibilities may become distorted in transmission and God is thus not the ‘sole’ power of the future although he is the ‘ultimate’ power.58 If this were indeed Pannenberg’s understanding, it would be possible to understand the origin of evil as the distortion of God’s creative intent in each new event that is released from the future. Pannenberg, however, will have none of this and is insistent that the power of the future should not only create possibilities but actualities as well, establishing ‘the complete dependence of everything real upon God’.59 It seems that, despite Pannenberg’s intent of preserving the reality of created freedom, the actual outcome of his language of God as the all-determining reality must be interpreted in terms of what I have been calling ‘strong determinism’. Pannenberg’s insistence that God creates historical realities, and not merely their possibilities, seems to leave little room for created freedom. His reasons for understanding God’s power in this way are to do with two connected themes that run throughout his theology: his defence of the absolute freedom of God on the one hand, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo on the other. What is at stake, for Pannenberg, in the discussion of God’s power and the freedom of the created order is the theological affirmation that the freedom of God is not held in check by realities external to God’s own being. To hold that some other power or cause, apart from God’s future, is also involved in the becoming of the present would entail that the ultimate truth of God incorporates that which is attributable to causes not exclusively derived from God. This would impinge upon the absolute freedom of God not to be determined by anything other than God’s self. This leads to the idea of creatio ex nihilo, for everything that exists must always have derived from God’s future. There can be no question for Pannenberg of God merely exerting creative influence over pre-existing matter, since this would detract from God. Not only is the idea of creation out of nothing relevant for the very beginning of God’s creation, but it is also relevant for every single moment in the history of ongoing creation. The creation, especially the human creation, may depart from the will of God, but it continues to be God’s creation. Moreover, such deviations from   Theology and the Kingdom, p. 59.   Ford, The Lure of God, p. 134, original emphasis. 59   Lewis S. Ford, ‘A Dialogue about Process Philosophy’ (with Wolfhart Pannenberg), 57 58

Encounter 38 (1977):318–24, at 319, 320.

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God do nothing to alter the nature of God’s rule, which is revealed through God’s preservation of the wayward creation.60 Polk believes that he has found a way through the apparent impasse of strong determinism in Pannenberg’s thinking.61 In Theology and the Philosophy of Science, Polk finds Pannenberg’s by now familiar affirmation that God’s all-determining power is itself determined only by itself, and is not subject to determining by anything else. But Pannenberg gives a possible way out of the determinist bind. Implicit in the idea of all-determining power ‘is the claim that this all-determining power is itself determined only by itself and not subject to determination by anything else, unless it determines that it should be determined by something else’.62 In Polk’s view, ‘no more crucial qualification has appeared in Pannenberg’s explorations into the power of God than this.’63 Polk takes Pannenberg’s words to mean that God as the all-determining power need not constitute fully the actuality of what becomes in history ‘if it is God’s absolutely free determination not to do so’.64 In other words, God could freely choose to surrender the sole determination of the future, choosing to give genuine power to the creation in determining its own future. Polk accuses Pannenberg of carelessness in his use of the word ‘future’, and suggests that Pannenberg would do better to distinguish more carefully between the ultimate future and the future, which is emergently present.65 This approach has merits, in that it provides an obvious entry point from which to consider the power of God as the power of love, which is something that Pannenberg certainly wants to do. Its major disadvantage, in terms of understanding Pannenberg’s intent, as Polk himself notes, is that Pannenberg has already rejected specifically such a possibility of understanding his theology in his dialogue with Lewis Ford. On Polk’s own admission, this resolution to the determinism question is achieved at the cost of the immutability of God. Recall here that divine immutability is, for Pannenberg, God’s faithfulness to God’s goal of creation and the guarantee that this goal will be achieved through the action of God’s omnipotence. If created agents are capable of determining the ultimate future to any extent, even with the specific permission of the Creator, then the ultimate future must no longer be certain. For Polk and others, created freedom can be maintained only at the expense of the certainty of the ultimate future.

  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, pp. 35–46 passim.   Polk, On the Way to God, pp. 274ff. 62   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. F. McDonah 60

61

(Philadelphia, PA 1976), p. 309, n. 615; emphasis added. 63   Polk, On the Way to God, p. 274. 64   Ibid., p. 164. 65   Ibid., p. 277.

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Escaping the Determinist Bind There is, however, a way through the determinist bind which still maintains God’s sole determinacy of the ultimate future. The root of the problem lies, I believe, in the different concepts of freedom with which Pannenberg and his interpreters are, often implicitly, working. Certainly for Ford and for Polk, the freedom of events involves at least a degree of self-determination of what they actually ultimately become. This is standard process ontology. Freedom, for Pannenberg on the other hand, is the freedom to actualise one’s proper destiny. Moreover, this freedom is possible only because God, as the power of the future, guarantees it. At first sight, there may seem little difference between these two views, but one is a freedom of choice, the other a creative freedom and power, which Pannenberg does not impute to the creation. For Pannenberg, our destiny is actualised when we accept our limitations and our dependency upon God, and thereby embrace fellowship with him on these terms.66 The way in which this distinction between the two understandings of creaturely freedom helps us through the determinist bind lies in a deeper understanding of the dispute between Ford and Pannenberg over precisely what it is that God creates. We saw in the discussion above that Pannenberg is clear that God cannot be thought of as creating only possibility, but must be understood as the actual ground of both possibility and actuality. The roots of Pannenberg’s dispute with Ford lie in the philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant. Kant was opposed thoroughly to Leibniz’s view that it is only the possibility of things that depends upon God’s almighty will, and not their concrete reality as well.67 For Kant, says Pannenberg, God is the being from whom both the possibility and actuality of existent things derive. Pannenberg writes: God’s creative action has not merely helped into existence things that are at present possible in the ideas of his understanding; he is the basis of the actual possibility of things. In this way Kant secured the necessary space for the concept of the omnipotence that is inseparably related to that of the Creator God.68

Pannenberg, it would seem, has no problem with the idea that the creation can subvert at least temporarily the Creator’s will, at least in the sense that obedience to that will is not forced. One of his underlying concerns in describing God as the all-determining reality seems to me to be the perceived need to secure the creation’s ability to reject the will of the Creator. Pannenberg roots this firmly in God’s creative action. The creation can choose, freely, to reject God’s future because God makes this actually possible. Thus Pannenberg asserts, ‘The future of human beings remains the prerogative of God. Human beings can’t help   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 420.   Leibniz, Theodicy, p. 335. 68   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 420. 66

67

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considering their future and acting upon it. Even so, despite all human effort, the reality of God does not come about. Human beings are not able to complete their future and thus their selves.’69 Human beings are free to act in accordance with their own consideration of their future, in independence of God. They are free to do so because God makes it actually possible. However. the result of this independent self-determination is not their fulfilment as human beings. Its reality is nothingness, no future at all. Pannenberg’s disagreement with Ford and process theology in general is that such self-determination on the part of human beings cannot be viewed in any sense in a creative or positive way. For the creation to turn aside from the will of the Creator is to turn aside from the source of its life: ‘it falls into nothingness.’70 It is not thereby embracing another future different from the ultimate future of the Creator. It is turning aside from all future. For Pannenberg, this is a denial of created freedom, which he understands as the creation’s ability to transcend its presently existing state. To use Gogarten’s terminology, discussed above, there is for Pannenberg no Futur in the sense of an emergent future that is real in terms of eternity. There is only Zukunft, God’s ultimate future, or there is nothingness. The blunt reality of created freedom in Pannenberg’s thought is that the creation is free to choose between future and no future. Herein lies also the solution to understanding the passages in Pannenberg which seem to understand the power of the future as merely that of revealing what is of eternal significance. From the perspective of time, the Futur and the Zukunft are not distinguished clearly. There is a necessary hiddenness of God to the creation, but, with the arrival of the ultimate future, what is of lasting significance and truth finally will be revealed. The Futur, to continue to use the term, will be finally exposed as the nothingness that in reality it is. If this choice is to be truly free, then there must be an epistemological distance between the creation and its Creator. If God were fully present to the creation in his omnipotence, then the creation would indeed be overwhelmed and its finite freedom lost in God’s infinity. The True Nature of Omnipotence If the creation is left in its futureless state as a result of its self-emancipation from God, then what comes to expression is the impotence of God rather than God’s

69   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie, Bd 2 (Göttingen 1980), p. 175 The essay ‘The Resurrection of Jesus and Human Future’ is not available in English. The original German of the passage is: ‘Die Zukunft des Menschen blieb die Prärogative Gottes. Der Mensch kann nicht umhin, seine Zukunft zu bedenken und auf sie hin zu handeln, ebenso wie er trotz aller Bemühung nicht herumkommt um die Wirklichkeit Gottes. Doch seine Zukunft und so sich selber zu vollenden: das vermag er nicht.’ 70   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 420.

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omnipotence.71 Omnipotence, rather, finds expression in the fact that God acts in power to save the creation from nothingness. Two ways in which God does this can be distinguished in Pannenberg’s thought. First, there is God’s providence and governance of the creation, maintaining it in existence despite the creation’s rejection of its future. It is this understanding that lies behind the otherwise almost incomprehensible statement in the Systematic Theology that God acts to reduce the effects of evil in the world.72 If God did not act in this way, the creation would, literally, cease to be. Non-existence is the ultimate effect of evil. In God’s providence, this is never allowed to be the result of the creation’s rejection of its future. The second way in which God acts towards the creation in the face of evil is by entering into the conditions of created reality directly in the incarnation, in order to lift the creation out of the futureless state in which it has become trapped. For God to encounter his ‘apostate’ creation in naked power would be to overwhelm the creation and destroy all possibility of achieving God’s goal in creation. Instead, Pannenberg argues, God is present to the apostate creation under the conditions of its own existence. In other words, the supreme expression of God’s power is, for Pannenberg, the incarnation of the Son. In the incarnation and the whole career of Jesus ‘comes to expression the divine will that the creature should live’.73 God affirms the creation in its finitude, in its limitations which, through its own wilful self-determination, it rejects. The result of the creation’s self-determination, however, is not a transcendence of its limitations. It is, as we have seen, a fall into nothingness. God overcomes this through the incarnation, as the finite shows itself to be eternally affirmed by God in its limitation and in acceptance of it. All of this leads finally to the view that Pannenberg, despite some of his language of God’s power having mastery over all, actually understands the power of God as none other than the power of love, and not the assertion of power and authority against all opposition: That power alone is almighty which affirms what is opposite to it in its particularity, and therefore precisely in its limits, which it affirms unreservedly and infinitely, so that it gives the creature the opportunity of accepting its own limits to transcend them and in this way participate in infinity. 74

It is, then, to the understanding of divine love that we now turn.

    73   74   71 72

Ibid., p. 420. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 238. Systematic Theology 1, p. 421. Ibid., p. 421.

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The Love of God The expression ‘the love of God’ is a little ambiguous, for it could mean the love of human beings for God, the love of God for the creation, or both things simultaneously. Anders Nygren’s study Agape and Eros was an attempt to analyse the concept of the love of God in both its meanings.75 Nygren treats the two aspects of the love of God as antithetical.76 Agape, the divine self-giving love, is set in opposition to Eros, understood in platonic terms as desire for the good or the divine. As Burnaby points out, this antithesis is a false one.77 If we understand God as being active in the world, guiding and governing it and giving himself supremely to the world in Christ, it is expressly because the creation needs God. The conscious need of God that emerges in the creation with human beings, far from being an obstacle to receiving the gift of divine love, is, in fact, a precondition of receiving the gift. I will argue in Chapter 6 that it is precisely at this point that the cross does its work of reconciling human beings and, through human beings, the whole of creation to God. The cross, it will be argued, is the point in history in which the love of God is realised in a dual sense. First, it gives concrete expression to the love of God for the world, and secondly, through this revelation of the true nature of God, human beings can understand their own true position before God as beloved. They can, thus, be reconciled to God and discover their true destiny for loving their creator. Both meanings are essential to a full understanding of the love of God. At different times within the theological tradition, each of these two aspects of the concept of the love of God has been stressed, sometimes at the expense of the other. Within the classical tradition, it was scarcely conceivable that God might be capable of love, in the modern sense of the word, for the creation. John Burnaby makes the point in his exposition of the theme of divine love in the thought of Augustine: The love of God itself is almost pure Eros. The caritas Dei from which nothing can separate us is our love for God: in ‘Jesus Christ,’ it is Christ’s love for God, in which the Spirit makes us participators. That God is capable of love for us is barely suggested: it is to his ‘goodness and kindness’ that we owe all that we are; if he may be called compassionate (misericors), it is only in a special sense.78

Although he understands the love of God as a divine gift, for Augustine, unless he specifically qualifies the expression, the love of God is always our love for God and not God’s love for the creation.79 By contrast, modern theology seems     77   78   79   75

76

Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London 1932). Ibid., p. 23. John Burnaby, Amour Dei (London 1938), p. 16. Ibid., p. 89. Ibid., p. 99.

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to have little difficulty in speaking of the love of God for the world. Paul Fiddes suggests that this change has come about by the need to reflect upon the meaning of God’s love for the world, in the light of psychological insights into the meaning of what it means to be personal.80 I would suggest that both meanings of the phrase are important and must be taken seriously. However, we cannot combine the two traditions in a straightforward way, for each makes different assumptions about the nature of God and the nature of love. These differences must be disentangled before we can consider the meaning of both God’s love for the creation and our love for God. Having considered these differences, the remainder of this section will expound Pannenberg’s understanding of the nature of divine love: that is, God’s love for the world. To anticipate the argument: love is an ontologically real power, the very being of God through which God constitutes God as Trinity. This ontological understanding of love is contrasted with the ontological nothingness of suffering, and it will be argued that suffering is not a necessary component of divine love, which is understood in terms of personal self-giving to the other. This love, as desire for the other, overflows from God, and is the ontological ground of the creation. The other aspect of the love of God – our love for God – is also important, but discussion of this will be delayed until Chapter 5, which considers God’s overcoming of evil and the reconciliation of the world to God. There it will be argued that salvation and overcoming evil consist in part of the recognition of God by the creation and the creation’s response of love towards its Creator. Disentangling the traditions is not straightforward, for a number of distinct themes and concepts are intertwined with the concept of divine love. The key concepts in relation to God and divine love are change and passibility. In much contemporary theology, both are held to be essential to the concept of love. To be capable of love is necessarily to be capable of change, and to be capable of suffering. True love involves sympathy. Clearly, this is to be understood in emotional terms, for love must involve a degree of, at least, mental pain and anguish. However, the word ‘sympathy’ is also to be understood in its root meaning of ‘sufferingwith’. Truly personal love, it is argued, will always involve a co-suffering with the beloved, because the world is such that love must be costly and sacrificial.81 Charles Hartshorne has insisted that love is a sharing of experience which must consist in participation in the suffering of the other.82 Fiddes seeks to understand this in terms of love as a form of communication between persons.83 Love is seen as a form of self-expression, or perhaps better, self-revelation, which creates true community. Suffering for and with someone is understood as a form of communication which is much deeper than language. The process theologian Daniel Day Williams picks up this notion of suffering love as the power for creating relationships in his work   Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford 1992), p. 16.   Ibid., p. 16; Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R.A. Wilson and John

80 81

Bowden (London 1974), p. 230. 82   Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, IL 1967), p. 105. 83   Fiddes, The Creative Suffering, pp. 16–17.

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The Spirit and Forms of Love.84 This concept of love has obvious explanatory power for understanding the work of Christ, which Williams exploits fully. Although the argument of modern theology has been highlighted here in terms of suffering, it should not go unnoticed that the nature of love which underlies the concept of love as suffering, and which is simply taken for granted in the contemporary tradition, is that love belongs to the emotions. For contemporary theology, for God to be capable of love, God must be capable of emotion. This is something that the Fathers were very keen to deny of God. For the Fathers to ascribe emotion to God meant subjecting God to the vagaries of change, which in turn would mean that God could no longer be relied upon in principle to overcome evil, and so patristic theology understood divine love as an attitude and action of benevolence towards another person. Love has nothing to do with emotions, but is the will to achieve the good of another. Thus Augustine: ‘His pity is not the wretched heart of a fellow sufferer … the pity of God is the goodness of his help … when God pities he does not grieve and he liberates.’85 The denial of emotional states in God is not to be taken as a denial that God cares for the plight of the creation. Augustine states specifically that God does have pity for the creation; it is merely that this pity is not an emotional state and has no affect upon the divine will to liberate. What may outwardly appear to us as an act of compassion does not in fact spring from divine co-suffering at all, but directly from the eternal divine will to save. By the time of Thomas Aquinas, it was firmly established that love is an act of the divine will and intellect.86 Both the classical and the contemporary traditions are, in fact, trying to preserve the same affirmation: that God is with us, acting on our behalf, in the face of evil and suffering. James Cone, for example, is concerned not so much with the amount of suffering in the world, but more with the unequal distribution of suffering in the world. Observing that black people suffer disproportionately in the world, Cone concludes that it is only because God is a fellow sufferer that the question ‘is God a white racist?’ is absurd.87 God is no such thing, Cone argues: God acts in solidarity with and on behalf of black people precisely because he suffers with them. By contrast, for Augustine, it is because God does not suffer that God is able to rescue us. Thus the analytical question posed by the dichotomy between the contemporary and the patristic tradition is whether or not love necessarily involves either suffering or the capacity for suffering. The argument for the necessity of suffering, as Michael Dodds points out, is in point of fact an instrumental argument.88 Suffering is held to be only seemingly an evil. It is a means to a greater end. Dodds quotes F. von Hügel: ‘Suffering is intrinsically an evil. It is impossible to read much of the literature which insists     86   87   88   84

85

Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Welwyn 1968). Augustine, Contra Adversarium Legis et Prophetarum 1.40. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Ia:20, I. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York, 1997), pp. 163, 166–7, 184–8. Michael Dodds, The Unchanging Love of God (Freibourg 1985).

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upon the presence of suffering in God, without being struck with the trend – I believe the inevitable trend, once suffering has been admitted to God – to treat that suffering as but a seeming evil.’89 Richard Creel offers a similarly instrumental argument for divine impassibility. Creel uses an analogy of a mother who does not share emotionally her child’s distress when she knows that the child is afraid of only an imagined danger. In like manner, Creel argues ‘we cannot rule out the possibility that God knows something of our destiny that renders it inappropriate for him to be disturbed by our suffering in this life.’90 Like unpleasant medicine, suffering is thus seen as instrumental for a greater good. Creel’s argument is undoubtedly weak. Regardless of the reality or otherwise of the cause of the child’s fear, the mother will be affected by her child’s emotional state. She will be distressed that her child is distressed. Nevertheless, the criticism of Paul Fiddes is wide of the mark. Fiddes believes that Creel ‘misses the whole dimension of suffering as a necessary form of communication between persons’.91 There can be no doubt that suffering can be a form of communication between persons, but this does not mean it is a necessary form of communication. Suffering is intrinsically evil, regardless of whether it can be used to achieve a greater good. Such considerations are irrelevant to a consideration of the ontological nature of suffering. Suffering is not in itself good. If evil and suffering were to be removed, this could in no way lessen love. Thomas Weinandy points out that precisely the opposite can very often be the case.92 Sin and the prospect of suffering hinder the full expression of love. In Augustinian terms, suffering is the absence of some good that the beloved should possess, for example, health or justice. Suffering, then, is not a necessary part of love; it is merely a contingent aspect of love in this world where evil is a part of our experience. Weinandy considers human friendship, understood as the giving of ourselves to one another for the good of the other, as the model of love. Human life can be seen as an attempt to live out this love within a ‘milieu of sin and evil’. Within this milieu, inevitably love means that we suffer but this is not a necessary or a constitutive aspect of love; it is contingent upon the presence of sin and evil. What is necessary to the concept of love is that love is a self giving to the other. Love is ‘defined and manifested in the giving of ourselves – in thought, word and deed – for the good and well-being of another’.93 This does not yet answer the question of whether or not God is capable of suffering: I will discuss this further in Chapter 5. It does, however, answer the analytical question about the relationship of love and suffering. Suffering is not an essential aspect of love, neither is it an essential means of communication between persons, though it can be both of these. Love is to be understood in terms of     91   92   93   89 90

Ibid., pp. 41–2. Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility (Cambridge 1986), p. 117. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering, p. 19, emphasis added. Thomas, G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh 2000), p. 160. Ibid., pp. 159–60.

