O' Donovan's Defense of Christian Mission

Oliver O’ DONOVAN, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). xii + 304 pp.

As the subtitle of Oliver O’ Donovan’s book makes clear, Desire of the Nations marks the author’s bold attempt to rediscover the roots of political theology. The scope of the work is nothing short of magisterial as the author traces the trajectory of political thought from the moment of Israel’s formation through to our current era, post-Christendom. The author remarks in the preface to the paperback edition of his work that what he set out to uncover was Christ’s kingship. This did not, however, prevent some of his readers to in fact see the work as a defense of Christendom. We proceed to outline the broad contours of Desire of the Nations and argue that, far from being a defense of Christendom, O’ Donovan’s work is better understood as a defense of Christian mission.
The book begins by addressing the suspicion directed toward the very concept of political theology in the present era, having been unmasked in the modern age as supposedly nothing more than a means to power and control. Despite the difficulties that this suspicious hermeneutic poses for anyone attempting to undertake political theology nowadays, O’ Donovan is to be commended for courageously stepping up to the plate in prophetic stance to take up the challenge against suspicion (6 - 12).
According to O’ Donovan, political theology, as with any theological undertaking, must begin with the articulation of concepts that comport with reality, and hence with objective truth. “True political concepts” are what this author is after, and he believes that chief among such concepts is that of political authority. In the face of modernity’s and post-modernity’s inability to speak intelligibly of political authority O’ Donovan turns first to Israel’s history and the divine reign revealed within that history. Israel’s political forms, believes O’ Donovan, are normative for all political reflection (25). Such a claim is already to place the author’s commitments emphatically and unapologetically within the sphere of Christian confession: O’ Donovan’s approach to political theology is a dogmatic political theology.
Having surveyed the manner in which political authority was understood within Israel, O’ Donovan concludes with remarkable insight that, in Israel, the notion of political authority arises where power, execution of right, and the perpetuation of tradition are assured together in one co-ordinated agency (46). Such a large-scale claim cannot help but face proportionate scrutiny by many who would want to resist such a unified reading of the Old Testament (and of the NT for that matter as we shall see below). In any case, it is welcome to see a sustained, attentive and nuanced reading of Scripture at centre stage, rather than at the periphery, of political theological discourse.
For O’ Donovan it is precisely in the person of the crucified and resurrected Jesus that each of the above aspects - power, right and tradition - find their fulfillment. Jesus is presented as an unmistakably political figure; to put faith in him is to acknowledge God’s political rule at work in his ministry (113). Thus, in light of the Old and New Testament narratives, political theology acknowledges one and only one authority in the person of Jesus. Under Christ, says O’ Donovan, the authorization of secular authority is dramatically relativized and made provisional, existing only for the sake of enabling the church’s subsequent mission and the exercise of judgment (147).
In the one unified act consisting of the four moments of Advent, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension, O’ Donovan sees Jesus as representative of Israel on the one hand, and the Church on the other. In this very act of representation, Jesus is said to authorize the church as a truly political community (146). Through the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost O’ Donovan believes that the Church proceeds to recapitulate the mission of the Christ-event itself as the gathering, suffering and glad community that speaks the word of God (161). Importantly for the author, the church is not to be thought of as being governed by its various institutions, but by only by Christ himself through his Spirit (171). Church order, far from being dispensable, however, functions as a necessary “badge” of the Church’s persisting identity as a political community authorized by Christ (172).
The type of political theology presented throughout Desire of the Nations is characteristically one of Two Kingdoms - one which sees the slowly fading kingdom of worldly powers overlapping with the coming ultimate reign of God in Christ (193). It is in the context of this dual authority that O’ Donovan offers a genealogical account of how political theology eventually arrived at Christendom. For O’ Donovan, Christendom is not to be confused either with revealed history or the church’s tradition. It is but the idea of a Christian secular political order put into practice. Over against the Hauerwasian critique of so called Constantinianism, he rightly understands Christendom not as the church’s buying into of Rome’s project, but quite the reverse vis-a-vis its gospel mission (215 - 216). The church’s relation to the state, says O’ Donovan, can never be one of identity, but persists in the stance of martyrdom. Thus, Christendom was the result of the church’s witness which sought and succeeded in humbling the state before the authority of Christ (219).
Thus, when O’ Donovan argues that the legacy of Christendom to the modern West is political liberalism (228) and that it is from that tradition that contemporary political theological reflection must proceed, he is able to both affirm and disaffirm various aspects. On the one hand, the liberal tradition is born out of the four moments of Christ’s representative action. On the other hand, however, liberal tradition as it has eventuated in late modernity under the influence of voluntarism and social contractarianism, has also, paradoxically, become a reflection of the Anti-Christ (252 - 284). Thus, O’ Donovan’s narrative of modern liberalism is one that is complicatedly mixed and requiring much discernment if the church is to see the Christ within it. But, such should the church’s quandary be if the the earthly and heavenly cities are indeed a permixtum.
As we noted earlier some have come to interpret Desire of the Nations as the author’s defense of Christendom. The reading is predictable, but rather a flat one. What the author does defend, however, is a broad depiction of modern liberalism, which has gained the status of the church’s tradition, bequeathed even in the passing of Christendom. It is important to realize that in defending the four aspects of modern liberalism he is in fact ultimately seeking to defend the four aspects of Christ’s mission to the world: in defending liberal freedom he defends the effectiveness of the Advent of Christ who has come and relativized all earthly authority (252 - 256); in defending liberal mercy in judgment he defends the effectiveness of the Passion of Christ who suffered judgment for the sake of others’ redemption (256 - 261); in defending liberal natural rights, he defends Christ’s resurrection and the vindication of the humane order of the world which followed (262 - 268); and, finally, in defending liberalism’s openness to speech O’ Donovan defends the freedom won to the church at Pentecost, which addresses God in prayerful and prophetic speech (268 - 271). Indeed, what the author intended to achieve in writing Desire of the Nations he has succeeded in doing - not a defense of Christendom but of Christ’s kingship, truly the desire of the nations, and the effectiveness of church’s mission to all political authorities, which witnesses to that rule.

