Pannenberg's Theological Anthropology: Method and the Movement 'From Below.'
This was originally posted by me over a year ago, but I never got around to completing the series. So in the hopes of attempting to complete it, I am re-posting (a newly edited) version of this initial piece.
What is human? The difficulty in appropriating a definition of the "human," in theological anthropology is that the basic architectonic of the question is abstract to the point of subverting the original impetus for asking in the first place: the history of Israel, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and that historical relationship in these events to the Father through the Spirit. Any theological anthropology must seek its evaluation of the structural composition of the human, and the relation to the world ultimately in reference to this history, this story of redemption, and so the final component of such an enterprise is inherently an analysis of the doxological life of humanity before God the Father, standing as and with His Son through the vivifying power of the Spirit.
But initially and abstractly, the broad question of the human cannot be avoided as merely a "foundationalist" attempt to ground further narration in an 'acontextual' or 'empirical' construal of man apart from God ("remoto Deo") that will then operate as a hegemenous ordering of the Christian narrative. This is a primary accusation that arises against Pannenberg (especially in the post-Barth climate which views with suspicion any theology that tries to argue on anthropological grounds e.g. Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 17 n.6). For Pannenberg the narratival aspect of the Christian theological enterprise must always realize that its narration is not ultimately the guiding principle of knowledge, but is itself grounded in the ontological constitution of the Trinitarian history for-us. This means that even supposedly 'secularized' disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history, despite often and obvious separations from references to the long standing influences of Christian theology on scientific methodology, and circumventing the need to claim that religious-or even specifically Christian-apprehensions for the world, are necessary for explaining the make-up (essentialist or otherwise) of the human being, all of these aspects of the sciences are, if Christianity is true, related already to the Creator and Consummator of the world (in this sense, as we shall hopefully see as this series develops, Pannenberg understands the movement 'from below' as sublated by the theological movement 'from above' which is asymetrically determinative of the 'from below data'; c.f. F. LeRon Shults, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology pp.165-236). In part this is not a completely "theological," principle but is basically related to the hermeneutical and epistemological inter-relationship between "part," and "whole." We may cite a few examples from Pannenberg's corpus more or less at random to illustrate his understanding: "The individual life-moments...undergone by the individual, have their meaning in the context of the course of his life. But the individual is himself, in turn, a part of life-forms and nexuses of meaning that transcend individualized human existence...which are in turn coordinated within still more encompassing totalities of historical life...the relationship between whole and parts exists everywhere in society and in history." (Basic Questions in Theology vol. 1 p.162); or elsewhere: "explanation explicates the existing frame of reference used by the person who seeks understanding, and at the same time partly replaces it with an intellectual construction of the totality of meaning under question. It is not just the sciences which do this; the process also occurs in religion and art." (Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.153)
Anthropological observations in their preliminary form are, despite the difficulties and truncations that would be apparent to an observer with theological sensitivites, not themselves devoid of theological thought, or of truth. They reflect it already in their ontological structure, per necessity, as creatures of the Creator God. "Christians are...bound to ask why man's being constituted in relation to God and why he is characterized by being religious are so neglected by modern non-Christian anthropology. They are, however, also bound to recognize that even this form of anthropology still deals de facto with man whose being is constituted in relation to God." (Pannenberg, "The Christological Foundation" p.93). Hence Pannenberg's Theological Anthropology can be summarized by the citing of two goals:
"First, that religion is not dispensable in the search for a proper understanding of human reality, that it is not a relic of a past age, but that it is constitutive of or being as humans.
Second...that there are sufficient reasons for regarding the God of the Biblce as the definitive manifestation of the reality of God that is otherwise hidden in the unsearchable depths of the world and of human life." (ST II.225).
Indeed, if we are in fact to stay true to our intuitions as Christians, then speaking of methodology to adequately integrate or seperate theories whose horizons are not developed 'in Church,' we must recognize that the world, society, and history, and all of the individual concatenations of particular personalities and communites, are themselves always-already related to God, even if in a fallen manner. The understanding of the world, and of God, are not merely expressions of man's search for himself, and are not a priori manifestations of an idolatrous will or an existentialist projection of man's psyche on the screen of the infinite. Though Barth's commentary on the Romans, and his evaluation of modern liberal neo-Protestantism in the likes of Schliermacher and his epigones, has developed many fruitful results, there stands like a "watershed" (Pannenberg's term--ST 1 p.105) between Schliermacher and Feuerbach the idea whether we are always a priori unrelated to an actually existing God, and so arbitrary about projections of our understanding of the infinite, or whether we are by nature and essentially always-already embedded in the greater unifying totality of God who is our Creator and Consummator. "It is not as if before meeting Jesus we had no general concepts of our nature and destiny, of God, of the Logos as the epitome of the world's order, or of our relation to God. Only through Jesus however, do these general concepts acquire their true content. It is herein that the specific person and history of Jesus have universal relevance." (ST II.295). While the old theological addage "where there is a Schliermacher, there always follows a Feuerbach," might be true, the genealogical connection is not one of natural progeny, but of an inverted mutation. Schliermacher's fundamental insight that religious sensitivities 'sense the infinite in the finite' or that 'the finite is always carved out of the infinite' is a sound one. The totality of the context of the world and all its correlary nexus' of interaction are what first mediate man to himself, are what the human is first embedded in to reflectively come to oneself. And this totality itself is not something self-coherent, but is unified by the ontological constitution of God, who, as the Theological Anthropological argument eventually concludes, is the Father of the Man Jesus, whose was raised by the Spirit.