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self-giving to another. This self-giving to another is, in fact, what love is. Love is not simply benevolence, in the sense of acting outwardly on behalf of the other. Love is more than this. If we understand love in this way, then we need not shrink from the ascription of love to God. Indeed, it opens up a way for us to understand God as pure love. If we understand God as unmoved and unchanged by God’s giving of God’s self to the creation, then we can understand how God can love from all eternity, giving God’s self totally on our behalf. So, then, this analysis of the classical and the contemporary understanding of love rejects the contemporary tradition’s insistence that suffering is a necessary component of love, but equally it rejects the patristic tradition’s consideration of divine love in terms of benevolence. The assertion of 1 John 4:8 and 4:16 that God is love must mean that love is more than simply outward acts of benevolence. In philosophical terms, this is an ontological statement: it makes a claim about the very nature of God’s being. One of Feuerbach’s complaints against Christianity was that it understands love merely as a predicate. If love is not understood in terms of substance or essence, there is always the possibility that something might exist without it.94 In terms of the understanding of love argued for in this chapter, God is self-giving. The being, the nature of God is self-giving love. Barth understood 1John in terms of his insistence that the one God is the subject of love.95 Hence divine love, for Barth, is God’s loving act towards the one God loves. In terms of the definition of love as self-giving, this seems inadequate. Jüngel points out that Feuerbach’s polemics were directed against the notion of God as the single omnipotent, personal subject of infinite spiritual essence, and he acknowledges the force of Feuerbach’s charge. However, Jüngel concludes that, for Feuerbach, love is ‘abstract Eros’, human self-realisation.96 Pannenberg is critical of Jüngel’s analysis at this point because in his view, Jüngel has failed to recognise that Feuerbach is speaking, not of human individuals, but of the species as a whole.97 Jüngel argues that Christianity must be very careful not to make an ontological distinction between God and love.98 Only by drawing on trinitarian concepts of God can Feuerbach’s charge be met. Nevertheless, Jüngel, like Barth, still considers God as the subject of divine love and so never really escapes the criticism of Feuerbach. Pannenberg develops a much more trinitarian understanding of the assertion that God is love, viewing the three persons as concrete forms of the love that is God. It is to Pannenberg that we now turn.

94   Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York 1985), p. 52. 95   Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 275. 96   Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Edinburgh 1983), pp. 338–9. 97   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 297. 98   Cobb, God and the World, p. 316.

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Pannenberg’s Understanding of the Love of God The analysis above is wholly consistent with Pannenberg’s understanding of the love of God. In the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg’s consideration of the love of God forms the climax to the first volume and the doctrine of God. He begins, predictably, with a discussion of love and Trinity. God is love, precisely because mutual self-giving is expressed fully between the persons of the Trinity. This love is changeless, in that each person gives themselves fully to the others, and yet this does not mean that God is static. Rather, God is dynamic. The Trinity is also immutable, in that love as self-giving between the persons is realised fully, immanently within the Trinity. It would be wrong to draw the conclusion that God is the being who loves himself from eternity. Such a description would fall disastrously short of the meaning of divine love. This is so, because if each person of the Trinity merely loves self in the other, love falls short of the self-giving ‘which is the condition that one who loves be given self afresh in the responsive love of the one who is loved’.99 The love that is fully realised in the intra-trinitarian life is love for the other. Thus, ‘the Father loves the Son, the Son the Father and the Spirit both in fellowship, and each thereby fulfils itself.’100 Each of the persons of the Trinity is ‘ec-statically’ related to the other and each finds their distinct personhood in relation to the others. The relations between the persons of the Trinity are thus not merely logical relations but existential.101 The Father is Father only in relation to the generation and sending of the Son. Conversely, the Son is Son only in relation to obedience to the sending by the Father, which thus includes recognition and acknowledgement of the Father. The Spirit is constituted as a divine hypostasis through the mutuality of the indwelling of Father and Son, through which the Spirit fulfils himself as love and is thus the Holy Spirit. This can lead to some difficulties in understanding Pannenberg’s trinitarian doctrine in regard to the ontology of love as divine being. Pannenberg distinguishes between existence and essence. The basic essence of God is Spirit – love – but this has no existence apart from the persons of the Trinity. For Pannenberg, the basic fulfilment of divine love is the coming forth of the Son from the Father.102 This coming forth occurs through the Spirit – love – the divine essence. In their distinction from one another through Spirit, the Father and the Son are in fact united to each other through their common essence, Spirit. As the essence common to both, Spirit comes forth as a distinct divine hypostasis and thus is fulfilled as the Holy Spirit. The Father may be said to love the Son from all eternity and the Son may be said to love the Father. But for Pannenberg, the Spirit, even as Holy Spirit, is not an object of the love of the Father or the Son. Even as divine hypostasis, the Holy Spirit remains the love which constitutes the mutual relation of the Father   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 426.   Ibid., p. 426. 101   Ibid., p. 428. 102   Ibid., p. 429. 99

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and Son. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit as divine hypostasis ‘can be at work in the creation and he can also be shed abroad in the hearts of believers’.103 Love as Spirit constitutes God as Trinity, as a community of love in which each member loves the other in distinction from themselves, and gives themselves to the others. This is all to the good, but this consideration of Pannenberg’s understanding of the relationship of divine power and love began by identifying the being of God with the power of God. If we are now to understand that being in terms of love as self-giving, then to avoid contradiction, we must understand love as power. From early in his theological career, Pannenberg has been keen to identify love and power. In the public ministry of Jesus, the power of God reveals itself in the forgiveness of sins and the offer of the gift of salvation. In the offer of new life, the power of the Kingdom of God comes in love, so that it is simply impossible to separate the power and love of God: The creative character of love is linked to the power of the future … The idea of power by itself is ambiguous, making possible both destruction and life. But creative love is unambiguous in asserting that the present is set free to life. Love is the only real answer we have to the startling question, Why should there be anything at all rather than nothing? Love grants existence and grants it contingently. This means that love grants new existence, in spite of the selfasserting arrogance of that which already is. In love we recognize the intrinsic dynamic at work in the eventuating of contingent events from the future and realising them in the process of time.104

This passage is pregnant with meaning for the understanding of the origin of creation in divine love, and for the overcoming of evil in creation by divine love. Both of these themes are discussed here. Love as the ground of creation was discussed in Chapter 3 and love’s outworking in the overcoming of evil is the topic of Chapter 6. The mature reflections of the Systematic Theology develop this early equation of divine power and love, tying them together in a coherent understanding of the divine Trinitarian being. Jüngel has shown that love is a power.105 Pannenberg notes that: Persons do not have power over love. It rises in them and thereby gives them their selfhood. It manifests itself through the reciprocal relation of those who are bound together in love. Each receives his or her self afresh from the other, and since the self-giving is mutual there is no one-sided dependence in the sense of belonging to another.106

    105   106   103 104

Ibid., p. 429. Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom, p. 64, cf. Basic Questions 2, p. 248. Jüngel, God as the Mystery, pp. 321ff. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 427.

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What constitutes the lover in this scenario is not the other, the beloved, as such but the ‘mystery that holds sway between them’.107 This mystery is the power of love, the ‘spirit of fellowship’ which binds persons together. It not only binds them together: it constitutes them as persons. It is this love-as-power that is identical with the divine essence. Love for Pannenberg is a creative, powerful force, personal in nature. It is not simply God acting on behalf of the world God has created. Love is God’s being. The love which constitutes the persons of the Trinity is none other than the Spirit. For Pannenberg, the phrases ‘God is love’ and ‘God is Spirit’ are identical. Love is ‘the materially concrete form of ‘Spirit’ as the characteristic of God’s essence’.108 But for Pannenberg, Spirit is also a dynamic field of force, through which God is powerfully active in the world.109

  Ibid., p. 427; Anthropology in Theological Perspective, pp. 181ff.   Ibid., p. 427. 109   Ibid., pp. 371–84; Systematic Theology 2, pp. 79–84. 107 108

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Chapter 5

The Realisation of Divine Love This chapter explores Pannenberg’s understanding of God’s action to overcome evil in the world. Chapters 2 and 3 gave an exposition of Pannenberg’s understanding of the presence of evil in the world in relation to the divine purpose for the world. It was argued that evil is part of the cost of creation which the Creator is willing to accept as part of the price of an independent creation in fellowship with God. This idea was given further weight in Chapter 4 in the exposition of Pannenberg’s understanding of the power and love of God and Pannenberg’s ‘working definition’ of God as the all-determining reality. As such, though human beings still bear responsibility for their sin, ultimate responsibility for the presence of evil in the world must rest with God: Responsibility for the coming of evil into creation unavoidably falls on the God who foresees and permits it, even though creaturely action is its immediate cause. God did not shirk the responsibility but shouldered it by sending and giving up his Son to the Cross. In this way as creator he stands by his responsibility for the work that he has made. Evil is thus costly enough for God himself as for creatures. Evil may be null and void for his creative will, but this nullity is sealed only by his victory over it in the event of reconciliation and in the eschatological consummation of creation.1

This short quotation indicates that the cross is the means through which, according to Pannenberg, God accepts and discharges his responsibility for the presence of evil in the world. Moreover, this action on the part of God is conceived of in terms of reconciliation. Divine action, and supremely the divine act of the sending of the Son to the cross, is not primarily, if at all, an act of atonement, conceived in terms of penal or punitive models, but as an outworking of the divine love for the world and as a revelation of that love. It will be recalled that, in Chapter 3, it was suggested that human beings’ fundamental problem was alienation from themselves, from others and ultimately from God. Moreover, this alienation was related to the ontological structure of human beings. It is alienation that leads to evil, and thus the cross is to be understood as a divine act aimed at overcoming this alienation. As we shall see, even though Pannenberg uses the language of expiation in his discussion of the cross, for him the cross is ultimately a revelation of the nature and scope of divine love, and it is this revelation that has the atoning power to overcome human alienation and, hence, the ground of evil. The ultimate   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 169.

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goal of divine action is communion between God and the creation, the fulfilment of his creative purpose. Reconciliation as Act of God In order for the reconciliation of the world through the cross to be understood as an act of God, the way in which God is present in Christ needs to be clarified. A statement from early in the Grundzüge is programmatic for both Pannenberg’s earlier and later Christology: ‘Thus the task of Christology is to establish the true understanding of Jesus’ significance from his history which can be described comprehensively by saying that in this man God is revealed.’2 It is well known that in his early work of Christology, Grundzüge der Christologie (translated as Jesus God and Man), Pannenberg’s methodological starting point was historical. He began, ‘from below’, with what may be said of the historical Jesus. The insistence upon this methodological starting point represents a major shift from the generation of German theologians (Barth and Brünner) immediately preceding Pannenberg and has, not surprisingly, called forth considerable comment. Colin Gunton is perhaps the most cogent English critic of Pannenberg’s approach in the Grundzüge. Gunton offers a relatively brief critique of Pannenberg’s early Christology, which is, I believe, based on a misreading of Pannenberg’s aims in the Grundzüge. Gunton believes that Pannenberg’s basic Christological framework is one of degree Christology.3 I do not agree with this interpretation and hope to show why it is incorrect. More systematic discussions of Pannenberg’s Christology are available which do not make Gunton’s mistake.4 Rise assesses accurately Pannenberg’s intentions in the Grundzüge: ‘Pannenberg wishes to show us that it is through Jesus’ history, or through that which is specific to Jesus’ individuality that God mediates his trinitarian life to the human person.’5 Nevertheless, Gunton accurately identifies a weakness in the argument of the Grundzüge, namely that an exclusive focus upon a Christology from below needs some form of supposition that God is present in the person of Christ, if it is not to become distorted. In the later development of his Christological reflections, Pannenberg shows that he is aware of the potential pitfalls of his early focus upon Christology ‘from below’. This can be seen both in the postscript to the fifth edition of the Grundzüge, which is reproduced in Jesus God and Man, and in the essay ‘Christologie und   Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (London 1990), p. 30. 3   Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today (London 1997), p. 18. 4   Frank E. Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Philadelphia, PA 1974); David Polk, On the Way to God (Lanham, MD 1989); Sven Rise, The Christology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (New York 1997). 5   Rise, Christology, p. 183. 2

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Theologie’.6 In the postscript to the fifth edition of the Grundzüge, Pannenberg additionally responds to critics of the work. Most criticisms he rejects as being based on mis-readings of the book. For Pannenberg, the real failing of the book is that in it he failed to pay sufficient attention to Christology ‘from above’ in the Grundzüge. He quotes Moltmann’s criticism that Pannenberg has failed to do justice to the fact that Jesus’ status as Son, is ontologically antecedent to Jesus’ factual history: ‘Whereas Jesus is not recognizable as the Son of God until his death on the cross and his Resurrection, in the order of being he is the Son of God before his history takes place.’7 Pannenberg has no disagreement with this statement. For Pannenberg, the antithesis between Christology from below and that from above is not ontological but epistemological. Rise notes that, for Pannenberg, these two aspects, the epistemological and the ontological, run in parallel in Christologies from above, whereas Pannenberg is concerned to establish their ‘contemporaneity’.8 In other words, it is only when one recognises Jesus’ identity on the basis of his concrete existence that one recognises, simultaneously, God’s being and, crucially for current purposes, God’s action in history. This is the meaning of Pannenberg’s recurring phrase in the Grundzüge that in Jesus God is revealed, but Pannenberg admits that it was given insufficient thematic attention in the book. He returns to the theme in the essay ‘Christologie und Theologie’. In this essay, Pannenberg clarifies and deepens his account of the weakness of his early approach to Christology, and attempts to emphasise more strongly that Jesus’ revelation of God in history is based on the fact that God acts in this history. In this essay, there is a new reciprocity between the two approaches to Christology. Christology from above and that from below constitute each other: ‘The God of Jesus is accessible only through the human being Jesus, but also Jesus the man comes only from his God.’9 Pannenberg now believes that beginning Christological reflection either from above or from below risks developing a one-sided Christology. In Pannenberg’s later thought, a shift has occurred: a one-sided Christology can be avoided only by making the human being Jesus, united with God, the starting point for Christological reflection. Pannenberg now sets his Christology explicitly within the context of the presupposition of the universal relationship of God to the creation: ‘Thus the

  Wolfhart Pannenberg, Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie: Gesammelte Aufstaze, Band II (Göttingen 1980), pp. 129–45. 7   Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (London 1974), p. 91. 8   Rise, Christology, pp. 184–5. 9   Pannenberg, Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie II, p. 134. The original German is: ‘Der Gott Jesu ist nur durch den Menschen Jesus zugänglich, aber auch der Mensch Jesus nur von seinem Gott her.’ 6

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world and humanity are always within that circle of divine life which one cannot break into from the outside.’10 God is only to be known on the basis of God himself, and one can make presuppositions about the truth of Jesus’ message only on the basis of the divine context in which the world, and therefore human life, exists. It is not possible to set this context aside in order to establish the truth of Jesus’ message and his identity with God. Any attempt to step outside this divine context leads inevitably to a misunderstanding of the particularity of Jesus. For Pannenberg, if one begins Christological reflection ‘from above’, from the fact that God is united with the human being Jesus of Nazareth, then one cannot establish subsequently the existence of this relationship without making it external to the human being Jesus. On the other hand, if one begins ‘from below’, with an exclusive focus upon the fact that Jesus is different from God, one again falls into the same trap and makes the relationship of the human Jesus to God something that is alien to his existence. One cannot begin Christological reflection either from above or below, without at the same time reflecting upon the fact that the human person, including the human person of Jesus, lives in the divine context. It is true, since the reality of God is contestable in the world, that this context is far from clear, and that there is only an indeterminate, disputable experience of God to be had in the world, but it nevertheless functions epistemologically as the horizon of understanding and meaning for the particular history of Jesus’ individuality and for his history. It is only in this divine context that it is possible to apprehend the history of Jesus as God’s history. Pannenberg believes that it is possible to formulate Christology in a way that is universally apprehensible: the basis of this universality is the fact that there is a correspondence between the human person’s experience of both God and Jesus in history. Before the explicit revelation of God in the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, there must already be a divine structure of meaning in reality based on the fact that reality is God’s creation. Pannenberg’s intention in holding together the Christologies ‘from above’ and ‘from below’ is to show how it is possible to recognise that Jesus’ revelation of God mediates God’s own action in history. The new methodology is stated succinctly in the Systematic Theology: The question of the deity of Jesus, of the relation of the reality of his earthly life to the eternal God, is falsely put if we view the relation solely or even primarily as the fellowship of his human nature with the eternal Son. For the man Jesus, God was there only in the person of the heavenly Father, to whom he knew he was related in his whole existence and by whose Spirit he let himself be guided. Only by way of the relation of Jesus to the Father can we decide how and in

10   Ibid., p. 135. The original German is: ‘Dann befinden sich Welt und Menschheit immer schon innerhalb jenes Zirkels des göttlichen Lebens, in den man nicht von außen eindringen kann.’

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what sense he himself may be understood to partake of deity, namely, as the Son of the Father.11

The new methodology is thus set explicitly within a trinitarian context, and actually begins from the same starting point for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in Pannenberg’s thought. Rather than viewing this negatively, as evidence of circularity in Pannenberg’s thought, we should understand this common starting-point of trinitarian and Christological reflection in Pannenberg’s thought as the outworking of the contemporaneity sought by Pannenberg, which was discussed above. One further difference in the structure of the argument in the Grundzüge and the Systematic Theology may be noted. In the early work on Christology, the divinity of Jesus is discussed first, and the humanity only after the divinity has been established. However, when Christological reflection becomes integrated into Pannenberg’s system, the humanity of Jesus forms the bridge between Pannenberg’s discussion of theological anthropology and Christology and so is discussed first. The Deity of the Man Jesus Jesus’ humanity is the new eschatological humanity. It is a humanity that obeys God and thus overcomes mortality.12 There is a sense in which Jesus becomes this new humanity throughout his life history. No one is what they are finally from the moment of birth. It is true for each of us that who we are, whose birth is recalled, is seen and decided only in the course of life, and in view of its end.13 Only in the light of his whole history can we truly say what Jesus is. In essence, Jesus’ identity as the new eschatological humanity lies in the fact that he was sinless. He is the ‘definitive form of humanity that corresponds to our divine orientation by creation to relationship with God’.14 This relationship is characterised in terms of obedience to the Father, not as a slave obeys his master but in the free agreement of his will with the Father. The goal of the Christological method outlined above is the development of a historical basis for the affirmation of the unity of the man Jesus with God. Contained within that goal is Pannenberg’s rejection of twonatures Christology. The Grundzüge makes a decisive break with such Christology with its talk of substances and human and divine natures, but there is no similar rejection of the Chalcedonian formula of true God and true human. The intention of the Chalcedonian formula, and subsequent theology, was to unite the truly human and the truly divine in the person of Jesus. Pannenberg has no quarrel with this intention, but believes that subsequent Christological reflection has failed to     13   14   11

12

Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, pp. 325–6. Ibid., p. 297. Ibid., p. 302. Ibid., p. 315.

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do justice to this intention. The problem lies in the logical starting point of the doctrine: the antithesis between God and the human person. Starting from this point, inevitably, Jesus comes to be conceived of as a reality consisting of two antithetical substances that, in Pannenberg’s view, Christological reflection has never succeeded in uniting. Indeed, it never can succeed in this task because its point of departure is mistaken. For Pannenberg, there are insoluble dilemmas in any substantial two-natures doctrine, because the idea of two distinct natures cannot be combined with an adequate idea of the unity of the two in a single person or reality.15 In this assessment of two-natures doctrine, Pannenberg acknowledges his debt to Schleiermacher who, Pannenberg says, had already seen the impossibility of establishing the unity of life in Jesus on the basis of two different natures or substances.16 Additionally, Schleiermacher noted the difficulty of applying the same concept – nature – to both the human and the divine being. According to Schleiermacher, one cannot employ a concept about God on the same premises one uses when deploying the same concept with respect to a human being without grossly distorting God’s otherness with respect to that which is created. Schleiermacher’s conclusion is that the concept of nature is unusable, because it is incapable of sustaining or containing the notion of God’s infinity. Such a failure does not affect the patristic doctrine, Pannenberg notes, because for the Fathers, nature was thought of as identical with being and thus no distinction was made between the substance and the accidents of the concept of being. This means that finitude, which for Schleiermacher was presupposed in the concept of nature, was not attributed to the concept of God’s being.17 Thus it was not the intention of the early Church to speak of the divine and human natures of Jesus in similar terms. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s critique exposes the inappropriateness of the doctrine of two natures for expressing the unity of Jesus’ person which is a given. Pannenberg’s logical starting point for Christological reflection, as noted above, is the human person of Jesus united with God. The methodological starting point is an examination of the proclamation of Jesus. Implicit within Jesus’ proclamation is a claim to a unique authority, which, though contestable from the perspective of Jesus’ lifetime and even flatly contradicted by the manner of his death, is confirmed by the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It is worth noting that the goal of Pannenberg’s Christological reflection, if one may so speak, remains unaltered from the Grundzüge. Consistent with the argument above, there has been a shift in method and a consequent deepening of the content of Pannenberg’s Christology, but not a change in substance. In both the Grundzüge and the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg’s discussion of Jesus’ message focuses upon two issues.18 The first issue is that the proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God by Jesus represents a claim to personal authority. The second     17   18   15

16

Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, p. 284. Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., pp. 225–35.