Reading Augustine with Ward and O' Donovan (3)

The vagueness which surrounds the eschaton in Ward’s theology means that it is exceedingly difficult for pilgrims of the earthly city to make political and moral judgments within the saeculum. Furthermore, political and moral judgments, whenever they are made, are entirely restricted to, and hence drastically relativised by, the particular communities from which they originate. Thus, Ward states, “the language of good and bad, worse and better, worst and best, can only have reference internal to the organization and life of the community in question.”[1] The postmodern uncertainty that characterizes Ward’s reading of Augustine stems from a failure to come to terms with the announcement that in Christ, by the Spirit, the present already participates in the final reality of the eschaton. Once again, O’ Donovan’s comments are helpful. Speaking of the “indeterminate” aspect that is undeniably present in Augustine’s definition of a people he states:

“this element of indeterminacy does not mean that the objects of community-forming love are a matter of open choice. For the underlying unity of knowledge and love means that love can take form only as a cognizance of reality, adequate or inadequate. There is a an objective measure by which we may differentiate “better” from “worse” loves, which is the adequacy of their grasp of reality.”[2]

Thus, pilgrims of the earthly city already have a purchase upon the eschatological reality. There is present knowledge of “better” and “worse” political and moral judgments, as the Spirit’s divine ministry makes the “then” of the eschaton into a “now”.[3]
One final criticism must be raised against Ward’s analogical world-view which, as we indicated above, is predicated on a trinitarian understanding of creaturely participation, arrived at by a comparison between Augustine’s City of God and On the Trinity. After comparing these two works Ward came to see that, “human beings as made ‘to the image’ of the Trinity is significant for civil relations, for the Trinity is a community of co-equals.”[4] Furthermore, Ward came to relate social actions analogously to the intratrinitarian relations: “the Trinity is the very structure of loving…that informs all loving.”[5] This particular reading would be rather uncontroversial if it weren’t for two crucial features of Augustine’s theology that Ward compromises. The first is his neglect of the fact that, according to Augustine, the trinitarian relations are never abstracted from the divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.[6] But this is precisely what Ward does in reducing his account of the Trinity to the abstract “structure” of “lover, what is loved, and loving.”[7] Indeed, Ward cannot but appeal to an abstract notion of the Trinity in light of the displacement of Christ’s body onto the church. In doing so he unfortunately succumbs to a thoroughly pluralist and relativist ethic, highlighted in his statement, “[love] bears witness, and ultimately that is what we all do – Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Bhuddist, atheist, agnostic – we each best witness to what we believe. The judgment of the witness lies elsewhere.” One is want to ask Ward, “where, then, might that judgment lie?” Secondly, Ward neglects the Augustinian emphasis on the intimate connection between love and knowledge. As we have already outlined above, the dire implications this has upon political and moral judgment in the saeculum are massive. O’ Donovan offers yet another helpful corrective:

“the unity of knowledge and love reflects, for Augustine, the image of the divine Trinity, in which the Word and the Spirit are consubstantial and coeternal. When we love some thing, however badly, it is a sign within our created being that we are made by God for God, in the order of the divine Word and the power of the divine Spirit. Our variously ignoble loves are not simply different from the love which bears all things and believes all things; nor is it wrong to take the content of that holy love as the measure of the challenge that God has set for our communal loves.”[8]

[1] Cities, 232.
[2] Common Objects, 23.
[3] Oliver O’ Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Leicester: IVP, 1986), 105.
[4] Cities, 235.
[5] Ibid.
[6] St. Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8 - 15, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1 – 23.
[7] Cities, 235.
[8] Common Objects, 24.

Reading Augustine with Ward and O' Donovan (2)

A number of critical comments must be made on Ward’s reading of Augustine. The first is related to Ward’s theology of the displacement of Christ’s body upon which his reading of Augustine is based. According to Ward, Christ’s body has undergone a series of “displacements”: At the incarnation the materiality of Jesus’ body is made “unstable” by virtue of his miraculous birth; the transfiguration displaces Jesus’ body in its presentation as the erotic sublime which directs our desires beyond his embodied presence; the eucharist displaces the body of Jesus as it comes to be revealed as an expanding body capable of incorporating other bodies into his own; the crucifixion displaces Jesus’ body in its objectification as an undifferentiated “dead, unwanted, discardable thing”; the resurrection displaces Jesus’ body as “figured” by the emptiness of his tomb and the continual absence of Jesus’ body from the post-resurrection narratives.[1] Finally, Ward’s account of “displacement Christology” concludes with the ascension of Christ, whereby Jesus’ body is continually displaced and transposed onto the church “without remainder.”[2]

Among the numerous deficiencies in Ward’s account of Christology is an alarming absence of Christ’s parousia from the otherwise Nicene structure of his account. Having argued that Christ’s ascended body has been displaced onto the Church, the very notion of Christ’s return becomes meaningless. The disconnection of Christology from eschatology that necessarily follows – since Christology collapses into ecclesiology - means that the eschaton itself, upon which Ward’s theology of the city totally depends, risks being infinitely displaced. In Ward’s “Augustinian” analogical world-view, the eschaton functions as the crucial limiting condition which prevents the saeculum from spiraling into the nihil.[3] It is the eschaton which prevents his notion of secular parody from finally overcoming the eternal reality of the heavenly city. Yet, the utter non-specificity by which Ward is willing to speak of this eschaton means that his notion of the saeculum only ever teeters on the brink of the nothingness. The eschaton comes to possess a strictly formal function that is void of material content. Indeed, in Ward’s account of the earthly city, there is never a concrete hope that the eschaton will ever arrive because Christ never returns to judge the earthly city. The Christian story, which the Nicene Creed seeks in its own way to narrate, is suddenly stripped of its climactic ending. Thus, speaking of this truncated and open-ended Christian narrative he states, “We do not know how the story ends and we do not know how far we have come in the plot.”[4] But this is a grave misreading of both the Christian tradition and Augustine on the saeculum. Oliver O’ Donovan’s comments on the saeculum in his reflections on Augustine’s definition of a people in City of God are salutary on this score:

“‘Secularity’ is an irreducibly eschatological notion; it requires an eschatological faith to sustain it, a belief in a disclosure of that is ‘not yet’ but is absolutely presupposed as the inner meaning of what we know already. If we allow the ‘not yet’ to slide to ‘never,’ we say something entirely different and wholly incompatible, for the virtue that undergirds all secular politics is an expectant patience.”

