In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters 365 Theology Update In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) By Ted Peters Abstract: Prompted by the September 4, 2014 passing of a Continental titan of Protestant systematic theology, this article summarizes the life and thought of Wolfhart Pannenberg. A brief review is offered of his conversion from atheism to the Christian faith, student studies, and faculty positions along with his corpus of writings. An in-depth analysis is offered of Pannenberg’s key theological commitments to creation, eschatology, Christology, Trinity, retroactive ontology, prolepsis, anthropology, and the relationship between time and eternity. The scale and complexity and subtlety of Pannenberg’s worldview renders it vulnerable to charges of incoherence; but few can doubt the masterful achievement of the gift of this person’s life—a gift from God—to the world of Christian theology. Key Terms: Wolfhart Pannenberg, creation, eschatology, Christology, prolepsis, time, eternity. “When I wrote Jesus–God and Man1 my method was a Christology-from-below,” Wolfhart Pannenberg said with a gleam in his eye; “but when I write my systematic theology it’ll be a Christologyfrom-above.” He seemed to draw some pleasure by announcing this methodological shift from his early historical approach to Jesus to what he would finally affirm dogmatically, namely, the eternal logos of God became incarnate in the Jesus of history. This was 1984, if my memory serves me accurately. I was spending a semester in Munich while writing what would become my own systematic theology. I had apprenticed myself to Pannenberg because his concepts of retroactive ontology and prolepsis had become the primary influence on my own understanding of God’s relationship to the creation (Paul Tillich’s ontology is the second major influence).2 One day at lunch I recall Trutz Rend- torff say jokingly to Pannenberg, “Wolf, you’d better hurry up and write your systematic theology before Ted here, your disciple, publishes his first.” Well, the master won the race in this case, publishing volume one of his three volume magnum opus in 1988.3 Wolfhart Pannenberg’s death in Munich on September 4, 2014 marks an occasion for us to pause to remember and appreciate this precious gift of God to the world of theology. Like a big brother, Pannenberg influenced the entire Dialog family. The 1960s work of some of Dialog’s founding editors, Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson in particular, brought their elder German brother in the faith to the attention of English speaking thinkers.4 In the decades to follow, the Munich theologian’s effect only broadened and deepened in the writings and teachings of John Benson, James Childs, Niels Ted Peters is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is former editor of Dialog.  C 2014 Wiley Periodicals and Dialog, Inc. 366 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December Henrik Gregersen, Philip Hefner, Antje Jackelén, Marc Kolden, Kristin Johnston Largen, Duane Larson, Duane Priebe, Ernest Simmons, Gary Simpson, and others. Pannenberg’s passing prompts both mourning and gratitude. From Birth to Death and In Between Born October 2, 1928 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland), the young Pannenberg was baptized but not raised to revere the Christian faith. “I was not raised in a Christian family,” he writes; “my adolescence was that of a young atheist during World War II and shortly thereafter.”5 The war was not kind to this former member of the Hitlerjugend, an inescapable destiny for boys during the Nazi period. He and his family fled the firestorm over his home town, Aachen, due to British bombing. After moving to Berlin, he again watched his home destroyed, this time in an American bombing raid. He joined the German army at the age of sixteen but missed out on his assignment to the Russian front due to hospitalization with a case of scabies. He finished the war as a British prisoner.6 The path to what would become his deeply held Christian faith began, like that of Paul on the Damascus road, with a theophany. “I had a visionary experience of a great light not only surrounding me, but absorbing me for an indefinite time. I did not hear any words, but it was a metaphysical awakening that prompted me to search for its meaning regarding my life during the following years, while I experienced the end of the war.”7 Pannenberg refers to this and related experiences as revealing to him that Jesus Christ had claimed him and his life. With the inspiration of a local high school teacher, he set off for the university to pursue the truth about reality through the study of theology. German university students dance between institutions like square dancers change partners. Young Pannenberg’s first partner was Humboldt Univer- sity in what was then East Berlin, where he engulfed himself in Marxist literature and ideology. Pannenberg never became a Marxist, to be sure; yet his erudition in Karl Marx made him a formidable debater during the student revolts of the 1960s. An “allemande right” took him to Göttingen in 1948 and then an “allemande left” to Basel— the seat of Karl Barth—in 1949. By 1950 he had settled in his home square, the Ruprecht-Karl University at Heidelberg, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation under Edmund Schlink on John Duns Scotus in 1953, and a Habilitationsschrift on the principle of analogy in medieval thought in 1955. Although both Schlink and Pannenberg were Lutherans, they concurred that systematic theology must be pursued ecumenically and in dialogue with non-theological disciplines. Heidelberg provided a promenade of intellectual influences on the new scholar: Gerhard von Rad in Old Testament; Hans von Campenhause in patristics; and Karl Löwith in philosophy of history. Pannenberg turned from student to teacher of systematic theology at Heidelberg in 1955, and along with some youthful colleagues began discussing the limits of Barthian and Bultmannian treatments of history in what others named the “Pannenberg Circle” or the “Heidelberg Circle.” In 1958 Pannenberg took a teaching position in the Theologische Hochschule in Wuppertal, where Jürgen Moltmann became one of his colleagues. In 1961 Pannenberg moved to the University of Mainz, and then in 1968 took a professorship in the Evangelical Faculty at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. He retired in 1993 and continued to live and work in a small town outside the metropolis, Gräfelfing, until his passing in 2014. Theology’s Task According to Thomas Aquinas, the task of systematic theology is to show how all things in reality relate to God. One of my favorite passages in Pannenberg’s corpus emulates this. The doctrine of God, says Pannenberg, In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters can only be done in form of a systematic theology, a coherent account of how the world and especially human nature and history are related to God as creative source and ultimate destination of all things. A Christian systematic theology has to deal with the task in the form of a history of the world and of the human race, a history that accomplishes the intrinsic aim of the act of creation and overcomes the failures and shortcomings of the creatures in order to fully realize the kingdom of the creator in the world of his creatures.8 Let me parse this in greater detail. David Tracy reminds us of the theologian’s task: “The systematic theologian’s major task is the reinterpretation of the tradition for the present situation.”9 Like other theologians whom we dub “modern,” Pannenberg takes up this theological task by asking his variant of the general hermeneutical question: How can the Christian faith, first experienced and symbolically articulated in an ancient culture now long out-ofdate, speak meaningfully to human existence today amid a modern worldview that is dominated by natural science, secular self-understanding, and the worldwide cry for freedom? Pannenberg’s answer has been fairly consistent throughout the five decades of his scholarly career. His answer includes six commitments. First, the modern secular self-understanding is misguided when it fails to recognize what is true: namely, God is everywhere present. Second, Christian theology should pursue the truth, and it should do so in conversation with the secular world surrounding the church. Third, a historical examination of the biblical claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the first Easter will show that he in fact did rise from the dead. Fourth, the Easter resurrection of Jesus is the prolepsis—that is, a concrete anticipation—of a larger reality yet to come in the future, namely, the eschatological kingdom of God (the new creation) in which all the dead will rise. Fifth, the still outstanding future of God reaches back into the present moment with the power to free us from our past and open us toward a new future. Sixth, the future arrival of the consummate kingdom of God will finish what has 367 been in progress all along, namely, God’s continuous creating of the world out of an inexhaustible supply of divine love. Revelation as History What we earlier identified as the “Heidelberg Circle” or “Pannenberg Circle” was productive. The collection of essays it produced in 1961, Revelation as History, began a revolution in Christian theology. It offered an alternative to the then dominant theologies of the Word of God promulgated by Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann and their disciples. Just what happened? In the period immediately following World War II, the dominant schools of thought had been existentialist and neo-orthodox theology, schools that had dug a wide ditch between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, had opened his two volume Theology of the New Testament by saying in the very first line, “The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.”10 What!? The historical Jesus is only a presupposition!? According to the Bultmann school, Christian faith could not exist until there was a kerygma—a kerygma proclaiming the eschatological event of salvation in Jesus Christ the crucified and risen one— and this kerygma had to come from the Word of God breaking into history from the transcendent beyond. Or, to say it Karl Barth’s way, Christian faith could not exist but for the self-revelation or selfdisclosure (Selbstenthüllung) of God by God that was direct and unique. “God reveals Himself. He reveals himself through Himself. He reveals Himself . . . .God is the Revealer, is identical with His act in revelation and also identical with its effect.”11 Note the directness of the event of revelation for Barth. Revelation is a direct unmediated encounter with the transcendent God. For the Pannenberg Circle, in contrast, revelation is indirect, mediated by history. 