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issue is linked to the first: since Jesus’ claim to authority is contestable within the context simply of his life, Jesus looked for a future confirmation of his message.19 In all his preaching, Jesus points away from himself to a final judgement which the Son of Man pronounces on the human person’s life.20 Jesus’ proclamation, thus, has a proleptic structure in that it is a message about judgement and salvation in anticipation of the future, eschatological decision. Precisely because it is a proclamation of the eschatological kingdom, Jesus’ life and message is a revelation of God himself. The clear implication of this is that a human person’s attitude to Jesus is, in reality, their attitude to God. As noted above, within the context of Jesus’ life and death, these claims are contestable if not flatly denied by the manner of his death. The cornerstone of Pannenberg’s argument is that the truth of Jesus’ claims is demonstrated by his Resurrection from the dead: ‘For the light which falls back from the Resurrection … on to the pre-Easter Jesus attaches to his person as a whole.’21 Jesus’ unity with God becomes visible in his factual history in the light of his Resurrection from the dead. In this sense, it is possible for Pannenberg to speak of establishing the unity of the man Jesus with God on the basis of the theology of revelation. It is obviously important for Pannenberg to establish that the Resurrection’s confirmation of Jesus’ unity with God is identical with God’s own self-revelation. In addition, an understanding of the nature of the event of Resurrection is also vital in order to understand its facticity. With regard to the identity of Jesus’ unity with God and God’s self-revelation, Rise provides an accurate summary of Pannenberg’s argument.22 It is certainly the case for Pannenberg that God makes himself known indirectly in the events of history. This is part of the human-divine circle in which all life exists, as discussed above. However, God is revealed fully only through the history of Jesus. The argument of the Grundzüge is summarised in three stages. First, since God is revealed fully only at the end of history, Jesus can only be the revelation of God to the extent that the close of history has come by means of his Resurrection from the dead. The Resurrection therefore is the real event of revelation and it is the Resurrection that makes it possible for God to be fully revealed in Jesus as God’s self-revelation: ‘Without the event of the Resurrection of Jesus, there would be no basis to speak theologically of a self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ.’23 Secondly, when God reveals God-self in Jesus as the one he is from all eternity, this excludes the possibility of any other full self-revelation. God cannot reveal himself in places other than where he is fully revealed. Other revelations, outside of Jesus, would mean that God was only revealed partly in Jesus. The third stage of Rises’ summary of Pannenberg’s argument in the Grundzüge follows logically     21   22   23   19 20

Ibid., pp. 65–6. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 140. Rise, Christology, pp. 150ff. Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, p. 127.

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from the first two. God himself, in his being from all eternity, and for all eternity, is revealed in Jesus and only in Jesus. Therefore, God must be consubstantial (Wesenseinheit) with Jesus.24 The term ‘consubstantial’ belongs to Rise.25 A more literal rendering of Pannenberg’s term would be ‘unity of being’. The merit of Rise’s term is that it captures something of Pannenberg’s intention in his notion of the revelational presence of God in the man Jesus, in that this notion goes beyond the idea of a mere appearance of God in the man Jesus, and is meant to express the idea of a real, ‘substantial’, concrete presence of God in the man Jesus. A similar intention may be discerned in the translators’ term ‘identity of essence’ in JGM. The word ‘consubstantial’ is used to translate the German Wesenseinheit in the Systematic Theology.26 This, I think, justifies its use here. The self-revelation means that Jesus belongs to the definition of God’s being. It follows from this that God is inaccessible absolutely apart from the history of Jesus. Pannenberg has linked here an understanding of the unity of Jesus, in terms of identity of being, with a functional establishing of the unity; Pannenberg’s use of the term ‘consubstantial’ (Wesenseinheit), together with his rejection of twonatures Christology noted above, demands further exploration.27 Clearly, the truth of the identity of Jesus depends upon the truth, the facticity, of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It depends upon the fact that the event we call ‘the Resurrection’ actually took place in history. To say this is not to prejudge questions about the nature of the raising from the dead, but merely to assert that something happened to Jesus after his death on the cross in history. Pannenberg’s discussion of the issues across the decades from the Grundzüge to the Systematic Theology is consistent, and there are no substantive changes across the two works, though, in the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg does attempt to correct earlier misunderstandings of his argument. In the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg provides a summary discussion of his earlier argument, and refers his readers to GDC for a more comprehensive treatment of the theme.28 The term ‘Resurrection’ is, for Pannenberg, a metaphorical term, in the sense that it bears witness to something that is unique in history and is beyond our normal experience. Though metaphorical, the term as used by Pannenberg is not figurative, nor is it used as a code word for a merely psychological or even spiritual phenomenon. It designates the fact that something happened to the dead body of Jesus of Nazareth on the Sunday after his death, before his tomb was found empty by some of his women followers. The something that happened involves a transition from an earthly mode of existence to a new eschatological mode of existence. This new mode of existence Pannenberg designates with the non-metaphorical New Testament term ‘life’. The claim that this event is historical in nature is not a     26   27   28   24 25

Ibid., p. 128. Rise, Christology, p. 150. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 367 [p. 410 of the German text], n. 26. Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, pp. 125, 131. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, pp. 346f.

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claim to indisputability. Claims to the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus are as subject to challenge by the canons of historical research as any other historical event. In this, despite its uniqueness and metaphorical character, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is no different from any other historical event. The burden of proof lies with those who would deny the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus to show that such a denial is based upon the results of historical research, and not upon a fundamental presupposition that would deny the very possibility of a resurrection from the outset of the inquiry. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, finally, is to be understood as a manifestation in history of the general eschatological resurrection of the dead. This end-time event constitutes the final proof of the truth of the Christian claim of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This context places the Resurrection of Jesus in a critical position. It is both confirmation of the message of Jesus of the coming (future) rule of God, and a demonstration of the new eschatological life that is, potentially at least, available for all in the fullness of time. This new eschatological life represents the overcoming of evil in the world, since it is a life no longer subject to the conditions of becoming necessary for the existence of finite creatures aware of their own existence relative to the existence of the infinite God. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead is, thus, a demonstration of the love of God for the world, in that it reveals that God stands with his creation by entering into life under the conditions which make evil not only possible, but a constant threat to finite creatures. It is also a demonstration of the power of God in the face of evil, in that it bears witness to the fact that beyond death, beyond the conditions under which evil thrives, there is new life guaranteed by God. To understand how this can be, we need two further things. First, we need to understand the precise relationship between the human and the divine in Jesus; secondly, we need to understand the soteriology that Pannenberg derives from his Christology. The term ‘Wesenseinheit’, or ‘consubstantial’, does not imply the undifferentiated presence of God in the human being Jesus, as if somehow it is the Father who is present in the Son. Such a view could not be maintained easily of so trinitarian a theologian as Pannenberg. The Resurrection of Jesus as divine confirmation of the person and mission of Jesus is to be understood first as a refutation and reversal of the condemnation of Jesus by his human judges for his ‘making himself equal with God’.29 Pannenberg notes that Jesus did not make himself equal with God (Father) by claiming to be the Son of God. Rather, in Pannenberg’s view, Jesus’ use of the term ‘Son of God’ as a self-referent reveals a self-differentiation from God, which involves a self-subordination to the Father, so that he might better serve the lordship of the Father. It is only in this selfdistinction from and subordination to the Father that Jesus claims to be and is, in fact, the Son. The Resurrection then confirms first and foremost that Jesus is righteous precisely in not making himself equal to God the Father. It is also to be understood as confirmation of that sonship and of the direct divine authorisation   Ibid., p. 363.

29

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of the mission of Jesus. Also, in the face of the charge of his (Roman) executors that Jesus was the Messiah, his Resurrection confirms that he is indeed the fully authorised representative of the royal rule of God that he proclaimed during his earthly ministry. Messiahship must, of course, be reinterpreted here in terms of the suffering obedience of the crucified one, rather than be understood in political terms. Jesus’ earthly mission was the proclamation of the divine rule, and of the coming of this rule with himself. The implied claim, made clear in Pannenberg’s theology with the understanding of God’s being in terms of God’s lordship or rule, that Jesus is indeed consubstantial with God, is also vindicated by his Resurrection. It is not that his Resurrection confers sonship, but rather, it reveals that God’s kingly rule was present already in the earthly Jesus; already in the earthly ministry, Jesus was the Son of the Father. The work and mission of Jesus are not to be separated from his person, and so the Resurrection confirms the person of Jesus himself, and so it is appropriate to date the beginning of his filial relationship with the Father from the actual beginning of his earthly existence. This filial relationship may also be expanded beyond the beginnings of his earthly existence into eternity. Pannenberg’s argument here is that the vindication of Jesus by the Resurrection says not merely that Jesus acted with divine power but also that God is, from all eternity as Jesus proclaimed him to be: Father; the Father moreover, who is acting, and has acted, from eternity in love towards his creation.30 The very title ‘Father’ implies that there must be a Son; this in turn means that we cannot think of the Father without the Son. On the one hand, Jesus’ Resurrection marks his exaltation to eternal fellowship with the Father, but on the other, that eternal fellowship means that the Son was linked to the Father before the beginning of his earthly existence. It is legitimate, even essential, that we speak of the pre-existence of the Son who was manifested historically in Jesus of Nazareth. Likewise, the earthly existence of Jesus must be thought of as the incarnation of the pre-existent Son. Theologically speaking, the eternal relation of the Father to the Son may not be detached from the incarnation of the Son. Pannenberg is, here, adopting a form of the argument of Athanasius, that the Father could not be the Father without the Son. But just as the Father needs the Son in order to be Father, so the Son needs the Father in order to be the Son. Hence, the Father is never without the Son, and vice versa. Without this inner basis for the historical relationship of Jesus to the Father, the filial dignity of Jesus would always be something external to his historical reality, says Pannenberg. The question arises whether it is possible to maintain this inner basis for the filial relationship of Jesus to God the Father? Jesus claimed no such dignity for his own person, but instead subjected himself as a human being to the coming divine rule, as he required his hearers to do, and thus differentiated himself from the Father as the one God. The point of the filial relationship, as Pannenberg understands it, lies in this self-differentiation and subordination and the relationship of dependence upon the Father which this expresses. The uniqueness of Jesus rests on the unconditional subordination of   Ibid., p. 367.

30

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his person to the lordship of God that he proclaimed.31 Paradoxically then, Jesus’ identity as Son depends upon the fact that he avoided making himself equal to God: historically, as a human being, he is the Son only to the extent that he subordinated himself unconditionally to the rule of God and as he gave his life in the service of the rule of God over his creatures. In the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg is here summarising the more detailed argumentation of the Grundzüge.32 This discussion raises the question of the authority which Jesus claimed during his earthly ministry, and how this is to be understood. The authority claimed by Jesus was not authority for himself, Pannenberg argues, but authority for the future of God that he proclaimed, although this does not alter the fact that he was the one who proclaimed the message. Confronted with the accusation that he had made himself equal to God, Jesus could only deny this by abandoning his whole message and ministry. Standing by these meant embracing the consequences of the charge of making himself equal to God. His death on the cross exposed the finitude of Jesus, in direct contradiction of his alleged claim of equality with God. Paradoxically, it would have been precisely in saving himself from the cross by denying the divine lordship, in making himself independent of God, that Jesus would have been claiming equality with God. The inner logic of Jesus’ sonship in Pannenberg’s thought becomes clear: No finite being can be one with God in infinite reality. Only as he let his earthly existence be consumed in service to his mission could Jesus as a creature be one with God. As he did not cling to his life but chose to accept the ambivalence that his mission meant for his person, with all its consequences, he showed himself, from the standpoint of the Easter event, to be obedient to his mission (Rom 5:19; Heb 5:8). This obedience led him into the situation of extreme separation from God and his immortality, into the dereliction of the cross. This remoteness from God on the cross was the climax of his self-distinction from the Father. Rightly, then, we may say that the crucifixion was integral to his earthly existence.33

The eternal self-distinction of the Son from the Father, which was discussed in Chapter 2, is the ground of all creaturely existence, and hence, also, of the human existence of Jesus, takes historical form in the obedient life of Jesus. It is only in this historical form that the self-distinction of the Son from the Father is given adequate embodiment, and therefore the life of Jesus is unique and never to be repeated. The eternal self-distinction of the Son has its historical counterpart in the obedient life of Jesus as his self-humbling in obedience to his divine mission in service of the Lordship of God. In its historical form, the self-distinction can be understood as a self-emptying or kenosis by the Son in the sense, not of a renunciation of his divine essence but, simply, of a renunciation of any equating   Ibid., p. 373.   Pannenberg, Jesus God and Man, pp. 226f. 33   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 375. 31 32

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of himself with the Father. Far from being a renunciation of deity, the historical existence of the Son is the activation (Betätigung) of his deity in distinction from the Father.34 To borrow Barth’s phrase, ‘He is nothing less or other than God Himself, but God as man.’35 Because this deity is enacted in the historical obedience of Jesus, the end of the earthly path of that obedience, the death of Jesus on the cross, is the revelation of his deity. Salvation as Reconciliation For Pannenberg, the salvation mediated by Jesus is fellowship with God, and the life associated with this fellowship, which includes a renewed fellowship with others.36 Thus, salvation is an overcoming of the alienation inherent in the human condition, as discussed in Chapter 4, and the appropriate metaphor through which to discuss this salvation is reconciliation. As such, salvation entails the wholeness and fulfilment of life, but this cannot be attained in the process of time, where, due to the continued presence of evil, it may be felt even to be absent or under threat: salvation is necessarily eschatological.37 Paul, according to Pannenberg, links salvation to the justification of the sinner at the final judgement, and hence to the eschatological future.38 Justification, says Pannenberg, is, for Paul, dependent upon the ‘past event of the saving death and Resurrection’ of Jesus, but salvation – ‘the glory of the new life’ – is still a matter of hope for the future. The death and Resurrection are understood as the event which inaugurates reconciliation, but ‘For the Apostle … reconciliation, justification and deliverance in the coming judgement form an indissoluble whole.’39 Christoph Schwöbel argues a similar case, but understands reconciliation as Paul’s guiding metaphor, because it incorporates elements of the other metaphors, to embrace both the past inaugural event, present anticipated experience of the reconciled new life, and the future consummation of this new life in the eschaton.40 Otto Weber notes that, despite its significance for Paul, the metaphor of reconciliation has not been taken up generally in the theological tradition with anything like the centrality that its Pauline usage suggests it deserves. Weber speaks of a ‘quiet consensus’, to ignore the central importance of the metaphor, noting   Ibid., p. 377.   Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, eds G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh

34 35

1936–69) (CD IV/1, p. 129). 36   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 398. 37   Ibid., p. 239. 38   Ibid., p. 240. 39   Ibid., p. 40. 40   Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Reconciliation: From Biblical Observations to Dogmatic Reconstructions’, in ed. Colin Gunton, The Theology of Reconciliation (Edinburgh 2003), pp. 13–38, 26–7.

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Ritschl, Kähler and Barth as significant exceptions to the consensus.41 Perhaps the reason for this neglect lies in a shift in the grammar of the doctrine which took place very early on in the history of theological reflection on the doctrine. For Paul, God is the acting subject of the act of reconciliation, but in the subsequent tradition, it is God who becomes reconciled, that is, the tradition has made God the object of reconciliation. Linking reconciliation to the death and Resurrection of Christ, as indeed theology must do, leads to the view that it is a function of Jesus’ humanity to reconcile God to us. This shift took place as early as the second century in the tradition, in the writing of St Irenaeus: ‘For us he reconciled his Father against whom we had sinned.’42 Similarly, Augustine understood the human condition as subject to the wrath of God because of original sin, and in need of a mediator who could appease this wrath.43 Moreover, it is Christ’s human nature that achieves this appeasement for ‘It is as man that he is mediator.’44 In this way, Augustine laid the foundations for Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the atonement which became subsequently the guiding metaphor in discussing the salvation wrought by Christ. Thus Aquinas, who understands the Trinity as the reconciling subject, develops nevertheless his understanding of reconciliation in terms of Jesus’ humanity, which, for Aquinas, is the ‘instrument of God’.45 The Reformation tradition, though it refers reconciliation to the whole person of Christ and not simply to his human nature, maintains the focus of the Father as the object of reconciliation: the death and Resurrection of Christ come to be seen in terms of expiation, which reconciles the wrath of God to sinful human beings. Post-Enlightenment liberal protestant theology largely abandoned this stress on expiation, argues Pannenberg. Thus, for Schleiermacher, reconciliation is a special case of Christ’s work of redemption which takes ‘us up into the dynamics of his Godconsciousness’.46 Closer though it may be to the Pauline doctrine, for Pannenberg, Schleiermacher’s reconstruction of the doctrine of reconciliation fails to take due account of the fundamental significance of the death of Christ.47 This loosening of the link between reconciliation and the death and Resurrection of Jesus has remained a significant aspect of the liberal protestant tradition. Hence, Albrecht Ritschl gave a thoroughgoing subjective account of reconciliation: reconciliation is something that takes place exclusively within the minds of believers.48 Martin Kähler responded to this that it is not possible to have the subjective experience 41   C. Schwöbel, ‘Wolfhart Pannenberg’, in ed. David Ford, The Modern Theologians (Oxford 1977), p. 203. 42   Irenaeus, Adversus haereses (Against Heresies), V 17.1. 43   Augustine, Enchiridion 10:33. 44   Augustine, Confessions X 68. 45   Aquinas, Summa Theologica III 48 5. 46   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 408. 47   Ibid., p. 408. 48   A. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (Clifton 1966), pp. 72–9.

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without its concrete, objective grounding in the past event of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.49 For Kähler, the Christ event institutes a new state of affairs between God and the world. However, it is not clear whether he intends by this to claim that the Christ event wrought a change in God, or whether it discloses merely the true nature of God’s attitude towards the world, which thus corrects erroneous understandings of this attitude. If the latter, then strictly speaking, it is the human being’s understanding of the Christ event as disclosing this new state of affairs that brings about the new relationship. If the former, then it is difficult to see how Kähler has advanced beyond the classical doctrine of reconciliation. None the less, his substantive point is that reconciliation can only be a subjective reality in the lives of believers because of the historical fact of the reconciling event.50 For Kähler, Christ’s death inaugurates the new relationship between God and the world, and this new relationship has its subjective expression in the minds and lives of believers. In this sense, says Pannenberg, it is correct to speak of Christ as the author of the new state of affairs. It is appropriate to speak of Christ’s death and Resurrection in terms of expiation because it removes the consequences of sin.51 We saw in Chapter 3 that human beings were responsible for their condition as sinners before God, but that what was required to lift them out of this condition was not punishment, but liberation. Thus, though Pannenberg uses the language of expiation, regarding it as essential to a proper understanding of the reconciling work of Christ, it is used in this liberative sense rather than in a punitive sense of appeasing the wrath of God. There is, thus, a significant element of the Christus Victor theme in Pannenberg’s doctrine of reconciliation.52 To sum up the discussion so far: for Pannenberg, reconciliation is an asymmetrical act of God – that is, God is the sole acting subject in reconciliation and the world is the objective recipient of this reconciliation. It is grounded in the expiatory death and Resurrection of Christ. Though this act is directed towards the world, it receives its subjective reality in the minds and lives of believers through faith. It is appropriate to use the language of expiation, because the death of Christ removes the consequences of human sinfulness, and hence there is a real overcoming of sin and evil through the death and Resurrection of Christ, as the new relationship between God and the world is instituted. Reconciliation, for Pannenberg, has an eschatological orientation and it is only in God’s eschatological future that evil is finally, demonstrably, overcome. This eschatological orientation marks out a major difference between Pannenberg’s doctrine of reconciliation and that of Karl Barth. For Barth, reconciliation is God’s ‘sovereign act’.53 Thus, as for Pannenberg, God and God alone is the acting subject in the reconciliation. However, for Barth,     51   52   53   49 50

Martin Kähler, Zur Lehre von der Versöhnung (Gütersloh 1937), p. 337. Ibid., p. 340. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 411. Ibid., p. 412. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV 1, p. 80.

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reconciliation as the sovereign act of God is exclusively a past event: it has taken place and is accomplished through the crucifixion and, as such, is a ‘definitive and self-contained’ event.54 For Barth, there is a clear distinction between the death and Resurrection of Christ as fundamental for reconciliation, and the subsequent proclamation of that event which invites a response of faith. This difference between Barth and Pannenberg raises sharply the related question of the role of human beings in reconciliation, which has already been noted in the discussion of the positions taken up by Ritschl and Kähler. The stress, both Barthian and Pannenbergian, upon God as the acting subject in reconciliation, could lead to the view that no human response is necessary at all. This, it seems, is Barth’s view, since for Barth, God has achieved the reconciliation of the world already: ‘We are clearly taught the aim of his reconciling activity in Rom 5:5: “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us”. It is remarkable enough that if this is the goal there has to be a reconciling of the world, and this has already taken place.’55 This was, according to Barth, accomplished by the substitution of Christ for the world as the object of God’s wrath. For Pannenberg, this answer is unsatisfactory: Barth’s substitution model leaves no room for creaturely independence, and, for Pannenberg, it is precisely this independence which is the divine goal in creation. The strength of Barth’s position, from the point of view of overcoming sin and evil, is that the substitutory model guarantees that the effects of evil are overcome. On the other hand, Pannenberg, who likewise seeks to demonstrate this assurance, still has some theological work to do at this point. For Pannenberg, Christ is not a substitute, but a representative. Jesus Christ as Representative In both the Grundzüge der Christologie and the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg speaks of Jesus’ death using the German word ‘Stellvertretung’: the root meaning of this word is ‘representation’ or ‘deputisation’. To be a Stellvertreter is to be a representative, to deputise for someone. Of course, this can shade into the meaning of the English word ‘substitution’, in the sense that the representative or deputy performs an action on behalf of the person being represented, such that the person being represented no longer must perform the designated action. The translators of the Grundzüge opt for the translation ‘substitution’ for the word Stellvertretung in Jesus God and Man. The translator of the Systematische Theologie appears uncertain about how to translate the word. Generally speaking, he opts for the word ‘representation’; however, he appears a little cautious on the point, and adds the words ‘or substitution’, sometimes in brackets after the word ‘representation’. In my own discussion of Pannenberg’s soteriology so far, I have opted for the   Ibid., p. 76.   Ibid., p. 74.

