GOD AND THE FUTURE: Wolfhart Pannenberg

BOOK REVIEW

God and the Future is among the impressive works dealing with eschatology in terms of exploring the doctrine of. It presents Wolfhart Pannenberg’s understanding of eschatology which shapes the structures of every theological doctrine. This book presents an important insight that the idea of the reign (kingdom) of God and the understanding of God as Holy Trinity explain God as an eschatological ruler over all creation.

In order to explore these ideas of Wolfhart Pannenberg, the author, Chistiaan Mostert, organized the book in six chapters. In the first chapter the author explains the eschatology in the twentieth-century theology. Taking the idea of Pannenberg, Mostert points that any theology must be about God, whether God is mentioned as such or not. In his view, the Christian doctrine about God must be an unfolding of the divine ‘economy’ of creation and redemption. It is an elaboration of the biblical statement that God is love. This divine love is expected finally to reach its fulfillment in the eschatological consummation of this finite, temporal creation and its participation in God’s eternal life.

Talking about the shocking discovery, Mostert brings in the Christ-event as the finality of the message of Christ as an eschatological revelation of God and thus one with the very essence of God. For pannenberg, as the author puts it, the essential eschatological idea of God is his self-revelation in the person of Jesus who brought about the idea of the kingdom. In this view, the kingdom of God is no longer the spiritual community of the people joined together by obedience to the will of God, but rather an eschatological reality where the Christian hope is not the details of ‘last things’, the eschata, which will follow this world and this age, but to the whole process of the history of the world, especially its future.

Chistiaan Mostert qualifies Pannenberg as the theologian of the future. He spoke of the priority of the eschatological future as a fundamental feature of Jesus’ message. For Pannenberg, the human person is characterized by the quality of self-transcendence in the future in the line of his ultimate destiny. To set out an eschatological direction in anthropological thought, he says that human existence is not conceivable apart from an unending movement into the open because the human identity is not given to us by the past but from the future.

While following his way of understanding Pannenberg’s eschatology, Mostert in the second chapter of this book, discusses the question of theology and apocalyptic. It is an understanding of Jesus’ message and his resurrection in the closest relation to the second Temple Jewish apocalyptic thought. Jesus’ message can only be understood within the horizon of apocalyptic expectations because, when Jesus is confessed as son of man, the bringer of the last judgment, we are in the realm of apocalyptic. In Jesus the world is confronted by ultimate promise, the promise of the kingdom which breaks the power of death and brings in new age of freedom.

The author points that pannenberg’s search for a new metaphysics, a new ontology converged with the growing conviction that Jesus’ proclamation of the coming of God’s kingdom has to occupy a central place in Christian theology. His conviction is that Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of God was radically eschatological. His own idea is that the starting point of theology has to be ‘the kingdom of God understood as the eschatological future brought about by God himself. This imminent kingdom of God, the central idea in the message of Christ, has to become the key to Christian theology as a whole. For the author, the resurrection of Jesus expresses the fulfillment of his expectation of the imminence of the kingdom of God.

In the third chapter Mostert shows how Pannenberg marries theology and philosophy. He discourses the ontological questions, in particular noting the effect of the eschatological grounding principals. It goes without saying that Pannenberg is emphatically a theological thinker, as his wants to relate his theology to philosophical reflection on the nature of that which ‘is’ in its totality. He says that the eschatological understanding of the kingdom of God has ontological implications which cannot be left unexplored. What he really wants philosophers to do is to speak of the absolute or the infinite as a condition of the finite itself. Pannenberg argues that the very idea of the finite logically implies something beyond it.

According to Mostert, Pannenberg’s intention is to elaborate here the ‘ontology of the whole’. He starts with the philosophical understanding of reality as temporality. For him, time is an indispensable part of metaphysics of reality as a whole because ‘being’ cannot be discussed in isolation from ‘time’. In the same line, human essence is not above time, it is a historical essence where the future will not be a return of the ‘first things’, but a new experience that surpasses everything that has been till now. This is where he founds his belief in God as the absolute or the infinite; because God is not exhausted by causing the world to come into being at the beginning. Rather, this God breaks into the course of his creation and initiates new events in it in an unpredictable way.

The reason for all this is that history, in Pannenberg’s view, gains its unity only from God’ faithfulness in God’s historical acts, that is, though time and will not be finally evident until the eschaton. However, for him the future is far more than a confirming reality at the end of time. He sees is as having an ontological priority over present time and past time.

