Co-missioners,
Gary Simpson is one of the handful of star Seminex students who went on to carve out careers as teaching theologians. Gary, now retired, spent the bulk of his working years in the systematics department at Luther Seminary. One of us asked him recently to reflect on a theologian that lots of us have heard of, though fewer will be familiar with. Here is the first part of what Gary sent us. Part Two will follow next week.
A word of advice as you dig into this. Paul Krugman, the renowned economist and longtime columnist for the New York Times, would sometimes tell us that what we were about to read was “wonkish.” That word applies here. Theology, no less than any other discipline, has its distinct vocabulary, and the deeper one sinks into it as a student and a scholar, the more arcane the language gets. Gary the scholar doesn’t hold back from employing it here. We encourage you to wade through it anyway if wade you must. If you encounter something in particular that you want clarification about, send a note to our editor who will pass it on to Gary.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Introducing Wolfhart Pannenberg (Part 1)
by Gary M. Simpson
Gary M. Simpson
Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology and The Northwestern Lutheran Theological Seminary Chair of Theology
Photo: www.luthersem.edu/faculty/gsimpson/
Preamble
Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) was an ordained German Lutheran cleric and systematic theologian whose first publication was in 1953 and whose first academic appointment was in 1955. Over the next 60 years he became a major influence across the ecumenical spectrum of Christian thought, and beyond. By 2012, for instance, at least 198 monographs, dissertations, and major essays had been published engaging his thinking across a wide swath of themes. (Two of these were mine.)
Avid readers of Thursday Theology might find it rather odd to have Pannenberg described as a Lutheran theologian, although he is also often described as a “Protestant” theologian. Why odd? Well, he never wrote a lick, so to speak, directly about law and gospel in a mode akin to the promising tradition that TT readers might find readily familiar.
Having said that I vividly recall Robert Bertram once saying to me two things regarding Pannenberg, with whom he had served on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. First, Bob noted, Lutherans around the world can be grateful that Wolfhart Pannenberg was representing them on Faith and Order. This was because numerous Reformed thinkers often exercised an overwhelming theological influence on Faith and Order matters. Second, said Bob, when Pannenberg heard “law-and-gospel” discourse within his own German Lutheran context, it was significantly overlaid by general Protestant pietistic assumptions. This entailed a kind of authoritarian fideism rooted in a privatized atomistic individualism regularly coupled with a biblicist anti-intellectualism that Pannenberg found particularly menacing for the mission of Christianity in the modern world. In my 1987 Festschrift essay for Bertram, I therefore highlighted how Pannenberg and Bertram “converge.” They both foreground the churchly communion implications—the constitutive sociality consequences, so to speak—of faith alone as trust in Christ. [1]
Pannenberg’s Emergence
Engelbert Reineke (1939–) – Bonn, CDU-Friedenskongress, Pannenberg
Bonn.- CDU-Friedenskongress, Porträt Prof. Dr. Wolfhart Pannenberg
From Wikimedia Commons
Pannenberg was born in Stettin, Germany, which after World War II came under Communist rule. As an infant he was baptized in a Lutheran church but had no substantive upbringing in the Christian faith. As a sixteen-year-old Pannenberg had a distinctive religious experience that thematized a number of other experiences that eventually led him to a self-conscious confession of the Christian faith. In his words, “On a lonely two-hour walk home from my piano lesson, seeing an otherwise ordinary sunlight, I was suddenly flooded by light and absorbed in a sea of light which, although it did not extinguish the humble awareness of my finite existence, overflowed the barriers that normally separate us from the surrounding world.” [2] As a sixteen-year-old he was also conscripted into the Nazi army but was hospitalized with scabies before ever making it to the front, finishing the war in a British POW camp.
