Guilty of Reason

For at least a century, German and Germanic theologians have dominated Protestant thought. In the current generation, the two acknowledged theological stars are Tuebingen's Juergen Moltmann and Munich's Wolfhart Pannenberg. Moltmann, of Theology of Hope fame, has been the better known and the more popular, especially among Protestant social reformers. Pannenberg is still largely unknown outside the tight little world of religious scholars. But, says John Cobb of California's School of Theology at Claremont, he "is fairly widely recognized to have published more substantive work in theology in the past decade" than any other Protestant.

Lutheran Pannenberg, 47, last week ended a 21-campus tour of the U.S., the most ambitious of his three visits to America, with a talk at Harvard on the relation between the doctrine of God's election and "civil religion." In many speeches during the tour Pannenberg attacked recent styles of Christian social activism. He insists that the church should not think of itself as an agent for curing social ills, which are not "immediately solvable" anyhow. He also has no use for those Christian activists who think that "questions of the meaning of human life are to be solved by material means alone." The "greatest deception" of our era, Pannenberg told an audience at the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, is the idea that "political change can satisfy a religious need."

Not that Pannenberg wants to shun society. He simply fears that a Christianity content merely to echo the activist slogans of the secular world will lose its long-range social influence. To accomplish social good, Christians must first rethink their "spiritual center."

Pannenberg speaks from the experience of his youth. Brought up as a Nazi atheist, he fought his way free of Hitlerian nihilism and underwent an intellectual conversion to Christianity. Pannenberg first won renown in the 1960s as a member of the "revelation as history" school in theology. He accused the pre-eminent Protestant thinkers, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Earth, of divorcing Christian faith from history and therefore from rational thought, by ultimately basing their theologies on subjective standards.

Pannenberg's dispute with the liberal Bultmann over the issue of Christ's resurrection, for example, won him a misleading fundamentalist image. No believer in biblical literalism, Pannenberg nevertheless thinks that Bultmann's evasion of the resurrection as a historical event is rationally untenable. As circumstantial evidence, he cites the early church's unshakable belief in it. Unless Christ actually rose from the grave, Pannenberg reasons, how can a historian plausibly account for the blazing fervor of the early Christians?

Heftiest Work. Pannenberg's treatment of the resurrection stems not from a new orthodoxy, but from his rationalism. Religion, he says, must be studied scientifically; it is not something special that has to be protected by walls of "authority" or reliance on "faith." He spins out his intricate argument in his heftiest work to date, the 450-page Theology and the Philosophy of Science, due out in an English translation later this year.

In all his theologizing, Pannenberg firmly dissents from any belief based on the "decision of faith" alone. Belief, yes, says Pannenberg, but belief founded on the rock of reason. If "the decision of faith is everything," he insists, "we can easily exchange the content of that decision. For this reason many Christian theologians become proponents of a rival religion without even knowing it." Adds he: "I am not the most popular theologian in Germany. I am found guilty for referring to reason."

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