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more general word ‘vicarious’, by which I intend to convey the more ambiguous idea that, in Pannenberg’s theology, Jesus’ death was suffered on behalf of human beings. However, the issue cannot be evaded if we are to understand the true significance of the death of the Son in Pannenberg’s thought. To anticipate the results of the discussion: I believe that the translators of Jesus God and Man were mistaken in their choice of the English word ‘substitution’, and that the translator of the Systematic Theology need not have added the words ‘or substitution’ in his translation. In the first place, Pannenberg notes that Jesus’ death ‘for us’ does not mean that human beings no longer have to face death as the end of their finite existence. The fact that human beings are still subject to death means that we cannot speak of Jesus’ death on the cross in any straightforward way as the substitution of his death for our death; already the concept must be modified.56 There is, indeed, a unique element in the death of Jesus, as noted above, and in this sense, there is an exclusive meaning to Jesus’ death in that there is something in this death that human beings will no longer have to experience even though they must still face death: ‘The understanding of this death as an expiatory death “for our sins” seems to offer a way out of the difficulty. This expiatory death indeed does not preserve from death the earthly life of those on whose behalf he died, but it does preserve them for eternal life in the judgement of God.’57 Because Jesus died, our future death is no longer the end of our existence. In Jesus’ death, we see God’s action to preserve our life in the face of human rejection of God and our dependence upon him. This can be seen properly as expiation because the action of the Son on the cross removes the consequences of human rejection of God. It affirms in the face of absolute evil the will of the Creator for life. The concept of substitution requires an altogether different view of Jesus’ action on the cross. The idea of substitutionary atonement is embedded within the view that God is offended in some sense by human sin and requires payment for this offence. As I have discussed above, the idea that Jesus’ action on the cross can be construed in any way as a payment to God for the sins of humanity is anathema to Pannenberg: the atonement is not an achievement of the human Jesus – it is the action of the incarnate Son of God. The entering of the Son of God into the existential conditions of human life that is governed by sin, and his suffering the death of sinners on the cross are thus to be understood as an act of representation, not of substitution. The cross is an act of solidarity of God with his creation, and God’s action on the cross reveals his real attitude towards his creation as one of love. Moreover, it should be noted that, for Pannenberg, the representative function of Christ refers only to his humanity. That is, Jesus is the representative of humanity before God, not of God to humanity: Jesus mediates the presence of the Father to the world; he does not represent it.58 This raises the   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 420.   Ibid., p. 420. 58   Ibid., p. 433. 56 57

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question of the exact relationship of this act of representation to the preserving of life in the face of death that is the aim of God’s action on the cross. It brings us to Kähler’s old question: does the cross constitute the means of preservation or does it reveal simply God’s real intention since the beginning of the creation? Pannenberg is critical of both Kähler and Barth at this point: neither, he believes, offers an adequate account of the role of the human recipients of reconciliation. Both, like Pannenberg, sought an answer in the concept of representation (Stellvertretung).59 For Barth, though representation shades into substitution, such that the person of Jesus Christ – always remembering that God is active in this person – is accepted as our substitute (Platzwechsels) and thus stands in our place under the wrath of God.60 Thus, for Barth, Jesus Christ accepts God’s offer of reconciliation on our behalf and the cross accomplishes the ‘complete conversion of the world’.61 For Pannenberg, this leaves no room for creaturely independence, which was, and remains, the divine goal of creation. The real question of reconciliation is how human beings ‘can no longer see God and his claim of their lives as hostile but can reconcile themselves to this claim’.62 It is a question then of how the reason for this human hostility toward God is removed in order for reconciliation to take place. This is the expiatory meaning of the representative death of Jesus on the cross: … the vicarious expiatory death of Jesus Christ is the purpose of his whole sending by God. Also, at least implicitly, the entering of the pre-existent Son into the conditions of earthly existence that are governed by sin acquires the meaning that he took the place of sinners in order that he might suffer their fate. The incarnation thus becomes an act of representation.63

The metaphors of the death of Jesus as both expiatory and representative are rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and Scriptures and ‘it is hardly likely that they can be fully covered by others that we can supposedly understand more easily today.’64 The theological task, therefore, is to interpret these metaphors afresh today, and not to discard them in favour of newer models. In keeping with his concept of the revelatory presence of God in Christ, Pannenberg offers a revelatory account of the means by which the expiatory and representative death and Resurrection of Christ are effective in bringing about reconciliation between God and the world. Displayed to the world in the death of Christ on the cross is the judgement of God on sin and death. On the cross, Christ dies condemned as a sinner. However, the Resurrection reverses the judgement on Jesus: Jesus is revealed as God, and     61   62   63   64   59 60

Ibid., p. 415. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 75. Ibid., p. 74. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 415. Ibid., p. 421. Ibid., p. 422.

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the human sin which placed Jesus upon the cross is judged and condemned. The Resurrection reveals that in Jesus, the eternal Son of God has embraced the conditions of earthly existence and overcome them. Understood in this way, the cross is expiatory, because it reveals the love of God embracing the conditions of finitude and sin, of suffering the consequences of these and overcoming them; by the removal of the cause of our hostility to God, on the cross is displayed the divine offer of reconciliation, the offer of liberation from the effect of sin and death. It is a display of the whole divine economy: a revelation that God was already at work in history to bring about the reconciliation of the world. Atonement thus operates at the epistemological level: it reveals the true nature of God as love, and opens up the possibility of the transformation of human being through the recognition of this love. This idea is rooted deeply in the theological tradition, and can be traced back at least as far as St Athanasius, who begins his reflections on the death of Christ: ‘these things the Saviour saw fit to do, so that recognising His bodily acts as works of God, men who were blind to His presence in creation might regain knowledge of the Father.’65 At the same time as this epistemological breakthrough, the life of Jesus, culminating in his death and Resurrection, is a proleptic realisation of the divine rule and love which will be complete only at the eschaton, when evil is finally overcome. The human task that remains is for individuals to ‘let their lives be linked to the death of Jesus’.66 The aim of the sending of the Son by the Father is the renewal of the independent existence of those damaged by sin; this must mean that something must happen to or within those who are reconciled: ‘If, however, our reconciliation to God is to renew us in independence, this cannot come solely from the Father, nor can it be achieved solely by the sending of the Son into the world. It must happen on our side as well.’67 This ‘something’ that happens in those reconciled to God Pannenberg describes as ‘liberation to their real identity’, through the inner working of the Spirit.68 The Spirit lifts those reconciled above their finitude, precisely as they accept their finitude before God, so that, by faith they share in Jesus Christ, who is outside them. The renewed life of the reconciled is thus ‘ecstatic’ (ekstatisch) – outside the self.69 As such, there is no overriding of creaturely independence or forced outcome of the cross, although the cross still has universal significance since it addresses a fundamental, universal, human condition. Human beings are thus offered the possibility of freedom, of liberation from the conditions of sin and death entailed in their present existence. It is not clear immediately what Pannenberg means by human beings letting their lives (and deaths) be linked with that of Jesus. He can speak of this in     67   68   69   65 66

Athanasius, On the Incarnation (New York 1977), p. 48. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 428. Ibid., p. 450. Ibid., p. 450. Ibid., p. 451.

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terms of baptism.70 For Pannenberg, baptism is an objective act of transfer that cannot be reversed: one cannot be unbaptised.71 There is a permanent transfer of ownership in baptism; the baptised no longer belong to themselves but to God.72 But if we are to take seriously the independence of human beings, can we really accept such a mechanistic view of the operation of baptism? Given the widespread practice of infant baptism, which Pannenberg defends, it is difficult to see how making the link between our life and death and that of Jesus in terms of baptism advances Pannenberg’s case for the independence of human beings.73 It is true that since Paul, sharing in baptism has been understood as a sharing in the destiny of Christ, but we are still left with the question of how this destiny is to be individually appropriated in order to maintain individual independence. Moreover is Pannenberg really saying that an individual must be baptised if the divine offer of reconciliation is to be effected in an individual? The answer to these questions lies in the link between faith, as trust, and baptism, for ‘Baptism certainly does not bring salvation without faith.’74 Barth, of course, rejected infant baptism altogether, arguing that baptism can only follow the candidate’s free confession of faith.75 Pannenberg, however, wants to understand baptism, and all that God says about the life of the baptised, in terms of ‘gift’. Reception of this gift ‘is not tied to a specific stage of the power of human judgement’.76 No human being making a profession of faith can guarantee to remain true to this profession, and as such the substantive position of adults is hardly different from that of children who are baptised. In sum, we may say that at the baptism of children, especially at the baptism of children of Christian parents, will and judgement may not have developed, but we have to reckon with a positive readiness for unlimited trust whose real object, even if infants do not yet know it, is the true God who has revealed himself in the sending of Jesus.77 Conversion is central to baptism in Pannenberg’s thought, and in turn, conversion is related to the ‘in-breaking of God’s future’ into an individual life and the acceptance of the call to faith.78 It is, thus, a response to the divine call to the self to let go its own security and to trust in God for its future. It is the acceptance of the call to live exocentrically, to use the terminology of the ATP discussed in Chapter 3. There is always a need for the once-for-all nature of baptism to be     72   73   74   75   76   77   78   70 71

Ibid., p. 430. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 257ff. Ibid., p. 261. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 262. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., p. 245.

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appropriated freshly in the life of the individual.79 It is this continual appropriation and re-appropriation of baptism which is the means of living in trust in God, living exocentrically, in conscious independent dependence upon God that constitutes the real linking of an individual’s life with the life and death of Jesus. The sacramental sign of baptism anticipates and guarantees the reality of the new humanity, which will become fully real only with the death of the individual. The meaning of Christ’s representation is inclusive rather than exclusive. It is not that Jesus does something which we no longer have to do. Rather, Jesus’ ‘career’ is paradigmatic: ‘there takes place in him that which is to be repeated in all the members of humanity that he represents.’80 The notion of inclusive representation is wider than expiatory sacrifice because it includes ‘the whole course of Christ’s life’.81 None the less, there is still the need for an explicit act of faith in the appropriation of this paradigmatic life and death by the individual. The idea of inclusive representation is, like the concept of exclusive representation or substitution, just as prone to interpretations that override human creaturely independence. This is the heart of Dorothee Soelle’s criticism of Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation.82 According to Soelle, Christ, for Barth, is a permanent representative, leaving human beings with no existence of their own before God. For Soelle, Christ’s representation can only be temporary, like that of a teacher protecting her or his students until they reach maturity and can stand for themselves. But Soelle has missed Barth’s stress on the need for a human response, in baptism, in appropriating this representation.83 Moreover, for Pannenberg, Soelle’s concept of temporary representation fails to take account of the expiatory nature of Christ’s life.84 For Pannenberg, the death of Christ is liberating, offers true freedom for the self to become the true self, because it makes room for the independent existence of human beings alongside and in fellowship with God: Only in the transition through the death of his individual existence as man is Jesus the Son. His human individuality has its definitiveness, not as its particularity endures, but only as he offers it up for the sake of God and in the service of the coming kingdom … By accepting the death of his particular existence, Jesus made room for that of others. At the same time, however, we see by his conduct that others in their individual particularity can share in the filial relationship to

    81   82   79

Ibid., p. 253. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 430. Ibid., p. 430. Dorothee Soelle, Christ the Representative An Essay in Theology after the Death of God, trans. David Lewis (London 1967), pp. 48f. 83   Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4, pp. 144–8. 84   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 432. 80

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God … only through the death of Jesus and through the acceptance of their own death for the sake of God and his kingdom.85

The death and Resurrection of Jesus demonstrate that there is room in God for individual human particularity. The death of the Son on the cross is the seal of his self-distinction from the Father and, paradoxically, it is thereby the proof of the Son’s unity with the Father.86 Human estrangement from God is the result of the desire, as sinners, to be like God, autonomous and, finding no room in God for this, falling into death. Through the death of the Son, however, because the Son dies in his incarnate particularity, there is room beyond death. What is revealed through the death and Resurrection of the Son is that an individual can live in fellowship with God: ‘Now linked to the death of Jesus, we may all live our own lives and follow our own vocations, in the certainty of sharing in the life that has overcome death in the Resurrection of Jesus.’87 The freedom, liberation, attained through the death and Resurrection is more radical than merely political or social liberation. It is radical because it addresses the deepest human problem, that which, as I argued in Chapter 4, nestles in the very ontological structure of human being. Nevertheless, this radical liberation does have consequences for the way in which people govern and organise themselves as social and political societies. I will return to these implications in the final chapter. In the final section of this chapter, however, I want to explore what Pannenberg means when he says that in the incarnation, the Son God has ‘entered into the conditions’ of earthly existence.88 Specifically, I want to explore this in relation to the notion, now nearly ubiquitous in Christian theological thought, of the passibility of God. Incarnation, Suffering and Love One of the most remarkable theological developments in contemporary theology has been the rise to dominance of the notion that God is passible. This view stands in marked contrast to traditional understandings of God, derived from the patristic era, as impassible, not capable of suffering. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines quite tightly what the theological tradition has understood by the concept of divine impassibility: There are three aspects in which orthodox theology has traditionally denied God’s subjection to passibility, namely (1) external passibility or the capacity to be acted upon from without, (2) internal passibility or the capacity for changing

    87   88   85 86

Ibid., pp. 433–4. Ibid., p. 433. Ibid., p. 436. Ibid., p. 421.

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Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God emotions within, and (3) sensational passibility or the liability to feelings of pleasure and pain caused by the action of another being.89

Creel discusses some eight different, though interconnected, understandings of what it means for God to be impassible.90 H.P. Owen notes that the concept of divine impassibility means particularly that God ‘cannot experience sorrow, sadness or pain’.91 Thomas Weinandy believes that the notion of a passible God first arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within an English Anglican setting.92 A key work here is that of Bertrand Brasnett, who in 1928 wrote, ‘Men feel, and perhaps will feel increasingly, that a God who is not passible, who is exempt from pain or suffering, is a God of little value to a suffering humanity.’93 Other key works from the period include the Archbishops’ Doctrine Commission report of 1926 written by J.K. Mozley. Mozley discusses the whole theological history of the concept of divine impassibility, as well as theologians who advocated a passible God. It may be true historically that English Anglicanism provided the initial entry point for notions of a suffering God into modern theology, but the theological world is now dominated by German notions of a suffering God. In particular, for the English-speaking world, the theology of Jürgen Moltmann has come to be synonymous with the idea that God suffers and dies. Moltmann, however, claims independence of the English Anglican tradition and attributes his own theological interest in a suffering God to his personal experiences as a prisoner of war.94 Moltmann develops his theology in dialogue with Hegelian notions of the death of God. Indeed, Hegel’s system dominates much German theology and not merely Moltmann’s thought. It is interesting to note the apparently complete independence of British theologians of the time advocating a passible God from the so-called English Hegelians (who were in fact Scottish!). Thus it seems that the notion of a passible God emerged more or less simultaneously and independently in German philosophical thought and British theological thought. Barth, Jüngel and, of course, Pannenberg have all sought to develop a theology either in critical dialogue with Hegel or in reaction to him and his legacy. Notions of the passibility of God open up ways of talking ultimately about the idea of God being capable directly in some way of experiencing death. This is the heart of the matter currently under consideration: if we are to understand Pannenberg’s assertions regarding the death of the Son on the cross, then we must begin with Hegel.

89   Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, eds F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford 1997), p. 823. 90   R. Creel, Divine Impassibility (Cambridge 1986), pp. 3–12. 91   H.P. Owen, Concepts of Deity (London 1971), p. 23. 92   Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh 2000), p. 2. 93   B.R. Brasnett, The Suffering of the Impassible God (London 1928), p. ix. 94   Jurgen Moltmann ‘A Lived Theology’, in ed. Darren C. Marks, The Making of a Theological Mind (Aldershot 2002), p. 87.

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The Death of God in Hegel’s Philosophy Hegel’s famous phrase concerning the death of God is often misunderstood. The phrase first appears in Hegel in 1803 in his Abhandlung über Glauben und Wissen, and it is notoriously difficult to interpret precisely what Hegel meant by it. One strand of interpretation can be traced through Nietzsche. In this strand, the ‘death of God’ is understood as meaning something like the end of the idea of God. Human beings have come to the point where they are able to understand themselves and the world without reference to God, and so, having no further use for the idea, or concept, God is dead. Thus, in Feuerbach’s and Marx’s development of Hegel’s thought, qualities that were attributed previously to God come to be understood as human capacities. Against the Nietzschian interpretation of the phrase, it can be argued legitimately that much of Hegel’s writing concerning the philosophy of religion carries the burden of establishing the truth, and falsity, in historical religions, and culminates with Hegel’s exposition of what he calls ‘consummate religion’ (vollendete Religion), by which he means Christianity. This line of thought takes seriously Hegel’s view that, though philosophy in principle can know everything that religion can know, religion is not thereby dispensed with or superseded: ‘On the contrary, religion is precisely the true content but in the form of representation (Vorstellung), and philosophy is not the first to offer the substantive truth. Humanity has not had to await philosophy in order to receive for the first time the consciousness or cognition of truth.’95 Both religion and philosophy express the same eternal truth; both are apprehensions of Absolute Spirit. This eternal truth, which is the content of both philosophy and theology, is ‘God and nothing but God and the explication of God’.96 Although the phrase ‘the death of God’ is to be found throughout Hegel’s writings, it is in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that the theme is given its most concentrated treatment. Coincidentally, it is also in these lectures that Hegel gives his most sustained treatment of the problem of evil. These lectures date from Hegel’s time at the University of Berlin, where he gave four lectures on the subject between 1821 and 1831. These lectures were never published in Hegel’s lifetime, and it has been only in the latter part of the twentieth century that they have been reconstructed in a reliable form. For Hegel, the divine idea is implicit in the whole of humanity, but it must be realised for humanity in a single human individual. This individual is the person of Jesus Christ. In the Lectures, Hegel’s talk of the death of God is linked exclusively to the death of Christ. Whatever else Hegel may have meant by his phrase ‘the death of God’, it must be connected in some way with this realisation of the divine idea in humanity. This point was made as early

95   G.F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3 vols, ed. P.C. Hodgson, trans. R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson and J.M. Stewart, with the assistance of H.S. Harris (Berkeley 1984–85), 1, p. 25. 96   Hegel, Lectures 1, p. 79.

