Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God

The Realisation of Divine Love

Mark Hocknull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317084303
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Pannenberg on Evil, Love and God examines a much-neglected aspect of the theological thought of one of the most original contemporary German theologians, Wolfhart Pannenberg: his theological and philosophical understanding of evil and its relationship to the love of God. The book seeks to correct a widely held misconception that in his theology, Pannenberg has neglected the darker side of the world, concentrating instead on an optimistic picture of the future. This book argues that questions of evil hold a central place throughout Pannenberg's writing and seeks to draw out the implications of his wrestling with these issues. The Introduction sets the scene by considering the nature of the question of evil and argues that a theological response must be made as part of a global view of the world and not in isolation from other themes. The succeeding chapters develop this theme through a reading of Pannenberg's theology.

Chapter 1

Pannenberg, Evil and the Task of Theology

For Pannenberg, systematic theology has a fundamentally apologetic or explanatory task. He defines succinctly what it means to be a Christian believer: ‘To confess to Jesus Christ that in him God has been active to restore and reconcile the human race and through the human race his entire creation’.¹

Whilst it may be a little unfair to regard a sentence lifted from a short work, intended as a teaching aid, as programmatic for an entire life’s work, this quotation does shed some remarkable light on Pannenberg’s whole theological programme. In particular, we should note two things from it. First, for Pannenberg, Christian belief involves the recognition that there is something wrong with the world. If God has been active in restoring the world, then it must need restoring, that is, in some sense it must be broken. Pannenberg seems to be saying that there is something structurally wrong with the creation. The second point to note is that the world needs reconciling to God. The structural fault, whatever it is, brings about an alienation of the world from God. The Christian confession, as Pannenberg defines it, affirms that God has been active to heal this breach and to restore the creation’s fellowship with him in his Son Jesus Christ. Whether or not one should make this confession depends on the question of its truth. Ultimately, the only reason for committing oneself to the Christian confession is because one accepts it as true. Pannenberg devotes much energy and expertise to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian truth claims. In particular, he has been concerned to meet the challenge of Ludwig Feuerbach, that religion is merely a human projection. Most readings of Pannenberg in the secondary literature engage with this aspect of his thought.

There is, however, another challenge to the reasonableness of the Christian faith in the form of the protest atheism of Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov. In a well-worn quotation, Ivan says to his younger brother Aloysha:

I don’t want harmony. From love of humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it is beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It is not God that I don’t accept, Aloysha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.²

For Ivan, any moral person could not accept eternal happiness at the cost of even one instance of innocent suffering. It is quite simply impossible to love God. It is important to note that Ivan’s objection goes beyond the question of truth, for even if Ivan were to be proved wrong, that is, if it could be proved to him that God really does exist, he would still refuse to accept God and be reconciled to him. Ivan’s problem, like that of Irenaeus, is the problem of how to love God, to be reconciled with God in the face of the presence of evil in the world.

In the past, Pannenberg has been criticised for not taking the argument from evil seriously enough.³ It is my contention that, though this may have been a serious failing of Pannenberg’s early work, this has been corrected in the mature theological reflections of the Systematic Theology, and a response to the argument from evil runs as an underlying theme throughout Pannenberg’s system. Whilst this chapter is intended as a review of the secondary literature on Pannenberg, it reviews that literature from this perspective, concluding with a delineation of the dimensions of Pannenberg’s answer to the question of how God responds to the presence of evil in his creation through the incarnation, life, death and Resurrection of the Son. In the course of the argument, it will become clear that, for Pannenberg, evil is not only a threat to human beings but is also a threat to the very deity of God.

There is a sharp contrast in the theology of Pannenberg and that of his contemporary Jürgen Moltmann in the space devoted to the whole question of evil. It can be demonstrated easily that for Moltmann the problem of evil is one of the main driving forces of his theological development. Moltmann has described his own journey to faith in several places.⁴ Having lost interest in the sciences, he links his own experiences of suffering as a youth towards the end of the Second World War and the suffering inflicted by the Nazis in the Holocaust as the impetus for his search for a new certainty:

My experiences of death at the end of the war, the depression into which the guilt of my people plunged me, and the inner perils of utter resignation behind barbed wire: these were the places where my theology was born. They were my first locus theologicus, and at the deepest level of my soul they have remained so.⁵

Doubtless there are other factors which drive the development of Moltmann’s theology, but this quotation taken from his own self-reflections indicates the absolutely fundamental place that questions of evil have for Moltmann. The confession that the experiences of death, depression, collective guilt and despair were the places where Moltmann first began to ask theological questions about the nature of God and the world may be no more than an historical fact. It was as a matter of history these experiences which turned Moltmann’s attention away from the natural sciences and to theology. However, the second sentence of the quotation seems to suggest something much deeper in addition to this. It suggests that the need to provide answers to or understanding of the presence of evil in the world is the underlying ground of Moltmann’s continuing theological development and exploration.

Pannenberg, two years younger than Moltmann, makes no comparable statement, and for him the problem seems to be much less important, and is certainly not a driving force in the development of his theological programme. One could go further and note Pannenberg’s deep antipathy towards the topic of theodicy. If this term means the human justification of God in the face of evil, then Pannenberg rejects it completely: only God can give an answer to the problem of evil.⁶ Some justification therefore needs to be offered for the study of Pannenberg’s response to the problem of evil.

