“Kurvenreich” was a road sign that greeted us often in the Bavarian Alps. “Abundant in curves” is, in fact, not only a warning appropriate to some driving conditions; it is an especially apt descriptive of German theology. Americans compensate for neglected emphases in religion by establishing new cults; Germans, on the other hand, produce new systems of theology.
A decade after its first publication in German, Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Revelation as History has now appeared in both a hardback (1968) and a paperback (1969) translation under a Macmillan label. As contributor to and editor of the volume, Pannenberg with his theological colleagues explores some long-neglected routes on the excursionary winding road of neo-Protestant theology.
The evangelical value of Pannenberg’s view lies in his recognition, long overdue in neo-Protestant dogmatics, of the revelatory significance of universal history, as inclusive also of special redemptive events, and supremely of the resurrection of the crucified Jesus as a striking anticipation of God’s future eschatological revelation. Over against dialectical-existential theology, which misconceives revelation as a present encounter in the internal “historicity” of the self, Pannenberg preserves the external, historically factual mediation of divine revelation centering in Jesus’ resurrection as the event decisive for the future of both church history and world history. With Moltmann, Pannenberg therefore happily extricates contemporary theology a bit from some of the strangleholds of Kantian criticism, which disallowed any and all external divine revelation in nature and history.
The doctrine of revelation, Pannenberg concedes in Revelation as History, “must somehow be confirmed on the basis of the biblical witnesses if it is to be theologically justifiable.” Somewhere or other almost every neo-Protestant theologian sends up such a flag salute to the Bible, only to make a revolutionary departure from these self-same Scriptures. Pannenberg is no exception.
Pannenberg gives a notably non-biblical turn to his theology of revelation in his failure to identify revelation adequately as a rational category, and in his one-sided connection of divine self-disclosure solely with God’s future eschatological manifestation. Nowhere does Pannenberg give a definitive statement of the noetic or epistemic content of divine revelation. As with Moltmann, so with Pannenberg, the emphasis that the consummation or completion of revelation is future is made to relativize all pre-eschatological disclosure, save only for the anticipative historical event of Jesus’ resurrection. But, like Bultmann’s dass, this notable exception may require more contextual anchorage than Pannenberg allows if we are to avoid its loss as a myth.
In his book on Christology, Jesus—God and Man, Pannenberg tells us that the prophetic and apostolic statements about the nature of God are to be regarded not as universally valid knowledge of God-in-himself but as doxological affirmations in the language of worship. But valid knowledge of God, I should think, is indispensable in worship. When the Apostle Paul emphasized in Romans 1 that God reveals himself objectively to the minds of men, he added that God gave the Gentiles up to self-deceptions because they glorified him not as God; in brief, authentic knowledge is the alternative to vain imaginations (Rom. 1:20 f.). It is simply not Gnostic to view divine revelation as conveying ontological information about God, nor is it Hellenistic to see the revelation of the glory of God in incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth.
Pannenberg’s exposition of the nature of revelation seems influenced at times by Hegel, by Ritschl, and by Troeltsch. Ritschl’s special emphasis had been that while God is revealed only in his acts, it is not God-in-himself that we know; the work of Jesus (in Pannenberg, his crucifixion and resurrection), and not the person of Jesus as incarnate Logos, was for Ritschl the locus of revelation. Ritschl’s brighter students never could discover what the “thing” revealed in phenomena is, if it is not the “thing-in-itself”; accordingly, the historical influence of Jesus embellished by value-judgments became for them the heart of Christianity.
Pannenberg refuses to identify revelation one-sidedly with Jesus of Nazareth, as did Ritschl, but stresses that God is revealed in universal history; contrary to Hegelian idealism, however, which sees history as the logical unfolding of the Idea, Pannenberg holds that the apocalyptic reading of history grasps God’s universal plan anticipatively disclosed in the fate of Jesus. But nowhere do Pannenberg and his theological cohorts so spell out this plan that it becomes significant for the subsequent history of the nations; in fact, the whole approach to historical revelation seems in some passages, quite in deference to Troeltsch, to be given over to what is now often called modern historical consciousness. The historical character of revelation comes then to mean the dispensability of the supernatural as a category of interpretation, and God himself is assigned a history. Avoid deism we must, to be sure; but if God is other than man and nature, then the category of the supernatural remains indispensable.
Finally, a clear weakness of Pannenberg’s view is his assumption that historical events are self-explanatory, and that the category of revelation is to be detached from the Divine Word and associated wholly with external historical acts; prophets or apostles, accordingly, are not to be viewed in terms of “a mediator between what happens and the one who experiences it” (Revelation as History). This view is so contrary to the prophetic-apostolic understanding of revelation that it virtually nullifies much of what Pannenberg gains by his recognition of the externality of historical revelation. For the Divine Word not only strikingly precedes and prepares for some redemptive events (e.g., the Exodus) but is also sometimes given independently of them to God’s spokesmen who are chosen bearers of his promise or warning.
Pannenberg does less than justice to revelation as a unity of event and interpretation, and to the fact that both the past event and its interpretation are now mediated to us in Scripture alone. The meaning of the saving events is not self-evident but is illumined from above, and their normative objective interpretation is to be found only in the inspired Word.
CARL F. H. HENRY
