Wolfhart Pannenberg

¶ 2 Second, I would like to offer a way of clarifying the relation between the revelation of God on the one hand to other phenomenological descriptions of humanity, culture, and nature on the other. Bultmann opens this door with his use of the existential nature of human existence. The point here is to clarify revelation as our primary source for knowledge of God, but our knowledge of humanity and world might serve as an important point of contact for theology, preaching, and witness in the world. The debate between Bultmann and Barth, as Dr. Congdon describes it, has made one thing increasingly clear. If we are to know anything about God, it will be because God reveals who God is. The initiative is from God. Revelation is therefore an expression of the grace and love of God for humanity. We hear revelation as a strange or foreign presence. In part, such strangeness arises out of differing cultural and intellectual settings. Yet, its strangeness also arises out of its escha...

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...