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as 1970 by Pannenberg in a lecture given at the Hegel Congress in Stuttgart.97 The universal must be incarnated in an individual human life if it is to be fully realised in, and for, humanity. The details of Hegel’s argument need not concern us here at the present: for the moment, our concern is Hegel’s understanding of the death of the human-divine individual in relation to the death of Christ. The point to emphasise is that, for Hegel, Jesus Christ represents the divine absolute in human form. According to Hodgson, in his editorial introduction to the Lectures, it is the death of Christ that is central, and in some of the most emotionally charged and emotive passages of the Lectures Hegel argues that since death is the ultimate destiny and negativity of finite spirit, the death of Christ is the supreme portrayal of the unity of the divine and human. It is the highest divestment of the divine idea: ‘God himself is dead – this death is both deepest anguish and highest love because love means the supreme surrender of oneself in the other.’98 The unification of the absolute extremes of divinity and death, of the eternal God and mortal humanity, which was manifested in the life of Christ, is love itself, the very love that was the substance of Christ’s teaching. For Hegel, the life of Christ is a natural, ordinary life and existence, and so his death is a natural death, in that Christ dies because he is finite.99 Nevertheless because of his unique significance, his death is invested with more precise significance, for in this death God also dies. According to Hegel, God dies because he unites himself to the finite human being Jesus, and in this uniting embraces all that it means to be finite: this includes supremely death. In the ordinary sense of things, death is the end of the existence of the finite thing, but this does not seem to be the case in Hegel’s understanding of the death of God: If the unity of divine and human nature is to be envisaged in one present individual, then incarnation, as immediate existence in the form of finitude, constitutes this aspect (death) just as much as it does the immediate existence, the divestment of the universal, of the divine (but a divestment of itself in such a way that it still is in this divestment … ).100

In the incarnation, the divine, though embracing finitude and finite existence, remains infinite. As such, of himself, God cannot die: he can die only because of his uniting of himself with one finite individual. For Hegel, beyond the death of this individual is Resurrection and Ascension, so that the death of Christ becomes not in the end the death of God, but the death of death. Resurrection and Ascension are not historical events in Hegel’s thought, nor are they to do with visible appearances of the dead and risen Christ. The words do not signify events   Pannenberg, Basic Questions 3, pp. 144–77.   Hegel, Lectures 3, p. 74. 99   Hegel, Lectures 3, p. 124. 100   Hegel, Lectures 3, p. 124. 97 98

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that happened post-mortem to the individual historical human being Jesus Christ. Rather, they are to do with changes wrought in humanity at large, as a result of a proper understanding of the death of Christ. The Resurrection of Christ denotes ‘the death of death’, whilst the Ascension denotes the assumption of humanity to the divine idea. By this, Hegel seems to mean something like the bringing of the many single individuals into unity with the Spirit. Here can be seen Hegel’s view of religion as a form of knowledge: it is the knowledge of the significance of Christ’s death that brings about the realisation of the ideals of Christianity and hence of Absolute Spirit in humanity. The death of Christ, then, which can be described as the death of God, becomes a necessary step in the realisation of Christianity in human beings. Hegel’s language does not, in fact, signify the end of the idea of God but quite its opposite: it is the actualisation of the idea of God in humanity at large. There is, of course, a question of precisely how Hegel is using the word ‘God’ in his work. We have seen that, though he understands the death of Christ as an historical event – that there really was a person called Jesus Christ who taught certain things about God and humanity, and who died on a cross – the events of Resurrection and Ascension are a-historical and Hegel uses the terms as metaphors for something else: nothing happened post-mortem to the body of Jesus. So there is an ambiguity in the way Hegel uses the word ‘God’. It is not clear whether or not the word denotes a transcendent being of some kind, or merely a human idea, as Feuerbach alleges. Fascinating though this discussion would be, it falls outside the realm of the present one. Of more immediate concern is that fact that contemporary theologians who have engaged with Hegel have understood him to be saying the former. Indeed, it has been the burden of much of Pannenberg’s theological work to probe more deeply into Hegelian concepts, and to show where he believes Feuerbach is in error. What concerns us here, then, is the theological appropriation of the Hegelian concept of the death of God. The Theological Appropriation of Hegel’s ‘Death of God’ Philosophy Pannenberg and his two contemporaries, Moltmann and Jüngel, seek to develop an understanding of the death of Christ as an event that affects God in some way before it has any soteriological significance for the world, but each of them receives the Hegelian tradition in a distinctive way. Jüngel makes the most direct use of Hegel’s ‘death of God’ language. Jüngel is concerned with the problem of speaking about God in a world from which apparently he is absent, and regards Luther’s theology of the cross as essential for such talk. The theme of his major work God as the Mystery of the World is that God is present and, simultaneously, hidden in the cross.101 For Jüngel, God identifies himself with the crucified Jesus. God’s self-identification with the crucified, such that God is dead in this death,   Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (München 1983).

101

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necessitates the positing of a distinction in God, which is expressed in the New Testament in terms of the Son (the crucified one) and God the Father (who raises the crucified one from the dead). This distinction forms the basis of Jüngel’s trinitarian doctrine of God. This, however, has not stopped critics of Jüngel from claiming that he fails to speak in properly trinitarian terms. It is his direct talk of the death of God that causes his critics difficulty. Within the context of Christian theology, to say directly that ‘God is dead’, seems to many to mean only one thing: that God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is dead. Svein Rise, for example, notes the Norwegian Regin Prenter’s response to Jüngel: When God’s Son enters death in his human existence, it is the Father, who does not die, who in his eternal love hands over the Son, who dies as a human being on the cross; and it is the Son, who in his eternal love allows himself to be handed over by the Father. But the Father does not die in the sense that the Son in his human life dies the human person’s death. This is why all language about the ‘death of God’ which is undifferentiated in trinitarian terms … is not genuine trinitarian language.102

Rise also refers to the criticism levelled at Jüngel by another Norwegian, Oskar Skarsaune, that his excessively direct language of the death of God betrays an inadequate understanding of the trinitarian distinction between the Father, the Son and the Spirit, as well as ‘a deficient understanding of the biblical image of God, where God as the antithesis of death, is the unfailing source of life and is never overcome by death’.103 In defence of Jüngel, we could point to the fact that for Jüngel, as indeed for Hegel, it is precisely in embracing death in the Son that God overcomes death and is the unfailing source of life. Indeed, Jüngel uses ‘death of God’ language as a point of departure for his own development of trinitarian doctrine and of his critique of philosophical theism and atheism which he contends, fail to think of God in trinitarian terms. Moltmann, too, believes that Jüngel is vulnerable to the charge of too direct an application of ‘death of God’ language to the crucified Christ, and of failing to carry through sufficiently proper trinitarian distinctions.104 Moltmann believes this can be resolved by a change in the preposition in the phrase ‘the death of God.’ Moltmann speaks instead of ‘death in God’. In what may be taken as a direct response to Jüngel, Moltmann writes: Jesus’ death cannot be understood as ‘the death of God’, but only as death in God. The death of God cannot be designated the origin of Christian theology,

  Rise, Christology, p. 199.   Ibid., p. 199, original emphasis. 104   Moltmann, The Crucified God, pp. 203–4. 102 103

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even if the phrase has an element of truth in it; the origin of Christian theology is only the death on the cross in God and God in Jesus’ death.105

Although eschewing ‘death of God’ language, Moltmann still wants to make it clear that God is not unaffected by the events of the cross. The cross is not, for Moltmann, merely an action of God towards the world, but also God acting within himself. The Son suffers abandonment by the Father, who suffers the abandonment of the Son: ‘… if God is acting in himself, he is also suffering in his own action in himself.’106 Moltmann is clearly unhappy with the way in which a two-natures Christology speaks of the death of Jesus in terms of Jesus suffering and dying according to his human nature, and the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. For Moltmann, the cry of dereliction from the cross means that God in his intra-trinitarian relationships is affected by the cross. Indeed, for Moltmann, it is not until we have grasped the meaning of the cross for God that we can begin to understand the soteriological significance of the cross. For Moltmann, it is essential that we grasp that both the Father and the Son suffer in the event of the cross, though, of course in different ways: Moltmann is no patripassionist. In terms of his understanding of death in God, we can say that, for Moltmann, God the Son dies on the cross and God the Father suffers in grief the death of the Son.107 For all his safeguards, however, Moltmann makes it clear that he wishes to attribute death and suffering directly to God. In his mature Christology, Moltmann looks back on his intentions in the Crucified God: In that book I was concerned with the question about God: what does the death of Christ mean for God himself? I tried to get over the ancient metaphysical apathy axiom in the doctrine of God, so as to be able to talk about God’s ‘essential’ suffering, and to do so not merely metaphorically but quite directly.108

He retracts nothing of The Crucified God and seeks to build upon this early work in his later Christology. Moltmann does want to say more than simply that God is present in the death of Jesus on the cross: he does want to affirm that in some sense God dies directly on the cross. For Pannenberg, this is to be guilty of reverse Monophysitism.109 Pannenberg’s point here is that ‘death of God’ language, even ‘death in God’ language, fails to give serious enough attention to the importance of the incarnation. It is only because the Son became a human being that he can suffer and die.

    107   108   109   105 106

Ibid., p. 207. Jürgen Moltmann, The Future of Creation (London 1976), p. 65. Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 243. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ (London 1990), p. 52. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, p. 314.

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Pannenberg’s Departure from the Hegelian Tradition For Pannenberg, it is incorrect to speak directly of death either of, or in, God: it is correct to say that God’s own Son suffered and died upon the cross, but this statement must be understood in the sense that the Son suffers and dies according to his human nature: But this thought of God’s death in that of Christ’s is alien to the NT, though Paul repeatedly spoke of the death of God’s Son (Rom 5:10, cf 8:32). Church teaching has rightly referred sayings of this kind to Christ’s human nature. This death was the death of Jesus, who in the light of his Resurrection by God is the Son of the eternal Father.110

There is no mistaking the clarity of Pannenberg’s central thought here: the Son of God dies on the cross in his human nature. This is a remarkable statement, particularly in the light of Pannenberg’s insistence upon the consubstantiality (Wesenseinheit) of the human and the divine in the person of Jesus. Given this, we cannot understand Pannenberg to be saying that Jesus’ human nature dies on the cross, and that somehow this experience of death is communicated to the divine nature. If this were the case, then the most we would be able to say is that, on the cross, while the human Jesus experiences death, the divine nature experiences (merely) the dying of the human nature. The experience of death for the eternal Son would be indirect. Whilst this may satisfy orthodox two-natures Christology, it is hardly congruent with Pannenberg’s own Christology. For here, at the crucial point in the career of Jesus, a division in his person would be indicated. The experience of the human Jesus and the incarnate divine nature would be different, and therefore separable. If this is what Pannenberg means by his statement that the Son of God dies according to his human nature on the cross, it would lead unavoidably to the unravelling of the whole of his carefully and elegantly constructed Christology. The unity of the person of Jesus would be exposed as unreal at this most crucial of points. Pannenberg, therefore, cannot mean that only the human nature of Jesus dies, leaving the eternal Son to experience death indirectly. Rather, it is better to understand him as saying that the Son of God, the eternal Son, can experience death only by virtue of the incarnation. It is only because the Son of God became a human being that he is able to suffer and to die. Confirmation that this is the correct interpretation of Pannenberg’s intention is found in the Christological chapters of the Systematic Theology: On the cross the Son of God certainly died and not just the humanity that he assumed. Nevertheless the Son suffered death in his human reality and not in respect of his deity. In the death of Jesus the deity reached the extreme point of

  Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 435.

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the self-distinction from the Father by which the Son is also related to the Father, so that even his humanity could not be held in death.111

For all of his considerable regard for Hegel, in the end Pannenberg must depart from the Hegelian understanding of the cross as the death of God. His critique of Hegel lies in what he believes to be Hegel’s express desire to avoid any understanding of the death of Christ in terms of the innocent suffering on behalf of sinners. This, Pannenberg believes, leads to an underplaying of the historical particularity of the death of Christ. The death of Christ thus becomes a symbol of absolute love and not an event that actualises that love in the world. By contrast, Pannenberg wants to understand the cross as bringing into existence a new state of affairs between God and his creation. This is done by means of expiation, and so requires that Christ suffers after the flesh. If Jesus is to represent humanity before God, it must be this way. Pannenberg’s remark about the death of Christ after the human nature then becomes an expression of the particularity of the death of the Son of God on the cross: in this death and only in this death is revealed the death of the eternal Son. On the cross, the human Jesus died and, simultaneously, the eternal Son, who is identical with Jesus, died. The death of the Son is a concrete historical event, bringing about a new state of affairs, and not merely an historical symbol of absolute divine love. A further reason for Pannenberg’s departure from Hegel at this point may be that he is much more deeply rooted in the patristic understanding of God than Hegel could ever have been. Beginning with this image of God, it becomes impossible to speak of God’s death: for if it is true that God is the source of all life, the all-determining reality, then God cannot die. God must necessarily be stronger than death, simply in terms of the inner logic of Pannenberg’s theology. The paradox that Pannenberg’s theology contains is that this internal theological logic also demands that the Son experiences death, and not merely dying. The death on the cross is the end of the earthly existence of the Son. He is dependent utterly upon the Father for his Resurrection. Whereas Hegel, Jüngel and, to a lesser extent, Moltmann can all speak of this death in terms of the death of God, for Pannenberg, such language is impossible. The reason for this lies in Pannenberg’s trinitarian thinking in relation to the notion of God’s love. Certainly for Hegel and for Jüngel, this love logically is independent of the differentiation of the three persons of the Trinity.112 For Pannenberg, this is impossible: it is not possible to think of the one God independently of the three persons – hence Pannenberg’s reversal of the traditional order of the discussion of the one God and God as Trinity in his systematic presentation. Christian theological reflection upon the nature of God must begin with the proclamation of Jesus, which leads directly to the Trinity before the unity of the three is established. The difference in starting point from Jüngel is highly significant here. For Pannenberg, who understands the   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 2, p. 388.   Rise, Christology, pp. 200f.

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unity of the three persons of the Trinity as being constituted by their mutual selfdistinction, it becomes impossible to speak of the death of the Son as the death of God. From a Pannenbergian perspective, Moltmann too makes a similar error in his choice of starting point. Moltmann’s robustly social model of the Trinity can tend towards tritheism, and the experience of death, though different for the Father and the Son, functions as a kind of bond uniting the persons of the Trinity in the moment of supreme separation. For Moltmann, an adequate theology of the cross is possible only where one thinks of God’s being and God’s revelation as being mutually dependent: ‘The economic Trinity not only reveals the immanent Trinity; it also has a retroactive effect on it.’113 On this basis, Moltmann believes that it is insufficient to ascribe Jesus’ suffering on the cross only to the Son, just as it is inadequate to ascribe creation to the Father alone without the Son. It is this joint experience in death which allows God to embrace humanity in its Godforsakeness through the pouring forth of the Spirit from the cross. The event of the cross is an act of God’s love towards the world. For Moltmann, as for Jüngel, this love is conceived of logically as being independent of the three persons of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit unites the Father and the Son in their love at the moment of separation in death and, as creative love, issues forth from the cross to forsaken humanity. For Moltmann, because he begins his trinitarian reflections from the cross, though he never says so explicitly, the unity of the three is focused around their joint experience of death in their joint action to embrace and overcome death. Pannenberg’s trinitarian understanding of the cross is focused differently, and he is able to express more precisely that the unity of Jesus’ life and destiny is a unity in God’s action and eternal unchanging intention. For Pannenberg, a correct theology of the cross is possible only where the connection between Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God and Jesus’ death on the cross is understood as something essential and not merely accidental. Pannenberg shares the aim of Schleiermacher and Ritschl to establish the human person’s fellowship with God on the basis of the perfect obedience of the historical Jesus to his mission, but he modifies the approach of his two predecessors in two essential points. First, it would appear that, for Schleiermacher, Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of the kingdom was identical with its arrival on earth, whereas for Pannenberg, Jesus’ proclamation has the function of announcing the coming Kingdom, of which the Father is the embodiment. This last point, that the Father is the embodiment of the kingdom, is an important factor in understanding Pannenberg’s language about God. If one presses behind Pannenberg’s use of the word ‘God’ in his writing, it often turns out to be the case that he means ‘Father’. Indeed, he has noted that when the New Testament uses the word ‘God’ in an absolute way, it means God the Father.114 Here, then, is a semantic key to understanding Pannenberg’s rejection of all ‘death of God’ language. For him to use such language would imply the death of the Father. Pannenberg’s second modification of the theology   Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God (London 1981), p. 160.   Ibid., p. 43.

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of his predecessors lies in his rejection of Schleiermacher’s view that the Church is identical with the Kingdom of God: for Pannenberg, just as Jesus had the role of announcing the kingdom, so the Church has the task of bearing witness to and symbolising the Kingdom of God on earth. Moreover, neither of his two predecessors, in Pannenberg’s view, was able to do justice to the ambiguity in Jesus’ life and teaching. It is only this ambiguity that permits one to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary consequence of his mission and message. The death of Jesus, of the Son, is the consequence of his message, not its purpose. Only against this background is it possible to understand the death of the Son as God’s action, or as intended by God. Jesus was condemned to death on the cross with the divine authority of the Law. In the light of the Resurrection, however, it can be seen that the death of the Son occurred in accordance with God’s intention from eternity. The death of the Son is a consequence of the mission that Jesus obediently received from the Father, since this obedience to the Father is identical to the intention of the Father in the sending of the Son: to reconcile the world to himself. When the Father allows Jesus, who is consubstantial with the Son, to die the sinner’s death, without himself dying, this is the strongest possible statement of God’s full acceptance of the consequences of his own creative will to establish a fellowship with finite, created human persons. The death of the Son on the cross, though it is primarily an act for God himself, bringing about his self-realisation in time, is also the message of salvation proclaimed and fulfilled proleptically in the life, death and Resurrection of the historical Jesus. Although God, understood here as the Trinity, does not die, he allows himself to be involved in this event to such an extent that his whole divinity is put at risk. The Son’s divinity is most clearly at risk, because he experiences death as the end of his existence and, as such, is utterly dependent upon the Father and the Spirit for his Resurrection, but the Father’s divinity, understood as love, is also at risk, being utterly dependent upon the success of the Son’s mission, that is, upon the obedience of the Son to his mission through the guiding action of the Holy Spirit. In turn, the Spirit himself is dependent upon the divinity of the Father and the Son. Returning to the definition of impassibility with which I began, we are now in a position to assess Pannenberg’s position in the debate. In terms of the first part of the definition, external passibility, or the capacity to be acted on from without, we can note that the divine intention from eternity was the establishment of fellowship with finite creatures and that the incarnation, life, death and Resurrection of the eternal Son form part of this intention. It is true that the Son died at the hands of human beings on the cross, but this was possible only because the Son became a human being: that is, the eternal Son and the historical Jesus are consubstantial. The divine intent remains intact and unaltered and, as such, God is not passible in this sense. In the second sense of the definition, that of changing emotions from within, we must also judge that God is impassible, in Pannenberg’s theology. God’s actions throughout, from eternity, have been consistent with the fact of divine love, and have had as their goal the realisation of that love in space and time. Finally, there is the third definition, that of sensational passibility, or the

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liability to feelings of pleasure or pain caused by the action of another being. Clearly, the Son experiences both in his earthly existence and, since the Son and the historical Jesus are consubstantial, these feelings must be predicted of the divine as well as the human. Once again, however, the crucial point is that this is only so because of the incarnation. In this sense, there is little difference here between the result of Pannenberg’s theology and traditional two-natures Christology which predicates such feelings of the human nature of Jesus which are communicated to the divine nature. Such a definition allows one to maintain the impassibility of God, whilst allowing that the Son suffers. This is precisely the intention of Pannenberg’s theology. It may be possible to argue, as Weinandy does, that much of the ‘death of God’ language deployed by theologians throughout the twentieth century is a result of dissatisfaction with the traditional two-natures doctrine.115 Pannenberg has sought a way through the problems of this doctrine, but also has a strong sense of the dangers inherent in loose talk of the death of, or even death in, God. Such language may hold rhetorical power, but it is not dogmatically correct theology, and raises more questions than it answers. In particular, it seems to let go of the one thing that those who advocate a passible God want to maintain: God’s constancy and presence in and through human suffering. Conclusion This chapter has discussed Pannenberg’s understanding of God’s action, through the incarnation and history of Jesus, to reconcile the world to himself, and thus to overcome evil. It was argued that this action was a proleptic enactment of the universal destiny of the world, brought forward into history. This action reveals the true nature of God as love, and this act of revelation heals the alienation at the heart of human being. Along the way, the nature of the relationship between incarnation, divine love and suffering was discussed and it was noted that, whilst the Son does indeed suffer on the cross, for Pannenberg, such language properly can be applied to the Son incarnate only, and cannot be predicted of God in God’s eternal being. The career of Jesus, viewed in the light of the Resurrection, is paradigmatic of the destiny of the whole world. That is, God offers through the Son reconciliation with God, now in history through faith, and in the future full communion with God the Trinity. This future communion with God, however, remains an eschatological reality, a hope for the future. The final overcoming of evil is an eschatological reality, for the kingdom of God and the love of God are not yet fully realised in the world. The final chapter begins with Pannenberg’s understanding of the grounding of this eschatological hope. Hope, for Pannenberg, as we shall see, must be rational, that is, there must be a reasonable ground for hope if the hope of overcoming evil is to be anything more than merely a human wish or desire with no real possibility of its fulfilment.   Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, p. 175.

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Chapter 6

Eschatology and the Present This final chapter discusses Pannenberg’s understanding of the eschatological hope for the overcoming of evil, paying particular attention to the grounds that Pannenberg offers for accepting this hope. The proleptic display and realisation of divine rule and love, through the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, discussed in Chapter 6, points to the eschatological fulfilment and full realisation of divine love and rule. Jesus displays and realises human destiny only in proleptic form. Though realised fully in him, it does not yet apply to the whole of humanity: only through the linking of their lives with that of Jesus can believers find assurance of their future participation in God’s salvation.1 This assurance, too, is a proleptic realisation of something that will be complete, will be fully realised, only in the eschaton. Evil will only be overcome finally when divine love, and hence the Kingdom of God, have been realised fully: the overcoming of evil is an eschatological hope. There is, thus, a clear difference between Pannenberg’s system and process theology’s account of evil. For process theology, the process of time is an unending, continual, infinite process: for Pannenberg, time has a definite end. Indeed, it must be so, since for Pannenberg the temporal sequence is related to the eternal in terms of longing for wholeness. If time is extended indefinitely, such wholeness can never be reached. Moreover, since for process thought, evil is linked to the inherent power of pre-existent matter, evil can never be overcome while matter continues to be. The overcoming of evil is an irreducibly eschatological hope. A similar conclusion can be drawn from secular accounts of evil. These accounts consider evil to be a human phenomenon. Thus, while human beings continue to exist, evil will remain in the world. Hence Richard Bernstein, though resisting the notion that evil is a ‘fixed ontological feature’ of the human condition, is prepared still to admit that evil is permanent feature of the human condition ‘in the sense that there will always be new concrete evils to be overcome and combated.2 While human beings exist, new forms of evil will continue to arise. Bernstein is concerned that regarding evil as a fixed component of human being could lead to pessimism and resignation in the face of concrete evils.3 This is indeed a potential problem. However, it seems to me that we must face this fact: if evil is a human phenomenon which continues to find ever-new expressions in the course of human history and development, the question rises inevitably what is it   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 435.   Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge

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2002), pp. 229–30. 3   Ibid., p. 229.

