1
24
2
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/2308a79f451e0b7b398aae5a37b33baf.pdf
759320894839a494b0e424d7e7761f03
PDF Text
Text
The Analogical Imagination:
Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
By David Tracy
(The Crossroads Publishing Company, 1998)
Review By
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Publication of Review Unknown
In the Preface to his study David Tracy states the task he sets out for himself:
The need is to form a new and inevitably complex theological strategy that
will avoid privatism by articulating the genuine claims of religions to truth
(p. xi).
He claims that theology, by its very nature, asks fundamental existential
questions because theology reflects on the reality of God, but it must develop
public, not private, criteria and discourse. Recognizing theology addresses three
publics: society, academy and church, each of which demands public criteria and
discourse, Tracy’s main focus is on Systematic Theology, which he understands as
fundamentally a hermeneutical enterprise and his development of that
understanding is to claim,
The issue of both the meaning and truth of religion is related to the
analogous issue of the meaning and truth of art. The central claim
advanced is a claim to both meaning and truth in our common human
experience of any classic. (p. xii).
Tracy recognizes the contemporary emergence of a sociological imagination
which he sees as analogous to the earlier rise of historical consciousness and it is
in such a social reality that the theologian must work. In such a context the
theologian makes his claim.
What is that claim? A claim to public response bearing meaning and truth
on the most serious and difficult questions, both personal and communal,
that any human being or society must face: Has existence any ultimate
meaning? Is a fundamental trust to be found amidst the fears, anxieties
and terror of existence? Is there some reality, some force, even some one,
who speaks a word of truth that can be recognized and trusted? Religions
ask and respond to such fundamental questions of the meaning and truth
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 2 of 20
of our existence as human beings in solitude, and in society, history and
the cosmos. Theologians, by definition, risk an intellectual life on the
wager that religious traditions can be studied as authentic responses to
just such questions. The nature of these fundamental questions cuts across
the spectrum of publics. Lurking beneath the surface of our everyday lives,
exploding into explicitness in the limit-situations inevitable in any life, are
questions which logically must be and historically are called religious
questions.
To formulate such questions honestly and well, to respond to them with
passion and rigor, is the work of all theology. (p. 4)
With such a vision of theology’s work, Tracy sets out to create a space in human
endeavor for such an undertaking. Claiming the common human experience of
encountering a classic in the spectrum of human culture, Tracy points specifically
to the classic in art which is universally recognized. He then claims the same
holds true for the religious experience; there have been religious expressions that
can rightfully be designated classic. As cited above,
The issue of both the meaning and truth of religion is related to the
analogous issue of the meaning and truth of art.
For Tracy, a Christian theologian, the classic religious expression is the event of
Jesus Christ. In Part I Tracy will develop his claim that a religious classic can be
portrayed through reasoning that is publicly recognized – there can be no appeal
to an external norm or private vision. This section he entitles “Publicness in
Systematic Theology.” From there he will go on to apply what he has claimed to
the event of Jesus Christ. Section Two he entitles, “Interpreting the Christian
Classic.”
The Preface announces the major question of Tracy’s The Analogical
Imagination: “In a culture of pluralism must each religious tradition finally
either dissolve into some lowest common denominator or accept a marginal
existence as one interesting but purely private option?” Tracy is not willing to
accept either option. A theological strategy must be found that can articulate the
genuine claims of religion to truth. This is the task he sets for himself: a
responsible affirmation of pluralism through the discovery of public criteria by
which truth can be affirmed.
Theology must develop public criteria of truth and discourse because it deals with
the fundamental questions of existence and because it speaks of God.
Recognizing that the theologian addresses three arenas, society, academy and
church, Tracy insists that the criteria of publicness applies in all three areas.
Theology is the generic name for three disciplines: fundamental, systematic and
practical theologies. Publicness is demanded of each. The primary focus of
fundamental theology is the academy, of systemic theology, the church and of
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 3 of 20
practical theology, society. They differ not only in their primary reference group,
but also in terms of their modes of argument, ethical stance, religious stance and
in terms of expressing claims to meaning and truth.
On the way to a responsible pluralism all conversation partners must agree to
certain basic rules for the discussion. Two constants are present: the
interpretation of a religious tradition and the interpretation of the religious
dimension of the contemporary situation from which and to which the theologian
speaks. In regard to the first, it is incumbent upon the theologian to make explicit
his or her general method of interpretation, to develop “criteria of
appropriateness” whereby specific interpretations of the tradition may be judged
by the wider theological community. In regard to the interpretation of the
contemporary situation, there must be an analysis of the “religious” questions,
the question of the meaning of human existence in the present situation.
There are major differences as well. Tracy addresses the question as to what
constitutes a public claim to truth in the three sub-disciplines of theology.
Fundamental theology’s defining characteristic is “a reasoned insistence on
employing the approach and methods of some established academic discipline to
explicate and adjudicate the truth claims of the interpreted religious tradition
and the truth claims of the contemporary situation.” (p. 62) Various models are
available but whichever model is chosen fundamental questions and answers are
articulated in such a way that any attentive, intelligent, reasonable and
responsible person can understand and judge them in keeping with fully public
criteria for argument. Personal faith may not enter the argument for the truth
claims in fundamental theology.
The systematic theologian’s major task is the reinterpretation of the
tradition for the present situation. Where the fundamental theologian will
relate the reality of God to our fundamental trust in existence (our
common faith), the confessional systematic theologian will relate that
reality to their arguments for a distinctively Christian understanding of
faith. (p. 65)
Christian theology…consists in explicating in public terms and in
accordance with the demands of it own primary confessions, the full
meaning and truth of the original “illuminating event”…which occasioned
and continues to inform its understanding of all reality. (p. 66)
Thus the task of the systematic theologian is an hermeneutical task. The
“illuminating event” Tracy calls a religious classic. As in a classic work of art, the
religious classic contains the possibility of ever new “disclosures.” Classics Tracy
defines as texts, events, images, persons, rituals and symbols which are assumed
to disclose permanent possibilities of meaning and truth. The hermeneutical
theologian seeks to articulate the truth – disclosure of the reality of God
embedded in the tradition for the contemporary situation.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 4 of 20
There is today a strong case being made by many theologians for the necessity of
any theological theory or argument yielding to the demand of praxis.
Praxis…must be related to theory, not as theory’s application or even goal
as in all conscious and unconscious mechanical notions of practice or
technique. Rather praxis is theory’s own originating and self-correcting
foundation, since all theory is dependent, minimally, on the authentic
praxis of the theorist’s personally appropriated value of intellectual
integrity and self-transcending commitment to the imperatives of critical
rationality. (p. 69)
Tracy states his response to the theologians of praxis as follows:
The very notion of praxis is grounded in a distinction, not a separation;
truth as transformation always also involves truth as disclosure; speaking
the truth is never separable but is distinguishable from doing the truth;
cognitive claims are not simply validated through authentic praxes any
more than causes are validated through the presence of martyrs; the crises
of cognitive claims does not simply dissipate when the shift of emphasis to
the social-ethical crisis of a global humanity comes more clearly into
central focus…. (p. 79)
In sum: fundamental theology seeks metaphysical and existential adequacy to
experience; systematic theology seeks the disclosure of the original “illuminating
event” in the present situation; practical theology emphasizes the necessity of
truth as transformative. Tracy hopes for the possibility of collaboration between
these sub-disciplines and the communal recognition of the real need for all three.
Tracy moves the focus now to systematic theology asking from the perspective of
fundamental theology what one can argue on obviously public grounds for the
public status of all good systematic theology. The question is simply, “Is
systematic theology public discourse?”
It is Tracy’s contention that systematic theology is hermeneutical. This means
that systematic theology’s task is to interpret, mediate and translate the meaning
and truth of the tradition. Where this is not the case, where the notion of
authority shifts from a truth disclosed to mind and heart to an external norm for
the obedient will, theologians can no longer interpret and translate the tradition
but “only repeat the shop-worn conclusions of the tradition.” (p. 99)
Eventually, the central, classical symbols and doctrines of the tradition
become mere “fundamentals” to be externally accepted and endlessly
repeated. (p. 99)
Tracy points to the contrast of an hermeneutical theology:
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 5 of 20
The heart of any hermeneutical position is the recognition that all
interpretation is a mediation of past and present, a translation carried on
within the effective history of a tradition to retrieve its sometimes strange,
sometimes familiar meanings. (p. 99)
How is this done? Recognizing that one begins within a tradition which has
shaped one, that one is socialized, acculturated and thus without the possibility of
finding some position “above” one’s own historicity,
…the route to liberation from the negative realities of a tradition is not to
declare the existence of an autonomy that is literally unreal but to enter
into a disciplined and responsive conversation with the subject matter –
the responses and, above all, the fundamental questions – of the tradition.
(p. 100)
Tracy refers to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s model of conversation as a model for
understanding the dialogue with the tradition.