368 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December What is important here is that the existentialist and neo-orthodox schools had eliminated from the divine-human equation any medium of revelation distinct from God in Godself. Eliminated was human history as a medium of divine presence and action. Pannenberg and his Heidelberg colleagues, in contrast, argued that history—especially the history of Israel including Jesus but also history in its broad scope—provides the medium and even the content of God’s indirect, not direct, revelation. Pannenberg opens the second of his two essays in that book with the thesis: “The self-revelation of God in the biblical witnesses is not of a direct type in the sense of a theophany, but indirect and brought about by means of the historical acts of God.”12 This move was significant in two ways. First, the Pannenberg circle was asserting ontologically that God could be present within history and that history could serve as a medium for divine action. Second, epistemologically, God could be revealed in the course of historical events and, in addition, faith should be understood as a response to historical revelation. The existentialist and neo-othodox theologians of the previous generation had operated pretty much with the Schleiermachian legacy and proffered an “eyes of faith” view, namely, that the subjective faith of the believer serves as a hermeneutical lens through which God can be seen acting. God is not revealed in the objective world but, rather, only when the objective world is viewed subjectively through the eyes of faith. Without the eyes of faith, it was presumed, history would be nothing more than a jumble of secular facts without inherent meaning. Divine revelation depends on a direct divine act of providing human subjectivity with faith before God’s objective activity can be discerned. In short, for the pre-Pannenberg prevailing view, faith comes before revelation in history; whereas for the nascent Pannenberg school, revelation as history precedes faith and elicits faith as a response. Pannenberg reports that this aroused “violent and malign reactions from the leading schools of the day, Bultmannians as well as Barthians.”13 Revelation as History was followed by dozens of essays and books during the 1960s that developed the primary thesis: “History is the most comprehensive horizon of Christian theology.”14 The decisively influential book of this decade was Jesus–God and Man. Here in Pannenberg’s Christology, he demonstrates how once again the Jesus of history could be seen as constitutive to the Christ of faith. Even more revolutionary for the time was Pannenberg’s rational argument for affirming the historicity of Jesus’ Easter resurrection, arguing that the eschatological meaning of the resurrection is built into the interpretation of the historical event. This marked a giant step away from the existentialists who had locked faith into a subjectivized and psychologized and privatized closet toward a more objective and public arena for theological discourse. One of Pannenberg’s unfinished projects was to write a theology of reason (Theologie der Vernunft). He came close with one of his major works, Theology and the Philosophy of Science.15 His method places theological discourse in the arena of public discourse as the grounds that we all share in the common pursuit of truth. And truth must be one. Among other things, this places theology once again into conversation with the natural sciences. “The scientist is after the same truth that is the object of the Christian confession of faith, and precisely for that reason, Christians should not be afraid of science or erect barriers against scientific inspection of their own affirmations.”16 In sum, Pannenberg wants to liberate our faith in God from the ghetto of subjectivity. To do so, he places our knowledge of God both as creator and redeemer into the objective sphere, the sphere where secular historians and scientists feel at home. Friends Among Roman Catholics and American Evangelicals Even though Pannenberg’s sympathies lay primarily in Enlightenment and Troeltschian liberal Protestantism, his historical and traditional emphasis drew initial interest on the part of many post-Vatican II In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters Roman Catholics and American evangelicals. The Roman Catholics, now willing to open church windows to let the breezes of modernity blow through (aggiornamento), were still a bit timid about facing squarely the hurricane of destructive modern winds—Hume, Kant, Schleiermacher, and 19th century relativism—that had blown liberal Protestantism off its objective foundation and left it cowering in a cave of subjectivity.17 Pannenberg looked to Catholics like a safe Protestant, one who could affirm philosophically as well as exegetically the classical foundations of the faith. Also attractive to Roman Catholics was Pannenberg’s retrieval and reverence for tradition. Whereas the Reformation churches in general and Bultmannian existentialism in particular interpreted the hermeneutical question so as to jump from the biblical text to the contemporary context—jumping what had become known as the hermeneutical gap and leaving out two thousand years of church history—Pannenberg sought ressourcement from this still living tradition. He cultivated Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) that traces the historical morphology of ideas as a means for pursuing truth.18 Rather than a hermeneutical gap, the two millennia of church history belong to the history of divine revelation. This move was welcomed in Roman Catholic circles and Pannenberg enthusiastically embraced the ecumenical challenge to reassert the oneness of the Body of Christ throughout Christendom. In addition to the Catholics, Pannenberg found new friends, at least temporarily, among American evangelicals. The evangelicals were attracted to Pannenberg’s rational defense of a historical resurrection. The historicity of Jesus’ resurrection was one of the Five Fundamentals of Fundamentalism, something conservative Christians believe the liberal establishment had forsaken for the whores of modern naturalism. In Pannenberg they thought they had found a first rate German critical scholar who affirmed what they affirm. They were right on both counts. Pannennberg did affirm the Easter resurrection, to be sure; but he was also a critical scholar. This means he worked in partnership with the biblical critics of his own era such as Bultmann, critics whom American evangelicals judged to be anathema. Pannenberg’s method pressed for 369 historical knowledge that went behind the biblical text; he did not appeal in any naive, let alone literal, way to the authority of Scripture. So, American conservatives invited into their living room this German’s theory of the resurrection but later found they were hosting an unwelcome guest. The guest was expelled and the Pannenberg agenda was tacitly abandoned for two decades. In the 1980s and 1990s the German guest was welcomed once again into the evangelical living room by theologians such as Donald Bloesch, Roger Olson, and Stanley Grenz.19 Evangelical publisher William B. Eerdmans asked Fuller Seminary professor Geoffrey Bromily (translator of Barth’s Church Dogmatics) to translate Pannenberg’s magnum opus, his Systematic Theology. Liberal in method yet evangelical in content, the German theologian is now almost as much at home in evangelical circles as in ecumenical circles. Theology of Hope, Revolution, and Liberation In Europe during the 1960s the label was “Theology of Hope.” It applied primarily to Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann but also to Roman Catholic Johannes B. Metz and Lutheran Wolfhart Pannenberg.20 The eschatological vision of a divinely transformed future was designated the content of Christian hope; and this vision of the future could provide leverage against the conservative weight of status quoism and spring Christian ethics free to embrace the revolutionary spirit then sweeping the globe. Future-oriented theology quickly became political theology. Eschatology quickly became the guide to social transformation. The transcendent vision quickly became translated into political ethics. In North America the hope school took the name, “Theology of Revolution.” Carl Braaten’s counter-cultural systematic theology of 1969, The Future of God, expands the Pannenberg program into a “politics of hope.” Against the skeptical Marxist dictum that the Christian faith with its hope for resurrection beyond death is an 370 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December opiate that drugs the proletariat into acquiescing to economic domination by the bourgeoisie, Braaten asserted boldly that Christian faith—especially Christian eschatology—is not a sedative but rather a stimulus to vigorous social action. In Central and South America the legacy of the theology of hope became liberation theology. Latin American students studying in Europe adapted this revolutionary thinking to their home situation, putting Marxist class theory together with the vitality of Christian eschatology and egalitarian politics. In addition to the ethical stimulus provided by applied eschatology, the retrieval of the historical Jesus for systematic theology by Pannenberg led to an emphasis on solidarity with the human Jesus, the Jesus who is God present among the humble and the oppressed and who brings the message of hope for liberation. Pannenberg’s direct influence is most visible in the work of El Salvadoran Jesuit Jon Sobrino.21 Even though the revolution and liberation trajectory of the 1960s continued into the next decade for Pannenberg’s students, it did