It is precisely the sliding from “not yet” to “never” to which Ward’s eschatology is susceptible. A properly analogical account of the earthly city whose reality and hope are grounded in the eschaton will therefore have recourse to the doctrine of Christ’s return, as St. Augustine himself had in Book XX of City of God: “Christ is to come from heaven to judge both the living and the dead.”[6]


[1] Ibid., 97 - 112.
[2] Ibid., 112 – 114.
[3] Ibid., 230.
[4] Ibid., 259.
[5] Oliver O’ Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 42.
[6] City of God, 895.

Reading Augustine with Ward and O' Donovan (1)

In the final chapter of Cities of God Graham Ward highlighted the indispensability of St. Augustine for reflecting theologically about the city: “as we move towards summing up a Christian theology of the contemporary city,” he stated, “it is through Augustine that we must proceed.”[1] The reading of City of God that followed began with an exposition of the earthly and heavenly cities. True to his “radical orthodoxy,” Ward noted that the amor sui that issues from the dominandi libido of the earthly city is but the “perverse imitation” of the amor dei that issues from the caritate of the heavenly city.[2] Despite the antithetical relationship between these “two loves” Ward rightly noted that, for Augustine, the earthly and heavenly cities are permixtum, and went on to suggest that in the saeculum both amor sui and amor dei as well as dominandi libido and caritate are difficult to distinguish from one another.[3] Thus, he understood Augustine to advocate the suspension of all forms of political and moral judgment in this world in deferment to the unveiling of certain knowledge at the eschaton: “only in the eschaton will we be able to judge rightly and understand rightly, and thus have knowledge of anything but in the most provisional of senses.”[4] Ward then proceeded to broaden the scope of his analysis to conclude that it is not merely in relation to the two loves that the two cities are permixtum but that this is also true with regard to such diverse categories as the good, peace and indeed human language as a whole. Thus, according to Ward, Augustine’s world-view of mixed cities was analogical.[5] Furthermore, this analogical world-view, whilst being explicitly “trinitarian” and participatory in character, is specifically conditioned by both the fall and parody. According to Ward, whatever Augustine predicated of the civitas terrana was but a fallen parody of what he predicated of the civitas dei.[6]
Ward’s peculiar reading of Augustine took a significant turn when he began to draw from the work of Michel de Certeau. Ward borrowed from Certeau in asserting that the architectural design of the earthly city forms the structural “grammar” by which the city’s inhabitants construct a metaphorical discourse on reality.[7] It is precisely on this point that Ward believed to have detected a Certeau-like logic in Augustine’s definition of a “people” (“the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love…the better the objects of this agreement, the better the people; the worse the objects of this love, the worse the people”) in Book XIX of City of God. According to Ward, when Augustine defined a “people” he was affirming that all value judgments pertaining to so-called “better” and “worse” communities necessarily fall within a world-view of pluralism, equivalence and relativism.[8] Thus, in the earthly city, “all meaning is set adrift.”[9] To be sure, Ward was cautious to maintain that Augustine, unlike Certeau, put definite limits on the “semiotic drift of the sign” within the earthly city. However, this appeal to Augustinian stability of the divine order fell swiftly by the wayside on account of Ward’s “displacement Christology.”[10] The overall result is Ward’s pronouncement of an equivocity of immanence: “In the saeculum as such,” he asserted, “all meanings are equivalent because all comparisons and contrasts are immanent…meaning now is equivocal”[11]
[1] Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 226 – 227.
[2] Ibid., 227.
[3] Ibid. 228.
[4] Ibid., 233.
[5] Ibid., 229 – 230.
[6] Ibid., 230.
[7] Ibid., 230 – 232.
[8] Ibid., 232.
[9] Ibid., 232 - 233.
[10] See Part 2.
[11] Ibid., 233.

