Wolfhart Pannenberg

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Wolfhart Pannenberg
University of Berlin
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    Notable studentsGunther Wenz [de]
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    Wolfhart Pannenberg (2 October 1928 – 4 September 2014)

    resurrection of Christ
    , which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.

    Life and career

    Pannenberg was born on 2 October 1928 in Stettin,

    Second World War encouraged him to take a hard look at Christianity, which resulted in Pannenberg's "intellectual conversion", in which he concluded that Christianity was the best available religious option. This propelled him into his vocation as a theologian.[citation needed
    ]

    Pannenberg studied in Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg, and Basel. In Basel, Pannenberg studied under Karl Barth. His doctoral thesis at Heidelberg was on Edmund Schlink's views on predestination in the works of Duns Scotus, which he submitted in 1953 and published a year later. His Habilitationsschrift in 1955 dealt with the relationship between analogy and revelation, especially the concept of analogy in the teaching of God's knowledge.[citation needed]

    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

    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

    ecumenical enterprise – an emphasis which remained constant throughout his career.[citation needed
    ]

    Pannenberg's understanding of

    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.[citation needed
    ]

    As 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]

    Pannenberg is perhaps best known for Jesus: God and Man in which he constructs a Christology "from below", deriving his dogmatic claims from a critical examination of the life and particularly the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is his programmatic statement of the notion of "History as Revelation". He rejects traditional Chalcedonian "two-natures" Christology, preferring to view the person of Christ dynamically in light of the resurrection. This focus on the resurrection as the key to Christ's identity has led Pannenberg to defend its historicity, stressing the experience of the risen Christ in the history of the early Church rather than the empty tomb.[citation needed]

    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

    Evangelical Church in Germany, going so far as to say that a church which approves of homosexual practice is no longer a true church. He returned his Federal Order of Merit after the decoration was awarded to a lesbian activist.[16]

    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
    • 1996. "Theologie und Philosophie. Ihr Verhältnis im Lichte ihrer gemeinsamen Geschichte". Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

    Online writings

    References

    1. ^ Clayton, Philip (7 September 2014). "Wolfhart Pannenberg – In Memoriam". Theoblogy. Patheos. Retrieved 15 June 2019.
    2. ISBN 978-0-470-67060-6
      .
    3. ISSN 1475-3065
      .
    4. ^ Date of Death: http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/glaube-geschichte-und-vernunft-1.18380264
    5. ^ Brief biography (in German), University of Munich[permanent dead link].
    6. ^ Roger Olson, The Journey of Modern Theology, 479
    7. ^ Pannenberg, Publications, University of Munich[permanent dead link].
    8. ^ Pannenberg, Wolfhart (11 March 1981), "God's Presence in History", The Christian Century, pp. 260–63.
    9. ISBN 978-0-664-20971-1
      .
    10. ISBN 978-0-8226-3055-5
      .
    11. ISBN 0-300-09211-3
      .
    12. ^ Tipler 1989.
    13. ^ Tipler 1994.
    14. ^ Tipler 2007.
    15. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1995.tb00072.x
      .
    16. ^ Root, Michael (March 2012). "The Achievement of Wolfhart Pannenberg". First Things.

    Further reading

    External links

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