not for Pannenberg himself. Pannenberg turned increasingly toward ecumenical matters and away from political theology. The reason: he became disenchanted with the student revolution of 1968 and its ideological aftermath. The student excesses made him “more keenly aware of the unpredictability of irrational factors still shaping the course of history.”22 Although Pannenberg sees himself as a theological champion of the Enlightenment and its democratic values, his stand on issues during the 1970s and 1980s moved him more and more into the conservative social camp. Pannenberg and his colleagues such as Braaten became increasingly critical of liberation theology, suggesting that this school prematurely immanentizes eschatology so that the transcendent kingdom of God becomes collapsed into an immanent political program. A former member of Dialog’s editorial council, Michael Root, draws this picture. Politically, Pannenberg has also stood apart. He does not belong to the academically fashionable left. He studied Marx as a philosophy student in the late 1940s in Berlin and found him wanting. He was disturbed by the sympathy for totalitarian dictators shown by fellow theologians during the 1970s and 1980s, and he made his concerns public. Though for years he was a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, he was sharply critical of the liberationist turn in the World Council as a whole.23 In my opinion, Pannenberg rightly contends that “the church cannot transform the world into the kingdom of God . . . .The kingdom comes only from God himself.”24 From this he argues against the liberation theologians “that church-incited revolutionary action can actualize the righteousness of God’s kingdom even in social practice, is an illusion. Such ideas prevent us from taking into sober account the perversion of human nature in this fallen world and the fact that God’s kingdom comes only from God himself, not by human hands.”25 Like Pannenberg, I too want to take into account the sober truth regarding human nature. I too want to place my ultimate trust only in a new reality to be brought about solely by God. Yet, there remains a positive connection between our vision of God’s future kingdom and the opportunity in the present aeon to press for social transformation toward greater justice in human affairs. The promise of God’s future transformation inspires and guides our human transformatory work. So, in recent years I have found myself arguing that liberation theology offers the social ethic that best fits Pannenberg’s eschatological vision, even if he himself does not see it this way. Conscientious liberation theologians have cautiously guarded against immanentization and political pelagianism. I believe the Munich theologian should see Latin Americans such as Gustavo Gutiérrez especially as theological compatriots.26 Eschatology and Retroactive Ontology Beneath the politics of the kingdom lies an ontology of creation and redemption. In a dramatic reversal of the common sense notion that the past causes the present and the future, Pannenberg In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters argues for a retroactive ontology. The future determines the present. The future even determines the past. “The future of God, contrary to our usual way of looking at things, is constitutive for what we now are and already have been.”27 What does this mean? Although Pannenberg makes it clear that he identifies with no “particular philosophical system, even my own,”28 a consistent and coherent structure of underlying reality can be discerned in his work. It is methodologically significant that Pannenberg does not want simply to pick out a single horse from the stable of existing philosophies and then take it out for a theological ride. This is what other theologians had done. The Bultmannians had ridden Heideggerian existentialism and the process theologians Whiteheadian metaphysics. To be sure, theology must still deal with the structure of reality; but borrowing a nag from the philosophical corral might lead to a Trojan horse in the theological citadel. What should a theologian do? Pannenberg does not want to avoid the matter by following Barth’s footpath, where all philosophical horses are to be avoided. Yet, surmises Pannenberg, the Bible tells us about reality. So, he mounts a metaphysical animal with a biblical pedigree. The indirect revelation of God through the history of Israel, argues Pannenberg, provides the point of departure for our reflections and speculations about the nature of reality. Pannenberg freely employs the thought processes of philosophical systems from Plato and Plotinus down to Whitehead in order to tease out the metaphysical directions that the biblical horse might lead us. Yet, Pannenberg is convinced that the point where God has made the divine self known is the point at which we should begin to ask about the nature of the God-self-world reality. In sum, what we find in the Munich theologian is a biblically constructed ontology. This leads Pannenberg to propose a retroactive ontology—that is, a dynamic view of reality as an open historical process in which the present and past take their final shape and meaning from the yet-to-be-determined divine future. In 1967 he published a key article, “Theology of the Kingdom of God,” that provided an outline of the ontology that would underlie his entire construc- 371 tive project. “Our starting point then is the Kingdom of God understood as the eschatological future brought about by God himself.”29 Jesus was not a metaphysician, so Jesus did not spell out the ontological implications of his confidence in the worlddefining import of the imminent kingdom of God. But the systematic theologian should spell out the implications of such a commitment; and Pannenberg does so. What this leads to is the startling proposal that we reverse our common sense understanding of cause and effect, that instead of viewing the present as determining the future we view the present as an effect of the future. “We see the present as an effect of the future, in contrast to the conventional assumption that the past and present are the cause of the future.”30 It is the future, not the present or even the past, that is the source and power of being. This applies to God as well as to creation. The symbol of the kingdom of God is a political symbol that includes the notion of kingly rule or lordship. Not yet intimidated by the anti-monarchical theology of the subsequent decade, Pannenberg developed the political metaphor into an ontological principle. God’s rule and God’s being become inextricably tied, so that God does not become fully God until the entire creation functions according to the divine will. Jesus proclaimed the rule of God as a reality belonging to the future. This is the coming Kingdom. The idea was not new, being a conventional aspect of Jewish expectation. What was new was Jesus’ understanding that God’s claim on the world is to be viewed exclusively in terms of his coming rule. “Thus it is necessary to say that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist.” Since his rule and his being are inseparable, God’s being is still in the process of coming to be.31 God does not exist!? Yet, God is the power of being by which all of creation exists!? What could this mean? Pannenberg’s unique doctrine of God asserts that God is the power of the future and that all historical reality is—that is, will be—determined by the God of the future. It also means that God is in the process of becoming God through the trinitarian involvement in the historical process that is creation. Looked at from the perspective of the 372 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December present, God is not yet. Looked at from the perspective of the future, all that will have been will be taken up into the divine eternity. The meaning, the reality, of what is now is open for transformation; its present definition is subject to revision until finally determined by its place in the eschatological kingdom of God. To say it another way, the present creation is determined by its place in the yet-to-be new creation. Startling here is that creation and eschatology are brought together into a single ontology. In addition to Jesus’ message regarding the coming kingdom, Pannenberg appeals to the common sense observation that things with a future exhibit power. To have no future is to be powerless. To have a future is to exist. To have no future is to drop from existence into non-existence. To speak of God as all-powerful would imply that God—the very being of God—is the future of the world. Only the one who has a future is in possession of power. The notion of the Kingdom of God evokes a vision of the unity of each being and the unity of the whole world as flowing from the future. Far from creation being at one end of the time spectrum and eschatology at the other, creation and eschatology are partners in the formation of reality. The future decides the specific meaning, the essence, of everything by revealing what it really was and is. At present a being is something, a unity in itself, only by anticipation of its unifying future. The future interprets the present and the past; all other interpretations are helpful only to the degree that they anticipate the future.32 We can now understand our past and our present as the creation of the coming God. Systematic Theology We have just reviewed the retroactive ontology developed by Pannenberg in the 1960s. Through all his occasional explorations into Christology and ecumenism, into natural science and anthropology, he has kept the ontological priority of the future in view and continually set our sights on the transformatory power of the coming consummation of creation in the new creation. The capstone of his career, the Systematic Theology, still follows this essential vision even though it adds considerable detail and nuance. Echoing what we might find in Karl Barth or Karl Rahner, where previously we saw rule or power we now see God’s freedom when Pannenberg writes, “God is eternal because he has no future outside himself. His future is that of himself and of all that is distinct from him. But to have no future outside oneself, to be one’s own future, is perfect freedom. The eternal God is the absolute future, in