Real conversation occurs only when the participants allow the question,
the subject matter, to assume primacy. It occurs only when our usual fears
about our own self-image die….That fear dies only because we are carried
along, and sometimes away, by the subject matter itself into the rare event
or happening named “thinking” and “understanding.” For understanding
happens; it occurs not as the pure result of personal achievement but in
the back-and-forth movement of the conversation itself. (p. 101)
…The word “hermeneutical” best describes this realized experience of
understanding in conversation. For every event of understanding, in order
to produce a new interpretation, mediates between our past experience
and the understanding embodied in our linguistic tradition and the
present event of understanding occasioned by a fidelity to the logic of the
question in the back-and-forth movement of the conversation. (p. 101)
Using the model of conversation Tracy shows how one enters into the history of
the illuminating event. When interpreting a classic one recognizes its “excess of
meaning” demands constant interpretation and is at the same time timeless –
“a certain kind of timelessness –namely the timeliness of a classic
expression radically rooted in its own historical time and calling to my
own historicity. That is, the classical text is not in some timeless moment
which needs mere repetition. Rather its kind of timelessness as permanent
timeliness is the only one proper to any expression of the finite, temporal,
historical beings we are….The classic text’s fate is that only its constant
reinterpretation by later finite, historical, temporal beings who will risk
asking its questions and listening, critically and tactfully, to its responses
can actualize the event of understanding beyond its present fixation in a
text. (p. 102)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 6 of 20
To be understood a classic cannot be repeated; it must be interpreted. Thus Tracy
claims
All contemporary systematic theology can be understood as fundamentally
hermeneutical. This position implies that systematic theologians, by
definition, will understand themselves as radically finite and historical
thinkers who have risked a trust in a particular religious tradition – They
seek, therefore, to retrieve, interpret, translate, mediate the resources –
…of the classic events of understanding of those fundamental religious
questions embedded in the classic events, images, persons, rituals, texts
and symbols of the tradition. (p. 104)
Tracy moves on to the normative role of the classics. He begins with the assertion
“classics exist.” It is true of all cultures. He claims,
We all find ourselves compelled both to recognize and on occasion to
articulate our reasons for recognition that certain expressions of the
human spirit so disclose a compelling truth about our lives that we cannot
deny them some kind of normative status. (p. 108)
Such expressions we call “classic.” Tracy defines the classic thus:
My thesis is that which we mean in naming certain texts, events, images,
rituals, symbols and persons “classics” is that here we recognize nothing
less than the disclosure of a reality we cannot but name truth….some
disclosure of reality in a moment that must be called one of “recognition”
which surprises, provokes, challenges, shocks and eventually transforms
us; an experience that upsets conventional opinion and expands the sense
of the possible; indeed a realized experience of that which is essential, that
which endures. (p. 108)
The experience of a classic work of art is used as an illustration of Tracy’s point.
Citing Gadamer, he writes,
The actual experience of the work of art can be called a realized experience
of an event of truth ....when I experience any classic work of art, I do not
experience myself as an autonomous subject aesthetically appreciating the
good qualities of an aesthetic object set over against me. Indeed, when I
reflect after the experience upon the experience itself, shorn of prior
theories of "aesthetics," I find that my subjectivity is never in control of the
experience, nor is the work of art actually experienced as an object with
certain qualities over against me. Rather the work of art encounters me
with the surprise, impact, even shock of reality itself. In experiencing art, I
recognize a truth I somehow know but know I did not really know except
through the experience of recognition of the essential compelled by the
work of art. (p. 111F)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 7 of 20
I am transformed by the truth which I encounter. I experience self-transcendence
not as an achievement; rather it happens, it occurs. I am caught up in the
disclosure of the work.
Gadamer uses the phenomenon of the "game" to describe this encounter. In
playing a game I lose myself in the play moving into the "rules" of the game.
The game becomes not an object over against a self-conscious subject but
an experienced relational and releasing mode of being in the world distinct
from the ordinary, nonplayful one. In every game, I enter the world where
I play so fully that finally the game plays me. (p. 114)
This is what happens when one encounters a genuine work of art. One finds
oneself in the grip of an event, a happening, a disclosure, a claim to truth which
cannot be denied.
Tracy notes the process of encountering the text. The first movement is the
reception of the text. Secondly, if the text is a classic it will carry a force that will
claim attention. The third step of interpretation involves the "game" spoken of
above.
The dialogue will demand that the interpreter enter into the back-andforth movement of that disclosure in the dialectics of a self-transcending
freedom released by the text upon a finite, historical, dialogical reader and
received by the text from a now dialoguing reader. (p. 120)
The fourth step involves the larger conversation of the entire community of
inquirers.
To illustrate our claim that an encounter with a classic work of art demands our
attention and discloses truth which we cannot but recognize as an encounter with
reality, Tracy describes the production of a classic. The discussion of that creative
artistic process leads him to conclude:
In the paradigmatic expressions of the human spirit - in those texts,
events, persons, actions, images, rituals, symbols which bear within them
a classic as authoritative status, we find in our experienced recognition of
their claim to attention the presence of what we cannot but name "truth."
... That truth is at once a disclosure and a concealment of what, at our best
and most self-transcending in interpreting the classics, we cannot but
name "reality." (p. 130)
Tracy therefore argues for his contention that the systematic theologian is the
interpreter of religious classics.
Systematic theology intends to provide an interpretation, a retrieval
(including a retrieval through critique and suspicion) and always,
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 8 of 20
therefore, a new application of a particular religious tradition’s selfunderstanding for the current horizon of the community. (p. 131)
Applying this understanding of systematic theology’s task to the specific task of
the Christian thinker, Tracy declares,
In Christian systematics, that self-understanding is itself further grounded
in the particular events and persons of Jewish and Christian history:
decisively grounded, for the Christian, in God’s own self-manifestation as
my God in this classic event and person, Jesus Christ. (p. 131)
But now the crux of the matter is reached: how does the systematic theologian
address the wider public with discussion characterized by “publicness” thus
stopping the retreat of Christian faith into the sphere of privateness and yet
remain faithful to
the radical particularity of the relationship of my gift’s disclosure to the
particular events of God’s action in ancient Israel, in Jesus of Nazareth, in
the history of the Christian church? (p. 132)
Acknowledging the dilemma, Tracy believes it can be overcome. The means of
overcoming the dilemma is the recognition of the public nature of the classic:
grounded in some realized experience of a claim to attention, unfolding as
cognitive disclosures of both meaning and truth and ethically
transformative of personal, social and historical life. (p. 132)
Tracy therefore contends,
Whenever any systematic theologian produces a classic interpretation of a
particular classic religious tradition (as both Barth and Rahner have), then
that new expression should be accorded a public status in the culture…. (p.
132F)
Every classic…is a text, event, image, person or symbol which unites
particularity of origin and expression with a disclosure of meaning and
truth available, in principle, to all human beings. (p. 133)
And again:
Any person’s intensification of particularity via a struggle with the
fundamental questions of existence in a particular tradition, if that
struggle is somehow united to the logos of appropriate expression, will
yield a form of aesthetically sharable public discourse. (p. 134)
Chapter four deals with the interpretation of the religious classics. The classic,
Tracy claims, has these two marks: permanence and excess of meaning. They
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 9 of 20
demand interpretation, never mere repetition nor simplistic rejection. The
interpreter must plunge in, get caught up in the subject matter of the classic.
Engaging a major classic or being engaged by it is to be engaged by the questions
of the truth of existence. This is the task of the systematic theologian – to
interpret the religious classics of a culture.
While many in contemporary culture relegate religious questions to a primitive
state of the race’s development, Tracy raises the question,
Yet what if the authority of religion is not the authoritarianism in our
impacted memories of “religion” but the authority of those authentic,
indeed inevitable fundamental questions about the meaning of the whole
codified in the questions and responses of classical religious texts, events,
images, symbols, rituals and persons? (p. 155)
To be sure, the religions have been purveyors not only of authentic truth but
demonic destructive power. There is a great deal of conflict of interpretations on
the meaning of religion and in the modern period the claims of Feuerbach, Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud that describe religion as “projection” and “illusion” must be
faced. Arriving at one definition for the essence of religion is not possible. Yet
Tracy will not back off; he claims,
The questions which religion addresses are the fundamental existential
questions of the meaning and truth of individual, communal and historical
existence as related to, indeed as both participating in and distanced from,
what is sensed as the whole of reality. (p. 157F)
Religion, Tracy argues, is not just another cultural perspective alongside
morality, art, science, commerce and politics. In its own self-understanding,
a religious perspective claims to speak not of a part but of the whole. (p.
159)
In a very technical philosophical argument Tracy maintains
An ability to partly state – more exactly, to metaphysically state – the
abstract, general, universal and necessary features of the reality of God as
the one necessary existent which can account for the reality of a limit-of,
ground-to, horizon-to the whole disclosed in earlier phenomenological
accounts. (p. 161)
Religion has essential characteristics even apart from a single definition of its
essence and chief among them, Tracy claims, is "a limit-character." There is both
a "limit-to" dimension:
a dimension present in the "limit-questions" of scientific inquiry and
moral striving, and in those experiences (either negative, like anxiety as
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 10 of 20
distinct from fear, or positive, like fundamental trust, wonder and loyalty
as distinct from trust in and fidelity to a particular cause), disclosive of the
"limit-situation" which is the human situation. (p. 160)
and a "limit of" dimension:
The philosophical analyses of fundamental theology, therefore, free the
inquirer to study the possible meanings of such recognized "situational"
limit-experiences as finitude, contingency, mortality, alienation or
oppression and thereby to explicate, indeed to state, the character of that
reality as a limit-to our existence. In that explicit stating of a limit-to, the
inquirer may also be able to disclose or show the existence of a reality here
named a "limit-of" (alternatively horizon-to our ground-of). In its
metaphysical or transcendental form, the analysis can also partly state the
character of that reality of the limit-of. This is the case, in the Western
tradition, when the metaphysical reality of God as the one necessary
existent grounding all reality is explicated as the referent of just such
limit-experiences of a religious dimension to our lives", (p. 160)
Tracy uses Karl Rahner's work to illustrate how this philosophical analysis of
fundamental theology relates to the Christian conviction of the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ.
For Rahner, the philosopher of religion can provide persuasive
philosophical arguments for the necessary existence of an absolute
mystery as ultimate horizon to all thinking and living. If that argument
holds, then Rahner is correct to insist that the human being, now
understood as always already within that horizon of ultimate mystery, can
be redescribed, in his now famous phrase, as a hearer of a possible
revelation from this horizon, i.e., a self-manifestation by the power of
ultimate mystery itself.
