Wolfhart Pannenberg

In Chapter 5, Pannenberg offers the first portion of his discussion of the Trinitarian God. In fact, Chapters 5 and 6 present his doctrine of God, keeping in view the plurality and debatability of all religious truth claims. He has already said that theology has to do with the study of God. Therefore, identifying God is important. Pannenberg begins the process of identifying this God from the perspective of Christian belief. He will do so understanding that he will need to reformulate the Christianity understanding of God from the standpoint of experience of the world, humanity, and philosophical reflection. He will want to redefine the relations of these doctrines to their historical origins. He will do so by reference to scripture and to Christian tradition. He does this because he is a Christian wrestling with the new realities of any religion that he laid out in Chapters 2 & 3. In his discussion of the Doctrine of God, he wants to see if he can reformulate Christian teach...

In Chapter 4, Pannenberg discusses the revelation of God. It forms a bridge from his discussion of the preliminary matters of the nature of systematic theology in Chapter 1 and his exploration into the philosophy of religion in Chapters 2 and 3 on the one hand, to a discussion of the Christian notion of God in Chapters 5 and 6. He is finishing his preliminary studies. He has already written that theology must deal with knowledge that comes from God, and is therefore inaccessible to human beings apart from that disclosure. Here is a primary point that he learned from Barth. He has argued that talk of God, even in a secular society, is credible because humanity needs a way to talk about the totality of reality and ultimate commitments. He has already argued that in our finitude as human beings we have awareness of our dependence upon the Infinite. He has argued that the religious quest is constitutive to the human journey. He has argued that the religious experience relies upon the...