With the rise (or return) of the Christian consciousness of its own dependence on narrative, so too has come the basic realization of the role of narrativity in every aspect of being human. The world functions "as" something. There are not basic monad-like components that then attain pragmatic use in the "narratization" of communal ritual. "In interpreting we do not, so to speak, throw 'signification' over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this invovlement is one which gets laid out by interpretation." (Heidegger, Being and Time p.190-191). The constant embeddedness of activity in the narrative, and the fundamental ubiquity of interpretation ('all the way down' as it were) has often, then, led Christian anthropology as of late to shy away from apologetic engagement with secular sciences, to a mystification of its own subject, to isolation in the "ghetto of an esoteric church ideology [that can] no longer make itself intelligible to anyone else" (Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p.182). Occasionally this is done through the justification of a simplistic appeal to the "interpretive" and "presuppositional" nature of thought--meaning, generally, that many claims (rightly) require multitudes of fore-conceptions and then (wrongly, in my opinion) that therefore such claims are inadjudicable and that the hope of cross-disciplinary accountability and dialogue is the lingering ghost modernity's nieve foundationalism.
But if, in fact, the Christian God is the One God of all, and so, as Robert Jenson so tersely and wonderfully put it, is "the one basic fact" of all reality, then even the "nihilistic" disciplines in the exteriority of the world should be (arguably) incomprehensible without some conception of God (Metaphysics and the Idea of God pp.142ff; Theology and the Philosophy of Science pp.305) It is, presumably, impossible to even speak of the whole of reality, or of any of its parts (which imply a whole) without in some way thinking of God. This first moment of thought is of course abstract, and seems to bear little to no resemblance to an inquiry primarily spawned by the Gospel or the Triune narrative. But so our beginnings are only a necessary preliminary examination that passes into, and is transformed by, the concrete historical particularity of the human in this narrative. Theological anthropology can no longer rest content with abstract and identical structures of human behaviour. "It is only through historical portrayal that one comes as close as possible to the actual course of the concrete life of man. In contrast to this, all general forms of anthropology, be they biologically, psychologically, or sociologically oriented, remain preliminary abstractions, which are indeed indispensable for a first approximation to an understanding of human behavior but can nevertheless have only a preparatory character, and must pass over to the phase of a historical representation." (Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology II.78).
If even this conception seems removed from the narrative of redemption and free grace, it is nonetheless a necessary initial abstraction, but one that is never done remoto Deo or apart from God. In fact to disregard fundamental anthropological (and, in the broader sense, scientific) data for Pannenberg is an already implicit admission of unbelief because it seems to proclaim, in advance of any particular inquiry, that being-in-relation-to-God, and hence the Theological dimension of any given data, does not, in fact, exist. The idea again should be (and this is, in part, what relieves Pannenberg of 'foundationalism') that the secular sciences do not gain general conclusions that then need to be fitted into a theological schema foreign to them, but already contain implicit theological themes, and so the conclusions already occur within the horizon of the Christian understanding of the world, even if abstractly and even if these 'conclusions' or 'implications' are not explicitly thematized in their subject matter outside the goals of a theological anthropology. Science and theology are always-already related to one another. Hence all scientific findings are not dealt with abstractly, but always with an eye towards their conceptualization within the greater Christian framework. "If it belongs to the structure of human existence to presuppose a mystery of reality transcending its finitude and to relate oneself to this as the fulfillment of one's own being, then in actuality man always exists in association with this reality...the reality of the mystery of being, to which the structure of man's existence points, must be demonstrated in such actual association with this mystery." (Basic Questions in Theology I.103-104)
But, then, after this methodological insight, what are some basic observations of human nature that can be made? In the next section I hope to outline some of Pannenberg's material conclusions regarding human nature in the 'from below,' movement by summarizing a few of his categorical observations on the 1.) finite and particularized nature of man 2.) man's essential sociality 3.) man's "openness," beyond any given horizon as an openness to God's unexpected future, and hence also 4.) man's need to ask beyond even the horizon of death. These four, of course, will by no means represent an exhaustive categorization of Pannenberg's observation, but stand rather themselves as heuristic devices to illustrate Pannenberg's thought.