the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, is the free origin of himself and his creatures.”33 This future of God does not stand over against the present or the past; rather it envelopes, fulfills, and consummates all that will have been. Pannenberg projects on the screens of our imaginations a theological phantasmagoria that unites creation with eschatology that places the history of the cosmos past and future within the trinitarian life of an eternal God. The Son is the origin as well as the consummator of creation . . . But the Son is not the origin of the world in the same way as he will be its consummator. He is its origin as his self-distinction from the Father becomes the generative principle of all the reality that is distinct from God . . . The Son is the consummator, however, inasmuch as all things will be gathered up into one in him. Independent existence is a premise of this. The difference between the work of the Son in creation and the eschatological consummation of all things leaves them room, then, for their independent life . . . The independent ongoing existence of creatures always needs fellowship with God by the Spirit . . . Thus the Spirit will consummate creation by summing up all things in the filial relation of Jesus to the Father.34 How might we unpack this? The superstructure for the ontology Pannenberg is building rests on foundational commitments regarding the relationship of creature to creation, and eternity to time. God as final destiny and hence as origin of all things is the creator. In their created nature all things in creation are differentiated from God yet dependently related to God as the source and goal of their being. Yet God, at least according to In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters classical theistic understanding, is not similarly related to created things. According to classical theists, God is eternal, whereas creation is temporal. And God could be God in eternity even if there did not exist a creation. An unbridgeable gulf separates creator from creature with the latter dependent on the former but not vice versa. Is this the shoe that fits Pannenberg? Despite the apparently outrageous assertion alluded to earlier that God does not yet exist (with respect to the creation), Pannenberg’s confreres are classical trinitarian theists. He will not be invited to family barbecues with deists, pantheists or panentheists. Trinity and Time We have just seen how, for Pannenberg, the divine eternity is not divorced from temporal history; rather, temporality is eschatologically taken up into eternity. This becomes coherent because of the immanent and economic dimensions of God’s trinitarian life. When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, Pannenberg belongs squarely in the ressourcement conversation begun by the two Karls, Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, about the middle of the twentieth century. The retrieval and renewal of this rich trinitarian theology has continued in the work of Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Catherine Mowry LaCugna, Robert Jenson, and our work in Berkeley at the Center for Theology and the Natural sciences, including Ernest Simmons.35 Two points distinguish this train of thought. First, the Christian faith is not a card carrying member of the club of monotheists that might include Jews and Muslims or others affirming a single transcendent deity. Christians believe in one God, to be sure; but as revealed in Jesus Christ, this one God has a trinitarian life. Trinitarians compose a club with one member, the Christian Church. Second, the new trinitarians affirm to greater or lesser degrees of commitment what I call Rahner’s Rule. According to Rahner’s Rule, the imma- 373 nent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.36 Here is Pannenberg’s version of the rule: “The immanent Trinity is identical with the economic Trinity. In virtue of trinitarian differentiation God’s eternity includes the time of creatures in its full range, from the beginning of creation to its eschatological consummation.”37 Note: God’s eternity “includes the time of creatures.” More to come on this. For Pannenberg, along with others who appeal to Rahner’s Rule, the single most important implication is that any hiatus between a set of internal trinitarian relations, on the one hand, and a set of external relations involving creation and redemption of the temporal world, on the other hand, is overcome.38 The internal relations experienced by Father, Son, and Spirit are activities that take place in and through world history. For example, the obedience to the Father on the part of Jesus when suffering on the cross does not mimic the Son-Father relation that exists elsewhere in eternity. Rather, this historical event of obedience is in fact the eternal relationship taking place within time. Key to Pannenberg’s trinitarianism and key also to his doctrines of creation and anthropology is the dialectic of self-differentiation and unity between the Son and the Father. The Son as the Logos differentiates himself from the abyss of the Father, thereby permitting the coming into existence of a creation that is similarly differentiated from the Father.39 This differentiation can become a separation, of course, when the creatures cease to acknowledge that they have a God and cease to live daily according to the divine will. The Father is no longer God, so to speak, if his Godness is dependent upon his now lost rule. The obedience or loyalty to the Son, who is differentiated from the Father, is key to reconciling the world to God. Reconciliation happens within creation history when the Son cedes lordship to the Father; thus, as a representative of all creation, through the Son all creation cedes proper lordship to its creator. The Holy Spirit binds Father to Son and creation to God. In this way God achieves divine rule or lordship or omnipotence through a trinitarian life 374 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December that is registered on both sides of the eternity-time ledger.40 [God’s] kingdom and his own deity are now dependent on the Son. The rule or kingdom of the Father is not so external to his deity that he might be God without his kingdom. The world as the object of his lordship might not be necessary to his deity, since its existence owes its origin to his creative freedom, but the experience of a world is not compatible with his deity apart from his lordship over it. Hence lordship goes hand in hand with the deity of God.41 Let’s try this again. Through his complete obedience the Son cedes lordship to the Father thereby granting the Father appropriate deity. The result is a dependent divinity—that is, divinity in relationship. Pannenberg, following Athanasius here, holds a relational rather than an autocratic understanding of divinity. Each of the three persons is ec-statically related to one or both of the others, and has its personal distinctiveness or selfhood in this relation. The Father is the Father only in relation to the Son, in the generation and sending of the Son. The Son is the Son only in obedience to the sending of the Father, which includes recognition of his fatherhood. The Spirit exists hypostatically as the Spirit only as he glorifies the Father in the Son and the Son as sent by the Father . . . .the relations are constitutive of their personhood.42 As you can see, for Pannenberg, the trinitarian dynamics begin with the interaction and mutual definition of Father and Son. Where does the Holy Spirit fit in? Following Augustine, for whom the Holy Spirit is the love that unites the Father and the Son, Pannenberg describes the third person of the Trinity as the very relationship enjoyed by the first two. All three of the divine persons are not divine in exactly the same way; yet it is their relationship to one another that establishes their divinity. In the case of the Holy Spirit, Pannenberg makes an unprecedented move in the dialogue between theology and the natural sciences. He incorporates the concept of force field from physics and applies it to the power the Holy Spirit exerts in maintaining unity in distinction. The idea of the divine life as a dynamic field sees the divine Spirit who unites the three persons as proceeding from the Father, received by the Son, and common to both, so that precisely in this way he is the force field of their fellowship that is distinct from them both . . . .But the Sprit is not just the divine life that is common to both the Father and the Son. He also stands over against the Father and the Son as his own center of action.43 In order to affirm only a Trinity and avoid a quaternity—a quaternity would include Father, Son, Holy Spirit plus a divine nature they hold in common—Pannenberg emphasizes that the eternal essence of God is not itself a subject alongside the three persons; rather, only the three persons are subjects of divine action.44 Where are we? According to Pannenberg, the trinitarian perichoresis incorporates the history of creation into God’s internal life. God’s eternity incorporates our temporality. Pannenberg belongs in the classical theist camp, to be sure; yet, the relationship between our gracious God and our creaturely stories is intimate and personal and eternal. New Testament giant N.T. Wright says what Pannenberg might want to say: “It is precisely the emerging threefold understanding of Israel’s God that prevents a move towards the high-and-dry ‘god’ of Deism on the one hand, and the lowand-wet ‘god’ of pantheism on the other, together with their respective half-cousins, the ‘interventionist god’ of dualist supernaturalism, and the ‘panentheist’ deity of much contemporary speculation.”45 Is Pannenberg a Patripassionist? When the economy of salvation becomes internal to the divine life in this fashion, it raises the question of patripassianism—that is, the suffering of God in the death of the Son. Martin Luther was willing to say that “God has died for us.”46 Moltmann In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters came perilously close to patripassianism in his book The Crucified God, but stopped short by speaking of Jesus’ death “in God” rather than a version of the “death of God.”47 Just where does Pannenberg stand? On the one hand, Pannenberg upholds the