Wolfhart Pannenberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century. According to Chulho Youn, “His theology surpasses that of any other theologian in its depth, scrutiny, and comprehensibility.” The late Stanley Grenz asserted that the renowned German theologian “must be included among the most creative thinkers of the 20th century,” adding that “his program has continued to influence the theological conversation not only in Germany and North America, but throughout the world.”
Pannenberg was born in Stettin—which, at the time, was part of Northern Germany—in 1928. Though he was baptized as a child, he was not raised to revere religion, choosing the path of atheism early in his development. In 1944, when Pannenberg was just a teenager, he was exposed to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which—on the one hand—skewed his view of Christianity and—on the other hand—sparked his interest in issues of philosophy. Shortly thereafter, in early January 1945, Pannenberg had a miraculous pre-conversion experience in the woods near his house. Though, in the moment, he didn’t fully comprehend what had happened to him, he somehow knew that this was the single most important event of his life. Pannenberg would later describe this encounter as the moment when Jesus Christ laid claim to him. This powerful experience became the basis of his keen sense of calling throughout his life.
Growing up in the shadows of National Socialism, Pannenberg became a member of the Hitler-Jugend movement, an inescapable destiny for adolescent boys during the Nazi regime. He enlisted in the army soon afterwards. A scabies infection spared Pannenberg from combat during the war. When Pannenberg was sent to a hospital in Northern Germany to treat his ailment, he was taken as a prisoner by the British army. Following his swift release, Pannenberg returned to the classroom, where he was introduced to an influential philosopher named Kant. It was during this time that Pannenberg’s feelings towards Christianity began to change—due in large part to positive interactions that he had had with a Christian literature teacher at the school. This educator, who was a lay member of the Confessing Church, simply did not cohere with Nietzsche’s negative portrayal of German Christians. For this reason, Pannenberg decided to explore Christianity more closely and more carefully. He would soon come to the conclusion that Christianity was the best of all philosophies.
On the basis of this newfound conviction, in the spring of 1947, Pannenberg enrolled at the Humboldt University in East Berlin to study both philosophy and theology in a scholarly setting. It was here that Pannenberg first realized that he was to be a theologian for the rest of his life. In Berlin, Pannenberg began to engage with Marxism—not only reading Karl Marx himself, but Lenin and Stalin as well. Though Pannenberg was initially impressed by the utopian idealism of Marxism, his personal exposure to the evils of two socialist or communist systems—Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Eastern Europe—made him realize that no political structure or socio-economic configuration can act as a substitute for the kingdom of God. This realization would eventually inform Pannenberg’s interpretation of the political theologies of the 1960s, especially the liberation theology of Latin America.
Pannenberg’s scholastic goals soon led him to Basel, where he spent a term studying under Karl Barth, the eminent theologian of the 20th century. Although he certainly respected Barth, Pannenberg grew dissatisfied with the “lack of philosophical rigor in his thought.” More specifically, Pannenberg was disheartened by Barth’s sharp dichotomy between general and special revelation.
Pannenberg transitioned to the University of Heidelberg in the fall of 1950. While at Heidelberg, Pannenberg was influenced by several scholars, but none were more influential than his systematic theology professor, Edmund Schlink, and his Old Testament professor, Gerhard von Rad. Through the influence of Schlink, Pannenberg arrived at the understanding that theology must be pursued in both an interdisciplinary manner and an ecumenical manner. Through the influence of von Rad, Pannenberg began to recognize the pivotal role that history plays in hermeneutics and biblical exegesis. Collectively, these two academic mentors inspired Pannenberg, in conjunction with some of his classmates, to develop a way to integrate systematic theology with von Rad’s program. This aspiration led to the formation of the so-called, “Pannenberg Circle.” The controversial conclusions of this group were eventually published in 1961, under the title Revelation as History. This book of essays, which represented a new and exciting approach to theology, functioned as the foundation of Pannenberg’s personal theological system, a system that would continue to evolve and take shape in the years to come.
Pannenberg officially submitted his doctoral thesis on the sometimes maligned medieval scholastic theologian, John Duns Scotus, in 1953. It was published the following year. He completed his Habilitationsschrift (the final academic hurdle that needed to be cleared if one wanted to become a professor in Germany) on the principle of analogy in medieval thought in 1955, which represented the conclusion of his extensive training as a student. That same year, Pannenberg transitioned from life as a pupil to life as a teacher, becoming a professor of systematic theology at the University of Heidelberg, where he also became an ordained minister. At Heidelberg, Pannenberg began to familiarize himself with the works of the famed German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he never actually became a full-fledged “Hegelian,” Pannenberg admired the sophistication of Hegel’s philosophy, appreciating the profound impact of his thought on the development of modern theology.
After Heidelberg, Pannenberg bounced around to various seminaries and universities. This included a short stint at the Lutheran Church Seminary in Wuppertal, where Pannenberg taught alongside a promising young theologian by the name of Jurgen Moltmann. It was during this time that Pannenberg started to work on his first systematic projects, one on the topic of anthropology and the other on the topic of Christology. In 1961, he moved to the University of Mainz, where he served as the distinguished Chair of Systematic Theology until 1967. While at Mainz, Pannenberg faced the daunting task of teaching the whole of Christian dogmatics.
Throughout his long and illustrious career, Pannenberg maintained a strong presence in North America and the United States, beginning with an invitation to serve as a guest professor at the University of Chicago in 1963. His engagement with the leading proponents of American process thought significantly shaped his theology, and his interactions with a diverse, multi-denominational American church—together with his participation in the World Council of Churches—encouraged Pannenberg to see himself as both a theologian called to minister to the church universal, not just to the specific Lutheran tradition in which he was groomed, and a philosopher called to converse with the whole world, not just with those residing in his home country of Germany. Pannenberg’s growing involvement in ecumenical theology, which was no doubt an extension of his unique American experience, gained significant traction after his move to the Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich in 1968, a teaching post that almost perfectly overlapped with his longstanding role as director of the Ecumenical Institute.
