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Wolfhart Pannenberg

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Wolfhart Pannenberg

Wolfhart Pannenberg (born on 2 October 1928 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland)) is a German Christian theologian.

Life and views

Pannenberg was baptized as an infant into the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, but otherwise had virtually no contact with the church in his early years. At about the age of sixteen, however, he had an intensely religious experience he later called his "light experience." Seeking to understand this experience, he began to search through the works of great philosophers and religious thinkers. A high school literature teacher who had been a part of the Confessing Church during World War II encouraged him to take a hard look at Christianity, which resulted in Pannenberg's "intellectual conversion," in which he concluded that Christianity was the best available religious option. This propelled him into his vocation as a theologian.

Pannenberg's epistemology, explained clearly in his shorter essays, is crucial to his theological project. It is heavily influenced by that of one mentor, Edmund Schlink, who proposed a distinction between analogical truth, i.e. a descriptive truth or model, and doxological truth, or truth as immanent in worship. In this way of thinking, theology tries to express the doxological truth. As such it is a response to God's self-revelation.

Pannenberg's understanding of revelation is strongly conditioned by his reading of Karl Barth and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Hegelian concept of history as an unfolding process in which Spirit and freedom are revealed combines with a Barthian notion of revelation occurring "vertically from above". Pannenberg asserts the Resurrection of Christ as a proleptic revelation of what history is unfolding.

Pannenberg is perhaps best known for Jesus: God and Man in which he constructs a Christology "from below," deriving his dogmatic claims from a critical examination of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. He correspondingly rejects traditional Chalcedonian "two-natures" Christology, preferring to view the person of Christ in light of the resurrection. This focus on the resurrection as the key to Christ's identity has led Pannenberg to defend its historicity, in particular the experience of the risen Christ in the history of the early Church.

Central to Pannenberg's theological career has been his defense of theology as a rigorous academic discipline, one capable of critical interaction with philosophy, history, and most of all, the natural sciences. Pannenberg's theology has much influenced the American theoretical cosmologist Frank Tipler, most notably his theories of a closed universe and the Omega Point; see Tipler (1989, 1994, 2007).

Career

Pannenberg has been a professor on faculty of several universities consistently since 1958. Between the years of 1958 and 1961 he was the Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Wuppertal. Between 1961 and 1968 he was a professor in Mainz. He has had several visiting professorships at the University of Chicago (1963), Harvard (1966), and at the Claremont School of Theology (1967), and since 1968 has been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich[1].

Throughout his career Pannenberg has remained a prolific writer. As of December 2008, his "publication page" on the University of Munich's website lists 645 academic publications to his name[2].

Books by Pannenberg in English

  • 1968. Revelation As History (edited volume). New York: The Macmillan Company.
  • 1968. Jesus: God and Man. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
  • 1969. Basic Questions in Theology. Westminster Press
  • 1969. Theology and the Kingdom of God. Westminster Press.
  • 1970. What Is Man? Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
  • 1972. The Apostles' Creed in Light of Today's Questions. Westminster Press.
  • 1977. Faith and Reality. Westminster Press.
  • 1985. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. T&T Clark
  • 1988-1994. Systematic Theology. T & T Clark

Online writings

Secondary Literature

References

  1. ^ Brief biography from University of Munich website (in German)
  2. ^ Publications by Pannenberg listed on the University of Munich's website

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