In the actual experience of that self-manifestation of God in Jesus Christ,
the Christian believer now, according to Rahner, recognizes that the
concrete revelation is a pure gift or grace from the incomprehensible God
of Love. Then the believer "recognizes" that all reality is graced by that gift:
that all reality partakes in a "transcendental" revelation disclosed in the
categorical revelation of God's own self-manifestation in Jesus Christ; that
revelation, as "transcendental," is always already present in this concretely
graced world; that revelation as "categorized" is present in the gratuity of
God's self-manifestation in the events of "salvation history," decisively
present, for Rahner, in the event of the manifestation of who God is and
who we are in Jesus Christ. (p. 162)
Thus we are hearers of a possible revelation or self-manifestation of the absolute
mystery and for the Christian believer that manifestation has taken concrete
shape in Jesus Christ. In these terms the religious classic
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 11 of 20
may be viewed as an event of disclosure, expressive of the "limit-of,"
"horizon-to," "ground-to" side of "religion." ... religious classic expressions
will involve a claim to truth as the event of a disclosure – concealment of
the whole of reality by the power of the whole – as, in some sense, a
radical and finally gracious mystery. (p. 163)
An experience of such a classic religious expression will carry an authority which
will give to the religious person the conviction
that their values, their style of life, their ethos are in fact grounded in the
inherent structure of reality itself. (p. 163)
Tracy summarizes his contention in this discussion of the interpretation of the
religious classic as follows:
First, a defining characteristic of the situational "religious dimension of
common experience and language" is the "limit-to" character of the
experience itself, whatever its particular existential focus. Second, a
defining characteristic of any explicit religion – more exactly any classic
religious expression – is a “limit-of” character bearing the status of eventgift-manifestation of and from the whole, and experienced as giving the
respondent wholeness. (p. 165)
His approach in pursuing this line of argument – that the religious classic exists,
claims our attention and discloses truth which we cannot but name reality –
presumes an appropriate preunderstanding for the interpretation of religion. He
argues:
If one is guided by a sense for those fundamental questions, if guided as
well by that great modern tradition of interpretation of the sui generis
character of religion ... The interpreter is likely to find relative adequacy in
the kind of interpretations of the appropriate responses to the religious
classics described in different, sometimes conflicting ways by these great
modern phenomenologists of the sui generis character of religion. (p. 168)
... The kind of claim to attention that a religious classic, as religious,
provokes is a claim that discloses to the interpreter some realized
experience bearing some sense of recognition into the objectively awesome reality of the otherness of the whole as radical mystery. The
genuinely religious person (James' "mystics" and "saints"), it seems, do
experience that reality of mystery as the reality of the holy bearing
overwhelming and life-transformative force, (p. 168F)
The religious person speaks of revelation, the self-manifestation of an undeniable
power not one's own or at one's disposal. They cannot but acknowledge the
eruption of a power manifesting itself – a power of the whole revealing the whole.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 12 of 20
For the whole experienced as radical mystery is experienced as giving itself
in the religious response. The whole, in manifesting itself, is also
experienced as freeing the real self of the respondent to its true freedom; a
freedom where the self's new ethos is experienced as grounded in reality
itself – a reality both disclosed and concealed as the whole by the power of
the whole. (p. 175)
Again Tracy explains the experience thus:
The same sense of radical giftedness both fascinates and frightens as it
shocks and transforms the self to believe what one dare not otherwise
believe: that reality is finally gracious, that the deepest longings of our
minds and hearts for wholeness in ourselves, with others, with history and
nature, is the case – the case granted as gift by the whole; the case
expressed with relative adequacy determined by the intrinsic inadequacy
of every classic religious expression. (p. 177)
We approach now the heart of Tracy’s argument as he discusses the religious
classic under the sub-divisions of manifestation and proclamation. Here he
makes a creative and passionate appeal for a genuinely ecumenically Christian
witness which brings together the strengths of the Catholic, Orthodox and
Protestant traditions rather than the more narrow focus of any single tradition.
Tracy's argument rests on his contention that truth becomes a realized experience
through the encounter with a religious classic. A classic expression encountered
frees oneself from the ordinary attempts to distance the self from any claims that
cannot be controlled as objects over against its own subjectivity.
... The interpreter of religious classics may admit that this classic
testimony bears a claim to truth. That claim is, more exactly, a nonviolent
appeal to the instinct of the human spirit for some relationship to the
whole. (p. 194)
The truth experienced in the classic has the character of event.
When technical rationality reigns, no recognition of the event-character of
truth can occur. Any interpreter of the religious classic must early decide
whether to impose some standards of technical rationality upon all
classical expressions or risk exposing oneself to another mode of
rationality; a mode proper to the thing itself as it discloses itself to
consciousness. We cannot, in fact, verify or disprove the claims of classical
religious expressions through empiricist methods….truth here becomes a
manifestation that lets whatever shows itself to be in its showing and its
hiddenness. (p. 195)
Neither the Enlightenment model of rationality nor traditionalist models of
heteronomy are capable of dealing thus with truth as event, occurrence. They
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 13 of 20
both interpret all claims to truth through the restrictive lenses of techniques
developed by autonomous and heteronomous interpreters. Just as one
approaches a classic in any field, so in religion one must be open to being caught
up in the "conversation," the "game," open to being transformed by the truth of
the whole which finds expression or which discloses itself through the concrete
religious expression.
Fundamental theology warrants the claims to truth of the religious
dimension to existence on ordinary public grounds; systematic theology as
interpretation warrants the claims to truth of a concrete religion on those
kinds of authentically public grounds appropriate to the kind of disclosive
publicness expressed in all classics.
This is the case, moreover, for radically experiential reasons: the realized
experience of the truth-character of the religious classic is an experience of
its purely given character, its status as an event, a happening manifested to
my experience, neither determined by nor produced by my subjectivity. (p.
198)
Tracy describes the structural similarity between the encounter with religious
classics and other classics.
Any classic will produce its meaning through the related strategies of
intensification of particularity and intensification of distanciation in
expression. The first journey of intensification into one's own particularity
will ordinarily free the person (or community) from the limitations of selfconsciousness into a sense of a real participation in, a belonging to, a
wider and deeper reality than the self or the community. That experience
of intensification, like all experience must involve some understanding
and some expression. When the struggle for expression – the second, selfdistancing journey of intensification – finds its appropriate genre, style
and form, then the self is positively distanced from the original experience
in order to express the meaning of that experience. Then a person can
communicate the disclosive meaning to others who may not now share it,
but can share its meaning through experiencing the now-rendered
expression. (p. 199F)
There is a difference between religious classics and other classics, however. It has
to do with intensity. The religious classic is an expression of the whole itself by
the power of the whole.
... The authentically religious impetus is one where the intensification
process is itself abandoned into a letting go of one's own efforts at
intensity. One lets go because one has experienced some disclosure of the
whole which cannot be denied as from the whole. (p. 201)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 14 of 20
Finally one experiences a sense of resting in the radical and gracious mystery at
the heart of human existence. Such an experience demands expression:
a demand to express that experience and its meaning and truth in a form –
a text, an image, a gesture, above all, a style of life. The demand to express,
to render, to communicate sets in motion the distanciation process
whereby the self distances itself from its own self-consciousness and finds
the proper genre for some expression of that meaning and truth. (p. 201)
Summarizing the process, Tracy claims,
Both the expression and the experience of a religious "limit-of" disclosure
and concealment of and by the whole remains, therefore, intrinsically
dialectical throughout the entire process. The demands of the journey of
intensification into the fundamental questions of the meaning of existence
imply their opposite: a letting-go, a being-caught-up-in, a radical
belonging-to some disclosure of the whole by the whole. And the very
radicality of that belonging-to the whole posits itself by implying its
opposite: I as a self recognize that I am absolutely dependent upon the
whole, recognize myself as in actuality profoundly ambiguous in all my
experience, my understanding, my ability and willingness to live by and in
the radical mystery which envelops and empowers me. As the dialectic
intensifies, this recognition of the disclosure of radical mystery posits itself
as disclosure by implying its opposite: The mystery is also concealed from
me by and in its disclosure as mystery. The revelation is also a revelation
of hiddenness; the flooding, white light of its comprehensibility frees me to
recognize the dark impenetrable incomprehensibility of both the whole
and myself in the whole. (p. 202)
Then comes the command to communicate by incarnating that reality in a word,
a symbol, an image, a ritual, a gesture, a life.
Tracy moves now to discuss the classical forms of religious expression:
manifestation and proclamation. The dialectical process just described,
an existential intensification of particularity, expressing itself through
distanciation in a sharable form – will operate dialectically at every
moment in the process. (p. 203)
But now Tracy makes another proposal regarding religious expression.
When the dialectic of intensification of particularity releasing itself to a
radical sense of participation predominates, the religious expression will
be named "manifestation;" when the dialectic of intensification of
particularity releasing itself to a sense of radical nonparticipation
dominates, the religious expression will be named "proclamation." (p.
203)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 15 of 20
The words "sacrament" and "word" are usually used to make this distinction, the
former being the predominate expression of the Catholic and Orthodox
traditions, while the latter has been characteristic of Protestantism. The
difference is also pointed out by the terms "mystical-priestly-metaphysicalaesthetic" and "prophetic-ethical-historical." Both types are found in the Hebrew
Scriptures and in the Christian tradition. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
contain both expressions although from the East they may appear more in the
proclamatory mode. Likewise, although the Eastern religions are thought of as
mainly in the mode of manifestation, they too must be understood in the dialectic
of manifestation or proclamation. Tracy moves away from the common
theological designation of the difference – word and sacrament – and uses
instead the terminology of Paul Ricoeur – manifestation and proclamation – in
order to see more clearly how the religious live in this dialectic and cannot be
placed on one side or the other, although, of course, they lean to one pole or the
other. He contends that the manifestation-proclamation dialectic is fruitful for
understanding the complexity and the conflicts in Christian self-understanding,
which is the focus of Tracy's work. This distinction provides the main rubric for
the thought experiment Tracy is setting forth.
Tracy argues that the very positing of manifestation or proclamation implies the
other; each needs the other. He begins his examination of these poles with a
discussion of manifestation. He uses the work of Mircea Eliade as the clearest
example of religious expression as manifestation.
... Eliade' s classic achievement ... paradoxically serves a prophetic
religious role to challenge the dominant prophetic, ethical, historical
trajectory of Western religion in favor of its grounds in the power of
manifestation.... The "archaic" ontology articulated by Eliade becomes the
focal meaning for understanding religion as an eruption of power of some
manifestation of the whole now experienced as the sacred cosmos.