What is human? The difficulty in appropriating a definition of the "human," in theological anthropology is that the basic architectonic of the question is abstract to the point of subverting the original impetus for asking in the first place: the history of Israel, the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, and that historical relationship in these events to the Father through the Spirit. Any theological anthropology must seek its evaluation of the structural composition of the human, and the relation to the world ultimately in reference to this history, this story of redemption, and so the final component of such an enterprise is inherently an analysis of the doxological life of humanity before God the Father, standing as and with His Son through the vivifying power of the Spirit. But initially and abstractly, the broad question of the human cannot be avoided as merely a "foundationalist" attempt to ground further narration in an 'acontextual' or 'empirical' construal of man apart from God ("remoto Deo") that will then operate as a hegemenous ordering of the Christian narrative. This is a primary accusation that arises against Pannenberg (especially in the post-Barth climate which views with suspicion any theology that tries to argue on anthropological grounds e.g. Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 17 n.6). For Pannenberg the narratival aspect of the Christian theological enterprise must always realize that its narration is not ultimately the guiding principle of knowledge, but is itself grounded in the ontological constitution of the Trinitarian history for-us. This means that even supposedly 'secularized' disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history, despite often and obvious separations from references to the long standing influences of Christian theology on scientific methodology, and circumventing the need to claim that religious-or even specifically Christian-apprehensions for the world, are necessary for explaining the make-up (essentialist or otherwise) of the human being, all of these aspects of the sciences are, if Christianity is true, related already to the Creator and Consummator of the world (in this sense, as we shall hopefully see as this series develops, Pannenberg understands the movement 'from below' as sublated by the theological movement 'from above' which is asymetrically determinative of the 'from below data'; c.f. F. LeRon Shults, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology pp.165-236). In part this is not a completely "theological," principle but is basically related to the hermeneutical and epistemological inter-relationship between "part," and "whole." We may cite a few examples from Pannenberg's corpus more or less at random to illustrate his understanding: "The individual life-moments...undergone by the individual, have their meaning in the context of the course of his life. But the individual is himself, in turn, a part of life-forms and nexuses of meaning that transcend individualized human existence...which are in turn coordinated within still more encompassing totalities of historical life...the relationship between whole and parts exists everywhere in society and in history." (Basic Questions in Theology vol. 1 p.162); or elsewhere: "explanation explicates the existing frame of reference used by the person who seeks understanding, and at the same time partly replaces it with an intellectual construction of the totality of meaning under question. It is not just the sciences which do this; the process also occurs in religion and art." (Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.153)
Anthropological observations in their preliminary form are, despite the difficulties and truncations that would be apparent to an observer with theological sensitivites, not themselves devoid of theological thought, or of truth. They reflect it already in their ontological structure, per necessity, as creatures of the Creator God. "Christians are...bound to ask why man's being constituted in relation to God and why he is characterized by being religious are so neglected by modern non-Christian anthropology. They are, however, also bound to recognize that even this form of anthropology still deals de facto with man whose being is constituted in relation to God." (Pannenberg, "The Christological Foundation" p.93). Hence Pannenberg's Theological Anthropology can be summarized by the citing of two goals:
"First, that religion is not dispensable in the search for a proper understanding of human reality, that it is not a relic of a past age, but that it is constitutive of or being as humans.
Second...that there are sufficient reasons for regarding the God of the Biblce as the definitive manifestation of the reality of God that is otherwise hidden in the unsearchable depths of the world and of human life." (ST II.225).
Indeed, if we are in fact to stay true to our intuitions as Christians, then speaking of methodology to adequately integrate or seperate theories whose horizons are not developed 'in Church,' we must recognize that the world, society, and history, and all of the individual concatenations of particular personalities and communites, are themselves always-already related to God, even if in a fallen manner. The understanding of the world, and of God, are not merely expressions of man's search for himself, and are not a priori manifestations of an idolatrous will or an existentialist projection of man's psyche on the screen of the infinite. Though Barth's commentary on the Romans, and his evaluation of modern liberal neo-Protestantism in the likes of Schliermacher and his epigones, has developed many fruitful results, there stands like a "watershed" (Pannenberg's term--ST 1 p.105) between Schliermacher and Feuerbach the idea whether we are always a priori unrelated to an actually existing God, and so arbitrary about projections of our understanding of the infinite, or whether we are by nature and essentially always-already embedded in the greater unifying totality of God who is our Creator and Consummator. "It is not as if before meeting Jesus we had no general concepts of our nature and destiny, of God, of the Logos as the epitome of the world's order, or of our relation to God. Only through Jesus however, do these general concepts acquire their true content. It is herein that the specific person and history of Jesus have universal relevance." (ST II.295). While the old theological addage "where there is a Schliermacher, there always follows a Feuerbach," might be true, the genealogical connection is not one of natural progeny, but of an inverted mutation. Schliermacher's fundamental insight that religious sensitivities 'sense the infinite in the finite' or that 'the finite is always carved out of the infinite' is a sound one. The totality of the context of the world and all its correlary nexus' of interaction are what first mediate man to himself, are what the human is first embedded in to reflectively come to oneself. And this totality itself is not something self-coherent, but is unified by the ontological constitution of God, who, as the Theological Anthropological argument eventually concludes, is the Father of the Man Jesus, whose was raised by the Spirit.
