Scientia Dei (Part Five): Wolfhart Pannenberg (Section One)

We honor [Darwinism] better if we recognize its limited ontological relevance and do not make a first philosophy out of it

                                                                                                Vittorio Hösle[i]

We must not forget that [science’s] reality is borrowed, and that, as with all things borrowed, it will at some point have to be given back…science must not abuse the generosity of its own possibility by mistaking itself for ontology…when science is left to its own devices—or becomes devoid of any constitutive relation to other disciplines and other modes of discourse—then science becomes contorted.  It is transformed into an ideology.

                                                                      Conor Cunningham[ii]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, about the heavens, and the other elements of this world….and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.  Now, it is disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.  The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions…reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in…false opinions, and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.

                                                                                    St. Augustine[iii]

            With Pannenberg (b. 1928—) we experience a severe sort of transition from some of the basic ideas that have been elaborated above, especially in relation to Barth.  Yet as with the two theologians already covered, Pannenberg’s concept of a theological science is intimately related to his concept of God and revelation.  Thus we see that Pannenberg’s first major work Revelation as History,[iv] originally published in 1961 is a movement away from “the basic presuppositions of [Barthian and Bultmannian] types of neo-orthodoxy,”[v] precisely on the basis of a reevaluated concept of God and revelation.[vi]  This was done by the concerted efforts of Pannenberg and the “Heidelberg circle,”[vii] to question what had become the axiomatic presupposition up to that point—due in no small part to Barth’s influence—that revelation was God’s direct self-revelation.[viii] 

Pannenberg rightly perceives in this notion of revelation as self revelation—as we have also briefly argued here—the engine that drives Barth’s emphasis on the uniqueness of revelation and so also what Pannenberg identifies as the logic which isolates Barth’s theology from other fields of inquiry,[ix] which creates what Pannenberg calls elsewhere—in what is for him an unusually impassioned phrase—“the ghetto of redemptive history,” which somehow avoids correlation with other truths.[x] 

Rather pointedly Pannenberg argues that such a concept of self-revelation “must somehow be confirmed on the basis of the biblical witnesses if it is to be theologically justifiable,”[xi] which, not surprisingly, Pannenberg concludes that such justification is lacking.[xii]  While not critiquing just because of its genetic origin, Panneberg notes the concept of self-revelation has more to due with the legacy of Hegel upon Barth than it does with scripture.[xiii] Far from only being justified “in the imagination of the pious soul,”[xiv] God’s indirect manifestation through God’s acts in history are open to methods of public verification, “[God’s acts] have a universal character.”[xv]  This is not, as has been misunderstood by some, to deny the claim that only God can reveal God.  Even in this early stage Pannenberg is in fundamental continuity with Barth on this theme—what is being revised is how God reveals Himself, and how it is we know this.  “God has proved his deity in the language of facts.”[xvi]  Facts that are not “naked,” of course, but must be viewed in their “traditio-historical context,” which leads to a famous thesis of Pannenberg’s: “The one and only God can be revealed in his deity, but only indirectly out of the totality of all events.”[xvii]  This totality, of course, has not yet occurred, thus the proof of God’s deity remains provisional and hypothetical until the end of history.[xviii]  However in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ the end of history has proleptically occurred, giving an anticipation of God’s final and ultimate demonstration of Himself, and thus giving us a provisional understanding of the contours and meaning of history and humanity itself in the person of Jesus.[xix]

Encapsulated protologically in this summary of Revelation as History are most of the major themes extensively developed over the course of Pannenberg’s career. We will elaborate on these in a moment, but first we must clarify how to read Pannenberg.  It is easy to misunderstand or mis-emphasize Pannenberg’s points by taking them out of the context of the total development of his method over the course of his life’s work.  No single major work of Pannenberg’s can be interpreted in and of itself as representative of Pannenberg’s material theology or methodology, not simply because of the normal development that occurs over the course of a career, but because each major work of Pannenberg’s is written in anticipation of its place within the total movement of his work as a whole.  For example Pannenberg expressed frustration at the reception of Revelation as History[xx] because, understandably (and despite Pannenberg’s own intentions),[xxi] instead of viewed as a sort of rough sketch which was creating a structure for future research, it was read primarily as a précis against neo-orthodoxy, thus setting up the binary of forcing one to choose between “the word of God,” and “history,” with Pannenberg obviously being seen as favoring the latter when the choice is put in such a way. 

