Theology for the Future: The Enduring Promise of Wolfhart Pannenberg

Although Christian denominations and their theologies face multiple old and new challenges today, a major challenge results from the growing divide between a secular and science-oriented worldview on the one hand and the attraction of religious fundamentalisms that promise clear and unquestioned intellectual and moral orientation on the other. The more religious fundamentalisms develop and nourish secular critique of religions, traditional religions in their institutional framework are expected more and more to take responsibility for promoting peace and justice and for a rational explanation of their convictions into the public sphere. Long before Jürgen Habermas publicly announced the divide “Between Naturalism and Religion” in the book with this title in 2006, the Lutheran German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg gave priority to rational and theological explanation across disciplines and to ecumenical and interreligious conversations. 
Pannenberg’s theological development was driven by his personal experience of the atheist intellectual milieu in which he grew up and his reading of Nietzsche’s radical critique of Christian theism and moralism. Being suspicious about this harsh verdict, he began to study philosophy and theology at Berlin. Although Pannenberg’s thinking centered on the question of truth from the beginning, he discovered the importance of history in dialogue with the philosophical method of Nicolai Hartmann in Göttingen, Karl Barth’s ahistoric response to the challenges of historicism in Basel, and Gerhard von Rad’s theology of the Old Testament in Heidelberg. Along with Ernst Troeltsch’s famous saying “Geschichte mit Geschichte überwinden” (overcoming history through history), Pannenberg started out to overcome the relativity of history through historical research in his first monograph, Jesus—God and Man.