In 1947 Pannenberg went to Berlin to study philosophy and theology and then to Göttingen. In 1949 he went to Basel in order to intensify his study with the famous Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Though impressed, Pannenberg did not find Barth sufficiently satisfying in regards to his own exploration of the Christian faith. He was troubled by Barth’s “revelational positivism,” a criticism of Barth that Pannenberg borrowed from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. [3]
Soon thereafter Pannenberg went to Heidelberg where he studied with numerous Lutherans. He quickly took to the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad from whom he learned to value the history of the transmission of confessional traditions both in the Scriptures and in Christian history. Also foundational for Pannenberg’s Lutheran commitments were well-known theologians Peter Bruner, Edmund Schlink, and Hans von Campenhausen. He found Schlink’s approach to faith and reason and von Campenhausen’s thoroughly historical orientation toward Christianity and toward life in general to be fruitful starting points for his own distinctive journey in the Christian faith and in theology. He gathered these concepts together in his 1959 programmatic essay, “Redemptive Event and History.” For as long as Pannenberg self-consciously confessed to being a Christian, he considered himself a Lutheran.
Pannenberg wrote two Pannenberg dissertations in Heidelberg, two being required in order to teach in a Germany university. Both of his took up “reason” and “knowledge of God” themes. Soon after, he helped gather together a small group of young German biblical exegetes and theologians, sometimes referred to as the “Pannenberg Circle.” They sought a different way to understand God’s self-revelation from the then-predominant Barthian or Bultmannian notions of the Word of God, both conceptualized existentially, though each in one’s own way, rather than conceptualized historically as these young upstarts would have it. Pannenberg argued that these existentialist concepts of God’s revelation excessively privatized and internalized Christian faith and generally sought to overly protect Christian theology and life from modern modes of reasoning, especially from historical modes of reason. These privatized, protective tendencies, he thought, actually surrendered the truth claims of the Christian faith to increasingly hostile forms of Enlightenment-style European secularization. He also saw these tendencies as a dangerous departure from historical Christianity’s openness to reason and the natural and human sciences as handmaids of theology. Pannenberg sought to bridge the chasm that nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologies, often called neo-orthodox, had opened between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
The Pannenberg Circle took up the spirit of certain pioneering Lutheran exegetes, like Johannes Weiss with his notion of Jesus’ consistent eschatology and Albert Schweitzer with his influential The Quest of the Historical Jesus. From different angles the Circle foregrounded Jesus’ preaching and teaching of the coming Kingdom of God, rather than featuring the more traditionally articulated doctrine of justification. They published their then-innovative Revelation as History (German edition 1961; English 1968), with Pannenberg writing the definitive essay. He argued that the Bible’s apocalyptic and eschatological themes, beginning with the history of Israel, set the stage for encountering and thinking God as the eschatological power of the future and the resurrection of Jesus within history as the proleptic, anticipatory self-revelation of God’s lordship over death itself. Pannenberg summarized this as “the ontological priority of the future” that opens all history to the coming Reign of God.
Pannenberg immediately followed-up Revelation as History with his attention-grabbing Christology “from below” in Jesus—God and Man (German1964; English1968) and with a series of four lectures which he gave across the United States including at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. These lectures were published in Theology and the Kingdom of God (English edition 1969) with an insightful Foreword by then-Missouri Synod Lutheran, Richard John Neuhaus. By forthrightly taking on Barth and Bultmann via the historical concept of “proleptic eschatology” Pannenberg had catapulted himself into the forefront of theology during the last third of the twentieth century. In a sense, we might say, “the rest is history.”
Endnotes
[1] Gary M. Simpson, “The Parish as a Confessing Community,” Currents in Theology and Mission 14.3 (June 1987): 196.
[2] See Pannenberg, “God’s Presence in History,” [How My Mind Has Changed Series],” Christian Century (March 11, 1981): 260-263. I vividly recall in November 1980 sitting in Bertram’s living room in St. Louis in a doctoral seminar on Friedrich Schleiermacher with Pannenberg as our seminar guest, hearing him reminisce about his sunlight experience of finitude and infinity in conjunction with Schleiermacher’s famous 1799 Second Speech in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, which we had read earlier in the semester.
[3] Ibid.