Thus, though not entirely without merit, Pannenberg being grouped in the 1960’s with the Theology of Hope movement was rightly never accepted by Pannenberg because the label absolutized emphasis on history and eschatology developed in the early course of Pannenberg’s career[xxii] to a point that missed them as sub-themes in a greater vision.[xxiii]  This is not an isolated methodological mistake in reading Pannenberg.  Take Pannenberg’s early monograph into method in Christology Jesus: God and Man as an example.[xxiv]  Colin Gunton criticizes Pannenberg’s distinction of “Christology from above,” and “from below,” (with Pannenberg taking the latter course in Jesus: God and Man) as a “gross oversimplification,”[xxv] where Pannenberg’s “process of thought is continuous, a movement from the finite to the infinite.”[xxvi]  This is despite explicit statements in Jesus: God and Man which situates this movement “from below,” by noting it will be taken up into “the overall framework of a comprehensive dogmatics,” which would operate by giving material primacy to the eternal Son who became incarnate.[xxvii]

This initial proclamation of method is important because we can ask, given this, and the themes briefly seen in Revelation as History, what is the unifying principle of Pannenberg’s work?  Following F. LeRon Shult’s excellent monograph on Pannenberg’s theological method,[xxviii] we will argue here that it can be summarized as “the attempt to understand and explain all things sub ratione Dei (under the aspect of their ‘relation to God’).”[xxix]  Pannenberg’s own statements seem to bear this out.[xxx]  This theme unifies various other sub-themes such as history, reason, and eschatology, and is a key to understand Pannenberg’s notion of a scientific theology and the relationship of theology to the other sciences.  Thus we will now turn to this theme, and then to a brief examination of how the various movements within Pannenberg’s total body of work are integrated into one another.

As briefly seen in Revelation as History, Pannenberg is particularly concerned to liberate the concept of God and revelation from any attempts to isolate or secure them from critical inquiry in a decision of faith.[xxxi]  In rejecting Barth, Pannenberg could state that “if the reality of God and His revelation or the liberating act of God is to function epistemologically as a preestablished datum in theological theorizing—and thus as theological premise—theology can no longer be concerned with knowledge or science, but merely with systematic description or exposition of what might be regarded as true dogma of the church.”[xxxii]  A truth that is simply “my truth,” and that could not claim to at least be universally true for everyone, “could not remain true even for me.”[xxxiii]

Pannenberg is insistent that theology is a publicly accessible discipline whose truths can, in critical dialogue, to some extent be measured by universal criteria.[xxxiv] In fact Pannenberg states “knowledge is not a stage beyond faith, but leads to faith…the act of faith or trust presupposes a knowledge of the trustworthiness of the partner.”[xxxv]   In one sense, this is a favoring of Heinrich Scholz over Barth.  Unlike Torrance or Barth, then, the very concept of God and His revelation in history is made a problem to be investigated by Pannenberg, and this is its fundamental nature as a scientific discipline. In contradistinction to the Barthian complaint, however, universal criteria are not alien impositions on the framework of Christian thought, rather universal criteria are demanded by the nature of its object (a concept we have seen extensively in Torrance and Barth): “Systematic theology always takes place within the tension between two tendencies.  On the one hand it is concerned about the faithfulness of theology itself…to its origin, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ…on the other hand…the task of theology goes beyond its special theme and includes all truth whatsoever.”[xxxvi]  And this is precisely because “universality is unavoidably bound up with the fact that it speaks of God…anyone who does not want to revert to a polytheistic or polydaemonistic stage of phenomenology of religion must think of God as the creator of all things.  It belongs to the task of theology to understand all being in relation to God, so that without God they simply could not be understood.”[xxxvii]