classic distinction between the suffering of the temporal human nature of Jesus versus the eternal unaffected divine nature. Yet, on the other hand, he acknowledges the role of sympathy, the role of feeling another person’s pain. Could the Father feel the pain of the Son? Because God as father loved the son dying on the cross, the father must suffer at least empathetically or sympathetically. By implication, this places pain and suffering into the very heart of the divine life proper. It is incorrect, of course, to speak pointblank of the death of God on the cross . . . .To be dogmatically correct, indeed, we have to say that the Son of God, though he suffered and died himself, did so according to his human nature . . . .Nevertheless, we have to say that Jesus was affected by suffering and death on the cross in his person, i.e., in the person of the eternal Son. In his extreme humiliation, in his acceptance of death, Jesus took upon himself the ultimate consequence of his self-distinction from the Father and precisely in doing so showed himself to be the Son of the Father. Nor can the Father be thought of as unaffected by the passion of the Son if it is true that God is love . . . .To this extent we may speak of the Father’s sharing of the suffering of the Son, his sympathy with the passion.48 Anthropology: Openness and Exocentricity The eternal God is open to what happens in time. The immutable God is open to sharing in the sufferings of Jesus as well as other historical creatures. This divine openness is matched by an openness that is built into God’s creation, especially the human race. Human openness readies us to be defined 375 by God’s eschatological future, wherein all things will attain their final definition. Pannenberg’s anthropology requires an inextricable connection between the individual and the universal. The essence of our identity is individual, to be sure; but we cannot as individuals establish ourselves as such. Who we are depends on who we are in relationship to nature, to one another, and to the consummate whole of reality. “Totality and personhood are linked,” he writes.49 Essential to our individuality is the dialectic between our openness and our connectedness. The Munich theologian propounded this view already in his first work on anthropology published in 1962, What is Man? His key terms were “openness” (Weltoffenheit) and “destiny” (Bestimmung).50 Let us pause to see what is meant by the concept of openness. What Pannenberg first called “openness to the world” and even “openness beyond the world” in What is Man? appear again in modified form in his second work on this topic, Anthropology in Theological Perspective in 1983, and then again in his Systematic Theology. The new term on which he relies is “exocentricity” (Exzentrizität). He borrowed this new term from Helmuth Plessner. Pannenberg explains how we human beings have the ability to perceive things objectively—that is, we grasp an object as something other. We even have the ability to step outside (exo) our self as the center and see our self as others see us–that is, to see our self objectively. The very existence of objective knowledge and self-reflection is evidence of our openness to the world around and, of course, openness even to God. In correlation to the significant role played by human openness to one another and to God, Pannenberg develops a fitting take on the relationship between the self and the ego. Whereas the self is exocentric, the ego may not be. It may be egocentric. Hence, there is a tension between the self and the ego, between exocentricity and egocentricity. The conventional wisdom seems to assume that the ego or the “I” (das Ich) is independent and not mediated through social relations; and it further assumes the self (das Selbst) is the summary 376 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December picture others have of you or me. According to this conventional view, the changeless ego provides the primary nucleus that gives enduring identity to an otherwise changing self. Pannenberg disagrees. He holds rather that the ego, just like the self, undergoes development and “is constituted though its relation to the Thou.”51 He is saying that the ego undergoes a process of development or formation (Bildung) which is marked in a decisive way by processing the ever changing social environment in which the self is developing. In fact, the development of the ego is dependent upon the development of the self. Pannenberg is reversing the self-ego relationship. The centering of one’s personal identity by the ego follows upon–it does not precede–the exocentric growth of the self. It can happen, of course, that at any given moment the ego might not accept the currently existing social self. The result is a two sided coin. On the one side, we find the experience of alienation or estrangement (Entfremdung). Alienation expresses itself as an identity crisis. I feel that I am not the person others think I am. I am not satisfied with my socially assigned role. I may even feel guilty because I do not live up to the expectations of others or of God. Feeling alienated I attempt to withdraw from myself into what I falsely think is an independent ego. The result is narcissism, an ego-centeredness which seeks to close the doorxbrk on openness to the world. But narcissism is based on an illusion, because the ego is not actually independent let alone autonomous. On the other side of the coin the split between ego and self may open the door to creativity, to further self-constitution, to further formation of personal identity. This happens, to use Freud’s terminology, with the projection of the ego ideal or, to use Pannenberg’s terminology, with the anticipation of a fulfilled future and the goal-oriented behavior this induces. Through the God-given power of imagination we can project images of who we can be. Through imagination we can transcend our present selves. And if combined with religious faith and confidence in God, such self-transcendence combats narcissism by opening us up to future experiences and to the adaptations this will require. Thus, self-divestiture (Entäusserung) does not nec- essarily imply self-alienation (Entfremdung). In fact, self-divestiture in the form of openness to what is beyond the ego is finally constitutive of the ego’s proper identity. In sum, the point of Pannenberg’s use of the terms “openness” and “exocentricity” is that our personal identity is not autonomously produced, not determined solely by the action taken by our own ego. Human beings are not closed monads. We are not like balls on a billiard table that simply bounce against one another according to the laws of external relations. Rather, our identities are so open to other people, to social institutions, to our natural environment, to the course of history, and open even to God, that who we are is determined in large part by external factors and events. We are internally related to one another and, ultimately. to the whole of reality. More Anthropology: Destiny and Definition Perhaps the most significant term in Pannenberg’s anthropological vocabulary is Bestimmung, which is usually translated “destiny.” This is the best translation, but one needs to be aware of the nuances. To Pannenberg’s mind, destiny does not connote a fatalism, a mood of resignation because things are already determined. Quite the contrary, the future is open. New things can and will occur. Furthermore, God’s consummate future is constitutive of the reality of who we are now. Our destiny is a determining factor–the decisive determining factor– in defining our identity. Our destiny becomes our definition. Two basic categories with which a classical Christian anthropology works are the image of God (imago Dei) and human sin. Especially relevant here is the concept of the imago Dei, which Pannenberg interprets evolutionarily and eschatologically in terms of Christ as the New Adam. What this means is that we are becoming human. We are not born that way. This applies to the whole race as well as to individuals. We will become what we truly are only in the fulfillment of history, only In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters at the arrival of the consummate kingdom of God and the establishment of the new creation. Hence, Pannenberg finds he must reject the naive orthodox view that in the past there once existed a Garden of Eden with perfect people in it. “The idea that there was an original union of humankind with God which was lost through a fall into sin is incompatible with our currently available scientific knowledge about the beginnings of the race.”52 Pannenberg is similarly dissatisfied with the neo-orthodox (especially Emil Brunner but it would apply as well to Paul Tillich) attempt to place this original innocence into some timeless or eternal orbit, because this renders the concept of origin meaningless. It also renders meaningless the concept of a meaningful history within which human identity is developed. If not to the past, then were should we go to find the fulfillment of the image of God within us? We should go to the future. The imago Dei is our destiny. Our destiny is calling us forward toward God and in the process is actually engaged in our formation (Bildung). Humanity in history is in the process of transcending itself and becoming itself, of gaining its own idenity, of attaining its true selfhood. Because selfhood is still in the process of coming to be, we cannot say that who we are is due strictly to self-initiation. We do not attain self-realization in a Promethean manner on the basis of our own power alone. We have help. That help comes in mediated form from interaction with other people around us, from our language and culture, and finally from God. It comes ultimately from the divine imago that is drawing us forward toward fulfillment. Call it “providence” or call it “spirit,” God is the extra-human factor that is in the process of making humanity what it will be. Here we close the circle. Our openness to God is in fact God himself calling us to communion with him through us, through the imago Dei. The call of our destiny calls for a response of faith. Faith, as Luther and Melanchthon described it, is trust in something extra se in Christo, beyond ourselves in Christ. We abandon ourselves