A Small Victory, (Yet for me) A Momentous Occasion

Those who read my blog know I am not one to post short blurbs, but tonight I thought I would make an exception.  The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg's thought, since highschool (though I hardly understood him then) has been the leading voice shaping my thought.  I have thus, for the last ten years, read his works, and secondary works about him, voraciously.  And though I have now grown to disagree with him on some issues he remains to me the apex of theological scholarship. His learning is enormous and something I could only dream to match.  He wrote more than most people read in a lifetime (his cirriculum vitae currently lists over 650 published works, including books and essays); he read more than it is sometimes imaginable for a human to read.  At one point in a single chapter of the third volume of his Systematic Theology he reaches nearly 1100 footnotes.  The inter-discplinary scope of his learning is enormous: one feels he left no stone unturned.  Aristotle, Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Tennyson, Barth, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Augustine, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Barrow and Tipler, Penrose, Hawking, Mircea Eliade, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud.  All of these names and so many, many more appear in his writing.  And he not only cites them as authorities he has read, but gives deep, meaningful critique and interaction with their works.  Francis Schussler Fiorenza calls him "the most learned living theologian," and I can hardly doubt it.  He is an inspiration to me not only in acquiring and utilizing knowledge, but also in generosity and temperance.

But enough of the accolades, which could be endless.  This week I finished reading his Anthropology in Theological Perspective, a 600 page tour-de-force which, if now a bit outdated, will forever stand the test of time as a piece of scholarship.  Reading a 600 page book, however painstaking in itself, is not the victory  I wish to speak of, however.  In finishing this book I have, at least for me, completed a small milestone: I have read every book by Pannenberg yet translated into English.  From Revelation as History to the three-volume Basic Questions in Theology to Jesus: God and Man to Toward a Theology of Nature, and most recently the three-volumed Systematic Theology and the collection of essays entitled The Historicity of Nature. Many say knowledge puffs up.  Makes arrogant.  I can say that perhaps this is true but I have experienced the opposite: I am absolutely humbled before this man.  I am humbled and grateful to have access to his knowledge.  But above all I think I am humbled that a man who has a learning which infinitely exceeds anything I could ever muster is unanimously recorded by all who know him to be a man of generosity, a man whose Christian character is always displayed in his own humility.  I can say honestly I am honored to, however obliquely, keep a man such as this in my company always through the books he has published.  And I look forward to the years to come when I revisit him, and feel the wonder all over again as I re-read his works.

To Wolfhart Pannenberg: we never knew each other, but across the seas you spoke to me.  I hope I listened well.