Bonhoeffer's Ecclesiology (4)

To be sure, in Bonhoeffer’s view, “the church is Christ existing as church-community”. (p. 211). However, this statement must be qualified by his belief that the church is also at one and the same time a sinful church. Thus, Bonhoeffer’s follow up remark that the above is true only, “as long as Christ is present in his word”. (p. 211). On a similar note, Bonhoeffer asks if the “collective person” of the church-community can really be said to be the body of Christ (p. 214). He believes this to be surely so, but, once again, “only insofar as God’s own self is at work in the act of repentance,” an act that Bonhoeffer assures us is mediated to the church-community by the word (p. 213). It is on account of sin, Bonhoeffer reminds us, that a distance will always remain between the real and actual church. That the church’s existence “as Christ” is wholly dependent upon the mediation of the word is because only the word is able to continually break up the sinful church to be the community-of-the-cross and then restore it to be the Easter-community (p. 213 – 214). Thus, the distinction between realism and actualism certainly does narrow in Bonhoeffer’s discussion of the empirical church. He can even affirm that the “invisible” church is visible from the outset. (p. 220. n. 92). However, it is important that we realize this is not a brute given for Bonhoeffer, but is only true to the degree that the existence of the sinful church is ever mediated by the word and sacrament: “The unity is established through word and sacrament…The word that works in history builds the bridge between the invisible and visible church.” (p. 219).

In conclusion, Bonhoeffer sought to overcome the two central misunderstandings of ecclesiology, one historicist and the other extrinsicist, by means of a realist-actualist ecclesiology of mediation by word and sacrament. This may be summarised in the following: (1) Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology held to a perspective on Christology that identified the church as being the real body of Christ. (2) This realist aspect of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology corresponds to an explicitly eschatological reality, which Bonhoeffer identifies as the invisible church. (3) The realist aspect of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology was balanced by a pneumatological actualism, whereby the real body of Christ is understood as ever being actualized historically in the empirical form of the church through the work of the Holy Spirit. (4) Whilst in some parts of Sanctorum Communio the clear distinction between the realist and actualist aspects of the church diminishes, Bonhoeffer never collapses these into a unity this side of the eschaton. (5) On account of the church’s sin a distance always remains between the real and actual church that needs to be ever mediated by word and sacrament.

Bonhoeffer's Ecclesiology (3)

Importantly, the bridge between the reality of the church in Christ and its actualization as a concrete community within history is, for Bonhoeffer, not left to the wills of individual human beings but is completed by the work of Holy Spirit. In his own words, “the Christ in whom the church-community is already completed seeks to win the heart by his Spirit in order to incorporate it into the actualized community of Christ” (p. 158). As we mentioned above, the church-community is actualized within history through the personal appropriation of God’s will by his people. For Bonhoeffer, therefore, the Holy Spirit is none other than the very will of God: “The Holy Spirit is the will of God that gathers individuals together to be the church-community, maintains it, and is at work only within it” (p. 143).

Crucially, Bonhoeffer re-asserts his christological foundation in his discussion of the Holy Spirit by maintaining that the Spirit’s work is never unmediated but is always mediated by the word (p. 157). Since Christ must remain the focal point of the church’s temporal actualization then the Spirit can work only through the word, which is the very word of Christ. (p. 158). “Christ and the Holy Spirit are at work in this word; and both are inseparably linked - the Holy Spirit has no other content than the fact of Christ. Christ is the criterion and the aim of the work of the Holy Spirit” (p. 161). This point concerning the role of the word in mediating the work of Christ and the Spirit is vital for clarifying the role that realism-actualism plays in Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the empirical form the church.

At certain points within Sanctorum Communio the distinction between the two modes of the church’s being appears to collapse. In a telling, albeit ambiguous, statement, Bonhoeffer said, “as a concrete historical community, in the relativity of its forms and its imperfect and modest appearance, it is the body of Christ, Christ’s presence on earth, for it has his word” (p. 209). The statement seems to undercut the distinction that was argued for above with respect to the real and actual church. This is the reading of James Woelfel, for example. In fact, however, when Bonhoeffer makes the above assertion he means it in the sense encountered previously - namely, that the church of history is the “body of Christ” but only to the degree that it is actualized as such through the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit by word and sacrament.

Bonhoeffer's Ecclesiology (2)

An important qualification should be raised at this point. For Bonhoeffer, the notion that the church was really the body of Christ could only be understood from the perspective of eschatology. Thus, whilst the visible church in his view was that which was comprised of the social body in worship and work in the present, the body of Christ itself remained for Bonhoeffer an object of faith and hope - an eschatological, and hence invisible, reality: Speaking of the church, he stated, “it is invisible as an eschatological reality, as the body of Christ.” (p. 141).