With the rise (or return) of the Christian consciousness of its own dependence on narrative, so too has come the basic realization of the role of narrativity in every aspect of being human. The world functions "as" something. There are not basic monad-like components that then attain pragmatic use in the "narratization" of communal ritual. "In interpreting we do not, so to speak, throw 'signification' over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this invovlement is one which gets laid out by interpretation." (Heidegger, Being and Time p.190-191). The constant embeddedness of activity in the narrative, and the fundamental ubiquity of interpretation ('all the way down' as it were) has often, then, led Christian anthropology as of late to shy away from apologetic engagement with secular sciences, to a mystification of its own subject, to isolation in the "ghetto of an esoteric church ideology [that can] no longer make itself intelligible to anyone else" (Moltmann, Theology of Hope, p.182). Occasionally this is done through the justification of a simplistic appeal to the "interpretive" and "presuppositional" nature of thought--meaning, generally, that many claims (rightly) require multitudes of fore-conceptions and then (wrongly, in my opinion) that therefore such claims are inadjudicable and that the hope of cross-disciplinary accountability and dialogue is the lingering ghost modernity's nieve foundationalism.
But if, in fact, the Christian God is the One God of all, and so, as Robert Jenson so tersely and wonderfully put it, is "the one basic fact" of all reality, then even the "nihilistic" disciplines in the exteriority of the world should be (arguably) incomprehensible without some conception of God (Metaphysics and the Idea of God pp.142ff; Theology and the Philosophy of Science pp.305) It is, presumably, impossible to even speak of the whole of reality, or of any of its parts (which imply a whole) without in some way thinking of God. This first moment of thought is of course abstract, and seems to bear little to no resemblance to an inquiry primarily spawned by the Gospel or the Triune narrative. But so our beginnings are only a necessary preliminary examination that passes into, and is transformed by, the concrete historical particularity of the human in this narrative. Theological anthropology can no longer rest content with abstract and identical structures of human behaviour. "It is only through historical portrayal that one comes as close as possible to the actual course of the concrete life of man. In contrast to this, all general forms of anthropology, be they biologically, psychologically, or sociologically oriented, remain preliminary abstractions, which are indeed indispensable for a first approximation to an understanding of human behavior but can nevertheless have only a preparatory character, and must pass over to the phase of a historical representation." (Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology II.78). If even this conception seems removed from the narrative of redemption and free grace, it is nonetheless a necessary initial abstraction, but one that is never done remoto Deo or apart from God. In fact to disregard fundamental anthropological (and, in the broader sense, scientific) data for Pannenberg is an already implicit admission of unbelief because it seems to proclaim, in advance of any particular inquiry, that being-in-relation-to-God, and hence the Theological dimension of any given data, does not, in fact, exist. The idea again should be (and this is, in part, what relieves Pannenberg of 'foundationalism') that the secular sciences do not gain general conclusions that then need to be fitted into a theological schema foreign to them, but already contain implicit theological themes, and so the conclusions already occur within the horizon of the Christian understanding of the world, even if abstractly and even if these 'conclusions' or 'implications' are not explicitly thematized in their subject matter outside the goals of a theological anthropology. Science and theology are always-already related to one another. Hence all scientific findings are not dealt with abstractly, but always with an eye towards their conceptualization within the greater Christian framework. "If it belongs to the structure of human existence to presuppose a mystery of reality transcending its finitude and to relate oneself to this as the fulfillment of one's own being, then in actuality man always exists in association with this reality...the reality of the mystery of being, to which the structure of man's existence points, must be demonstrated in such actual association with this mystery." (Basic Questions in Theology I.103-104)
But, then, after this methodological insight, what are some basic observations of human nature that can be made? In the next section I hope to outline some of Pannenberg's material conclusions regarding human nature in the 'from below,' movement by summarizing a few of his categorical observations on the 1.) finite and particularized nature of man 2.) man's essential sociality 3.) man's "openness," beyond any given horizon as an openness to God's unexpected future, and hence also 4.) man's need to ask beyond even the horizon of death. These four, of course, will by no means represent an exhaustive categorization of Pannenberg's observation, but stand rather themselves as heuristic devices to illustrate Pannenberg's thought.
Comments