and build our lives upon that in which we place our trust. Trust recognizes and exploits our dependence upon that to which we abandon ourselves. Pannenberg follows Luther and Melanchton here. 377 He also follows Cicero in saying that we are religious by nature, whether we acknowledge it or not. We are religious by nature because we live on the basis of a fundamental trust that sustains our life. Christian faith consists in consciously and actively putting our trust in the God who is exta nos yet who–through this very faith–is in the process of drawing us toward our true selves.53 Thus, Pannenberg understands personality as essentially future-oriented. “The person lives by the future in which its trust is placed.”54 Still, we might ask: how do we know who we are in the present moment? Answer: the identity which we experience at the present moment—the moment within history and prior to its consummate end—is accomplished by our time-bridging consciousness. We remember the past and anticipate the future, all the while envisioning our own particular part in the drama of the wider whole. What makes such consciousness possible is our participation in spirit. “Personality is to be understood as a special instance of the working of the spirit.”55 The Spirit provides for the continuity of our identity through time. Similarly, it is the spirit which provides continuity between all things temporal and spatial. It is the power which is in the process of integrating the parts of God’s creation into a single comprehensive whole. The whole will be complete at some time in the future. Yet, we can experience the whole in the present by anticipating it within the life of the spirit. Following Schleiermacher, Pannenberg asserts that through feeling (Gefühl) we human beings can have a prereflective familiarity with the whole that integrates our own identity with all of existence. The whole is finally an eschatological reality that through the Spirit is exercising its integrative power on us now, in the present time, through anticipation. Still More Anthropology: Sin and Finitude The tie between human finitude and original sin has been a knotty one for Christian theologians since Augustine. On the one hand, we wish to affirm that our existence as finite creatures is 378 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December essentially good because we are part of a divine creation that is essentially good. On the other hand, we wish to acknowledge that sin is universal even if it is not inevitable. What we wish to avoid is suggesting that we cannot help but be sinful because God has created us this way. The distinction between finitude and sinfulness is less than fully clear in Pannenberg’s anthropology. Oh yes, he distances himself from Paul Tillich, for whom the fall from essence to existence is virtually a condemnation to estrangement from essence. For Tillich, to be finite is to be estranged, fallen. Is this Pannenberg’s position as well? Recall that for Pannenberg we cannot date a fall into sin within the chronology of our evolutionary history. This is the case for Tillich as well. Yet, we must address a stubborn phenomenological fact: we humans wake up into a world and find ourselves already estranged, already fallen into sin. We wake up to find ourselves outside of Eden. Tillich has no Eden beyond our dream of innocence. With Pannenberg, Eden is back in an objective and cosmic way. It’s just that Eden lies in our future, not our past. We have not fallen from Eden. We are still being created as finite creatures and being readied to enter Eden. Eden is God’s coming kingdom, the new creation where all finite creatures will find their fulfillment and wholeness. Because we humans are still becoming—are still on the way to attaining our identity—we find ourselves in the present moment separated from our future destiny. We find ourselves divested if not alienated from our true selves. This creates anxiety. Although exocentricity calls us to trust the God of the future, our natural tendency is to center ourselves in our selves in order to sustain ourselves. Egocentricity becomes the means for self-preservation. This is inevitable. All the other animals do it too. The difference between egocentric animals and humans, of course, is that humans have spirit and hence awareness of a destiny which transcends the present moment. Here, Pannenberg offers a distinction. When self-preservation is based upon trust, it is truly a human expression of finitude and, hence, is not sinful. When self-preservation proceeds from anxiety or worry, however, it represents the perversion of the human will and the prideful concupiscence against which Augustine had warned us. The problem here is that Pannenberg comes close to saying that anxiety is built into the human condition. “Anxiety may be taken as a universal condition for aggressive behavior,” he writes, “even though the passage from anxiety to aggression depends on other conditions as well.”56 Now, it appears that we must live with anxiety but simply avoid aggressive behavior. Yet, if anxiety is a universal human condition, then the basic trust in the God of our future for which Panneneberg calls becomes the exception rather that he rule. That Pannenberg comes close to identifying finitude and sin can be seen in the following passage on sin and guilt. The consciousness of guilt then gives expression to the fact that human beings are not identical with the idea of their destiny, and the concept of sin describes this condition in the form of anthropological reflection . . . .The consciousness of the failure of the self–that is, of sin–is a necessary phase in the process whereby human beings are liberated to become themselves.57 Elsewhere, however, he speaks so positively of finitude as to answer affirmatively to the question: Can we have finitude without death? “Finitude does not always have to include mortality. The eschatological hope of Christians knows a finitude of creaturely existence without death.”58 This suggests that in our eschatological Garden of Eden we will be finite yet deathless. Finitude does not necessarily entail estrangement, for Pannenberg. Like Tillich, Pannenberg affirms that faith— faith understood as trusting God for our future— prevents our anxiety from getting a grip on us and leading us to sin. Faith as trust unites us with our destiny, with our true selves, with our future life in the new creation. Finally, the Munich theologian paints a beautiful picture of the eschatological reconciliation of the individual with society and with the totality of creation. The end of time, like the death of the individual, is to be seen as the event of the In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters dissolving of time in eternity. Not only the individualities of creaturely reality but even the differences of moments of time and the tenses are, not erased, but no longer seen apart. God is the future of the finite from which it again receives its existence as a whole as that which has been, and at the same time accepts all other creaturely being along with itself. Hence the antagonisms between the individual and society will also be overcome herein. But above all the existence of all individuals is simultaneous in the eternity of God, so that under the conditions of eternity there will also be fulfilled our individual destiny to belong to the whole human society across all the boundaries that separate epochs of history from one another. Only in the sphere of eternity can there be an unrestricted actualizating of the unity of our destiny as individuals with that of humanity as a species.59 The eschatological consummation is more than merely the end of God’s creative enterprise with the world. It is also healing. It is also salvation. According to this scheme, creation is a yet-to-becompleted process; and, when complete, all things will be reconciled in God. Sin, evil, suffering, and despair will be healed. Robert John Russell puts it eloquently: “Ultimately, the response that I would make as a Christian to suffering in humanity and in the natural world, is to interpret the whole of history of life on earth as a process of redemption which points directly to eschatology. The suffering God on the cross leads, praise God, to the resurrected God of Easter—otherwise you have a God who suffers with us forever . . . .theodicy is unanswerable if we focus on the world as it is now. And that’s why tomorrow eschatology is absolutely essential for me to address as a Christian.”60 In short, our eschatological banquet will turn out to be our fist picnic in the Garden of Eden. Time in Eternity We can see how decisive and pervasive eschatology is in the Pannenbergian worldview. We can’t have 379 anthropology without it. Nor can we have anything in Pannenberg’s systematic theology without it. This draws our attention once again to the problem of the relationship of time to eternity; “and its solution has implications for all parts of Christian doctrine.”61 Recalling our discussions of the Trinity and anthropology, we can see how the God-world relationship requires that eternity not be divorced completely from time. Eternity and time can be distinguished, but they are not separate domains. Here is the key: what happens temporally becomes an eternal reality. With the ring of Boethius in our ear, Pannenberg tells us that “Eternity is the undivided present of life in its totality . . . it is a present that comprehends all time, that has no future outside itself.”62 The transitional moment from time to an eternity that comprehends time is the advent of God’s eschatological new creation. What we human beings experience in the present is the separation of times—the separation of past and future from a present that is constantly sinking into the past— and we mistakenly think that this separation of times belongs inherently to our finitude. Now, Pannenberg believes that eternity will maintain a distinction between past, present, and future; but it will be a distinction without a separation. Finitude in the sense of distinction—distinction between God and creatures or distinction between one creature and another—can be eternal. Therefore, the end of the temporal aeon and the beginning of the eternal is more than just one more epochal turning point in the flux of time. With