The ontological priority of the future is the question of the fourth chapter. In this section Mostert considers the nature of the eschatological ontology. What he seeks to articulate more adequately is the unity of identity and difference between being (or essence) and the form in which it appears. He turns to theology for example that, Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom of God, makes it already a present reality, yet without abolishing its futurity. The kingdom of God is expressed in the present but not exhausted by its presence in that time and space. He establishes a relation between being and appearance in a way that the ‘appearing’ reality can be understood as the ‘appearance’ of something that always is. Appearance is better seen as an anticipatory arrival of the future.

Pannenberg’s point is that if the new can only be accounted for as an outcome of past events, there is no genuine freedom and contingency; no escape from determinism. The only alternative is to see the new coming is some way from the future; from the creative activity of God the power of the future.

It is a real search for ‘an alternative’ to an understanding of the real which is concentrated entirely upon what is existent. What is ‘real’ is not restricted to what exists at present. Both the past (which has existed) and the future (which is not yet existent) are ‘real’, because they are effective in the present moment. What belongs to the future is not yet existent, and it already determines present experiences, at least the present experience of beings who are oriented towards the future and always experience their present and past in the light of the future which they hope for or which they fear. This is how he shows that the future is a real priority because it has an effect on the present and the present could not come into being without its determination by the future.

He does not remain there. Pannenberg goes deep in the apocalyptic thought and in the New Testament where there is a remarkable interweaving of time and eternity. He describes the future of God as the ‘parousia of his eternity’, and it is this that constitutes the dimension of the depth of the present. Conversely, the present has its place n the eternity of God and finds its meaning therein. Eternity is the present of life in its totality; the whole is already present in the part. However, this coincidence of eternity and time is mediated temporally. The present has its relation to the hidden dimension of the eternal only via the future. Without this temporal mediation the eternal and the present would be polarized in a stark dualism.

In his logic, Panneberg continues saying that the present is the ‘anticipation’ of the ultimate future as the eschatological rule of God in which all things will have their right relation to God. According to Mostert, Panneberg is convinced that it is not a question of realized eschatology, but rather the concept of anticipation has its meaning in the framework of the Christian experience of the already and the not yet. Christian experience is that salvation is already truly experienced, but not yet in its fullness.

Pannenberg’s ontology of the future sounds unfamiliar and counter-intuitive. But the major strength of his position is its emphasis on the openness of being to the new. It is immensely liberating, for example, to think o human persons as not simply the outcome of their past history but as the anticipation of their future identity.

How does the eschatological perspective shape the doctrine of God? This is the big deal in these two last chapters. Without exaggerating, these chapter are very important to understand the ideas of Pannenberg in the sense that they show what he means by the idea of that God is the power of the future or that the future is God’s mode of being, and what this means both for God’s being and God’s action in the world.

This is where Pannenberg formulates his doctrine of God. He tells us that the question of God arises primarily in the religious experience of a power that can bring human existence to its wholeness and grant it coherence and meaning. He argues from the biblical context of the God of promises, the God who leads history into a new future, the God of the coming kingdom. Pannenberg wants to emphasize the idea of God’s futurity in order to move from a static to a dynamic conception of God.

God is God only in the accomplishment of his lordship over the world, leading it to a new future. In this sense, we cannot think of God’s being apart from God’s kingdom. God’s being is God’s rule or God’s kingdom. As Mostert puts it, God’s rule is the explanation of God’ power and the idea of power is implicit in the very idea of deity. In other words, if the kingdom of God does not come God cannot be God.

The problem of God’s relation to time may be expressed in terms of the idea of self-actualisation. God is involved in the process of self-actualisation, which operates in relation to the world. On the premise that God’s being is God’s rule, this self-actualisation is identical with the coming of the kingdom of God. In terms of imminent Trinity, which as eternal is already in the eschatological position in relation to the process of history. For God is sausa sui, owes God’ being to nothing else neither past present nor future.

Finally, Mostert presents Pannenberg’s Trinitarian articulation of his eschatological doctrine of God. The major point is to articulate Trinity in relation to the principal that God’s being is God’s rule. He states that the Son reconciles us with the Father by drawing us into his sonshp and making us open to God’s future, God’s coming rule, which the Father establishes through the Son and the Holy Spirit. This study culminates in the logic that the doctrine of the Trinity becomes the theological framework for understanding the eschatological completion of the divine project of creation.

The present work is much more a theology of the future. It offers valuable insights to current theology as far as it focuses on eschatology which should take the central place in Christian faith and ends with the doctrine of Trinity. This book can be an important tool for theologians of today in the sense that it begins with theological issues, move to the ontological and returns to theological structuring the unity of eschatology and Trinity.