Co-missioners,
Last week Gary Simpson told the story of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s emergence as a major theologian in the final third of the twentieth century. Today he points to some key features of Pannenberg’s thought.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Introducing Wolfhart Pannenberg (Part 2)
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/
Positioning Pannenberg
Noted Roman Catholic theologian David Tracy (d. April 29, 2025) has described three great publics that theologians engage as audience: church, academy, and society. Catholic theologians also often ascribe to three major fields of inquiry within the theological task that overlap with these three publics: fundamental theology (prolegomenon, philosophy), systematic theology (doctrine), and practical theology (ethics and pastoral care). These publics and fields can help us locate Pannenberg, so to speak, as well as help us get a handle on how he understood himself as a Lutheran. And, of course, none of these fields and publics are mutually exclusive for any theologian, and they certainly weren’t for Pannenberg.
While Pannenberg ranged widely over the course of his oeuvre, he made his early mark primarily engaging the academy in the fields of fundamental and systematic theologies. First, he pursued teaching assignments in the academy within German universities though for a few early years he taught at a Lutheran seminary. This meant two things. First, the question of secularization within the academy itself and then within society as a whole rose to the top of his intellectual agenda. Second, for Christianity to address secularization effectively it must renew its commitment to and conviction regarding an updated Christian concept of truth and reason that moves beyond obsolete notions of biblical inerrancy or ecclesiastical authoritarianism. Christian theologians must integrate the truth of the Christian faith via the ontological priority of the future with a thoroughgoing modern concept of historical reason.
As a university student Pannenberg had studied with the influential philosopher of history, Karl Löwith. In his 1949 Meaning in History Löwith thought hard and long about so-called secular history and biblical eschatology and about the relation of faith and reason, themes that decisively influenced a young Pannenberg. Löwith argued that the modern West had too facilely and too completely divorced itself from its Christian moorings, which historically had sought a fruitful alliance with the pagan Greco-Roman world of Western antiquity. Pannenberg agreed with Löwith’s basic assessment and sought within his own academic calling to forge a rational approach to Christian theology beginning with the resurrection of Jesus itself by way of the modern canons of historical research.
Like Friedrich Schleiermacher in the speeches of his On Religion, Pannenberg understood himself to be following a call from God to speak persuasively to the growing number of “cultured despisers” and doubters of religion and of Christianity with the truth of the God who raised Jesus from the dead. This calling also meant speaking to the societal institutions that Pannenberg thought had cut themselves off prematurely from any serious and meaningful engagement with Christianity and with the religions in general. In this sense Pannenberg was an apologetic theologian, though he imagined that task differently from Schleiermacher and more in the mode of people like Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, for instance. This sense of calling to the public of the academy was illustrated during a visit to Seminex in November 1980. On being invited to preach in chapel, Pannenberg declined, saying that he preferred to lecture and that he did not recognize for himself a strong calling to preach in liturgical settings (unlike Tillich, who preached and published moving sermons and in this way also engaged the public of the church).
Pannenberg’s apologetic mission within the academy led him to write two massive books in addition to Jesus—God and Man. One addressed the philosophy of science and theology itself as the science of God—Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Eng. 1976). The other addressed the modern anthropological sciences and philosophies in light of the Christian doctrines of the image of God and of sin—Anthropology in Theological Perspective (Eng. 1985). Personally, I learned much from these two books, one written before my 1983 dissertation on Pannenberg’s political theology and the other published in English after the dissertation was done.
Pannenberg also addressed the academy with scholarly articles that thematized issues in ecclesiology, in ecumenism, in the sacraments and ministry, in ethics, and in spirituality. These essays were full of insight that always enlightened a guy like me who ended up teaching systematic theology for thirty years. I say this even though I’ve never considered myself a “Pannenbergian” in the sense that folks often describe themselves as a “Barthian,” for instance.
Along the way Pannenberg wrote many scholarly articles addressing topics within the natural sciences, like biology, evolution, quantum physics, and field theories. He not only searched how theology might render itself more competent scientifically but, significantly, also how the sciences might render themselves more theological and thus more competent in their own fields of knowledge. He remained convinced throughout his career that the contemporary world also in its halls of learning needs theology, needs the truth of God, needs the God who raised Israel’s Jesus from the dead. Moreover, he remained convinced, also through interreligious conversation, that the Christian trinitarian confession of God remains the more adequate theological apologetic for our scientifically construed world. Creatively, for instance, he sought to imagine the lifegiving power of the person of the Holy Spirit as the life-giving energy of the cosmos itself by using recent findings within quantum physics’ field theory.
From Canva
Personalizing Pannenberg
Eventually Pannenberg wrote a three-volume Systematic Theology (Eng. 1991-1998). I have been especially influenced by Pannenberg’s basic approach to the doctrine of the trinity, often called a “social” doctrine of the trinity. He shares this social trinitarian approach with numerous other late 20th- and early 21st-century theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, Catherine LaCugna, John Zizioulas, Leonardo Boff, and Stanley Grenz among others. Generally, the social trinitarians chart a trinitarian path beyond St. Augustine’s more “psychological” conceptualizing of the trinity.
Augustine’s psychological trinitarianism became in the modern Western world more and more vulnerable to a modalistic-like, single-Subject concept of God that weakened, even surrendered the thoroughgoing relationality and communion of three “persons” to a near infinite variety of sheer and separable modes of divine agency or attributes like creation or redemption or reconciliation or sanctification or justification or liberation or wisdom or sustainer or judge or preserver or. . . . Beginning with Schleiermacher in the early 19th century, modern theology in the West had functionally given up on the trinity being meaningful in the modern world until Karl Barth and Karl Rahner tried to retrieve it. They based this effort on an idealistic upgrading, so to speak, of Augustine’s more psychological approach. The social trinitarians turned more determinatively toward an Eastern Orthodox-style social orientation, though with important critiques as well.
Pannenberg digs deeply into questions and insights that open up toward a social trinitarian Christian confession of God. Most significant is his concept of “reciprocal personhood,” where he also draws from the deep wells of the social anthropological sciences which he had explored in his Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Reciprocal personhood moves sharply beyond the numerous Enlightenment forms of atomistic subjectivity and thus makes room for some of the best feminist, liberationist, postcolonial, and ecological forms of critical theological reflection and wisdom. Reciprocal personhood opens contemporary imaginations doxologically toward God’s being as communion, to borrow a pregnant phrase from the Eastern Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas. For Pannenberg, reciprocal personhood also renders a needed critique of the East’s more hierarchical and patriarchal orientation. Via reciprocal personhood Pannenberg sees Christianity’s trinitarian confession of the faith as nothing more than and nothing less than an exposition of “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
I suggest to Thursday Theology readers that Pannenberg’s reciprocal-personhood grounding of the social trinity opens a clear path for connecting contemporary trinitarian theology with the theology of the cross articulated via Luther’s “joyous exchange” (“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song of Songs 2.16; 6:3)). Pannenberg himself does not take that road, however. It waits for some future time to be traveled. Also, toward the end of his life Pannenberg responded in a more traditional di-polar physicalist way, so to speak, to questions regarding sexuality and gender. These too must wait for another time.