The most basic criteria of truth for Pannenberg is thus its unity, which must cohere into a whole and correspond to reality.[xxxviii]  For Pannenberg however truth itself is fundamentally historical—it is not based upon the structuring of deductively secure axioms or the protocol statements of logical positivism—but will remain provisional and hypothetical until the eschaton (completion of the world), needing to continually prove itself in the way it highlights the fundamental intelligibility of reality and unifies it (however provisionally) into a whole.[xxxix]  The unity of truth is unavoidable to any field of knowledge because “explanation [i.e. hypothesis] explicates the existing frame of reference used by the person who seeks understanding, and at the same time 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.”[xl]  Anthony Thistleton describes Pannenberg’s view as a “metacritical argument for the unity of knowledge which incorporates hermeneutics.”[xli]  This is a unique combination, especially in the postmodern condition, in which relativistic philosophers like Richard Rorty have precisely turned hermeneutical understanding against metacritical argument attempting to adjudicate universal criteria of meaning.  In a world that has increasingly turned to interpretation, everything is interpretation (hermeneutics) and nothing truth.  Yet for Pannenberg the two are inseparable.  While meaning always seeks universal application, it nonetheless arises out of a contextually definite location in an act of interpretation:

Dialectic and hermeneutic share the fundamental feature of being concerned with the analysis of the interrelation of wholes and parts.  However, whereas hermeneutic sees the whole only as a horizon which establishes the meaning of all the details and whose transformations initiate the continuing process of interpretation, and can therefore remain uncertain about the final form of this whole, dialectic considers the totality as such, without which the individual element could have no definite meaning.  Because dialectic analyzes the categories which hermeneutic applies in its practical work, it has to make explicit the totality which hermeneutic assumes only implicitly and for that reason can leave uncertain.[xlii]

This is an important point because it cuts critically across theories of scientific explanation that are still too heavily reliant upon positivistic criterion of what counts as a scientific hypothesis—namely verificationism, which indicated the only acceptable statements were those which are either analytically true (i.e. true by definition) or immediately empirically verifiable.  Pannenberg engages in a lengthy and detailed examination of the history of the philosophy of science—covering thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Karl Popper, Willard Quine, Thomas Khun, and Hans Georg Gadamer—in order to demonstrate that one’s intention to reveal the enormous amount of weakness in positivistic explanation is not merely a special pleading in the case of theology because it doesnt fare well under positivism, but demonstrates that positivism is not in any sense how science actually operates and has operated.[xliii] This is a critical modification of Popper’s notion of falsifiability along the lines of Thomas Kuhn and Hans Georg Gadamer’s theories of the theory-laden nature of all judgment. 

Against the verificationism of the Vienna Circle, Popper suggested induction could never lead to stable universal judgments of theory.  Seeing a thousand white swans does not allow one to reach the conclusion that all swans are white.  Popper proposed in its place that hypotheses are in fact socially mediated theories whose criterion is not whether they are verifiable, but if they are falsifiable.  In other words whether they can posit conditions in which the hypothesis would be, or could be, proven false.  “[According to Popper] the central task of the philosopher (and ultimately of every scientist) is no longer to find proof or justification for true scientific knowledge; it is, rather, to attempt to show—in the context of interdisciplinary debate—how a specific critical method can be used to enhance knowledge in science.”[xliv]  Pannenberg agrees with Popper, as we saw a moment ago, that all observations presuppose a point of a view, an expectation, or theory which makes observation possible and directs and proposes the frame of investigation.  What Pannenberg argues however—against Popper and for Kuhn and Gadamer—is that by Popper’s own admissions of the theory-laden nature of observation, the line between metaphysics and science is blurred because the communal and individual presuppositions which guide observation always presuppose—however implicitly—a total horizon of reality.[xlv]  Thus while Pannenberg agrees that hypothesis are given degrees of confirmation by their provisional heuristic usefulness to comprehend coherently the data in question (rather than in a pure verificationism), he also says Popper’s criteria of falsifiability needs to be modified along Kuhnian lines by noting it is an illusion that falsifiability criterions might be applied without reference to wider contexts and bodies of knowledge, and thus falsifiability itself metaphysically controlled.[xlvi]  Here Pannenberg and Torrance, despite differences in the particular thinkers and lengths of history with which they engage, are actually of one mind.  They both overturn the shallowness of positivism in order to reveal positive affinities between actual philosophy of science and theological methodology. 