Pannenberg capped off his life’s work with the publication of his three-volume Systematic Theology in 1993. This monumental achievement in Christian thinking represented the holistic integration of the various strands of Pannenberg’s ambitious theological enterprise—thoughtfully arranged and neatly organized in a unified, coherent, and accessible explication of the Christian faith and the revealed truths of God. Pannenberg immediately retired after the release of his magnum opus, but continued to live and work in a small town outside the municipality of Gräfelfing, Germany until his eventual passing in 2014. All in all, a current bibliography of Pannenberg’s scholarly writings extends to well over 600 titles—and the amount of secondary literature is also vast. Pannenberg received many honors and awards throughout his notable career, including honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow (1972), the University of Manchester (1977), Trinity College Dublin (1979), the University of St. Andrews (1993), the University of Cambridge (1997), and the University of Comillas in Madrid (1999).
Wolfhart Pannenberg’s legacy is crucial for several reasons: First, he championed both the historicity of the resurrection and the eternal validity of the deity of Jesus Christ in an age of intense skepticism and distrust, characterized by the demythologization of Rudolf Bultmann and his intellectual descendants. Pannenberg was a bastion of theological realism in an academic environment that had reduced the supernatural to mere metaphor or symbol. Working within the parameters of the historical-critical method, Pannenberg demonstrated that one could be both a critical scholar and a committed believer. He affirmed the dual-truths of the incarnation and the resurrection without recourse to the Gospel of John, which has been all but discarded in modern biblical scholarship—mapping out a way forward for future generations, made up of both Christian scholars and laypeople alike. Simply put, in an intellectual milieu defined by incredulity, Pannenberg successfully reconciled the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith.
Second, in an age dominated by historical agnosticism, Pannenberg was a defender of historical realism, even biblical realism. In contrast to the fideism and existentialism of Neo-Orthodoxy, which downplayed the importance of history and questioned the legitimacy of historical knowledge, Pannenberg advocated for evidentialism, rational freedom, thoughtful deliberation, historical inquiry, and the realism of salvation history. As opposed to Karl Barth, who relegated God’s self-revelation to the restrictive, albeit capable and trustworthy, boundaries of the biblical text—reducing divine revelation, at least in some sense, to the purely propositional—Pannenberg reopened God’s revelation of himself to the vast canvas of universal history and the expansive text of space-time. Pannenberg dared to believe that God was ever-present and ever-active in the world—not just in and through Scripture, but in and through nature and shared human experience. It is not merely the written word that reveals the character, purposes, and promises of God, but the very actions of the Triune Community (Father, Son, and Holy Spirt) in human history. Thus, Pannenberg reawakened a vivacious and visceral theism in the wake of Enlightenment Deism and in the face of Post-Enlightenment atheism.
Third, in a post-modern situation in which all “meta-narratives” and worldviews and belief systems are called into question and approached with suspicion, Pannenberg boldly recast the lofty vision of medieval scholasticism. In imitation of scholastic heroes like Anselm and Aquinas, he reinstated theology to its rightful place amongst the human disciplines, reasserting its dominion as the “Queen of the Sciences.” Challenging the most radical iterations of postmodernism, which had basically eradicated objectivity from the collective consciousness—substituting the individual and the relative for the universal and the absolute—Pannenberg had the audacity to construct an all-encompassing meta-narrative, to build a towering and daunting cathedral of ideas, amidst the nihilism, cynicism, disillusionment, and deconstructionism that were slowly emerging in a disenchanted world that was promised great things, but had seen too much. In defiance of certain fanatical factions within the greater post-modern movement—destructive factions that sought to deconstruct all complex intellectual arrangements and demolish all elaborate and interconnected systems of thought—sowing fragmentation and division in the world of ideas and theories, Pannenberg sought to reconcile philosophy with theology, reason with faith, science with religion, the age of the Enlightenment with the post-Enlightenment age, and the modern world with ancient thought. He united all of these things in the all-consuming idea of God—the "unifying unity of all unity”—the source and goal of all reality. Pannenberg rightly understood theology as the study of everything, for all things have to do with God, the primal ground and enduring end of all creation.
Finally, Pannenberg is important because of his eschatology. Along with his cohort, Jürgen Moltmann, his theology has been characterized as a “theology of hope.” For Pannenberg, this hope is revealed in the warp and woof of human history. It is proleptic in nature—functioning as an anticipation, a sign, of what is to come. In the key moments of salvation history, the future is breaking into the present. In these decisive events, eternity is revealing itself in the very fabric and fluidity of time. Pannenberg was not just a theological and historical realist; he was also an eschatological realist. His eschatological realism was rooted in the power of the resurrection, an event that took place at the center of human history. This salvific event stands as a prolepsis, an enduring symbol of the consummation of time in the middle of time, a dynamic and redemptive foreshadowing of the eschatological future in the present. Like the Apostle Paul, Pannenberg believed in the “kingdom come” because he believed that the kingdom had, at least in part, already come—making itself known and revealing its reality—in Jesus of Nazareth. In Pannenberg’s eschatology the true relationship between time and eternity and the economic trinity and the immanent trinity begin to come into focus. When time is consummated and when the economic trinity reaches its final form, all things will be recapitulated in the Triune Life and placed under the rule of Love, the benevolent dominion of Father, Son, and Spirit in the eschatological future.