…
By entering the ritual, by retelling the myth, even by creatively
reinterpreting the symbol, we escape from the "nightmare" of history and
even the "terror" of ordinary time. We finally enter true time, the time of
the repetition of the actions of the whole at origin of the cosmos. In illo
tempore, the power from the whole was first disclosed as sacred. ... only by
entering into the originally nonlinguistic manifestations of power of the
sacred in the ritual, the symbol, the festival, the myth, can we participate
in, belong to, a realm disclosed in the other side of the ordinary: a realm
which has manifested itself as sacred, which exposes the ordinary as
profane, a realm which at the same time chooses any ordinary reality –
this rock, this tree, this city, this mountain, this rite – as the medium for
the saturated power of the sacred – the "center of the world." ... (p. 205F)
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 16 of 20
Thus the realm of the sacred can be experienced by being willing to enter the
purely given, that sheer event of manifestation. Tracy maintains that Eliade has
effectively challenged the Western Augustinian assumptions through his retrieval
of the genius of Eastern Christianity:
a theology oriented to and from, not history and ethos, but the cosmos and
aesthetics; a style of religious practice oriented not so much by the word of
scripture as by the manifestations of the sacred in image, icon, ritual, logos
and cosmological theologies; a way of being Christian that both demands a
radical separation from the ordinary via the rituals and myths of the
repetition of the origins of the cosmos and allows real participation in the
manifestations of the sacred available to our "divinized" humanity. (p.
208)
But there is another pole; the pole of proclamation:
Those religious expressions where the power of a word of proclamation
from God in an address to an ambiguous self occurs as the paradigmatic
disclosure of religious reality. (p. 208)
The pole of manifestation brings to expression the sense of participation in the
whole. Yet the very sense of identity in the moment of manifestation implies the
non-identity of the individual, finite self. Therefore the estranged self may be
addressed by a word of proclamation:
A word of defamiliarizing proclamation now experienced by the self as the
transcendent, unnamable Other which has now disclosed itself in word as
like a who: the self of God. ... This God speaks a word of proclamation
whereby and wherein the whole discloses itself in a new manifestation by
the presence of a personal, gracious, acting, judging, proclaiming God.
This God acts in the word-events of ordinary history and time. (p. 209)
This word shatters our sense of participation, disconfirming any complacency in
participation.
To shatter any illusions that this culture, this priesthood, this land, this
ritual is enough, to defamiliarize us with ourselves and with nature, to
decode our encoded myths, to inflict its passionate negations upon all our
pretensions, to suspect even our nostalgic longings for the sacred cosmos,
to expose all idols of the self as projections of our selves and our mad
ambitions, to expose all culture as contingent, even arbitrary. …To make
us recognize that Judaism and Christianity disclose a radical worldaffirmation only because they have first undergone a radical, decentering
experience of world-negation in the kerygmatic, proclamatory word of
address of prophetic religion. (p. 209)
…
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 17 of 20
The self finds that the response to that proclamation by the self and the
people to whom the self belongs is that radical paradigmatic response of
trust and obedience called faith. (p. 209)
The proclaimed word will be expressed in the realm of the secular which was
formerly thought of as profane but now is recognized as the arena in which the
power of the word must be heard.
... The very power of the proclaimed word – a word addressed by God to
both a community and a self, a word of address shattering their security
and their idols – demands that the major expression of one's religious
experience now be found in fidelity through word and deed in this time
and this history to the God who gives that word as enabling command. (p.
210)
The paradigm of proclamation does not eliminate the religious expressions of
manifestation. Without them there is no place for the word to be heard and do its
work. Yet the focus has definitely shifted.
The language of radical participation in the religions of manifestation will
now seem extravagant, sometimes even idolatrous. The rejection of the
ordinary as the separated profane will now, in the proclamation of the
word about the extraordinariness of the ordinary as the central expression
of God's word and action, will now itself be rejected in favor of a classical,
paradigmatic religious ethic of the secular. (p. 211)
The affirmation of the secular in contemporary Jewish and Christian
theology, therefore, is not properly understood as some collapse of
Christianity and Judaism in the face of contemporary secularism. Rather a
secular Christianity and a secular Judaism are, in fact, faithful to the
paradigmatic eruption of a proclaimed and addressing word-event which
founds these traditions and drives them on as their religious focal
meaning. Some desacralization of the claims of participation via
manifestation must occur whenever this kind of world-shattering and
world-affirming paradigmatic religious experience of proclamation
happens. For the very proclamation which affirms time and history and
demands expression in and for ordinary time and history frees Jews and
Christians in and for the world. When the paradigmatic religious power of
that word has become a nostalgic echo, a presupposition that is no longer
an impulse, then the great danger of a merely secularist Judaism, a merely
secularist Christianity, a finally secularist culture emerges. (p. 211F)
But where the proclaimed word is remembered, the word of world-negation and
world-affirmation, the Jew and the Christian are freed for the world. This was the
case in the Reformation according to Tracy. He calls it a classic religious event.
The Reformation was a response to the graced freedom of the Christian before
God's Word in Jesus Christ.
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 18 of 20
Where the paradigmatic power of that word saturates the religious
consciousness with its power, then the negation of all over-claims to
participation, the religious negation of the focus of "magic," "superstition,"
"legalism," and "ritualism" will burst upon any complacent resting in any
religion of manifestation, any non-dialectical solace in a too easy
humanism or any hardened priestcraft. (p. 212)
The word exposes the world's real ambiguity, its possibilities for both good and
evil and it points to a new time, a time of genuine newness, not just the repetition
of the origins of the cosmos. If liberal Christianity loses its sense of the word of
proclamation it loses its religious vitality.
It loses its religious dialectic of the world and the secular and becomes
another decent, ethical vision living in, by and for a world which sets its
agenda and writes the words for its decent, ethical, but ultimately
irreligious tunes. The liberal churches are always in danger of losing their
paradigmatic religious dialectic and becoming only psychological
counseling centers or resources for societal causes. And yet the fidelity of
the liberal churches to the world empowered by their listening to the
Christian word of proclamation compels them, as it must, to aid all
authentic causes of personal wholeness and societal justice. (p. 212)
Tracy points to Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as leading examples of the
ministry of the paradigmatic word which shatters the idols of culture. Barth so
feared any claim to participation in the transcendent reality that he wanted to
admit of no point of contact; such a view sees a word-centered Christianity
devoid of all manifestation apart from the erupting power of the Word.
Commenting on the two poles, manifestation and proclamation in their recent
exponants referred to here, Eliade, Barth and Bonhoeffer, Tracy declares,
With the same kind of radicality as Eliade, Barth and Bonhoeffer will also
insist, "Only the paradigmatic is the real." Yet their paradigm of the
proclaimed word will drive them into a direct confrontation with the
equally radical "only" of Eliade through its dialectic in and for the world, in
and for time and history. For Eliade, manifestation discloses not an entry
into the secular but an escape from the terror, the nightmare, the banality,
the latent nihilism of ordinary time and history. Not the profane, not the
secular will save us; only an entry into the religion of manifestation, the
worlds of sacred space and the repetitions of sacred time can do that.
Eliade's work serves in the contemporary period as a classic expression of
the power of religion as manifestation releasing its dialectic of the sacred
and the profane and its passionately religious sense of radical participation
in the cosmos through the saturating repetitions of myth, ritual and
symbol. His is recognizably iconic consciousness. In an analogous manner
Barth and Bonhoeffer, with their distinct and sometimes conflicting
positions, represent two contemporary classic expressions of Christian
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 19 of 20
faith as a faith living by the power of the proclaimed word releasing its
dialectic of the word and the secular and its suspicion of "religious
participation" and repetition. (p. 213F)
It is Tracy's contention that we must not be forced to choose one pole or the
other. Christianity does not live by the "only" of Eliade or Barth. It is his purpose
to push beyond these oppositions to find a place where both can be embraced.
Both manifestation and proclamation are necessary to Christian religion.
The dialectic of the Christian religion is one in which the word does negate
any claim to a mode of participation which logically approaches identity or
existentially relaxes into complacency – a dialectic which, in fidelity to the
word, must radically negate all idolatries, yet a dialectic which implies,
includes and demands genuine manifestation. ... Christianity embraces
nature in and through its doctrines of creation – transformed, to be sure,
in the light of the doctrines of redemption and future eschatology. Indeed
Christianity celebrates nature in and through its doctrine of incarnation as
theophanous manifestation – understood, to be sure, only in the light of a
shattering, defamiliarizing cross and a transformative resurrection. (p.
214)
Tracy contends that a Christianity of word without real manifestation stands in
peril of becoming either fanatical or arid and cerebral and abstract. Barth
understood this dealing at length with the doctrine of creation. Manifestation,
Tracy argues, is always the enveloping presupposition of the erupting word of
proclamation.
Manifestation envelops every word from beginning to end, even as it
allows itself to be transformed by the shattering paradigmatic power of the
proclaimed word. But manifestation returns, thus transformed, to reunite
even the secular, the historical, the temporal, the self with the whole
disclosed in nature and the cosmos. A Christianity without a sense of
radical participation in the whole – that sense which Schleiermacher
named the "feeling of absolute dependence," which others name a
fundamental trust in the very worthwhileness of existence – is a
Christianity that has lost its roots in the human experience of God's
manifesting and revealing presence in all creation, in body, in nature, in
spirit, not only in history. (p. 215)
The powerful, eruptive word of proclamation that defamiliarizes us from the
world is yet itself rooted in the enveloping cosmos.
To speak Christian eschatological language is to speak a language where
the religious power of the whole has entered time and history in the
decisive proclamation of this particular word and event, where that power
has freed the "profane" to become the "secular" and has liberated the
present and the future from the exclusive hold of the sacred time of past
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 20 of 20
origin by empowering history and ethical action with religious power. (p.
216)
Tracy points to the sacramental view of Catholic Christianity:
Nature and the secular become sacrament in their transformationsublation by the word, the "prime sacrament" and decisive manifestation
or representation named Jesus Christ. There can be no negation of the
cosmos or nature. Indeed a sacrament is nothing other than a decisive
representation of both the events of proclaimed history and the
manifestations of the sacred cosmos. (p. 216)
If the kerygmatic power of the word in the sacrament is lost, the sacrament
becomes magic. But if the paradigmatic power of real manifestation is lost, the
word alone will not meet the deepest needs and satisfy the deepest longings of the
human heart. Christianity then becomes a righteous rigorism of duty and
obligation.
How can we hold on to both poles and not lose the necessary experience of either
manifestation or proclamation? Tracy believes it can be accomplished but only a
radically ecumenical Christianity can accomplish it.
