Pannenbergs umstrittenste These

Eine werkgeschichtliche Studie zur Erkennbarkeit der Geschichtsoffenbarung

Book cover: Pannenbergs umstrittenste These

Extent: 320 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Series: Dogmatik in der Moderne

Language: German

Paperback (Forthcoming)

(January 2027)

ISBN: 9783162010698

6.1 x 9.13 inches

Price: $150.00

Pannenberg argues that God’s revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is “open to anyone who has eyes to see.” What he meant by these biblical-sounding words and how he justified the evidential claims associated with them is the subject of this developmental study of his thought.


Hardly any of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s claims have sparked more extensive debate than the third doctrinal thesis of Revelation as History (1961): that God’s self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is “open to anyone who has eyes to see.” Christian Schaufelberger examines these biblically metaphorical words and investigates their significance within the context of Pannenberg’s theology of the 1960s. To this end, he reconstructs Pannenberg’s early writings as the outline of a theological system encompassing key dogmatic loci such as revelation, hermeneutics, anthropology, hamartiology, pneumatology, and the relationship between faith and reason.
The fact that Pannenberg revisited and reaffirmed this most controversial thesis twenty-seven years later in the first volume of his Systematic Theology (1988) raises the question of its significance within the framework of his mature theological system. Two developments in the history of his thought are central in this regard: first, Pannenberg’s refinement of the relationship between subjective noetic anticipation and objective historical prolepsis; second, his rapprochement with Word-of-God theology, from which he had still distanced himself vehemently during the 1960s.
Only this comparison between Pannenberg’s early and later work makes possible a precise understanding of his doctrine of revelation and the epistemic claims associated with it. As its principal contribution, the study develops a developmental reading of Pannenberg’s oeuvre that also opens up new perspectives for contemporary reflection on the possibilities and limits of publicly persuasive theological claims.