The identification of the “body of Christ” as an eschatological entity led Bonhoeffer to account for the church’s status in the present history in a very particular way. He did so by naming the church of history as the new will and purpose of God for humanity that was made visible in history. (p. 141). Whilst the church is already “completed” in a real, albeit eschatological, sense in Christ, the will of God must be ever actualized in history through the personal appropriation of this will by his people, a matter which we shall return to in our discussion of the role that the Holy Spirit plays in Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology (p. 143).

Thus, in Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology we find a distinction being drawn between what might be called the real church and the actual church. On the one hand there is the historical community, vicariously represented by Christ as the fulfillment of a new humanity, and continually actualized within time. On the other hand is the eschatological church, already brought to real completion in Christ in eternity. In Bonhoeffer’s own words, “The relationship of Jesus Christ to the Christian church is to be understood in a dual sense. (1) The church is already completed in Christ, time is suspended. (2) The church is to be built within time upon Christ as the firm foundation.” (p. 153).

Bonhoeffer's Ecclesiology (1)

In his 1927 doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “there are basically two ways to misunderstand the church, one historicizing and the other religious; the former confuses the church with the religious community, the latter with the Realm of God” (125). He was there asserting that an adequate account of the church must properly attend both to its divinely established “reality” that transcended mere human social relations as well as to the fact that it was “bound by history” (125). As James Woelfel has pointed out, Bonhoeffer was, in effect, seeking to avoid the modern Anglo-American progressivist tendency, inspired by Kant, which saw the divine aspect of the church as merely an ideal goal toward which its existence as a real social institution was to strive. Bonhoeffer sought to overcome the ecclesiological misunderstandings outlined above on the basis of a realist-actualist ecclesiology.

In order to avoid the dual misunderstandings mentioned above, Bonhoeffer began by ensuring that his ecclesiology was rooted upon a thoroughly christological foundation. Over against ecclesiologies which sought to ground religious community upon a generic notion of “the holy,” or “human unanimity of spirit” he was adamant that, “the church-community exists through Christ’s action. It is elected in Christ from eternity...It is the new humanity in the new Adam...It has been created in a real sense only by the death of Christ” (137 - 138). Bonhoeffer went on to further delineate a two fold relation of Christ to the church. Accordingly, Christ was not only the foundation, cornerstone, and master builder of the church, but was also at one and the same time the body of the church herself. Christ’s “real presence” was said to be always for the church at all times. (139). Clearly, Bonhoeffer was asserting a remarkably strong correspondence between Christ and the church-community: “Where the body of Christ is,” he announced, “there the church truly is” (140). Furthermore,  Bonhoeffer perceived the church to constitute a collective personality within herself which was to be identified with Christ himself. According to Bonhoeffer, Christ exists in the form of what he called the church-community (141). “It is none other than Christ who ‘is’ the church” (157).

Bonhoeffer: Church and Community

"Since I as a Christian cannot live without the church, since I owe my life to the church and now belong to it, so my merits are no longer my own but belong to the church. Only because the church lives one life in Christ, as it were, can I as a Christian say that the chastity of others helps me when my desires tempt me, that the fasting of others benefits me, and that the prayers of my neighbours is offered in my stead" ~ Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio, p. 183.

Balthasar on Christ and the Old Testament

"The form of Christ is inseparable from the Old Testament; together they constitute the one historical revelation in a diptych of type and antitype, promise and fulfilment. Within this unique system of order, Christ's form is indeed related to an overall order, but we cannot say therefore that Christ is subordinated to that order; for the point is precisely that promise and fulfilment are not neutral parts of a whole from which something univocal could be abstracted; promise as such has its truth in fulfilment. In so far as the promise, precisely, is not itself the fulfilled truth, it does indeed participate, but only participate, in the uniqueness of the fulfilment" ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics: Volume 1: Seeing the Form, p. 496.

