Wolfhart Pannenberg

Short description: German Lutheran theologian (1928–2014)

Wolfhart Pannenberg

Pannenberg in 1983

Born| (1928-10-02)2 October 1928

Stettin, Germany

Died| 4 September 2014(2014-09-04) (aged 85)

Munich, Germany

Academic background
Alma mater|

* University of Berlin
* University of Göttingen
* Heidelberg University
* University of Basel

Influences|

* Karl Barth
* Hans von Campenhausen
* G. W. F. Hegel
* Karl Löwith
* Gerhard von Rad
* Edmund Schlink

Academic work
Discipline| Theology
Sub-discipline| Systematic theology
School or tradition| Lutheranism
Institutions|

* Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal (de)
* University of Mainz
* University of Munich

Doctoral students|

* Philip Clayton[1]
* William Lane Craig
* Stanley Grenz

Notable students| Gunther Wenz (de)
Influenced|

* Carl Braaten[2]
* Robert Jenson[3]
* Roger Olson
* Ted Peters
* Jon Sobrino

Template:Lutheranism

Wolfhart Pannenberg (2 October 1928 – 4 September 2014)[4] was a German Lutheran theologian. He made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.

## Contents

* 1 Life and career
* 2 Theological views
* 3 Public Lectures
* 4 Partial bibliography
* 4.1 Books by Pannenberg in English
* 4.2 Online writings
* 5 References
* 6 Further reading
* 7 External links

## Life and career

Pannenberg speaking at a Christian Democratic Union conference in Bonn in 1983

After 1958, Pannenberg consistently served as a professor on the faculties of several universities. Between the years of 1958 and 1961 he was the Professor of Systematic Theology at the Kirchliche Hochschule Wuppertal (de). Between 1961 and 1968, he was a professor in Mainz. He had several visiting professorships at the University of Chicago (1963), Harvard (1966), and at the Claremont School of Theology (1967), and since 1968 had been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich.[5] He retired in 1993, and died at age 85 in 2014.[6] Throughout his career, Pannenberg 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.[7]

## Theological views

Pannenberg's understanding of revelation is strongly conditioned by his reading of Karl Barth and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as by a sympathetic reading of Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature. 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". While Pannenberg adopts a Hegelian understanding of History itself as God's self-revelation, he strongly asserts the resurrection of Christ as a proleptic revelation of what history is unfolding. Despite its obvious Barthian reference, this approach met with a mainly hostile response from both neo-orthodox and liberal Bultmannian theologians in the 1960s, a response which Pannenberg claims surprised him and his associates.[8] A more nuanced, mainly implied, critique came from Jürgen Moltmann, whose philosophical roots lay in the Left Hegelians, Karl Marx and Ernst Bloch, and who proposed and elaborated a Theology of Hope, rather than of prolepsis, as a distinctively Christian response to History. As a disciple of Karl Löwith, Pannenberg continued the debate against Hans Blumenberg in the so-called 'theorem of secularization'.[9] "Blumenberg targets Löwith's argument that progress is the secularization of Hebrew and Christian beliefs and argues to the contrary that the modern age, including its belief in progress, grew out of a new secular self-affirmation of culture against the Christian tradition."[10]

Eschatological views of Pannenberg discount the importance of temporal process in the New Creation, time being linked with the sinful present age.[11] He preferred an eternal present to limited concepts of past, present and future and an end of time in a focused unity in the New Creation. Pannenberg has also defended the theology of American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory.[12][13][14][15]

Central to Pannenberg's theological career was his defence of theology as a rigorous academic discipline, one capable of critical interaction with philosophy, history, and most of all, the natural sciences. Michael Root wrote on First Things in 2012, "In recent years, he has been outspoken in his opposition within the Evangelical Church in Germany to any approval of homosexual relations. He said that a church that approved homosexual relations had by that act ceased to be a true church. In 1997, he created a public stir when he returned his Federal Order of Merit after the order was bestowed on a lesbian activist."[16]

## Public Lectures

In 1994, Pannenberg delivered the eighth Erasmus Lecture, titled Christianity and the West, sponsored by First Things magazine and the Institute on Religion and Public Life. In his lecture, Pannenberg reflected on the historical and theological foundations of Western civilization, arguing that the decline of Christian belief in the modern world has profound implications for culture, moral order, and political life. His address exemplified the Erasmus series’ engagement with questions at the intersection of faith and contemporary society.[17]

## Partial bibliography

### 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.
* 1976\. Theology and the Philosophy of Science. 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

* "God of the Philosophers," First Things, June/July 2007.
* "Letter from Germany," First Things, March 2003.
* "Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," First Things, August/September 2002.
* "Review of Robert W. Jenson's Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II," First Things, May 2000.
* "When Everything is Permitted ," First Things, February 1998.
* "The Pope in Germany," First Things, December 1996.
* "How to Think About Secularism ," First Things, June/July 1996.
* "Christianity and the West: Ambiguous Past, Uncertain Future ," First Things, December 1994.
* "The Present and Future Church ," First Things, November 1991.
* "God's Presence in History," Christian Century (11 March 1981): 260–63.