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about human beings that makes this so? I have discussed Pannenberg’s location of human evil in the ontological structure of human being in Chapter 3, where it was argued that the fundamental flaw can be overcome by placing human beings in their proper relationship to the divine, which fulfils their exocentric calling. While this calling remains unfulfilled, evil will always be part of the world, and will always find fresh expressions. Once again, we return to the view that eschatology is the necessary condition for overcoming evil. The Eschatological Overcoming of Evil For Pannenberg, eschatology is not merely one aspect of Christian theology, but, rather, it determines the entire shape and outlook of Christian doctrine, as with the arrival of the Kingdom of God comes the fulfilment of the deepest longings of human beings and the whole of creation.4 This present life is merely an anticipation of the final future.5 All things, including the work and history of Jesus, the efficacy of baptism in uniting the believer to Christ and the assurance of faith, are referred to the eschaton for their meaning. Even the Christian concept of God as loving Creator is not exempt from this epistemological rule: it too is merely an anticipation of the reality of God, which has yet to be manifested. More than this: it too depends upon the eschaton for its meaning, for this represents the final justification of God by the Spirit. Until the final consummation of salvation, evil and suffering will be a constant presence in the world and a constant accusation against the existence and character of a loving, powerful God.6 For Pannenberg, it is only the eschaton that can bring vindication of divine righteousness, and clarification of the nature and character of God. The eschaton marks the final and full outpouring of divine love for the creation, which began when, as an expression of divine love, the creation sprang into being, and individual creatures were given life. This final outpouring of love brings about the final transformation of the world, overcoming its alienation from God and reconciling it to God: it is universal in scope, including not only that which exists at the eschaton, but also all that has existed in the past. The totality of the creation is redeemed, transformed and freed from corruptibility and death. Christian believers experience an anticipatory assurance of this final state in their baptism, but the final eschatological state itself is universal. Hick has been critical of Pannenberg’s eschatology and indeed Christian eschatology in general.7 His charge is that, because eternity is experienced as time ‘as a non-temporal whole’, nothing new can happen ‘after’ the eschaton. Evils will still be evils and, moreover, may appear     6   7  

Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, pp. 531, 527. Ibid., p. 531. Ibid., p. 631. John Hick, ‘A Note on Pannenberg’s Eschatology’, Harvard Theological Review 77(1984): 421–3. 4 5

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even worse, because they will be comprehended as an accumulated total of evils rather than as individual, separate incidences of evil. But Hick has missed the point. Eschatological life is transformed life, not more of the same life that we have here. Hick does speak of a change with the eschaton, but he connects this only with Christian believers, and this is of only limited value to an eschatology that is universal in scope and intent. By contrast, for Pannenberg, the significance of Jesus at the eschaton is that he becomes the criterion of God’s relationship to the world: … God sees and judges all people, not just Christians, from the standpoint of their explicit or implicit relation to the teaching and destiny of Jesus, and especially with the merciful love in view that found expression in the sending of Jesus. Thus God’s relation to all people, and not just Christians, is different from what it would have been without the sending of Jesus. Even those who have not become confessing members of the Christian Church, then, can have a share in the new life manifested in Jesus Christ if their hearts are open to the nearness of God and his kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.8

This is the logic of any theological strategy that stresses the divine overcoming of evil. In the Kingdom of God, there can be no place for evil; no place where God’s love and God’s rule are not fully actualised. Even the annihilation of that which refuses the Kingdom of God would constitute a failure to overcome evil. This is so because evil aims at destruction, at loss of life. Only transformation of that which is opposed to God, that which corrupts God’s creatures, can constitute a victory over evil. There are, however, hints in Pannenberg’s writing that he wishes to express a caveat to this logic. In the quotation above, there is a condition attached to the universal offer of transformation and salvation: that hearts are open to the nearness of God and the Kingdom of God. For Pannenberg, as we have seen, salvation is participation in the life of God, and this is not possible without transformation. Transformation marks the completion of our true identity as human beings, and not a threat to individual human identity. Rather, what is a threat to true identity is the inner contradiction, the self-alienation, which comes with evil. This inner contradiction and alienation will remain, unless the identity that an individual builds in this life is open to God.9 This openness need not be conscious openness, nor is it dependent upon explicit faith. A life that is fully closed to God, however, is not transformable, on this view, since the offer of new life can find no entry point into the life that is fully closed. This is so because the need for reconciliation lies solely on the human side of the equation. God needs no reconciliation with the world: the world must be reconciled with God. A fully closed life cannot be open to the transforming love of Christ. Thus, Karl Rahner argued that death could mark the completion of an   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 639.   Ibid., p. 641, n. 334.

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individual’s identity, in self-exclusion from God.10 In Pannenberg’s terms, such an outcome constitutes the rejection of human destiny and the divine future. As such, the individual does not embrace another alternative future, but no future. Elsewhere in the Systematic Theology, Pannenberg discusses the eschatological judgement of individuals in terms of the metaphor of cleansing fire. This fire is a purging and cleansing fire rather than a destructive one, that cleanses the individual of all that is not of God.11 The question remains whether an individual can be so closed to God that passing through this fire of judgement does actually turn out to be a destructive fire, because nothing remains once the impurities of sin and evil have been destroyed. It is, like all other theological questions, one to which a definitive answer will be found only in the eschaton itself. This referral, however, cannot be used as a theological escape route, or a means of avoiding difficult questions: theology must continue to wrestle with these afresh in each generation. In particular, the question of the legitimacy of eschatological hope must be faced. Eschatological ambiguity can be acceptable if there are strong grounds for eschatological hope, and it is to Pannenberg’s answers to these that we now turn. Pannenberg and the Grounding of Hope There are three distinct challenges to an eschatological overcoming of evil: a moral challenge, an epistemological challenge, and an ontological challenge. The moral challenge is a challenge to the righteousness of God. It questions whether, given the presence of evil in the world, God can be justified in the act of creation. I have already argued, in Chapter 5, that Pannenberg meets this challenge through his understanding of the cross as God’s action in the world to take responsibility for the presence of evil in the world and to overcome evil. The remaining two challenges will be discussed in this chapter. The epistemological challenge consists in the question of whether eschatological statements can be grounded in such a way as to provide sufficient grounds for the hope that evil will be overcome. It is, thus, a generic challenge to the notion of eschatology per se. The ontological challenge is much more specific to Pannenberg’s construal of reality. For Pannenberg, as indeed for process theology, the world is in process of becoming. It is therefore dynamic. A whole series of questions arises from this. If the world is in the process of becoming, once it has become, does the dynamism of the world also cease, does the world become static? What is the relationship between eternal, eschatological life and the physical processes of life? The linking of entropy and evil, discussed in Chapter 2, means that these processes cannot continue in any post-eschaton existence. All complex life forms make use of the energy released by physicochemical processes in order to maintain themselves, to grow and to develop.   Karl Rahner, On the Theology of Death (New York 1973), p. 32.   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 619.

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Entropy is inextricably linked to life as we know it. Is eternal life thus more akin to eternal death than the fullness of life? For Pannenberg, much is at stake in the attempt to meet the three challenges: ‘as regards its content and truth all Christian doctrine depends on the future of God’s own coming to consummate his rule over his creation.’12 The Epistemological Challenge The first challenge to be discussed is the epistemological challenge. Ernst Troeltsch remarked famously that the ‘eschatological office is now closed’; the reason that eschatology fell into neglect is, Troeltsch tells us, because it has lost its root: eschatological thought cannot be grounded properly. For Troeltsch, Weiss’s and Schweitzer’s historical rediscovery of the eschatological content of Jesus’ proclamation rendered any link between Jesus and nineteenth-century liberal theological thought illegitimate. The history of twentieth-century theology can be read as an attempt to rethink the epistemological roots of theological reflection in terms of eschatology. According to Schwöbel, at the end of the twentieth century, there was still no consensus on how this might be achieved.13 Since the time of Schleiermacher, says Pannenberg, Christian eschatological hope has been based exclusively upon the ‘fellowship of believers with Jesus, without trying to find a rational justification’.14 Not surprisingly, Pannenberg is not entirely happy with this state of affairs, for this fellowship presupposes God’s power to overcome death and, we might add, evil. The eschatological hope rests on our confidence in the Resurrection, and, for Pannenberg, this confidence is, in part at least, connected with the intellectual, and therefore rational, credibility of Christian theological statements about the Resurrection.15 For Pannenberg, this requirement for rational credibility is the reason why Weiss and Schweitzer’s original discovery could not be incorporated immediately into systematic theological reflection, and also why, a century on, its incorporation is still incomplete.16 This stress on rational credibility is a significant distinguishing feature of Pannenberg’s theology, setting him apart from his contemporary Moltmann, though both of them seek to use the concept of promise in the epistemological grounding of their eschatology. Pannenberg distinguishes himself from Moltmann with respect to the role of the Resurrection. For Moltmann, the Resurrection is a validation of

  Ibid., p. 531.   Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Last Things First? The Century of Eschatology in Retrospect’,

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in eds David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot, The Future as God’s Gift (Edinburgh 2000), pp. 217–41, at pp. 217–18. 14   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 534. 15   Ibid., p. 535. 16   Ibid., pp. 535, 532.

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biblical eschatology, rather than a fulfilment of that promise.17 The historicity of the Resurrection is itself referred to the eschaton. By contrast, Pannenberg devotes a considerable amount of theological effort to the demonstration of the historicity of the Resurrection, because, for him, the Resurrection is both a validation of biblical promise and also a fulfilment, a demonstration, in history of human eschatological destiny. For this reason, McGrath is quite wrong in his assertion that the Resurrection possesses a soteriological function for Pannenberg, without any significant epistemological dimension. McGrath believes that for Pannenberg the ‘cross does not appear to be able to disclose God’.18 This is incorrect, though it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the epistemological significance of the cross can be understood. For Pannenberg, the difficulty with the concept of promise is that one needs a reasonable basis on which to trust the promise, even the promise of God: ‘Even if the traditional promises may be pronounced in the name of a deity, we can regard them as promises of the true God only on the condition that we can first on other grounds support our conviction concerning the reality of God.’19 It is at this point that the presence of evil in the world and its overcoming become the theme of eschatology. The presence of evil in the world constitutes a ground for doubting the reality of God. It has been the burden of this book to argue that the world with its evil can be accounted for properly in relation to the reality of God. Chapters 2 and 3 argued the case from the perspective of creation and anthropology respectively. Nevertheless, plausibility is not the same as demonstration, and so as such, the grounding of eschatological statements will always be a matter of debate, for the reality of God can never be established definitively: only the world’s ‘consummation removes occasions for doubt whether this world is God’s creation’.20 Key in this regard, for Pannenberg, is the connection with anthropology: as statements of promise, eschatological pronouncements must connect with human beings’ deepest longings.21 In other words, for Pannenberg, eschatological statements of promise need to be ‘shown to be consistent with the nature and destiny of human beings’.22 It is this connection with anthropology that Pannenberg sees as essential to the credibility of eschatological statements: ‘anthropology is the soil on which we can argue for the universality of the Christian eschatological hope’, though there can never be any question, this side of the eschaton, of definitive proofs.23 Rather, theology offers 17   Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: 1965), p. 144. 18   Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology 1750–1990 (Eugene, OR 1984), p. 198. 19   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 540. 20   Ibid., pp. 540–41. 21   Ibid., p. 541; Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, pp. 22–3. 22   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 541. 23   Ibid., p. 541.

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a credible vision of humanity, one that warrants being taken seriously, and one which has explanative power. Pannenberg is close to Rahner in this respect, who, likewise, sought a basis for eschatology in anthropology.24 For Rahner, human life in the present is fragmentary, ‘broken’ in Pannenberg’s terminology. We can know ourselves to be in this condition, however, only if we have some concept of wholeness with which to compare our current state.25 If salvation, seen as a future event is understood properly as involving our wholeness, then it follows that knowledge of our future, eschatological state is constitutive of life in the present.26 Eschatological statements are not extrinsic to human being, but intrinsic to it. Thus, anthropological considerations, for both Rahner and Pannenberg, point to the idea of a consummation which fulfils human being, overcoming its brokenness, even though there can be no certainty of its realisation. However, from the perspective of Christian theology, Pannenberg can point to the proleptic manifestation of the Kingdom of God in the person of Jesus Christ. There is a sense, therefore, in which eschatological statements have already been fulfilled. This fulfilment is available to the community of Jesus through its ‘liturgical life in the celebration of anamnesis and epiclesis’.27 As a eucharistic community, therefore, the Church enacts its future wholeness in the present. It is the actualisation of the promises of God in Christ that ‘form the basis of their force for us’, says Pannenberg.28 The critical reader of Pannenberg could point to the interconnectedness of this argument, perhaps regarding it as circular. At best, one might perhaps point to its fragility, for if one aspect fails, its interconnectedness means that the whole edifice would collapse. This, however, I think is to misunderstand the nature of Pannenberg’s theological thought. As a research programme, a concept that was discussed in Chapter 1, all of the concepts I have been discussing in this section constitute the belt of supporting hypotheses to the main aim of understanding the world in relation to God. As such, these supporting ideas are adaptable and even changeable. Only the fundamental aim is vital. The Ontological Challenge The second challenge facing the eschatological understanding of the overcoming of evil is the ontological challenge. I have already raised this in connection with the linking of evil with entropy, which points to an utterly different order of being in the eschaton. Also connected with this challenge is the idea of the end of the world and the end of time, as this new order is ushered in. For Pannenberg, these two aspects of eschatology, as end, or terminus, and as completion or fulfilment,     26   27   28   24 25

Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations 4 (London 1966), pp. 323ff. Ibid., p. 331. Ibid. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 545. Ibid., p. 545.

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belong together and are not alternatives.29 Fulfilment, completion, requires that time also comes to an end. To think otherwise, says Pannenberg, would mean that ‘the time that follows unavoidably loses all content.’30 As Kant found, this strains the imagination considerably.31 Tillich sought a way through the problem, through an interpretation of eschatology in purely existential terms. For Tillich, the end, or goal, of history transcends all moments in history and, as such, the fulfilment of the historical process ‘lies in the generally present end of history’.32 It is not an ontological state at all. The eschaton is a symbol of an existential state. Yet the idea of a real ontological end to time is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition: for Pannenberg, it is one of the distinctive claims of the Christian faith.33 Fulfilment necessarily involves transformation. Human beings, indeed all life as we know it, exploit the principle of entropy, capturing the energy released in biochemical processes to drive the synthetic reactions that maintain life. This we do at the cost of the overall increase in entropy in the universe. Once this is done away with at the eschaton, and the association of evil and entropy means that this must be the case, then the life that continues, eternal life, must be utterly different from life as we currently understand it. Moreover, this new life must be more than existential transformation as seen in Tillich and Bultmann. It is a fortiori an ontological transformation. Pannenberg seeks to understand this transformation in terms of the relationship between time and eternity: ‘God and not nothing is the end of time.’34 Moreover, transformation must be thought of in terms of the completion or fulfilment, rather than the negation, of what currently exists. For Pannenberg, the desire for totality, wholeness, is inherent in all living creatures and the attainment of this totality through transformation is the fulfilment of the creature.35 This view stands in marked contrast to Moltmann for whom transformation is the negation of creaturely life.36 For Pannenberg, it is our essential reality that is finally manifested and revealed in the eschaton: an essential reality purged of all ‘heterogeneous admixtures, perversions, and woundings of their earthly existence’.37 All traces of evil will be removed, though we should note that the marks of suffering are not necessarily removed at the eschaton, since the essential self may still bear traces of the cross.38   Ibid., p. 586.   Ibid., p. 587. 31   Kant ‘The End of All Things’, in ed. L.W. Beck, Kant on History (Indianapolis, IN 29 30

1963), pp. 78–9. 32   Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 3 (London 1964), p. 396. 33   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 589. 34   Ibid., p. 594. 35   Ibid., p. 601. 36   Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (London 1996), p. 271. 37   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 606. 38   Ibid.

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In eternity, on Pannenberg’s view, there is no distinction between past, present and future, but all are simultaneously present. Yet eternity is not timelessness, the absence of time, but timefulness, the completion of time. Luco van den Brom has criticised Pannenberg’s formulation of the relationship between time and eternity, finding no meaning in the distinction between timelessness and timefulness.39 Pannenberg sees time as bounded by eternity, but van den Brom objects that this is to conceive of time in terms of spatiality, which leads inevitably to the idea of a ‘block universe’, and, for van den Brom, this means the essential absence of human freedom from necessity.40 I have already argued in Chapter 4 that human freedom is compatible with Pannenberg’s conceptualisation of God as the all-determining reality, and in Chapter 3, I discussed Pannenberg’s idea of freedom in terms of anthropology. In these chapters, I argued that freedom, for Pannenberg, is the freedom to actualise one’s destiny, which is to fulfil one’s capacity for communion with God. This freedom to transcend the bounds of cause and effect in the world is a freedom that is guaranteed by God. It does follow, however, as I suggested in Chapter 3, that for Pannenberg human beings have freedom with respect to God. Again, this is a matter of ontology: human beings were created for communion with the divine and we do not have the capacity to redefine what we essentially are. Van den Brom’s issue is what he terms the ‘logical problem’ of Pannenberg’s concept of time, which I understand as Pannenberg’s ontology of time. That is, Pannenberg’s spatial metaphors imply a realist ontology of time, which van den Brom sees as incompatible with Pannenberg’s relational conceptualisation of the Trinity.41 He believes that Pannenberg has preserved divine freedom at the cost of creaturely freedom. Pannenberg, he concludes, offers a ‘deterministic eschatology [that] neglects the value of history that is supposed to be saved in the first place’.42 Preserving history and acknowledging its value is the point of the conceptualisation of eternity as timefulness, rather than timelessness, and it is this issue to which we turn next. The real question raised by van den Brom’s critique is the significance of the difference between eternity as timelessness and eternity as timefulness. As already noted, van den Brom sees no distinction between the two, but the distinction makes a considerable difference to how eternal life can be conceived. The problem is an ancient one, and is connected with the notion of the creature’s duration, a concept deployed throughout the tradition from Augustine to Barth. For Barth, we exist as we cross the border between the past and the future.43 This view of the relationship between time and existence can be traced to Augustine, who in the Confessions, focused upon the idea of the soul bridging the past and the future 39   Luco van den Brom, ‘Eschatology and Time: Reversal of the Time Direction?’, in eds Fergusson and Sarot, The Future as God’s Gift, pp. 159–68, at p. 162. 40   Ibid., pp. 161–3. 41   Ibid., p. 162. 42   Ibid., p. 165. 43   Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2, p. 257.