By themselves, Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity seem
trapped in historically hardened emphases: unable alone to restore the
power of both proclamation and manifestation in a manner that does not
seem some uneasy compromise. ... This demand for both manifestation
and proclamation is incumbent upon all Christians who recognize the
reality of Jesus Christ as the Christian classic, i.e., as the decisive representation in both word and manifestation of our God and our
humanity. Thus will Christocentric Christians recognize that the
paradigmatic Christ event discloses the religious power of both
manifestation and proclamation ... both Christian manifestation and
proclamation are ultimately rooted in that God whose radical otherness in
freedom posits itself to us as the radical immanence of an all-pervasive,
defamiliarizing, shattering, enveloping love in cosmos, in history, in the
self. (p. 218)
Part II: Interpreting the Christian Classic
Tracy applies the methodological argument of Part I to a distinctively Christian
systematic theology in Part II. He has argued that there is a distinctly religious
classic among the other classics generally recognized and he contends that that
classic status means that the religious classic too has public status. Such religious
classics are “expressions from a particular tradition that have found the right
mode of expression to become public for all intelligent, reasonable and
responsible persons.” (p. 233). He asks then what are the classic texts, events,
symbols, images and persons in a tradition. While in the Christian tradition there
© Grand Valley State University
�David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination, Review by Richard A. Rhem
Page 21 of 20
are several candidates for classic status, there is one which is the norm of all
others and which provides the focus for understanding God, self, others, society,
history, nature and the whole from a Christian perspective: the event and person
of Jesus Christ. Tracy claims,
One need not be a believer in Christianity to accord it (and thereby its
central, paradigmatic, classic event) authentically religious status: a
manifestation from the whole by the power of the whole. (p. 234)
Christology is the attempt to respond through some interpretation to the event of
Jesus Christ in one’s own situation.
…The Christian interpretation of this classic event recognizes in some
present experience of the event – more precisely, in the claim disclosed in
that event (paradigmatically in experiencing that event in manifestation
and proclamation) as an event from God and by God’s power. To speak
religiously and theologically of the Christ event is ultimately to speak of an
event from God. )p. 234)
The Jesus remembered by the tradition is experienced in the present mediated
through the word, sacrament and action. Jesus remembered as the Christ is the
experience of the presence of God’s own self.
The expression “The event of Jesus Christ” means for the Christian
tradition…that we recognize Jesus in the Christ event as the person in
whom God’s own self is decisively re-presented as the gift and command of
love. The always already reality of a graced world is made present again
decisively, paradigmatically, classically as event in Jesus Christ. The event,
as re-presentative of reality always already present to us as human beings,
is present again as the decisive that it happens. The event as command is
also present as the not-yet-actualized reality internal for each person and
for all history responding to that one decisive event of God. (p. 234)
Tracy will now examine this position to see if it is a relatively adequate
interpretation of the event and, secondly, to understand how this interpretation
differs from alternative interpretations.
The key for the interpretation of the event of Jesus Christ must be the claim
exerted in the present by that event as the claim that it happens now.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
KII-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1981-2014
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
text/pdf
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
References
David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, 1998
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RA-4-19980101
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1998-01-01
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Title
A name given to the resource
The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard A. Rhem
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Book Review created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on January 1, 1998 entitled "The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism ", on the book The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism , written by David Tracy. Tags: Theology, Pluralism, Truth, Meaning, Sacred, Religious Tradition, Nature of God, Nature of Religion, Ecumenical, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mircea Eliade, David Tracy. Scripture references: David Tracy. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, 1998.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
David Tracy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Ecumenical
Karl Barth
Meaning
Mircea Eliade
Nature of God
Nature of Religion
Pluralism
Religious Tradition
Sacred
Theology
Truth
-
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/67450db648a60e2c64f7cdb5a81fa11e.pdf
6134a1e45b48a65c513371461ff0c784
PDF Text
Text
A Theological Conception of Reality as History
Some Aspects of the Thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg
Article by
Richard A. Rhem
Minister of Preaching and Theological Inquiry
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
Published in
Reformed Review
A Theological Journal of Western Theological Seminary
101 East 13th Street, Holland, Michigan
Autumn, 1972
I. Pannenberg in the Context of Modern Theology
In his essay entitled “Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century” Karl Barth
speaks with great respect of the daring with which the leading theologians of that
period, which was so replete with magnificent achievements in the arts and
sciences, wrestled with the challenges of the modern world. They displayed an
openness to the world which ought always to characterize theology and they
accounted themselves well, both as Christian men and as scholars. However,
Barth points out, their strength was also their weakness in that they allowed this
confrontation with contemporary culture to become their decisive and primary
concern. This, he maintains, was the key problem of nineteenth-century
Protestant theology.
This general assumption of openness to the world led necessarily to the specific
assumption that theology could defend its own cause only within the framework
of a total view of man, the universe, and God; which would command universal
recognition.1
One of the leading exponents of this point of view criticized by Barth was Ernst
Troeltsch, although his work extended well into the first quarter of the twentieth
century. Troeltsch was critical of the leading representatives of the liberal
tradition also, but for precisely the opposite reason. Though he, himself, had
much in common with the dominant Ritschlian school, he was nevertheless
critical of the Schleiermacher-Ritschl-Herrmann line of development because,
although they accepted fully the application and the results of the historicalcritical method in the investigation of Christian origins, they still maintained the
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 2
uniqueness of Jesus, rooting the redemption wrought by God through him in his
person. For all their openness to the modern world and their conviction that
theology must be restructured in the light of the modern world-view of the
natural sciences, the epistemology of Kant, and the newly prestigious science of
history, they nevertheless stubbornly maintained the necessity of the present
experience of redemption being indissolvably related to Jesus of Nazareth. To
Troeltsch this appeared to be a futile grasping after the last remains of dogmatic
thinking which located absolute and definitive revelation in a particular historical
phenomenon. He acknowledged that these theologians had broken with the old
dogmatics of Protestant orthodoxy, but in the light of the development of
historical thinking and the application of the historical method, he was convinced
that they were holding an impossible position. They were resisting the pressure of
consistent thinking by stopping short of admitting the relativity of each and every
historical appearance. For Troeltsch the decisive fact was not the historical
person of Jesus, but rather the idea which was concretized in him and from him
has issued forth into history. Once launched, the idea or principle is independent
of its initiator, its essence to be sought not in its initial embodiment but rather in
the pluriformity of its historical configurations at any given stage in its
development. In the Schleiermacher-Ritschl-Herrmann line of thought Troeltsch
saw a mixing of types of theological method and consequently a failure to
distinguish the person of Jesus from the principle he incarnated. He criticized the
failure sharply to distinguish person and principle, personality and idea, and
likewise the contention that the historical person and a personal relationship to
him were essential to saving faith in God. He saw this position rooted in the later
churchly Schleiermacher and being strongly advocated in his day by Ritschl and
Herrmann.2
In Troeltsch’s view the very historical-critical approach to Christian origins,
especially to Jesus himself, undercut any attempt to salvage from the uniformity
of history a final and absolute revelation of God. This was clearly demonstrated,
Troeltsch maintained, by the fact that the History of Religions school, of which he
claimed to be the dogmatician, had itself sprung from the Ritschlian school,
differing only in the greater consistency with which it pursued the consequences
of the very methods accepted by Ritschl, himself. Thus Troeltsch was convinced
that the theology of the future would have to purge away these last vestiges of the
old dogmatic approach and carry through more rigorously the requirements of
the historical-critical method which draws all historical phenomena, Jesus of
Nazareth not excepted, into the movement of historical process, allowing for no
absolute uniqueness in the midst of the relative.
Paradoxical as it may appear, Karl Barth quite agreed with Troeltsch—agreed,
that is, that to subject Jesus to historical-critical research behind the witness of
the New Testament is to bring him down to where he is one historical person
among others, one in whom there cannot possibly be found the final and
definitive revelation of God. Of course, agreement with Troeltsch, that having
followed the path they did, the great nineteenth-century theologians could not
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 3
consistently stop halfway, does not imply that Barth advocates with Troeltsch
that their successors should draw the logical conclusion, as Troeltsch counseled.
On the contrary, Barth examines the Schleiermacher-Ritschl-Herrmann Theology
and discovers their fatal error, not in their failure to follow consistently the
course on which they embarked, but rather in the course they chose to follow in
the first place. It was not their decision to grant recognition to the use of the
historical-critical method and then failure to draw the conclusions to which it led.
Rather it was their understanding of religion as an innate potential of the human
spirit and their failure to see that, defined in such terms, the Christian faith was
not being spoken of at all. If Christianity was a phenomenon of the religious
capacity of man, then it was one religion among others and could be understood
only as Troeltsch maintained, by a comparative historical study. In such an
instance there could be no talk of an absolute and definitive revelatory
significance or meaning in history. If one started where Troeltsch started, Barth
maintained, one would end where Troeltsch ended. But then, according to Barth,
we have to do not with the religion of revelation, but with the revelation of
religion3 and the application of the historical-critical method will discover in
Jesus no more than a man among other men and in Christianity no more than a
religion among other religions. The History of Religions school is only the logical
outcome of a theology that speaks of the believing man rather than of the
revealing God. Theology which takes itself seriously can speak only from the
revelation of God who has grasped it, paying homage to no world-view, be it
ancient or modern, no philosophical system or no anthropological analysis of the
religious capacity of man. Theology must speak from out of the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ.
Thus Barth completely repudiated the counsel of Troeltsch and pursued the
dogmatic method, reducing historical-critical research to a secondary, helpingrole in the explication of the biblical witness to Jesus Christ.
One of the young theologians in the 1920’s who joined with Barth in his revolt
from the theology of the nineteenth century was Rudolf Bultmann. He too
recognized the poverty of Liberalism and its failure to give centrality to the
decisive redemptive act of God in Jesus Christ. He criticized Liberalism for reducing Christianity to a system of timeless and eternal truths and the History of
Religions school for reducing Christ to a cultic symbol.4 However, what for Barth
was a secondary matter became for him the central concern, namely the
hermeneutical problem. Granting that Christian theology must start from the
Word of God, Bultmann could never emphasize too strongly that revelation must
be understandable to man. This man he found most adequately defined by the
analysis of existentialist philosophy as set forth by the early Heidegger. While he,
himself, was unexcelled in the application of the historical-critical method,
Bultmann denied that the results of such research were of any consequence for
faith, faith which was not belief in factual information about Jesus, his life, death,
and resurrection but rather obedience to the kerygmatic Word in the present
moment calling men to a new self-understanding. Bultmann the historian and
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 4
Bultman the theologian never met; for apart from the fact that Jesus appeared
faith has no relation to history.