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[i] Quoted in Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea p.262.

[ii] Ibid p.301-302.

[iii] Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis 1.19.

[iv] Revelation as History, ed. Wolfhart Pannenberg, trans. David Granskou (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968)

[v] Ibid p.ix.  For the sake of nuance, however, it is important to note that Pannenberg describes this movement away from Barth as “a silent one,” (ix) because he will not spend a majority of his time directly critiquing the position, but in generating the positive theses of his own proposal.

[vi] Pannenberg, “Introduction,” in Revelation as History p.5-6.

[vii] More commonly termed the “Pannenberg circle,” given the clear leadership of Pannenberg, though Pannenberg, being a humble guy, has never accepted the term and prefers Heidelberg Circle.

[viii] See specifically Pannenberg’s two contributions to the volume, “Introduction,” p.3-21, and especially, “Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation” p.125-158.

[ix] “Introduction,” p.6.

[x] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology, vol.1, trans. George H. Kehm (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1970), 41.  Pannenberg is a very careful interpreter of Barth, however many of course are not pleased with his accusation of fideism at Barth.  As we saw, Barth is attempting to redefine what counts as rational theological discourse.  I am in no position really to say if Pannenberg has interpreted—and so also rejected—Barth “correctly,” however I believe counter-positions to Pannenberg need to be just as careful and understand that Pannenberg’s accusation comes from the positive structures of his own system, because quite clearly on his own terms Barth is not a fideist.  His definition of rationality, however, is not something everyone would accept.

[xi] Ibid p.8.

[xii] Ibid p.13.

[xiii] Ibid p.6.

[xiv] “Dogmatic Theses on the Doctrine of Revelation,” p.136.

[xv] Ibid p.135 Thesis 3.

[xvi] Ibid p.137.

[xvii] Ibid p.141.

[xviii] Ibid p.139.

[xix] Ibid p.142.

[xx] Grenz, Reason for Hope p.34

[xxi] Wolfhart Pannenberg, “An Intellectual Pilgrimage,” Dialogue: A Journal of Theology 45, no.2 (2006) p.188

[xxii] For examples of Pannenberg’s early work regarding the concept of universal history, see the various essays collected in Basic Questions in Theology vol.1 and, of course, Revelation as History itself.

[xxiii] Grenz and Olson, 20^th Century Theology p.186.

[xxiv] Wolfhart Pannenberg Jesus: God and Man 2^nd Ed. trans. Lewis L. Wilkens and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977)

[xxv] Colin Gunton, Yesterday and Today: A Study in Continuities in Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1983) p.51.

[xxvi] Ibid p.20.

[xxvii] Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man p.406.  This is reconfirmed in Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology vol.II p.288-289.

[xxviii] Shults, Postfoundationalist Task of Theology.

[xxix] Ibid p.92ff.

[xxx] E.g. Basic Questions in Theology vol.1 p.xv; Idem, Introduction to Systematic Theology p.13; Idem, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.298; Idem, Jesus: God and Man p.406; Idem, Metaphysics and the Idea of God trans. Philip Clayton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990) p.73; Idem, Systematic Theology 1:63.

[xxxi] This is a topic frequently broached in the earlier essays.    See: “Insight and Faith,” and “Faith and Reason,” in Basic Questions in Theology vol.2; “Eschatology and the Experience of Meaning,” in Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Idea of God and Human Freedom trans. R.A. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977).

[xxxii] van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith p.81.

[xxxiii] Wolfhart Pannenberg Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985) p.15.

[xxxiv] Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.13.

[xxxv] Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth,” in James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb Jr. (eds) New Frontiers in Theology: III, Theology as History (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) p.127.

[xxxvi] Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology vol.1 p.1.

[xxxvii] Ibid.

[xxxviii] Wolfhart Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1991) p.8.

[xxxix] Pannenberg, “What is Truth?” in Basic Questions in Theology vol.2 p.1-28.

[xl] Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.153.

[xli] Anthony Thistelton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992) p.334.  Emphasis in original.

[xlii] Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.189-190.

[xliii] Ibid p.23-155.

[xliv] Van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justification of Faith p.26.

[xlv] Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science p.40.

[xlvi] Ibid p.57.