the completion of God’s plan for history in his kingdom, time itself will end (Rev. 10:6f ) in the sense that God will overcome the separation of the past from the present and the future and therefore the separation of the present from the past and the future that is a feature of cosmic time in distinction from eternity. In the eschatological consummation we do not expect a disappearance of the distinctions that occur in cosmic time, but the separation will cease when creation participates in the eternity of God.63 Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December 380 Eternity will not be dull. Eternity will not be timeless or static. Robert John Russell who draws out implications of Pannenberg’s theory of eternity adds the dimension of duration. Eternity is neither timelessness: the conflation of all moments of time into a single timeless ‘now’ in which all temporal thickness is lost. Nor is eternity endless ordinary time: a continuing succession of separate temporal moments, each of which exists only for an instant as the ‘present’ and then is gone forever. Instead, the divine eternity is one of duration, but a duration that includes co-presence: it is a differentiated unity that holds together all present events in the history of the universe both now and in the eschatological New Creation as proleptically anticipated in the present age.64 In sum, for Pannenberg and his disciples eternity is not simply a timeless realm that generates its own reality and remains aloof from the sequence of historical events within the temporal flux. Rather, eternity, at the point of eschatological transition, takes the temporal creation up into itself, unites it while maintaining its distinctive history, and grants it everlasting perdurableness. This is by no means an everlasting preservation of what has been divisive and evil. It is salvation, because the transition from time to eternity is also the reconciliation of the world to God. Prolepsis Essential to Pannenberg’s Christology as well as his ecclesiology and ethics is the element of prolepsis, sometimes dubbed anticipation. A prolepsis is a concrete pre-actualization of a still outstanding future reality. It is the eschatological reality appearing within history ahead of time. The focal prolepsis is the Easter resurrection of Jesus, which constitutes the still outstanding eschatological new creation appearing ahead of time in the person of Jesus. “Jesus’ resurrection . . . has its eschatological significance only because it is a proleptic occurrence of the general eschatological salvation expected by the Jews of that time, and hence only in the context of the totality of human history, whose ultimate future it unveiled.”65 As Jesus’ resurrection overcame his death and fulfilled his life, so also the final consummation of creation will transcended yet fulfill the history of all creation to that point.66 The concept of prolepsis acknowledges the ontological priority of the future and its retroactive power. Just as the future kingdom or rule of God will determine for all previous time the deity of God, so also did the resurrection of Jesus determine for his entire life prior that he was the incarnate Son of God. “Only in light of the resurrection is he the preexistent Son.”67 Only in light of the Easter resurrection is Jesus the preexistent Son of God. Only in light of the eschatological new creation do creatures attain their true identity. A prolepsis anticipates this future reality; it embodies future reality ahead of time. This applies to ecclesiology. “The church . . . is nothing apart from its function as an eschatological community and therefore as an anticipatory sign of God’s coming rule and its salvation for all humanity.”68 I like to think of the church as an arc between two terminals, the Easter resurrection of yesterday and the consummate kingdom of God tomorrow. This applies to ethics. Christian ethics begins with hope. Christian ethics begins with a vision of God’s future and then seeks to transform present reality in light of that vision. This proleptic structure for ethics is embraced by Antje Jackelén, who at this writing serves as Archbishop of Sweden. “Futurist striving for world improvement and the adventist composure in the expectation of a consummation lying beyond the immanently possible complement each other. Eschatology is not speculation about the grand finale, but rather, above all, the ferment of hope.”69 This proleptic form of ethical deliberation has influenced church bodies such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. “For believers, it is hope in God’s future, not in an idealized past, that inspires participation in God’s changing, open, and inexhaustible creation. Christians believe that God’s promised future includes the transformation of the whole creation (Romans In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters 8:19–25). Guided by this vision, Christians anticipate and live out the values of God’s promised future concretely in the present.”70 Time in Eternity: One More Time Prolepsis and retroactive power only apply to finite life within temporal history, of course; not to eternity. Or, do they? Has Pannenberg painted himself into a corner? On the one hand, he wants an eternal God who would be God by necessity, even without a world. Yet, on the other hand, he wants a God who’s very deity is contingent upon a world’s willingness to treat God as Lord. Can he have it both ways? Let’s cast the problem in terms of time and eternity. From the present perspective within temporal history, it would seem that time influences eternity and that eternity in its fullness does not yet exist. Eternity itself is contingent. Eternity must await the eschaton to be what it will be. However, from the perspective of eternity, we might look back to see all times untied—that is, finalized, fulfilled, and consummated. God’s eschatological gaze— God’s eternal gaze—seems unconditioned. Pannenberg occasionally presumes that eternity is unconditioned. He speaks of eternity as stable and immutable. He describes the life of God as eternal and necessary, over against creation which is temporal and contingent. He emphasizes that God would be God even without a creation. Can he have it both ways? Pannenberg would answer: yes. The eschatological completion of the kingdom of God will decide definitely whether or not God exists. This is because God’s divinity is tied to his rule; and without this rule God could not be God at all. From the perspective of the eschatological consummation, however, it will be ascertained that God has been God from all eternity and that the course of creation’s history has always been directed by divine rule. It is now hidden from our temporal eyes, of course; yet it is still present in proleptic form. In light of the eschatological future, then, God will have been the same from all eternity. 381 Does Pannenberg intend to say that God’s eternity is constituted by what happens over time? Yes and no. Yes, with regard to our knowledge of God. God’s eternity is never complete in our past or present, because we have yet to come to know God fully. Full knowledge awaits us in the future. This makes the future different from the past and present. This does not apply to God, however. God’s eternity does not await a future that is different from God. God is his own future. Pannenberg wants it both ways. The contingent events of creaturely history and the eternal identity of God belong together. They remain different, though together, just as the two natures of Christ do. This flirtation with incoherence may be unavoidable when positing a God who is both transcendent and immanent, both different from we creatures yet dynamically present in our lives. R.I.P. The funeral for this titan of Christian apologetic theology was held on Friday, September 9, 2014, at St. Markus Kirche in Munich. In his on-line obituary for Wolfhart Pannenberg, Philip Clayton wrote what I would like to say on behalf of myself: “the world has lost a brilliant interpreter of Christianity, and I have lost the mentor who molded me as a scholar, theologian, and person.”71 Endnotes 1. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus–God and Man, tr. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1968, 1977). 2. Ted Peters, God–The World’s Future: Systematic Theology for a Postmodern Era (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1st ed., 1992; 2nd ed., 2000; 3rd ed., forthcoming). 3. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematischer Theologie (3 Volumes: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988–1993); Systematic Theology, tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (3 Volumes: Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991–1998) hereinafter abbreviated ST. 4. See especially Carl E. Braaten, The Future of God: The Revolutionary Dynamics of Hope (New York: Harper, 1969) along with Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, The Futurist Option (New York: Newman, 1970). Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 4 • Winter 2014 • December 382 5. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “An Intellectual Pilgrimage,” in Theologians in Their Own Words, ed., Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M. Moritz, and Ted Peters (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 151. 6. I rely in large part here on two earlier accounts of Pannenberg’s life and thought: Ted Peters, “Wolfhart Pannenberg,” in A New Handbook of Christian Theologians, eds., Donald W. Musser and Joseph L. Price (Nashville TN: Abingdon Press, 1996) 363–374, and Ted Peters, “The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg” for “Theology Update,” Dialog 37:2 (Spring 1998) 123–133. 7. Pannenberg, “Intellectual Pilgrimage,” 152. 8. Ibid., 160. 9. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981) 64. 10. Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (2 Volumes: New York: Scribers, 1951–1955) 1:3. 11. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (4 Volumes: Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936–1962) I/i/296. Pannenberg no less than Barth believes that God is responsible for our knowledge of God. “Human knowledge of God can be a true knowledge that corresponds to the divine reality only if it originates in the deity itself. God can be known only if he gives himself to be known.” ST, 1:189. The issue between Barth and Pannenberg has to do with direct versus indirect revelation. ST, 1:230–257. 12. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Rolf Rendtorff, Trutz Rendtorff, and Ulrich Wilkins, Revelation as History, tr. David Granskou (New York: Macmillan, 1968) 125. 13. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “God’s Presence in History,” The Christian Century 98 (March 11, 1981) 262. “The task is this: How can theology make the primacy of God and his revelation in Jesus Christ intelligible, and validate its truth claim, in an age when all talk about God is reduced to subjectivity?” ST, 1:128. 14. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology, tr. George H. Kehm (2 Volumes: Minneapolis: Fortress, 1970–1971) 1:15. 15. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, tr. Francis McDonagh (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1976). 16. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Theological Appropriation of Scientific Understandings,” in Beginning with the End, eds., Carol Rausch Albright and Joel Haugen (Chicago and LaSalle IL: Open Court, 1997) 434. Pannenberg’s essays dealing directly with scientific issues are found in two English language collections, Toward a Theology of Nature, ed., Ted Peters (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993) and The Historicity of Nature, ed. by Niels Henrik Gregersen (West Conshohocken PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008). 17. See: Langdon Gilkey, Catholicism Confronts Modernity (New York: Crossroad Seabury, 1974). 18. See: Ted Peters, “Truth in History: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Pannenberg’s Apologetic Method,” Journal of Religion 55:1 (January 1975) 36–56. 19. See especially Stanley J. Grenz, Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The persisting evangelical un-ease with Pannenberg is reflected in a fine obituary by Biola’s Fred Sanders in Christianity Today. The title and subtitle tell the story. “The Strange Legacy of Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg. He vehemently defended the Resurrection but denied the Virgin Birth.” http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/september-web-only/strangelegacy-theologian-wolfhart-pannenberg.html, accessed 9/18/2014. 20. See: Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (New York: Harper, 1967) along with Religion, Revolution, and the Future (New York: Scribner’s, 1969); plus Johannes B. Metz, Theology of the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969). 21. Jon Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1976). 22. Pannenberg, “God’s Presence in History,” 263. 23. Michael Root, “The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg,” First Things (March 2012); http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/03/theachievement-of-wolfhart-pannenberg, accessed 9/18/2014. 24. ST, 3:48. 25. ST, 3:55. 26. See: Ted Peters, “Pannenberg’s Eschatological Ethics,” in The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg, eds., Carl E. Braaten and Philip Clayton (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988) chapter 10. Frankly, I identify more with the revolutionary spirit of the early Pannenberg, early Braaten, and early Jenson. 27. ST, 3:551. 28. ST, 1:xii. 29. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, ed., Richard John Neuhaus (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1969) 53. In 2013 Pannenberg could still say, “The God of the coming kingdom, the power of the future that will bring about the completion of everything: that has remained the guiding idea of my theology.” “Intellectual Pilgrimage,” 159. 30. Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, 24. 31. Ibid., 56. 32. Ibid., 30. 33. ST, 1:410; see 2:20. “Creation and eschatology belong together,” he writes, “because it is only in the eschatological consummation that the destiny of the creature, especially the human creature, will come to fulfillment.” ST, 2:139. 34. ST, 3:454 35. For a detailed tracking of this Trinity Talk see: Ted Peters, God as Trinity (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993). Perhaps the newest voice in Trinity Talk is the work of Dialog contributor, Ernest L. Simmons, The Entangled Trinity: Quantum Physics and Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013). 36. Karl Rahner, The Trinity (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970) 21–22. Both Roger E. Olson and I employ this term, Rahner’s Rule, to describe the position taken by Rahner and subsequently adopted by other members of this school of thought. My introduction of the term began in the “Trinity Talk” series for Dialog 26:1 (Winter 1987) 44–48, and 26:2 (Spring 1987) 133–138. 37. ST, 1:406. 38. Rahner’s Rule does not require a total collapse of immanent and economic Trinity; but it does require continuity in revelation and divine action. “Even though we must finally distinguish between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity,” writes Pannenberg, “because God in his essence is the same as he is in his revelation, and is to be viewed as no less distinct from his revelation than identical with it, nevertheless, the unity of the trinitarian God cannot be seen in detachment from his revelation and his related work in the world in the economy of salvation.” ST, 1:32; see: 1:62–64; 325. 39. “In the Son is the origin of all that differs from the Father, and therefore of the creatures’ independence vis-à-vis the Father.” ST, 2:22; see: 1:421; 2:62–64; 325. 40. ST, 2:3–9. 41. ST, 1:313. 42. ST, 1:428. In Memoriam: Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014) • Ted Peters 43. ST, 1:385. “When you describe the Holy Spirit as a force field, do you mean this metaphorically or literally?” I asked Pannenberg on one occasion. “Literally,” he answered emphatically. “Ouch!” I responded. “It’s risky for a theologian to bet on one scientific horse which might not win the race for the dominant theory.” The concept of force field with which Pannenberg works is a 19th century view, which has already been surpassed by the idea of a quantum force field in more recent decades. 44. ST, 1:384. 45. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Volume III of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) 735–736. 46. Martin Luther cited in the Formula of Concord in the Book of Concord, ed., Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1959) 599. 47. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (New York: Harper, 1974) 207. 48. ST, 1:314. 49. ST, 2:200. 50. Wolfhart Pannenberg, What is Man?, tr. Duane A. Priebe (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1970). 51. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, tr., Matthew J.O’Connell (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox, 1985) 190. 52. Ibid., 57. 53. Ibid., 73; ST, 3:152–154; 170. 54. Pannenberg, Anthropology, 527. 55. Ibid., 528. himself . . . .This is exactly what we have learned to deny. God is not subject to the march of time, but this is not because his eternity does not march.”Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 218.n.61. 64. Robert John Russell, Time in Eternity: Pannenberg, Physics, and Eschatology in Creative Mutual Interaction (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012) 319. 65. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Focal Essay: The Revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth,” in Theology as History, eds., James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York and San Francisco: Harper, 1967) 125. 66. “Here we find anticipation to be a real instance of something’s occurring in advance. The anticipated future is already present in its anticipation–though only given the presupposition that the eschatological future of God’s Lordship and the resurrection of the dead will actually occur.” Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, tr., Philip Clayton (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990) 96. Robert W. Jenson is less than fully happy with Pannenberg’s use of prolepsis, thinking it should carry more ontological weight than it apparently does. “I have probed for an ontological content to his [Pannenberg’s] notion of prolepsis, and I have always been frustrated . . . .A prolepsis, as he uses the notion, is simply a claim staked out in history, which, when and if history is fulfilled, will be verified or falsified, and which is of such a nature that those who in the meantime have accepted it will all along have been living appropriately to the truth that will at the end be discovered.” “Parting Ways,” First Things 53 (May 1995) 61–62. If Jenson’s reading is accurate, then prolepsis would be the equivalent of promise, merely a word awaiting fulfillment. Yet Pannenberg wants to say more, I think, because a prolepsis is a promise of God, the eternal God. See: ST, 3:540. Shouldn’t this satisfy Jenson? 56. Ibid., 150. 67. ST, 2:283. 57. Ibid., 152. 68. ST, 3:32. 58. ST, 2:271; see: 3:560. 59. ST, 3:607. 60. Robert John Russell, Cosmology, Evolution, and Resurrection Hope: Theology and Science in Creative Mutual Interaction, edited by Carl S. Helrich on behalf of the Fifth Annual Goshen Conference on Religion and Science (Kirchener, Ontario: Pandora Press and Adelaide, South Australia: ATF Press, 2006) 34. 61. ST, 3:595. 62. ST, 2:92. 63. ST, 2:95. Robert W. Jenson challenges Pannenberg on the lack of a future within eternity. “God, says Pannenberg, has no future beyond 383 69. Antje Jackelén, Time and Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology (Philadelphia and London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005) 230. 70. Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, “Sexuality” Social Statement, 2009. http://www.elca.org/What-We-Believe/SocialIssues/Social-Statements/JTF-Human-Sexuality.aspx. 71. Philip Clayton, “Wolfhart Pannenberg–In Memoriam,” Patheos, 9/7/2014; http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/09/07/wolfhartpannenberg-1928--2014/#ixzz3DguLyNLV . See also: Leona Foxx, “Pannenberg’s Passing,” Huffington Post Blog, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leona-foxx/pannenbergs-passing_b_5788844.html,accessed 9/16/2014.