## References

1. ↑ Clayton, Philip (7 September 2014). "Wolfhart Pannenberg – In Memoriam". Theoblogy. Patheos. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/09/07/wolfhart-pannenberg-1928-2014/.
2. ↑ García, Alberto L. (2012). "Braaten, Carl e. (B. 1929)". in Kurian, George Thomas. The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470670606.wbecc0184. ISBN 978-0-470-67060-6.
3. ↑ Schlesinger, Eugene R. (2016). "Trinity, Incarnation and Time: A Restatement of the Doctrine of God in Conversation with Robert Jenson". Scottish Journal of Theology 69 (2): 198. doi:10.1017/S0036930616000053. ISSN 1475-3065.
4. ↑ Date of Death: http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/glaube-geschichte-und-vernunft-1.18380264
5. ↑ (in de) Brief biography, University of Munich, http://www.st-foe.evtheol.uni-muenchen.de/personen/pannenberg/vita/ .
6. ↑ Roger Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology, 479
7. ↑ Pannenberg, Publications, University of Munich, http://www.st-foe.evtheol.uni-muenchen.de/personen/pannenberg/publikationen/ .
8. ↑ Pannenberg, Wolfhart (11 March 1981), "God's Presence in History", The Christian Century: 260–63 .
9. ↑ Pannenberg, Wolfhart (1973). "Christianity as the Legitimacy of the Modern Age". The Idea of God and Human Freedom. 3. London: Westminster Press. pp. 178–91. ISBN 978-0-664-20971-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=dS4mAQAAMAAJ&q=Pannenberg+"Christianity+as+the+Legitimacy+of+the+Modern+Age"+"The+Idea+of+God+and+Human+Freedom".
10. ↑ Buller, Cornelius A (1996). The Unity of Nature and History in Pannenberg's Theology. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-8226-3055-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=EBwpiVj5skoC.
11. ↑ Polkinghorne, John (2002). The God of hope and the end of the world. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09211-3.
12. ↑ Tipler 1989.
13. ↑ Tipler 1994.
14. ↑ Tipler 2007.
15. ↑ Pannenberg, Wolfhart (1995). "Breaking a Taboo: Frank Tipler's the Physics of Immortality". Zygon 30 (2): 309–314. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1995.tb00072.x.
16. ↑ Root, Michael (March 2012). "The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg". First Things.
17. ↑ Pannenberg, Wolfhart. "Christianity and the West". https://firstthings.com/christianity-and-the-west/.

## Further reading

* Bradshaw, Timothy, 1988. Trinity and ontology: a comparative study of the theologies of Karl Barth and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books.
* Case, Jonathan P (2004), "The Death of Jesus and the Truth of the Triune God in Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel", Journal for Christian Theological Research 9: 1–13, http://www.luthersem.edu/ctrf/JCTR/Vol09/Case.pdf, retrieved 27 November 2008 .
* Fukai, Tomoaki, 1996 (in de), Paradox und Prolepsis: Geschichtstheologie bei Reinhold Niebuhr und Wolfhart Pannenberg, Marburg .
* Grenz, Stanley J (2005), Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (2nd ed.), Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans .
* ~~ ~~ (30 September 1987), "Pannenberg on Marxism: Insights and Generalizations", The Christian Century (Religion online): 824–26, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=89 .
* ~~ ~~ (14–21 September 1988), "Wolfhart Pannenberg's Quest for Ultimate Truth", The Christian Century (Religion online): 795–98, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=59 .
* Lischer, Richard, "An Old/New Theology of History," The Christian Century (13 March 1974): 288–90.
* Don H. Olive, 1973. Wolfhart Pannenberg-Makers of the Modern Mind. Word Incorporated, Waco, Texas.
* Page, James S., 2003, "Critical Realism and the Theological Science of Wolfhart Pannenberg: Exploring the Commonalities," Bridges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Theology, History and Science 10(1/2): 71–84.
* Schwarz, Hans, 2012. 'Wolfhart Pannenberg' in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity J.B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (eds.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
* Shults, F. LeRon, 1999. The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
* Tipler, Frank J (1989), "The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg's Questions for Scientists", Zygon 24 (2): 217–53, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1989.tb01112.x, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119442501/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 . Followed by Pannenberg's comments, 255–71.
* ~~ ~~ (1994), The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York: Doubleday .
* ~~ ~~ (2007), The Physics of Christianity, New York: Doubleday .
* Tupper, E. Frank, 1973. The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Philadelphia: Westminster press.
* Woo, B. Hoon (2012). "Pannenberg's Understanding of the Natural Law". Studies in Christian Ethics 25 (3): 346–66. doi:10.1177/0953946812444686. https://www.academia.edu/3325466.
* Stewart, Jacqui, 2000. Reconstructing Science and Theology in Postmodernity: Pannenberg, ethics and the human sciences. Aldershot: Ashgate.
* Galloway, A.D., 1973. Wolfhart Pannenberg. London: George Allen & Unwin.
* Gué, X., 2016. La christologie de Wolfhart Pannenberg. De la modernité à la postmodernité. Zürich: LIT Verlag.

## External links

* Articles in First Things
* Articles related to and by Pannenberg. – Links not functional[when?].
* Neuhaus, Richard John (1982), "Pannenberg Jousts with the World Council of Churches", The Christian Century (Religion online), http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1282 .

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