Great differences separate Troeltsch, Barth, and Bultman from one another.
Troeltsch sees no alternative to pursuing the historical method in the analysis of
the phenomenon of religion. Barth rejects the idea that the Christian faith is first
of all a religion and he pursues the dogmatic method, judging all religion by the
norm and criterion of Jesus Christ. Bultmann interprets the Christian faith
within the possibilities afforded by an Existentialist analysis of man. Interestingly
enough, however, there is one point on which they all seem in agreement; that is
the understanding of the nature of history and the principles of historiography.
For Troeltsch, history and the methods by which it is investigated rule out in
advance any final and definitive revelation of God in history. The early Barth
agreed and moved revelation to the frontier of time and eternity. Later he
brought revelation back into history, defining history from the perspective of
Jesus Christ but at the same time he continued to recognize the validity of
historical science as defined by Troeltsch maintaining that it had no competency
to deal with God’s revelatory action in history. Bultmann as a practicing historian
followed the historical-critical method as defined by Troeltsch and, because he
saw history as the realm of the relative and transient, he removed revelation from
the sphere of history to the realm of human existence. All three agreed that
history and historical science are what the great historians of the nineteenth
century said they are and all three agreed that, that being the case, there was no
trace of God’s revelatory action discoverable in history by the historian.
In the last decade this whole conception of history and accompanying
historiography has been called into question by the German theologian Wolfhart
Pannenberg. German theology has often been characterized by drastic swings of
the pendulum and, as Pannenberg’s early writings appeared, it seemed that once
again the pendulum was swinging from the theology of the word which has
dominated the twentieth century in its various forms to a theology of history. As
Pannenberg has continued to address himself to the problems of revelation,
history, and theological method, however, it is evident that we have to do here
with more than simply a reaction to the one-sided emphasis of dialectical
theology, a reaction in its turn as one-sided on the other side of the issue. Much
rather, Pannenberg has sought to do justice to the valid insights of those who
have preceded him. Specifically, he acknowledges the valid insight of Troeltsch
that Christianity cannot be arbitrarily isolated from the rest of man’s religious
experience, but much rather can be understood only in relationship to the whole
of the history of religions. However, with Barth and Bultmann, over against
Troeltsch, he speaks of the priority of revelation in terms of which the respective
religious experience of man is to be judged, rather than seeing religious
experience as the expression of an innate potentiality within man.
With Troeltsch, over against Barth and Bultmann, Pannenberg sees the necessity
of relating the Christian faith to the whole of reality. But over against Troeltsch,
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
he does not interpret Christianity in subjection to the prevailing worldview of
modern man, but rather interprets the whole of reality theologically, submitting
his argumentation before the bar of human judgement, being convinced that a
Christian interpretation of the whole of reality is more rational than any other.
With Troeltsch and against Barth and Bultman, Pannenberg insists that the claim
of a revelation in history must be historically perceptible by means of historicalcritical research. The central revelatory event, the resurrection, serves as the
model for his understanding of the relation of historical reason and revelation.
But against Troeltsch, he affirms the historical verifiability of such revelatory
action.
In short, Pannenberg pursues the historical method as advocated by Troeltsch
but, rather than ending with the loss of a final and definite revelation of God in
history, he proclaims with Barth and Bultmann the finality of Jesus Christ in the
definitive self-revelation of God. How is this possible? The answer lies in the fact
that precisely where Troeltsch, Barth, and Bultmann were one, Pannenberg parts
from all three; that is at the point of the understanding of the nature of history
and the principles by which the past is known. Troeltsch gave definitive
statement to the understanding of nineteenth century historiography. Barth and
Bultmann recognized that in those terms the final revelation of God could not be
posited within history and, rather than subjecting the understanding of history to
a thorough critique, they removed revelation from the competency of the
historical-critical method (Barth) and from the arena of history itself (Bultmann).
By a critique of Troeltsch’s understanding of history and the principles of
historiography Pannenberg attempts to do justice to Troeltsch’s demand to
pursue the historical method while leaving room for a definitive revelation of God
in history which Barth and Bultmann in their respective manners recognized as
essential to the Christian tradition.
Thus, in a sense, by tracing the understanding of revelation, history, and
theological method in these four thinkers, we come full circle but, through Pannenberg’s critique of Troeltsch, the whole perspective is turned around and,
rather than understanding Jesus in terms of the modern worldview of reality,
reality is understood from the perspective of Jesus, the end of history, who has
appeared proleptically in the midst of history.
II. The Universality of Systemic Theology
The theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg is characterized by a tension which, in his
view, is given with the task of systematic theology itself.5 Systematic theology
always resides in a tension between the two poles of the subject matter with
which it has to do. On the one hand, there is the Christian tradition itself for
which it is responsible, specifically, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as
witnessed to in the Scriptures. On the other hand, Systematic theology must be
concerned with all truth in general as represented in its various facets by all nontheological disciplines. Systematic theology cannot, as is the case in other
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
disciplines, devote itself exclusively to the investigation of its special subject
matter, for inherent in its task is a universality which impels it to take up the
question of truth per se. This universality follows inevitably from the fact that
theology purports to speak of God. “One uses the word God meaningfully only
when one intends thereby the Power determining everything that is.”6 To speak
thus of God as the author of all reality brings with it the intellectual obligation to
relate all truth to the God of the Bible and then to understand it anew from him.
Pannenberg acknowledges that the theological task thus conceived may appear
presumptuous. Yet, to the extent that the theologian is conscious of what he is
doing when he speaks of God, he has no alternative. Pannenberg acknowledges
further that the task can never be consummated once for all. But if this
responsibility appears as an almost unbearable burden, it likewise constitutes the
peculiar dignity of theology, especially in an intellectual situation which is
characterized by fragmentation as a result of the present high degree of
specialization, for it falls to theology to seek truth in its unity.
Such a conception of the task of systematic theology is by no means generally
accepted. Particularly in the last hundred years theology has been conceived
rather as an independent science alongside of the other sciences with its own
special subject matter, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ witnessed to in the
Scriptures. Pannenberg counters, however, that the revelation of God is only
really conceived of as the revelation of God when it is understood in relation to all
truth and knowledge and when all truth is integrated into it. Only thus is it
possible to speak of the biblical revelation as the revelation of the God who is the
creator and perfecter of all things.
Since Harnack’s famous characterization of the apologist’s assimilation of the
Greek philosophical quest for the true structure of the divine into the Christian
tradition as the “hellenization” of the gospel, that endeavor has been generally
judged in a negative light. Pannenberg, however, rejects that negative judgement.
While he grants that the apologists were not, in fact, successful in carrying
through the assimilation in all respects, he disputes the idea that their efforts
resulted in a complete capitulation to the philosophical quest. But apart from the
degree to which the early church fathers were successful or unsuccessful in what
they undertook to do, the real issue, as far as Pannenberg is concerned, is the fact
that they undertook the task of offering the Christian gospel as the answer to the
Greek philosophical quest. This undertaking is generally recognized as having
been inevitable in that the Hellenistic world into which the gospel came was
dominated by the Greek philosophical conception of God. Thus, in spite of the
disastrous mingling of the Christian message with Greek metaphysics, there was
no alternative. But such a view, Pannenberg insists, misses the primary point,
which is that the Christian message itself necessitated the encounter with the
Greek philosophical quest. He contends:
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 7
The discussion with the philosophical question of the true form of the
Divine was, indeed, occasioned by the encounter with the Hellenistic
Thought-world, but it was also inwardly rooted in the biblical witness of
God as the universal God, responsible not only for Israel, but for all
people.
In the claim of the God of Israel to be the God, alone having jurisdiction
over all men, it was, therefore, theologically rooted that the Christian faith
had to enter into the philosophical question of the true nature of God and
until today must give an answer to it.7
The ancient church fathers as well as the authors of the great scholastic summas
understood the universality of theology, the responsibility that rests upon him
who would speak of God.
That modern theology has not so conceived of its task can be traced to Albrecht
Ritschl’s attempt to carve out for theology its own sphere, the sphere of religious
experience, rejecting all metaphysical elements of the Christian tradition in the
face of the critique rendered by Positivism. Liberal Protestantism passed this
heritage along to Dialectical Theology which had reacted so strongly against it.
Pannenberg observes that Barth’s struggle against every vestige of natural
theology is really in many respects an extension and radicalization of Ritschl’s
idea of an independent theology with its own special theme.8
If we would discover where theology lost its universality, however, we must go
back much further. Evangelical theology has never had a universal character
since it inherited the Scripture-positivism which has been its hallmark from the
doctrine of Scripture formulated in the late Middle Ages in, for example, the
School of Occam. It has been axiomatic in the Protestant tradition that the
theological task consists in the exegesis of Scripture. Thus to find the root of the
loss of universality we must go back into Scholasticism, specifically to the
thirteenth century and Thomas’ careful demarcation of two spheres of
knowledge, natural and supernatural. Pannenberg recognizes the exigencies
under which this bifurcation took place. Aristotelian philosophy prevailed, being
generally acknowledged as the embodiment of all “natural” thought. If one would
hold to the truth of the Christian tradition, one could do so only by setting it
alongside the summation of “natural” truth as unfolded in Aristotelianism.
Aristotelian philosophy represented that truth which could be discovered by
man’s natural faculties; the Christian faith represented that truth which could
only be bestowed by revelation. Neither Aristotelian philosophy nor the Christian
tradition was intended for this kind of reciprocal supplementation, according to
Pannenberg, but he asserts:
It would seem much rather to have been the expression of a compromise
of theology with the intellectual power of Aristotelianism. In this compromise lie the historical roots of the last of the universality of theology.9
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 8
For Thomas, who was responsible for the consummate expression of the naturalsupernatural division of the spheres of knowledge, the two spheres were carefully
coordinated into a systematic whole. In the course of time, however, the structure
fell apart rendering the sphere of natural knowledge independent of any
reference to the truth of revelation, the consequence of which was increasingly to
render “supernatural” knowledge superfluous for a knowledge of the world and to
make of theology a positivistic science of Scripture. Such a state of affairs hardly
accords with Paul’s struggle to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (II Cor.