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in the present.44 According to Pannenberg, this conceptualisation is of enduring theological significance.45 Augustine’s term ‘disentio’ has a dual meaning: it can mean both the extension of the soul in time and the fragmentation or ‘distension’ of the soul in time. Pannenberg sees in this an expression of the creature’s ontological dependence upon God.46 The creature’s duration in time comes about, according to Pannenberg’s interpretation of Augustine, as it focuses attention toward the future and the past in the present.47 This bridging of the past and the future gives to the human being’s experience of time the character of time as an image of eternity – the unity of all time. Where Pannenberg diverges from Augustine is in the characterisation of this unity as timefulness, rather than as timelessness. The significance of this is that, for Pannenberg, unity is almost a synonym for wholeness and completion or fulfilment. To conceive of eternity as timelessness is to deny the possibility of wholeness. In a timeless eternity, history is absent. In a timeful eternity, it is preserved. A timeless eternity is one where nothing can happen. A timeful eternity contains all events. This is, of course, a spatial metaphor, but van den Brom reads too much into this, forgetting that it is metaphor. In any event, the concept, so important in physics, of the ‘space–time continuum’ should leave us in little doubt over the inevitability, if not necessity, of spatial metaphors, when discussing time. This discussion, however, leaves unresolved the question of entropy and evil, and how, in the absence of entropy, life can continue to maintain itself. There is a link between the discussion of time and eternity and entropy, and hence evil, however. It lies in the fact that entropy is linked frequently with the irreversibility of time.48 If each moment of eternity contains the fullness of time, then there would be no directionality to time, and hence no entropy. It is, then, just possible to conceive of life without entropy, without the physico-chemical processes which constitute earthly existence. This does indeed stretch our conceptualisations almost to breaking point. Pursuing the spatial metaphor further, we could perhaps conceive of eternity as a singularity, rather like that thought to be at the centre of a black hole. All of this points to the radical transformation of life, such that the continuity of identity seems to be threatened across the eschatological divide. Continuity of identity is achieved through the integration of ‘the facts of previous and present life’ before and after the eschaton.49 In life, we achieve only a broken realisation of our destiny, a broken integration of the facts, but these are integrated as a whole in eternity in the fullness of time:     46   47   48  

Augustine, Confessions XI 28.38. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God (Edinburgh 1990), p. 78. Ibid.; idem, Systematic Theology 3, p. 599. Augustine, Confessions XI. 28.38. Michael Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe (Oxford 2007), pp. 188–90. 49   Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 3, p. 640. 44 45

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The eschatological transforming of the life we live here in the light of the divine destiny that transcends its successes and failures … does not threaten our identity but completes it beyond anything we are now by fulfilling that which is not yet fulfilled in the fragmentary form of our present life.50

This returns us to the question of the universality of the reconciliation with God, brought about through God’s action on the cross. As I argued above, there can be no definitive answer to eschatological questions until the eschaton itself is reached; until then, all remains a matter of hypothesis, and faith. However, any theological tradition, indeed any worldview, can commend itself to the world now through its explanatory power: its ability to orientate one’s life in the here-and-now and to help make sense of the world. It is to this that we now turn. The Value of Theological Accounts of Evil in a Post-9/11 World Writing shortly after the end of the Second World War, and when the evil of the concentration camps was beginning to become clear, Hannah Arendt wrote that the problem of evil would be the dominating question of twentieth-century philosophy.51 Though Arendt herself devoted much intellectual energy to the problem, her prediction failed to materialise; though of course the question of evil has continued to attract attention, it did not become the dominant issue of the twentieth century. Richard Bernstein, however, makes the claim that the world has entered a new era with respect to evil in the twenty-first century. For Bernstein, the events of 9/11 inaugurated a new era; the language of evil flooded the media, and with this deluge, he argues, came a new dualistic conception of the world. In a post-9/11 world, the world is divided into those who seek to destroy and those who enlist in the fight against evil.52 This situation is not unique in political history, as Bernstein himself acknowledges, but, says Bernstein, the present situation is disturbing in its ‘rigidity and popular appeal’.53 Evil, he argues, is a concept deployed as ‘psychological reassurance’ against the fear of unpredictable threats of terror. Such a use of the concept of evil constitutes ‘an abuse of evil’, he says, because its deployment in this way aims to suppress thinking, to stop questioning. Thoughtful responses to the problem of terrorist attacks are not required in the new climate, only the ‘stark opposition’ to those designated evil.54 In its turn, this stark opposition to an evil   Ibid., p. 641.   Hannah Arendt ‘Nightmare and Flight’, in ed. Jerome Kohn, Hannah Arendt:

50 51

Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York 1994), p. 134. 52   Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: the Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Cambridge 2005), p. 10. 53   Ibid., p. 10. 54   Ibid., p. 11.

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enemy is used to support actions against the enemies of freedom and democracy which, when perpetrated by these enemies are condemned rightly as illegal and evil. Hannah Arendt’s comment, ‘the absolute … spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm’, has never been more apposite.55 Theological accounts of evil are concerned frequently with the absolute. This is certainly the case for Pannenberg’s account, because that account is developed in relation to God, who is ‘all-determining reality’, and hence, absolute. Should such accounts be brought into the political realm, or does such a move spell doom for society? I suggest that Pannenberg’s account of evil offers three specific insights into evil that can be applied fruitfully in a post-9/11 world. First, it grounds the universality of evil ontologically in the structure of the universe. Human, social and political evils are an out-working of this structural evil. Secondly, the understanding of human evil in terms of alienation offers the potential for a more nuanced and objective analysis of the causes of the wave of terrorist attacks at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Third, God’s proleptic reconciliation of the world and overcoming of evil through the cross has consequences for the ways in which human beings organise their social and political lives in the present. The Ontological Grounding of the Universality of Evil There is more at stake in the discussion of evil than merely moral, intellectual, or political concerns. As Stephanie Power has rightly identified: … sheltering behind black-and-white characterizations is not only questionable for moral or epistemological reasons. It poses practical problems because it blinds us from understanding and thus undermines our long-term ability to prevent and surmount what we don’t know and most fear. ‘Evil’, whether radical or banal, is met most often with unimaginativeness. Terrorism is a threat that demands a complex and elaborate effort to distinguish the sympathizers from the militants and to keep its converts to a minimum. Terrorism also requires understanding how our policies helped to give rise to such venomous grievances.56

As W.H. Auden put it, on the eve of the Second World War, ‘Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’57 The ontological grounding of evil in Pannenberg’s account of evil challenges the notion that the world can be divided into two camps, one of which is good and the other evil. The grounding of the concept of sin in the ontological structure of the universe reconnects the Christian discourse about sin with public, practical, or political discourse on evil. It does this, moreover, not   Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York 1963), p. 9.   Stephanie Power, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Lessons’, New York Review of Books 51

55 56

(2004): 37. 57   W.H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London 1979), p. 86.

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primarily in personalistic or moralistic terms – for example, through a concept of personal sin – but in terms of an ontological structure of the world and human being. Properly understood, evil and sin describe the condition of world and human being in the present as the necessary condition for the future, eschatological fulfilment of both the world and human being. In the post-9/11 world, religious rhetoric has been used as an effective tool, by both sides of the conflict, to support this dualist view of the world. Peter Singer, in his study of the ethics of George W. Bush, for example, points to the clear influence of Bush’s conservative, evangelical background on his repeated characterisation of the ‘war on terror’ as a conflict between good and evil.58 Singer goes on to note that this kind of characterisation, far from being orthodox Christianity, is in fact a manifestation of Manichaean dualism. Singer’s assessment is slightly misleading in that post-9/11 dualism is not quite Manichaeism, in that, whilst for Manichaean dualism the world is the battleground of the opposing forces of good and evil, modern dualism divides the world itself into opposing camps. It is a transparent attempt to use the language of good and evil for ideological purposes. In this context, Pannenberg’s ontological account of evil serves the same function today that Augustine’s ontological account of evil as privatio boni served in the fifth century: both accounts seek to identify evil in terms of the God who is creator and apart from whom nothing else exists. In other words, both accounts are set explicitly in opposition to any form of dualism. For both, though each account understands it differently, evil is a distortion of human being and of the world. As a distortion of the structure of being, evil has epistemological consequences. In the Confessions, Augustine recognises the debilitating effect of evil on his ability to understand and act in accordance with the will of God. Frequently, in the Confessions, Augustine uses the image of entanglement to describe the effects of evil on the human mind and action.59 For Augustine, only God can untangle the knot and illuminate the disordered mind.60 Likewise, for Pannenberg, epistemological uncertainty is linked closely to the conditions of earthly existence and evil. It is the consequence of the God-given independence of the world, necessary if the world is to realise for itself divine love and respond in kind. Under such conditions, which remain until the eschaton, no one can claim to know the will of God. Though, as I have been arguing, reason is an essential tool in seeking to understand the divine mind, there can be no possibility of establishing our understanding of God on any secure epistemological foundation. Theological and religious assertions and statements are always, like those of science, provisional and subject to revision. The truth of theological and religious assertions will be demonstrated by God only in the eschaton. Pannenberg’s theological account of evil, therefore, undercuts attempts to divide the world into good and evil. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr wrote recently 58   Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York 2004), pp. 207–8. 59   Augustine, Confessions VI iii.4; II x.18. 60   Augustine, Confessions II vii.15.

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that ‘there are no more dangerous people on earth than those who believe they are executing the will of the Almighty.’61 We might expand this: there are no more dangerous people on earth than those who believe they have the complete and certain truth and act accordingly. Pannenberg’s account of evil, and in particular its stress on the overcoming of evil as a divine act, undercuts any and all claims made to speak and act definitively for God. It does so, moreover, on theological grounds. But can such a theological account be of any general interest to anyone other than a specialist theologian? Does the stress on reconciliation with God in the overcoming of evil relegate theological accounts of evil to the domain of the believer only, and deny theology a public voice? Alienation and Reconciliation Chapter 3 developed the argument that the fundamental cause of human evil is a threefold ontological alienation at the heart of the structure of human being: alienation from self, the world and God. This threefold structure links political and social human alienation to alienation from God, and so opens the legitimacy of the public voice of theology: theology and religion cannot be relegated to the realm of the private or the individual. Nevertheless: Under the pressure of the concern to speak for world peace, talk of peace with God in any but directly political terms will seem futile today, a diversion from the urgent task on which all our energy and insight must be concentrated. To turn one’s attention to the peace with God, especially in the sense of peace of soul, can easily give the impression of cynicism or bigotry in view of the terror which threatens the future of mankind in the atomic age. Nonetheless, peace with God may have more to do with world peace than a superficial glance would indicate. It could prove to be a source of strength that enables the ordinary citizen to exert new efforts for peace and not to give in to resignation, thinking that peace will finally be preserved – or lost – only by those who wield power on earth.62

The realisation of divine love, like the peace of God of which the New Testament speaks, is by no means identical with world peace, which is transcended by divine love and peace. Pannenberg’s theological account of evil relativises popular accounts. It provides a perspective from which to critique the present situation and so furnishes a possibility of moving forward away from conflict. Such a movement, however, requires the acknowledgment that evil is a universal condition. Much of the discussion in this book has been conducted in the highly abstracted terms of the ontological structure of the universe and of human being.   Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, War and the American Presidency (New York 2004),

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p. 116.

  Wolfhart Pannenberg, Ethics (Philadelphia, PA 1981), p. 151.

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The structural evil discerned at these levels of abstraction has its consequences for human social and political life. The alienation at the heart of human being, and the associated drive for security rather than openness, has its corollaries in terms of the way that human beings organise their corporate and social lives. The neo-Lacanian and Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek discerns what he describes as ‘objective violence’ underpinning subjective expressions of violence such as acts of terrorism or torture.63 This objective violence, says Žižek, is found in the structure of language, which he sees as deeper than merely incitement to violence and the manipulative use of language as a tool for social domination: ‘There is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning.’64 Human language simplifies things and forces them with Procrustean force into a field of meaning that is external to the object itself, being the creation of human values. Žižek cites ‘gold’ as his example. Human beings violently extract this metal from its natural context, he says, and invest in it dreams of power, wealth, spiritual purity and more besides; none of this has anything to do with the immediate nature of gold itself; what gold is, in and of itself.65 The very nature of language itself thus reflects the alienation at the heart of human being. This relativisation of gold to a human-centred meaning is linked, according to the analysis presented in Chapter 3, directly with the structure of human being as exocentric, and, our capacity to treat things as external to us and relative to us. It is associated directly therefore with the same structure of human being that brings about the threefold alienation. Žižek notes also a second form of objective violence, which he calls ‘systemic violence’.66 This is the violence ‘inherent in the normal state of things’, that which sustains the normal standard against which expressions of subjective violence are judged and identified. As George Orwell famously put it, ‘those who abjure violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.’67 If Žižek is right that the fundamental structure of human social organisation and language is inherently violent, then there is no possibility that, left to ourselves, human beings can overcome evil. This insight matches that of Erich Fromm, who observed that the incidence of destructiveness and cruelty could be correlated inversely to the sophistication of human society.68 In other words, as society develops, it also develops new ways of expressing the destructive and cruel aspects of the human character. We ought not to be surprised by this. The paradigmatic symbol of twentieth-century evil, Auschwitz, is of course shocking for the sheer     65   66   67  

Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London 2008), pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 1. George Orwell, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, in ed. Peter Davison, The Complete Works of George Orwell (London 1988), p. 154. 68   Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York 1973), p. 177. 63 64

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scale of the human destruction it represents. However, human destruction on this scale only became possible because society had developed the technology to make it possible. The tools of progress – science and technology – were used not in the service of humanity, but for its destruction. This is the underlying reason for the symbolic power that Auschwitz, rightly, holds today. Again, this observation can be understood in terms of the structure of alienation at the heart of human being. In Pannenberg’s theology, the concept of alienation functions, ironically, as a unifying concept, enabling him to see the brokenness of human being in relation to the self, the world and to God as a single compound condition, much as Tillich had done before.69 Pannenberg, however, seeks to press beyond Tillich’s use of the concept of alienation, drawing out its social implications. The very forms of communal and cultural life upon which human beings are dependent display themselves the marks of alienation for both the successful and the marginalised in any particular culture. Any social or political system will exclude and marginalise some, who will thus experience that form of society as a form of oppression. Others, on the other hand, will be skilled at turning the system to their own advantage, turning it in to a tool of ‘alienated inclinations’.70 Pannenberg’s point, however, is that this latter group too are, in reality, just as oppressed. They are ‘caught in the maelstrom of autonomous laws of acquisitiveness, envy, domineerings, and ambition’.71 The felt experience of alienation depends entirely on what it is that individuals identify with. To embrace a particular form of social organisation, to identify with it, is, formally at least, an act of love. Where love is present, alienation must recede. However, in the case of misplaced love, this is true only in the mind of the lover. Since their behaviour continues to disrupt the community objectively, the objectively existing alienation remains intact and unabated. Under these conditions, it is possible for the shared world to be far more alienated than members of the society realise.72 If I understand him correctly, it is this, almost invisible, alienation in the structures of social and political organisation that Žižek has labelled ‘objective violence’. In classical (Augustinian) theological understanding, what Žižek has identified in the structure of human societies is the outworking or social expression of human sin. Religion, too, is subject to the structural distortions as a result of alienation. As examples of this, the letter giving religious and spiritual instruction to the 9/11 terrorists which was found in a car at Logan Airport, and that the Ku Klux Klan claims a Christian root, could be cited. The crusades and Jihad alike were given religious justification. The scriptures of the three monotheistic faiths contain descriptions of wars and bloody conflicts between God’s elect and those whom God has rejected, or at least not elected. These descriptions form part of the background 69   Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 283, cf. Tillich, Systematic Theology 2, p. 45. 70   Pannenbeg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 284. 71   Ibid., p. 284. 72   Ibid., p. 285.

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from which we face new situations; as such, they exert a deep and often invisible influence. Mark Jurgensmeyer argues that, whilst it is true that religion can give rise to violence, violence can also give rise to religion, and he suggests that people turn frequently to religion when they feel threatened or disparaged at the deepest level.73 Religion, thus, provides a narrative of meaning to explain their suffering. Hence the claim of Marx, and before him Hegel, that religion is the product of an alienated consciousness.74 On this view, religion is a flight from the world and in this context, Hegel denied that such a use of religion was authentic. Critiques of religion often point to the fact that different traditions accuse one another of failing to grasp the true nature of the divine. Moreover, in an age of pluralism, it is widely thought that no criterion exists to judge between the truth claims of religions. However, ‘In response to this view it is important to realise, first, that such a criterion does exist in principle, in fact the talk about God or gods is meaningful, because free of internal contradiction, only to the extent that it describes a power that determines all experienced reality.’75 The German of this passage is extremely difficult to translate, but Pannenberg’s meaning is reasonably clear. Religious truth claims can be judged on the extent to which they illuminate the experience of living in this world, rather than merely describing and pointing to another world, beyond this world. Whilst this criterion can not be applied in a mechanical, rigid manner, it does point to a very important means of distinguishing authentic expressions of the religious consciousness and alienated expressions. Different religious claims must be judged on the extent to which they illuminate our understanding of lived experience and reality.76 Failure of a particular religious discourse to illuminate lived experience is evidence of its alienated character. It is in this sense of failure to illuminate experience that Hegel describes a religious consciousness, as an alienated consciousness in that it substitutes another world, and the hope of a better life in this other world, for this world. Marx, rightly, understood that this false religious consciousness was also an expression of discontent with this world. Marx, however, believed that the present world could be changed, eliminating the need for religion altogether. Pannenberg’s analysis of the structure of alienation, however, leads to the view that this can never be the case: evil can never be overcome. The phenomenon of alienation in religion calls not for the abandonment of religion or the trading of religious justifications, but for a rigorous quest for authentic religion. Such an authentic religion issues a radical challenge to the world, because it challenges us not merely to respond to threats and defend ourselves, but also to look to ourselves and the evil and alienation that is lurking in our religious, social and political lives. 73   Mark Jurgensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA 2003). 74   Karl Marx, Collected Works (London 1976), p. 105; G.F.W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York 2004), p. 512. 75   Pannenbeg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, p. 280. 76   Ibid., p. 280; idem, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 301f.

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In theological perspective, the only hope of overcoming evil must indeed rest with God. Overcoming evil must indeed be a divine act. Such overcoming occurs as a result of the one-sided offer of reconciliation from God to the world. However, that does not mean that human beings must become merely passive, waiting for the eschaton. God’s action in overcoming evil has practical and political consequences for living in the world. Christoph Schwöbel has commented that since reconciliation is based on the one-sided offer of peace, it is costly and requires the abandonment of all attempts at retribution. The reconciler must pay the cost of the new relationship in the sense of foregoing retribution.77 Caution must be exercised here, however, for there is no direct correlation or analogy between the divine work of reconciliation and human political reconciliation. The challenge is to seek to find a means of reconciliation in the political sphere that reflects and bears witness to God’s act of reconciliation. Returning to the quotation from Pannenberg with which this section of the chapter began, the peace with God offered by God through the cross points to a more fundamental human solidarity, that of sin, which relativises all human differences, and hence the causes of alienation between different people and thus the causes of conflict. Schwöbel is surely right in his assessment that this relativisation is the most important implication of the message of reconciliation.78 The value of nation, culture, race and religion are strictly relative. This relativisation itself has an important consequence, for it undermines grand political visions, meta-narratives, which claim to offer the solution to human social and political problems, be they liberal democratic visions of society or Marxist-inspired visions, divesting them of their soteriological claims. Schwöbel sees a case here for a revival of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms. Barth, of course, claimed famously that this doctrine was partly but directly responsible for allowing the rise of National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930s.79 Pannenberg points out that Luther’s doctrine does not advocate unquestioning submission to the state.80 Far from it, in fact, for it belongs to the office of the preacher to summon all members of society to conform their lives and work to the Kingdom of God. Support for the state can involve being its severest critic, in order that it might better be able to fulfil its true purpose: Luther held that certain truths belong together: that the one God is Lord not only in the church but also in secular government, that rulers are bound by that which reason recognizes as natural and just, and that the preaching of the church also has the responsibility of instructing secular authorities and strengthening them through criticism and exhortation. The intimate relationship of these themes 77   Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Reconciliation: From Biblical Observations to Dogmatic Reconstructions’, in ed. Colin Gunton, The Theology of Reconciliation (Edinburgh 2003), pp. 13–38, 35–6. 78   Ibid., p. 37. 79   Karl Barth, Einer Schweizer Stimme (Zurich 1945), p. 122. 80   Pannenberg, Ethics, p. 112.