(4) Pannenberg: History, Revelation, Resurrection

In his mature Systematic Theology, which commenced publication in German in 1988, Pannenberg may be seen to slightly reformulate the “from below” approach which he took in Jesus – God and Man. He states, “Rightly understood […] the two lines of argument from above and from below are complementary”.[1] There seems to be several reasons for this shifting accommodation to an argument “from above”. First, his Systematic Theology finally moves beyond the limited monographic genre of Jesus – God and Man towards a full-scale dogmatics. Pannenberg’s task, therefore, becomes one of relating Christology to the Doctrine of God proper, expressed in fully Trinitarian terms.[2] Second, Pannenberg is responding to various criticisms of his earlier work. Karl Barth, for example, wrote to his former pupil in the same year that Jesus – God and Man was published:

“My first reaction on reading your book was one of horror when on the very first page I found you […] intended to pursue a path from below to above”.[3]

Thus, we see Pannenberg much more willing to speak of the pre-existence of Christ and of fulfilling his eternal Sonship in the incarnation, even without immediate reference to the retroactivity of Jesus’ resurrection.[4] Further, whereas in the past Pannenberg merely asserted the historicity of the resurrection event, in his Systematic Theology he ventures to speak of the resurrection as a ‘metaphor’. We will discuss this further in the next post, but for now it will suffice to note that the concept of “metaphor” already contains a 'supra-historical' element within it. Despite the slight reformulation of the doctrine of the resurrection in his later Systematic Theology, Pannenberg never came to explicitly repudiate his earlier claims, and so we must believe them to stand, however nuanced, as the basic groundwork of his mature Christology.[5]

[1] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, 289.
[2] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, 289. cf. Stanley J. Grenz, Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 134.
[3] Karl Barth, Karl Barth Letters1961 – 1968. ed. Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt. Trans Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1981), 178.
[4] Cf. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, 325.
[5] Whilst Pannenberg does not repeat the claims he made in Jesus – God and Man he frequently refers the reader to his earlier work. cf. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, 277; 282 – 83; 289.

(3) Pannenberg: History, Revelation, Resurrection

I showed in my earlier post that Pannenberg believes to have dogmatically established the resurrection as the ground for Jesus’ unity with God. The necessary next step then, if he is to remain true to his Christology “from below”, is to somehow defend the resurrection as a historical event - an object of knowledge, not merely of faith. The resurrection must stand as the best historical explanation of the New Testament witness and the rise of Christianity.[1] Thus, Pannenberg argues that the resurrection of Jesus has, since the 19th century, fallen prey to an erroneous use of Ernst Troeltsch’s historical ‘principle of analogy’ (see Kim Fabricius' fantastic sermon on Troeltsch and the resurrection here.[2] That the probability of a past event is ruled out simply because there is no analogy to it in the present is to discount unique events off hand. Further, he argues that natural science cannot rule out the resurrection in principle since by nature it is incapable of making definitive judgments about the possibility or impossibility of individual events.[3] In positive terms, Pannenberg cites the Jerusalem empty tomb tradition, a fact that could not even be denied by Christianity’s Jewish opponents, as evidence for the resurrection.[4] Furthermore, the presence of women witnesses at the empty tomb also attest to the resurrection. This could not have been fabricated in a Markan “apologetic tendentious legend” since women were not considered to be reliable witnesses in the Jewish setting.[5] Finally, in his most recent historical defense of the resurrection, Pannenberg addresses Gerd Lüdemann’s claim that the New Testament “apparitions” of the Risen Jesus originated in the disciples’ psychological projections.[6] On the New Testament evidence alone, Pannenberg argues that Lüdemann’s thesis can only be believed under the antecedent presupposition that history precludes divine activity.[7] We must stress that for Pannenberg, this effort to ground the resurrection in history is not a mere apologetic addendum to the theological task proper. Rather, for a Christology “from below”, it is absolutely central to the very doctrine of the resurrection itself.[8]
[1] Ibid., 88 – 106.
[2] Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Redemptive Event as History,” in Basic Questions in Theology: Volume 1. trans. George H. Kehm (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), 39 – 80.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 99.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Resurrection of Jesus: History and Theology,” Dialog 38 (1999): 21 – 23.
[7] Ibid., 23.
[8] Pannenberg believes that one of the central tasks of Christian doctrine is to “argue” the truth in public discourse and debate. cf. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 9.

The first post to this series can be found here

The second post can be found here