10:5) and, with the unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the modern period in
the wake of the development of the scientific method, the division of spheres of
knowledge formulated by Thomas has resulted in an almost unbridgeable gulf.
The task of understanding the whole of reality in its unity from the perspective of
its author, the God of creation, is formidable indeed, and yet unless it is
undertaken, the universality of theology will never be realized and theology, as an
independent science with its own special theme, the exegesis of Scripture, will
fade increasingly into the background of man’s pursuit of truth. Concentration of
its own special theme has about it a pious sound and it makes for a comfortable
co-existence of theology with the other sciences. It can only signify, however, the
utter failure of theology to carry out its peculiar intellectual responsibility which
is to take in claim all truth as witness to the one true God as the author of reality
and, in turn, to understand all truth anew from him.
Where does one begin? How can such an overwhelming task be undertaken? It is
Pannenberg’s conviction that the conception of theology as an independent
science alongside others with its own special subject matter must be rejected and
that its universal character must be recognized by its addressing itself to the
second pole of its dual concern, namely, to the questions which concern man in
his experience of reality in the present cultural situation. Only by seeking the
truth per se can theology do justice to its special subject matter, the revelation of
God in Jesus Christ as witnessed to in the Scriptures; for in that it purports to
speak of God, it purports to speak of the Power determining all reality. Implicit in
the responsibility of speaking of the Power determining all reality is the necessity
of thoroughly grasping how modern man experiences reality, for only by speaking
of the Power determining reality as it is presently experienced can theology speak
convincingly. It is, therefore, incumbent upon theology to speak of God in terms
of the present experience of reality. Thus the most general question which
theology must answer is how one can speak of God in the present cultural
situation. Only by determining this can theology once again undertake to exercise
its universal function.
III. Revelation As History
Pannenberg’s unique contribution to contemporary theological discussion has
had to do primarily not with the content of revelation so much as the mode of its
occurrence. Stated theologically the question has been, How does God manifest
himself to man? Stated anthropologically it is the question of how man perceives
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page 9
that self-revelation. The theological question has issued in the debate as to
whether God reveals himself directly or immediately through his word, that is,
through an act of speaking the content of which is God himself, whether he
himself speaks, or another speaks in his name; or whether God reveals himself
indirectly or mediately through his activity, his activity being conceived not in
terms of a series of special acts next to other events explainable as “natural” as
opposed to “supernatural” but rather his continuous dynamic relationship to the
whole of reality as its Creator, transcendent Ground, and Destiny. In
oversimplified terms, it is a question of whether God “speaks” to man directly,
thus making known his essence to man, or whether God’s essence can be known
only indirectly from what he does. Obviously, when stated thus “word” and “act”
are placed in a falsely antithetical relationship and a biblical theology will rather
understand them in a positive relationship with the priority given to word or act
depending on the point of view of the biblical writer. Nonetheless, setting the
question up in terms of the two poles, word and act, is helpful in identifying the
problem.
If we approach the problem from the anthropological side, that is, if we ask how
the revelation of God is perceived by man, then we are asking whether God in his
self-manifestation can be known by man through the exercise of his rational
faculties or whether God can be known only through the means of some suprarational faculty however that may be understood. Essentially this is a question of
whether God in his self-manifestation can be perceived by reason or whether he
can only be perceived by faith. It should be underlined here that this is not a
question of whether man by his own rational faculties can discover God or
whether God must make himself known to man. If the question we are asking is
misunderstood in this way—a not uncommon misunderstanding—the real issue
will be missed. The point rather is: Granted that God can be known by man only
through his self-disclosure, is that self-disclosure rationally perceptible or only
supra-rationally perceptible.
Again, it is not a question of whether the content of God's revelation is rational or
supra-rational. It is possible to hold, as does Karl Barth, that the self-revelation of
God is highly rational and yet deny that man through the exercise of his rational
faculties can discover that revelation apart from an illuminating act of the Holy
Spirit which can be described only as a miracle. For Barth, to be more accurate,
revelation is never “there” to be perceived, but rather it “occurs” in the
illuminating act of the Holy Spirit, although once it is given it is rationally
comprehensible.
From this it should be evident that of the two questions, or rather the two aspects
of the one question concerning the revelation of God, the most basic question is
not whether God reveals himself through word or event but whether man as a
rational creature is able through the exercise of his rational faculties to
comprehend the revelation of God. Whether that revelation takes the form of
spoken word or historical event is to be determined subsequently. The primary
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page10
division of opinion will occur on the anthropological or epistemological question
as to whether man as man can perceive the revelation of God. This point is
illustrated by the fact that, for example, Bultmann and Cullmann represent two
radically different positions in regard to the question of where God reveals
himself, in word or event. However, in spite of their differences on the mode of
revelation, they both agree in their own way that man comes into the possession
of knowledge of God through an illuminating act of the Holy Spirit and not
through the exercise of his reason over against the “proclaimed word”
(Bultmann) or the “acts of God” (Cullmann). On this question Kerygmatic
Theology and Heilsgeschichtliche Theology are in agreement.
With regard to the first question as to how God reveals himself, whether through
word or event or in combination of the two, we have an inter-theological debate.
With regard to the second question, as to how man perceives the revelation of
God, we are dealing with a matter that has wide-ranging implications for the
whole sphere of human knowledge, depending on how we answer the question. If
we answer it as do Barth, Bultmann, or Cullmann, to name only three
representative figures, holding that man as man, by the exercise of his rational
faculties can never achieve a knowledge of God apart from a supplementary
illuminating act of the Holy Spirit, then, to employ Kantian terms, we remove
theology as an independent science, into the realm of practical reason; or, in
Ritschl's terms, we make theological statements as value-judgments; or, in Existentialist terms, we make theological truth equivalent to the truth of expression of
the existing individual. If, on the contrary, we hold that although man by his own
creative reason could never discover the knowledge of God, yet, given the fact
that God has revealed himself and that man as man can achieve the knowledge of
God so revealed, then we place theology squarely in the center of human
knowledge wherein it will be obliged to demonstrate the revelation of God before
the court of human judgment in terms of the generally accepted canons of
rationality. For if the theologian is convinced that God is and that he has
disclosed himself, and, further, that that revelation is available to rational
reflection, he will not be content simply to affirm his conviction, nor will he be
able to appeal to some sort of esoteric experience wherein his knowledge was
ascertained, but he will find it incumbent upon himself to support the truth of his
knowledge of God through rational argumentation.
The case as stated here is intentionally stated in the sharpest possible contrasts in
order most clearly to isolate the central problem we wish to discuss in our
critique. It is our conviction that only in such a posing of the problem does the
real significance and urgent importance of Pannenberg’s theology become
evident. We have sketched in brief outline the crisis which developed in
evangelical theology with the loss of the authority of Scripture. We have seen that
that authority was undermined through the rise of historical thinking although,
paradoxically, historical thinking itself and consequent secularism are in part
fruits of the Christian tradition. Protestant theology over the last century and a
half can best be understood as an attempt to come to terms with historical
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page11
thinking, but to the present no satisfactory solution has been found. We
concentrated particularly on the attempt of Dialectical Theology as formulated
respectively by Barth and Bultmann to disengage the revelation of God from the
sphere of history thus removing theology from the lordship of historical thinking.
More and more, however, it has become clear that the creation of a special
sphere of theological truth inaccessible to the judgment of reason is selfdefeating, leaving theology in the position of affirming an existential truth
(Bultmann) or a revelational truth (Barth) neither of which can claim generally
binding power. Theological truth is reduced to private truth.
We have attempted in our exposition of Barth and Bultmann not only to
understand what they were saying, but why they were saying it. If we come to
conclusions differing from theirs this is not because we have seen the problem
more clearly than they saw it, but rather because we view it in a changed climate
of opinion, changed at least in part through the genius of their labors. We are
convinced that it is possible today in a climate of opinion radically different than
that which prevailed in the opening decades of our century, to affirm the
universality of theology. We are further convinced that in the systematic theology
of Pannenberg we have the most adequate and most comprehensive attempt yet
made to integrate the true insights of post-Enlightenment or modern thought
into a theological understanding of reality. In the theology of Pannenberg we
have the revolutionary truth of historical thinking, which is the hallmark of
modern thought, incorporated into a conception of the Christian tradition which
at the same time maintains the essence of the latter.
We have seen both in our introductory discussion of the rise of historical thinking
and in our exposition of Pannenberg’s theology that western thought shows
widespread agreement on the fact that the whole of reality must be conceived as
history, as dynamic process in contrast to the cosmological thinking of Greek
philosophy which conceived Being as static. It was the greatness of Ernst
Troeltsch that he recognized the fundamental revolution in human thinking
which historical thinking occasioned. He was convinced that historical thinking
was incommensurable with the Christian theological tradition because that
tradition was formulated in terms of Greek metaphysical conceptually which had
been undercut by post-Enlightenment thought. He was so certain that historical
thinking was irreversible that he felt compelled to re-formulate the Christian faith
in accommodation to it. In so doing he gave up the idea of a final, definitive
revelation of God in the course of history, specifically in the history of Jesus.
Troeltsch’s conception of the nature of history and his formulation of
historiographical principles was so much the consummate expression of the
prevaling intellectual climate that for a considerable period they were viewed as
axiomatic. This was the climate of opinion when the young theologians who were
to be grouped together as constituting the dialectical movement came on the
scene. They were not prepared to challenge Troeltsch’s conception of the nature
of history nor his formulation of the principle of the historical-critical method. Of
one thing, however, they were certain: in such a view of history and
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page12
historiography there was no room for the definitive revelation of God in Jesus
Christ. Therefore, being convinced that they must speak of God in his deity, his
sovereignty, and his freedom in his revelation, they removed that revelation from
the history whose nature Troeltsch described and from the access of the
historical-critical method whose principles Troeltsch formulated.