The first justification lies in Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task. This justification is two-fold. First, there is the sheer scale and scope of Pannenberg’s theological project. Pannenberg is attempting nothing less than a re-conceptualisation of the whole of reality. Perhaps this is seen most clearly in Pannenberg’s willingness to engage in genuine dialogue with the natural sciences. Such is his confidence in the value of theological explanations of the world that Pannenberg seeks not simply to incorporate scientific insights into his theology, but is also willing to challenge the natural sciences with theological questions – questions which are intended not simply to challenge scientific claims to truth but which aim at a genuine mutual search for truth. Its sheer scope has caused one interpreter of Pannenberg’s theological project to describe it as ‘breath-taking’.⁷ The experience of evil is part of reality and, therefore, if nothing else, if that experience is not accounted for in a theological account of reality, it constitutes an omission detrimental to the claim to universality. A related point is that Pannenberg’s principle that God is to be found in the particulars of history must at least raise the question of evil, given that so much of history seems so contrary to the active presence of God. The second justification arises from a preliminary or preparatory study of Pannenberg’s theology. Though Pannenberg is suspicious of the subject of theodicy and has been criticised for his failure to acknowledge the issue of evil sufficiently, he does take the issue seriously, and deals with it throughout his theology and particularly in his Systematic Theology. However, he offers no systematic treatment of theodicy, but deals with evil in the various contexts in which it arises in his theology. The issue of evil, then, might be a useful hermeneutical tool with which to probe the content of Pannenberg’s theology. This book seeks to move beyond the debate which has preoccupied much of the secondary literature on Pannenberg which has focused upon methodological issues or issues of ‘fundamental theology’.

Many of the issues of fundamental theology have been discussed and laid to rest in the publication of the work of F. LeRon Shults, and this opens up the possibility of engaging more fully with the substance of Pannenberg’s theology.⁸ Shults reviews the secondary literature on Pannenberg from the perspective of fundamental theology. He discusses a number of attempts to isolate Pannenberg’s key concept or grundprinzip, the controlling methodological presupposition which shapes Pannenberg’s entire approach to the theological enterprise. Ultimately, Shults rejects the candidates put forward for the grundprinzip in favour of his own understanding of it as Pannenberg’s attempt to understand the whole of reality in its relation to God. Shults’s analysis of the secondary literature is penetrating, and his case for seeing the grundprinzip as understanding all things in their relation to God is a strong one. Nevertheless, it does not persuade finally, and it will be worthwhile to revisit Shults’s analysis and to evaluate his own contribution, in an attempt to develop an alternative understanding of Pannenberg.

Pannenberg is a remarkably consistent theologian. This is not to say that there has been no development in Pannenberg’s thought during his theological career, but rather to recognise the fact that there has been no fundamental shift in his theological perspective since the publication of Redemptive Event and History in 1959. One of the earliest English language treatments of Pannenberg’s thought delivered the assessment that Pannenberg defies ready-made theological labels.⁹ In 1967, James M. Robinson was proclaiming confidently the launch of a new theological school.¹⁰ The authors of three English introductions to Pannenberg published in 1973 all agreed that, even if Pannenberg had not launched a new theological school, he had certainly introduced a new way of doing theology.¹¹ Subsequent work on Pannenberg has, however, failed to reach a consensus on what is the key feature of this new theological school. In the literature, four principal candidates for what constitutes Pannenberg’s new approach to theology have emerged: history, reason, a cluster of terms centring on Pannenberg’s concept of prolepsis, and, finally, Pannenberg’s quest to understand all things in relation to God, sub ratione Dei. Reginald Nnamdi saw Pannenberg’s theology in the light of hermeneutics, describing Pannenberg’s conception of the theological task as reflecting on the human condition in the light of revelation. Theology’s task is, then, to interpret human life in relation to God.¹²

Pannenberg’s Theological Method

The secondary literature can be read as an attempt to discover the hermeneutical key to Pannenberg’s theology. The purpose of this section is to review this secondary literature and to propose an alternative way of conceiving Pannenberg’s understanding of the theological task. A chronological analysis of the secondary literature on Pannenberg reveals three distinct groupings. There was a flurry of early contributions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, responding to Pannenberg’s early work. This was followed by a period of relative quiet, until the publication of an American Festschrift in 1988 in honour of Pannenberg’s sixtieth birthday. A similar break in the German secondary literature was brought to an end with the publication of Sebastian Greiner’s assessment of Pannenberg’s work from a Catholic perspective, also in 1988. This second chronological grouping reflects on the way Pannenberg had developed his thinking prior to the publication of his Systematic Theology. Stanley Grenz’s 1990 book Reason for Hope is a concise but comprehensive introduction to Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology, based on Volume 1 of the Systematic Theology, which was published in 1988 in Germ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Pannenberg, Evil and the Task of Theology
• 2 Reconsidering Evil
• 3 Can Sin Be Original?
• 4 The Power of Love
• 5 The Realisation of Divine Love
• 6 Eschatology and the Present
• Bibliography
• Index