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to each other is seen in striking manner in Luther’s teaching that the voice of reason and nature is identical with that of love.81

There is also something to be gained on the religious side from Luther’s doctrine, for it assigns a vital and clear role to that realm also: the role of safeguarding the spiritual well-being and health of the state. It is a prophetic role of indirect action, rather than one of direct political action. This is not to deny the problematical nature of Luther’s, basically mediaeval, understanding of politics, which makes it very difficult to refute Barth’s criticisms of the doctrine.82 It certainly falls outside the scope of this present work to develop the argument. It is sufficient to point to the fact that the analysis of evil found in Pannenberg’s theology has pointed to new avenues of research, which could prove theologically fruitful in understanding human lived experience. Conclusion This book has aimed at using the question of evil in the world as an hermeneutical tool to probe Pannenberg’s theology, in an attempt to assess the claim that the post-Enlightenment tradition of German theology has come to a natural end. An intellectual tradition may be said to have ended when it no longer furnishes answers to questions posed by human beings and their constructions of the world: that is, when it fails to offer new insights into the world. Conversely, an intellectual tradition may be said to be living and active when it is producing new insights and helping to provide answers to questions that are being asked. A particularly important question in regard to this fruitfulness of an intellectual tradition is whether it helps to unify phenomena or understandings which have previously been thought of as disparate. There are, for example, many semi-popular accounts of the history of science which present the development of science in precisely these terms. One such is Lee Smolin’s recent account of string theory, which accounts for physics as the quest for mathematical unity in the description of the fundamental forces of the universe.83 In Chapter 1, I argued that Pannenberg’s theological system should be regarded as a research programme, analogous to those of science, according to the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos. The underlying intention of this conceptualisation was to allow the assessment of the fruitfulness of Pannenberg’s theological programme to be assessed along the twin lines of fruitfulness and unification, used in assessing scientific research. I argued that the subject of evil provides a test case for Pannenberg’s theological programme because it constitutes an underlying theme of the Systematic Theology. Chapter 2 made the case that   Ibid., p. 113.   Ibid., p. 115. 83   Lee Smolin, Trouble With Physics (London 2006). 81 82

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our conceptualisations of evil in the contemporary world are indeed fragmentary. Bernstein views this plurality positively.84 His concern is that in seeking to describe the ‘essence’ of evil, we attempt to reduce all expressions of evil to one particular, chosen, evil. The unification of evil described in this book does not seek to reduce all expressions of evil to a single expression. Rather, it seeks to understand the plurality of evils as expressions of the underlying ontology of the world. Chapters 2 and 3, taken together, argued that Pannenberg’s understanding of evil united aspects of the topic that had come to be thought of as separate phenomena, that is, the concepts of physical and moral evil. They do this by resetting the question of evil as an ontological question, rather than as an existential question. First, in Chapter 2, physical evil was understood in terms of entropy and futility, and in Chapter 3, moral evil – sin – was understood in terms of the ontological structure of human being. This resetting of the question of evil as an ontological question also unifies the ontological and the existential question of evil. Pannenberg’s theology achieves this through an understanding of evil in terms of the ontological priority of the future. Augustine had, of course, understood evil ontologically in terms of a privatio boni – a lack of goodness. By this means, Augustine was able to understand how evil might be present in the world without being the result of the creative will of God: evil was literally no thing. In Pannenberg’s ontology, the future is the place from which God creates. His concept of the ontological priority of the future means that it is the future that determines what a thing ultimately is. Evil, because it is not the creation of God, has no future, and therefore it has no ultimate existence. This ontological nullity is expressed in the present through the concept of entropy, which Pannenberg and others link with evil. Uniquely, however, Pannenberg makes the link in terms of futility, rather than the more usual terms of disorder. Entropy speaks of a world that is futile, that has no future. Left to itself, the cosmos faces a closed, cold future. The future is a cosmos that cannot sustain life. It therefore has no future. Human beings, by contrast, have a destiny for communion with God. They have a future, but this future, though given as part of our created structure, must be actualised. Human beings must actualise their future, or likewise be subject to no future. For human beings, as for the cosmos in general, life without God is subject to futility and ultimately has no future. Chapter 5 discussed the nature of the power of God as love, and argued that divine power is exercised in the loving service of the world, guaranteeing its future. Chapter 6 discussed God’s action in the world to overcome evil and so to guarantee the future of the world. The grounding of this hope for the future was discussed in the first part of this chapter. Thus, in terms of the first criteria for intellectual vivacity, Pannenberg’s theological programme does demonstrate an ability to unify that which is currently understood as disparate. We could also note in passing that the programme also rehabilitates the concept of physical evil, which since the Enlightenment, has fallen into disrepute.   Bertstein, Radical Evil, p. 226.

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The second criterion for intellectual vivacity is that of generating new insights, or new understandings, and of providing resources for dealing with the practical, political and social issues that confront humanity. Again, though the discussion has been conducted in highly abstract terms, it does provide an underpinning for dealing with the practical problem of evil, which, at the beginning of the twenty-first century in western culture, has begun to take on the form of terrorism and the so-called ‘war on terror’. The discussion in this chapter has suggested ways in which Pannenberg’s understanding of evil might provide intellectual resources for resisting the division of the world into two opposing camps, designated good and evil. It does this by pointing to the universality of evil, which in turn relativises all perceived human differences, pointing to an underlying solidarity. This is not to say that human differences are unimportant, or that there can be a single, universally valid, account of human being, but it summons human beings to look beneath surface differences and context-led theologies in order to seek constantly a more integrated understanding of the world. Far from being the last flowering of a tradition that has come to its natural end, therefore, Pannenberg’s theology serves a vital function in the world of today.

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‘Constructive and Critical Functions of Christian Eschatology’, Harvard Theological Review 77 (1984): 119–39. ‘Der Einfluß der Anfechtungserfahrung auf den Prädestinationsbegriff Luthers’, Kerygma and Dogma III (1957):109–39. ‘The Emergence of Creatures and Their Succession in a Developing Universe’, The Asbury Theological Journal 50 (1995): 17–25 ‘Erfordert die Einheit der Geschichte ein Subjekt?’, in Geschichte Ereignis und Erzahlung (Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 5), eds R. Koselleck and W.D. Stempel (Munchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1973), pp. 478–90. Ethics, trans. Keith Crim (Philadelphia: Westminster 1981). From Part I of Ethik und Ekklesiologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977). ‘The Experience of Meaning, Religion, and the Question of God’, in Knowing Religiously, ed Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), pp. 153–65. Faith and Reality, trans. John Maxwell (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1975). German: Glaube und Wirklichkeit (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1975). ‘Der Geist und sein Anderes’, in Hegels Logik der Philosophie: Religion und Philosophie in der Theorie des absoluten Geistes, eds D. Henrich and R. Phorstmann (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1984), pp. 151–9. ‘God’s Presence in History’, The Christian Century (11 March 1981): 260–63. ‘Gott ist Geist’, in Gegenwart Gottes: Predigten, by W. Pannenberg (Munich: Claudius, 1973), pp. 100–108. Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie: Gesammelte Aufsatze, Band II (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980). ‘History and Meaning in Lonergan’s Approach to Theological Meaning’, Irish Theological Quarterly 40 (1973): 103–14. Human Nature, Election and History (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster 1977). These essays were lectures originally presented in English universities and then published in German the following year as Die Bestimmung des Menschen (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978). An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991). Jesus God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (London: SCM, 1977). German: Grundzuge der Christologie (Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1964, 7th edn, 1990). Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. P. Clayton (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988). German: Metaphysik und Gottesgedanke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988). ‘Moglichkeiten und Grenzen der Anwendung des Analogieprinzips in der evangelischen Theologie’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 85 (1960): 225–8. ‘The Nature of a Theological Statement’, Zygon 7 (1972): 6–19. ‘Offenbarung und “Offenbarungen” im Zeugnis der Geschichte’, in Handbuch der fundamentaltheologie, vol. 2 Traktat Offenbarung, ed W. Kern (Freiburg: Herder, 1985), pp 84–107.

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Index

alienation 4, 7, 84f, 96, 97, 127, 138, 158, 161, 170, 172ff and sin 86, 97 from God 4, 96, 160, 172 from self 4, 83, 86, 96, 97, 161 from the world 83 radical 84f Anselm 81 anthropology 4, 36, 47, 63, 71ff, 131, 164, 165, 167 anticipation 14, 15, 21ff, 33, 55, 65, 110, 133, 160 see also prolepsis atheism 1, 25, 152 Augustine 3, 4, 23, 37, 42, 44, 45, 47, 58, 59, 61, 68, 69, 76, 78, 86ff, 104, 106, 118, 120, 139, 167, 168, 171, 178 autonomy 38, 48, 55, 88, 93 Barth, Karl 25, 35, 36, 51, 59, 71, 72, 101, 102, 107, 122, 128, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 167, 176, 177 Bible 33, 101, 105 Bloch, E. 14, 63, 111 brokenness 25, 34, 77, 165, 174 Brunner, E. 128 Bultmann 166 causality 91 cause 41, 42, 66, 72, 76, 80, 85, 87, 109, 113, 127, 144, 167, 172, 176 Christ 7, 12, 22, 32, 33, 77, 94, 99, 118, 120, 128, 133, 139, 140–46, 149, 150, 151, 153, 153, 155, 160, 165 christology 14, 36, 128–32, 134, 135, 153, 154, 154, 158, 161 church 157, 161, 165, 176 Clayton, Phillip 15, 18 Cobb, John B. 16

concupiscence 87, 95 contingency 55, 64, 65, 66, 81, 97 contingent 54, 55, 60, 65, 66, 75, 97, 108, 109, 121, 124 cosmos 105, 106, 108, 178 creation 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 19, 33, 36, 37, 38, 46, 48, 49, 50–52 , 53–6, 59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 80, 82, 85, 93, 98, 99, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 113ff, 127, 130, 131, 135, 136, 141, 142, 143, 143, 144, 155, 160, 163, 173, 178 ex nihilo 4, 32, 33, 37, 45, 78, 106, 113 death 8, 21, 27, 35, 41, 65, 84, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 142, 144, 145, 150, 160, 161, 163 in God 152, 153 of God 149f, 154 of Jesus 129–34, 137, 138–44, 146, 143, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158 of the Son 154f destiny 4, 21, 77, 78, 84, 86–90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 115, 118, 121, 145, 150, 156, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 169, 178 determinism 4, 15, 109, 111, 112–14 determinist 104, 109, 111, 114, 115, 167 economy 144 ego 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88 egocentric 87, 89 epistemology 14, 23, 24, 25, 26, 49, 101, 103 eschatological 2, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 27, 32, 35, 37, 39, 51, 52, 61, 62, 65, 67, 82, 99, 102, 103, 105, 127, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 140, 158, 160f, 171 eschatology 4, 15, 21, 24, 36, 102, 159ff

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eschaton 24, 27, 32, 33, 138, 144, 159, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 176 eternity 52, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 103, 111, 116, 122, 123, 133, 134, 136, 157, 166, 167, 168 ethics 171 evil 1, 2, 4, 8–10, 15, 25, 33–9, 45, 46, 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 104, 106, 107, 108, 112, 117, 120, 121, 138, 140, 144, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 177, 178, 179 absolute 38, 142 and entropy 4, 56f, 58, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 166, 168 and ontology 44, 45, 57, 61, 62ff, 106 banal 44, 83 divine permission for 4, 37, 55, 69, 104f, 127 divine responsibility for 4, 36f, 55, 69, 98 ground of 42, 43, 44, 45ff, 78, 92, 127, 170 human 85, 90, 160 latent 38 metaphysical 47, 91 moral 43, 44, 47, 68, 72, 73, 91, 178 nullity of 4, 37, 61, 67, 68, 127, 178 origin of 36, 37f, 44, 46, 47, 106, 109, 113 overcoming/overcome 4, 5, 20, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 46, 61, 68, 69, 99, 103, 108, 119, 120, 124, 127, 135, 140, 141, 158, 159, 160f, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178 physical/natural 41–5, 49ff, 60, 68, 72, 73, 96, 178 problem of 3, 8, 9, 25, 34, 35, 36, 38, 44, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 149, 169, 178, 179 radical 46, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93 responsibility for 4, 5, 34, 36f, 55, 69, 97, 98, 107, 127, 162 structural 71, 73, 170, 173 universality 39, 170ff see also wickedness

exocentric 4, 79, 80–88, 97, 145, 146, 160, 173 faith 8, 13, 14, 19, 22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 35, 48, 77, 140, 141, 144, 145, 158, 160, 161, 169 and reason 13, 17, 33 Christian 7, 13, 48, 74, 110, 111, 166 faithfulness 20 God’s 66, 105, 114 Fall, the 59, 75, 78, 96, 97 Feuerbach 7, 22, 25, 46, 54, 73, 77, 80, 81, 100, 102, 122, 149, 151 Fichte 46, 100, 102 Fiddes 119, 121 field 18, 19, 32, 33, 60, 125, 173 finite 19, 37, 46, 49, 51, 55, 69, 80, 82, 85, 96, 107, 108, 110, 112, 116, 117, 135, 137, 142, 150, 157 finitude 36, 37, 38, 45, 46, 47, 49, 54, 85, 90, 97, 102, 117, 132, 137, 144, 150 freedom 4, 25, 37, 38, 42, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 63, 64, 65, 84, 91f, 103f, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 144, 146, 147, 167, 170 future 11, 12, 15, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 52, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76, 77, 87, 90, 103, 111, 112–14, 115, 116, 133, 135, 138, 140, 142, 158, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 168, 171, 172 God’s 117, 137, 145, 162 ontology 4, 109f power of 67, 90, 102, 109f, 115, 127 priority 14, 15, 24, 25, 62-64, 67, 68, 104, 109f, 178 rejection of 117 Galloway, Allan 10, 12, 13 Gehlen, Arnold 78–80 God 1, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 16f action 1, 7, 23, 32, 33, 35, 42, 99, 115, 120, 127f, 142, 143, 153, 156, 157, 158, 169, 176, 178 all-determining 19, 32, 104ff, 127, 155, 167, 170 becoming 52

Index doctrine of 15, 49, 50, 102, 103, 107, 123, 152, 153 eternity 53, 55, 63, 103 existence 22, 25, 27, 38, 49, 99, 100, 109 faithfulness 66, 105, 114 futurity 14, 103 glory 49 immutability 114, 123 infinity 63, 116, 132 lordship 51–3, 135, 136, 137 love of 3, 8, 15, 42, 52, 98, 100, 102, 118ff 127, 135, 141, 144, 158 omnipotence 100, 104, 105, 114, 115, 116f power 15, 42, 52, 55, 67, 94, 98, 100, 101ff, 113, 114, 115, 117, 124, 127, 135, 136, 160, 163, 178 reign see Kingdom of God rule 51, 62, 114, 135, 136, 137, 159, 161, 163 suffering 4, 35, 120, 121, 147ff unity 50, 156 Grenz, Stanley 11, 13 guilt 8, 37, 75, 91f, 97 Gunton, Colin 128 Hefner, Philip 9, 31, 32, 56, 62, 63 Hegel 16, 21, 22, 36, 77, 148, 149f, 175 Heidegger 27, 65, 94 Herder 63, 76, 77, 78 Hick, J. 56, 106, 160, 161 history 9, 10–13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23–5, 28, 32, 33, 34, 36, 39, 42, 46, 49, 52, 53, 58, 60, 66, 67, 101, 105, 107, 112, 113, 114, 118, 128, 129, 130, 133–5, 139, 144, 149, 158, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 177 Holwerda, David 14 Holy Spirit 123, 124, 152, 156, 157 hope 5, 13, 21, 25, 59, 63, 67, 68, 110, 111, 128, 138, 158, 159, 162f, 175, 176, 178 human 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 21–3, 24, 27, 32, 34, 36, 41–5, 47, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76ff, 90, 91, 92–6, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 113, 115, 116, 118,

199 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140–47, 149, 157, 160, 161, 164, 170, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179 destiny 4, 21, 77, 78, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 115, 118, 121, 159, 161, 162, 164, 167, 168, 178 misery 90

image of God 4, 76, 78, 152, 155 incarnation 4, 8, 117, 136, 143, 147ff independence 38, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 88, 91, 116, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 171 of creation 53–6 see also self/selfhood: self-independence infinite, the 80, 81, 82, 85, 88, 112, 122, 135, 150 see also anthropology Jenson, Robert 71, 72 Jesus Christ 7, 12, 22, 89, 102, 117, 118, 124, 128, 130, 132, 133,137, 149, 160 consubstantial 133, 136, 157, 158 death 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 151, 152–3, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159 deity/divinity 51, 130, 131ff, 154 destiny 21, 156, 159, 161 finitude of 137 future 22 humanity of 131, 139, 151, 154 identity 136 representative 51, 136, 141ff, 150, 155 resurrection 21, 24, 32, 134, 135, 136, 140, 159 revelation of God 22, 133, 134, 144 Son of God/sonship 129, 137, 144 suffering 149, 153, 156 unity with God 133–4, 136 Jüngel 14, 53, 122, 124, 148, 151, 152, 155, 156 Kähler, M. 139, 140, 141, 143 Kant, I. 3, 16, 45, 46, 64, 76, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93, 115, 166 Kingdom of God 12, 13, 62, 103, 111, 124, 132, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 176

200

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Kierkegaard 76, 89, 97 Lakatos 3, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 177 Leibniz 35, 37, 45, 46, 47, 91, 115 love 1, 52, 101, 108, 114, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 142, 147, 150, 152, 155, 157, 158, 160, 161, 172, 177 God’s/divine 3, 4, 8, 15, 36, 38, 42, 49, 52, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 117, 118f, 123f, 127, 135, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 171, 172 of /for God 8, 118f, 123f, 135, 141, 144 of self/self-love 88, 89, 90, 94, 95 power of 108, 114, 117, 118, 127, 178 realisation 36, 127ff, 144, 157, 159, 172 suffering 119, 120, 121 Luther 71, 72, 108, 111, 151, 176, 177 McGrath 1, 2, 164 Molnar 23, 26 Moltmann 2, 4, 8, 9, 24, 53, 63, 110, 119, 129, 148, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 163, 164, 166 ontological 3, 4, 14, 15, 24, 27, 37, 42, 43, 45, 47, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76ff, 91, 96, 97, 104, 109, 110, 111, 119, 121, 122, 127, 129, 147, 159, 160, 162, 165f, 170f, 178 ontology 4, 15, 26, 27, 43, 44, 45, 57, 61, 71, 73, 74, 77, 82, 83, 87, 89, 97, 106, 123, 167, 178 evil and 62f future 109ff openness 96, 109, 173 to the future 21, 22, 60, 66 to God 88, 161 to the world 78, 79, 80, 82, 88 omnipotence 100, 104, 105, 114, 115, 116f Paul, Apostle 21, 51, 59, 87, 138, 139, 145, 154 person/pershonhood 8, 38, 49, 50, 52, 72, 75, 82, 84, 85, 86, 91, 92, 94, 97, 120, 123, 124, 125, 128, 130, 132,

133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 143, 149, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165 personal 99, 100, 101, 102, 119, 122, 125, 132, 148, 171 Peters, Ted 85, 86 philosophy/philosophical 2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 16, 18, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 46, 49, 55, 56, 63, 64, 65, 69, 76, 77, 78, 88, 90, 92, 95, 100, 106, 111, 115, 122, 148, 149, 151, 152, 169 Plessner, Helmuth 79, 80, 82, 97 Polk, David 15, 63, 67, 80, 103, 105, 111, 114, 115, 128 possibility 66, 67, 73, 113, 115 power 4, 15, 16, 22, 28, 42, 45, 52, 55, 56, 58, 61, 62, 66, 67, 72, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 100, of God 101f, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 124, 125, 127, 135, 136, 145, 159, 163, 165, 169, 172, 174, 175, 178 pride 88, 89, 90 process thought 111, 159 prolepsis 10, 14, 15, 18, 19, 25, 32, 33, 39 promise 24, 111, 163, 164, 165 providence 54, 77, 102, 117 Rahner, Karl 51, 52, 161, 165 reality 2, 3, 4, 9,10, 12, 16–22, 26, 28, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 62, 64, 65, 68, 74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 89, 90, 103, 108, 111, 113, 116, 130, 132, 137, 140, 146, 154, 158, 160, 162, 164, 166, 175 reconciliation 34, 35, 36, 37, 61, 119, 127, 128f, 138f, 143, 144, 145, 146, 158, 161, 169, 170, 172f redemption 96, 105, 107, 139 religion 7, 80, 81, 91, 99, 100, 111, 149, 151, 172, 174, 175, 176 responsibility 5, 34, 69, 75, 84, 87, 91f, 97, 98, 127, 176 divine for evil 4, 36f, 55, 69, 98, 107, 127, 162 resurrection 8, 14, 21, 22, 24, 32, 59, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 150,

Index 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 163, 164 revelation 4, 11, 13, 16, 22, 23, 27, 32, 33, 39, 50, 52, 71, 82, 101, 102, 118, 119, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 138, 144, 156, 158 Rise, S. 128, 129, 133, 134, 152 Romans 56, 59, 87 salvation 119, 124, 133, 138f, 157, 159, 160, 161, 165 Scheler, Max 79, 80 Schleiermacher, F. 132, 139, 156, 163 Schweitzer, A. 163 self/selfhood 4, 8, 36, 45, 55, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 124, 144, 166, 172, 174 self-distinction 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 137, 147, 155 self-independence 38, 48, 49, 59, 88 see also autonomy self-love 88, 89, 90, 95 self-revelation (God’s) 4, 119, 133, 135 Shults F. LeRon 2, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 33, 39 sin 1, 4, 5, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 54, 59, 62, 63, 71ff , 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 104, 121, 124, 127, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 162, 170, 171, 174, 176, 178 original 4, 71, 73, 74f, 92, 95, 96, 97, 139 sinfulness 25, 93, 140 Singer, Peter, 171 soul 8, 38, 88, 167, 168, 172 soteriology 68, 135, 141 spirit 36, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 71, 85, 94, 118, 120, 123, 124, 125, 130, 144, 149, 150, 151, 153, 157, 160

201

God’s 125 Holy 123, 124, 152, 153 suffering 4, 7, 8, 25, 33, 34, 35, 38, 41, 42, 43, 48, 58, 67, 68, 119, 120, 121, 122, 158, 160, 166, 175 Christ/Son 136, 142–4, 147ff God 4, 121, 147ff temporality 63, 64, 85, 90, 97 theodicy 1, 2, 9, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 47, 107, 115 Tillich, Paul 166, 174 time 52, 55, 60, 63, 65, 87, 99, 103, 110, 111, 116, 124, 135, 138, 157, 159, 160, 166, 168 end of 165, 166 timefulness 53, 103, 111, 135, 167, 168 timelessness/timeless 53, 64, 167 Trinity 38, 49, 50, 51, 52, 67, 84, 119, 123, 124, 125, 131, 139, 155, 156, 157, 158, 167 truth 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20–28, 39, 90, 113, 130, 133, 134, 149, 153, 172 Tupper, F. 1, 8, 9, 12, 13, 24, 25, 34, 35, 63, 71, 107, 128 violence 173, 174, 175 Weiss, J. 163 wholeness 138, 159, 165, 166, 168 wickedness 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 58, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78 worldview 1, 169, 31, 34