We noted above the self-defeating consequence of the removal of revelation from
history. Theology pursued as an independent science becomes a matter of private
truth. The widespread questioning, particularly of the position of Bultmann by
his own eminent students, is an indication of the dissatisfaction felt with his
handling of the problem of revelation and history, and, while Barth has indeed
moved the occurrence of revelation back into the sphere of history, his existence,
the subjectivity of truth, the openness and contingency of the historical process,
reality itself as historical process—into a theological conception of history which
finds in Jesus the definitive revelation of God, that we have contended that
Pannenberg’s theology is the most adequate formulation of the truth of historical
thinking and the Christian tradition yet attempted. His theological conception of
history is not simply a rejection of and reaction against the prevailing dialectical
theology as that theology had been over against the nineteenth century Protestant
Liberalism and the historicism of Troeltsch. While Pannenberg rejects the
authoritarianism and revelational positivism of dialectical theology, he
nevertheless is concerned to preserve the essence of what that theology was
saying, namely, that God in his sovereign freedom has disclosed himself in Jesus
Christ. He recognizes the justification of dialectical theology’s reaction against
Troeltsch’s historicism and he too is critical of Troeltsch. However he is equally
aware that Troeltsch had a grasp of something which theology simply cannot bypass, the recognition of the revolutionary nature of historical thinking whose
truth must be incorporated into the Christian tradition. In Pannenberg’s
theological conception of history there is a meeting of the best insights of
Troeltsch with the best insights of the theology of the Word, and the result is a
significant advance, a breakthrough in theological understanding.
IV. Dogmatic Theses Drawn From Pannenberg’s Thinking
Thesis I: Utilizing the best insights of twentieth century historical science,
Pannenberg has presented a valid critique of both Troeltsch’s understanding of
the nature of history and his formulation of the principles of historiography
thus creating the possibility of a theological conception of history and asserting
once again theology’s universal function.
It is characteristic of Pannenberg’s theology that he speaks of God in relation to
the whole of reality. In so doing he seeks to integrate the best insights of the
respective disciplines into a theonomous conception of reality. It is equally
characteristic of his procedure, however, that he claims no privileged perspective
as a Christian theologian when discussing, for instance, the anthropological
structure of human existence or the nature of history. When discussing historical-
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page13
critical thinking he does not begin with some theological requirement to be
forced on the historian, but rather listens to how the historians themselves
understand their subject. How do they understand the nature of history? How do
they conceive of the task of the historian? How do they justify the
historiographical principles with which they carry out their investigation? His
own critique of the science of history is then an immanent critique. Given an
understanding of history as advocated by Collingwood, for example, principles of
historiography as formulated under the impact of positivism must be modified.
This is but one illustration of his method throughout. Only after he has
determined what the leading thinkers in the various disciplines themselves have
to say about the nature of their subject and their methodological principles does
Pannenberg begin his theological reflection on that subject matter. He claims that
if he is seriously to speak of God, which as a theologian he must do, then he
cannot allow the historian’s truth to stand in isolation as simply the truth about
history. Rather, if God is God then the historian’s truth which he has discovered
by means of investigation and reflection must be relatable to the one unifying
ground of truth, namely, God. What he does argue in this dialogue with the
various disciplines of science is that, given their own self-understanding, the
reality with which they have to do is more adequately explained on the
presupposition of God than without him. To use history again as an example,
Pannenberg cites several leading historians of the past and present to the effect
that concrete historical research of a limited historical period always presupposes
a wider context which ultimately presupposes some sort of universal-historical
conception. But, he argues, such a conception of the total course of events is
unavailable, as the historians too are vividly aware. Any universal-historical
scheme which denies the contingency of events and the openness of the future
contradicts our understanding of history. This was the fatal weakness of Hegel’s
scheme, and since Hegel historians have eschewed every all-encompassing
system. However, Pannnberg points out, the contemporary historian is in a
dilemma: on the basis of his understanding of his work, universal history must be
thought, but on the basis of his understanding of the nature of history such a
conception cannot be thought. In other words, by means of this immanent
critique of historical science Pannenberg points to an inner contradiction. Then,
taking a cue from Collingwood, he asks what are the prerequisites for a model of
history if its unity as well as its contingency must both find place? He concludes
that such a conception is possible only if we conceive of a ground of history which
is both the source of the contingency of its events as well the basis of its unity.
Can such a ground be found within history itself? Pannenberg attempts to
discover such, but concludes that there is no possible ground within history
which can meet the requirements of the model. Therefore, he concludes, on the
basis of the requirements of historical research and the nature of history, both as
understood by the historian, a transcendent ground which bears the whole of
reality as history must be presupposed.
But, the objection may be raised, did not Hegel presuppose just such a ground,
the Absolute, and did not his system fall in ruins before the recognition of the
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page14
openness of the future? Quite true, Pannenberg responds, and the objection to
Hegel was completely justified. However, in rejecting Hegel’s grounding of the
historical process on a transcendent Power, subsequent philosophy of history lost
the only possibility of establishing the unity of history required for historical
science. Hegel was not wrong in establishing history on a transcendent ground,
but only in his conception of that Absolute coming to self-realization in his own
philosophy. What is required is a transcendent ground, which not only
establishes the unity of history but also is its future, its End. But how can such a
Power be conceived, for the End has not yet arrived? We are back at the same
point apparently. Now, however, Pannenberg offers a model which meets the
requirements: the proleptic appearance of the End of history in the midst of
history. If the End has already appeared, albeit provisionally, then the whole of
history can be anticipated. Yet if the End has appeared proleptically, then
obviously the process of history is still under way and the future is still open.
Where did Pannenberg come up with such a model? Not out of the blue, of
course. It is a model suggested by the eschatological character of the Christ-event.
The model itself proves nothing. It can only be verified by determining if it
explains the facts and, indeed, it must be subjected to a double test: is it an
adequate explanation of the Christ-event and is it an adequate explanation of
reality as history. In the case of the first test we are in the area of biblical
theology; in the case of the second we are still dealing with history as the
historian understands it. We limit ourselves here only to the latter case. The
question is: does the model of history as process moving toward a still
outstanding End within which, however, the End has already provisionally
occurred meet the requirements of the historian’s conception both of his work
and his subject matter? It would seem to meet these requirements. The next step
would be to pursue concrete historical investigation in the framework of this
model. Only then can it be determined if the model is, in fact, a true conception of
reality as history. Here there are two criteria: positively, the model will be verified
if it is able to effect the most adequate explanation of the data encountered in
historical research; negatively, the model will be confirmed if known data
remains unexplainable without the model.
This verification process will be carried out by the historian using the best
scientific techniques at his disposal. The phenomena presented to him are not
perceived with any sort of “eye of faith,” nor must he operate with some sort of
supernatural conception of God. In short, no special pleading is involved in his
phenomenological research.
Is this model the only possible model? Not necessarily. At least that cannot be
presupposed. Anyone is free to propose a model as long as it fits the requirements
of historical science’s own self-understanding. Should such a “competitive” model
be presupposed, then it in turn must be judged on the basis of the criteria cited
above. The conception of models can be various but they must all be subjected to
the criterion of truth, that is, they must be tested as to their adequacy in
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page15
explaining available data and the impossibility of explaining data without them.
In such a process of testing the model which corresponds to reality as presently
comprehended will emerge. Only through such a procedure is it still possible to
speak of truth. Further, should the model constructed in the light of the eschatological understanding of the Christ-event prove true, it would, at the same time,
be a verification of the Christian conception of reality.
The point we must make here is that Pannenberg has proposed a theological
conception of reality not because, being a theologian, he automatically begins at
this point. Whether he does or not is not the point. We may even grant that the
model he constructs is suggested by his own orientation in the Christian
tradition. This still does not detract from the general validity of his procedure.
His theological perspective imposed on the historian neither his historiographical
principles nor his conception of the nature of history. He allowed the historian
himself to dictate the terms. Given those terms, he argued that those terms
require some such model as he proposed. Still he makes no extrinsic demand on
the historian. He simply asks him to test the model, working as a historian.
Whether this model meets the criteria of truth or not is not in any sense
dependent on a position of faith or theological position. The results are submitted
to the bar of generally valid canons of rationality.
But, someone objects, does this not subject the truth of the Christian faith to the
judgment of human rationality? The answer is yes. There can be no sidestepping
that test. There is no sheltered cove within which the Christian tradition can
practice its faith. Either it is true and commends itself as such to human
rationality or it must give up its claim to truth and be content to exercise itself as
a private affair. This is not to say that man comprehends the depths of the
mystery of the Deity or the secrets of the whole of reality. It does mean to affirm,
however, that if God has revealed himself to man in the midst of history, then
that revelation must be comprehensible to man. If God only makes himself
known “vertically from above,” by miracle, through some supernatural
illumination of the Holy Spirit, by means of some esoteric gnosis, why bother
about a revelation in history. If revelation is punctilear, why the horizontal line or
point on the plane of history? If revelation occurs only here and now, then why
does it need a “dass” in history? As an anchor to guard it from myth? But why not
myth? Because the Christian faith claims to be historical, not mythical? But why
be concerned about the Christian faith unless it is true? And if it is true then
revelation has occurred in history, so why all the strenuous efforts to deny that it
is “there?”
Bultmann admitted that he must come to terms with modern thought and so
when he operates with a conception of history as defined by the positivist and
then goes on to carve out a place for the Christian faith in the realm of existence
we must admit that he is at least consistent. But what shall we say of Barth? He
faults Bultmann for allowing modern thought to dominate. Barth rejects the idea.
But what has he done? The very same thing! Barth’s whole amazing theological
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page16
endeavor can well be understood as an affirmation of the truth of the Christian
faith in the face of positivistic thinking in which there was no room for it. But the
paradox of the matter is that the very Achilles’ heel of his whole position is his
contradictory statements about the historicity of revelation and the inaccessibility
of that revelation to historical-critical research. The charge of revelational
positivism is not unjustified. Is it not that he who denied the sovereignty of
modern thought constructed his own theology as if positivistic historiography
were indeed sovereign? Not exactly. Barth’s theology shatters all positivistic
historiography as far as the whole of reality is concerned. But he left it intact as
far as the historical process is concerned. He allowed Troeltsch the final word as
far as historical science was concerned, thus conceiving the historical process as a
self-contained entity set over against God. Historical science is competent to deal
with the one-dimensional reality of history but theology speaks of the One who
encounters the man who lives in that one-dimensional reality, and consequently
historical science is not competent to deal with the intercourse of man and God.
Pannenberg’s superiority must be recognized in two directions. Over against
Troeltsch he says that the historical-critical method, to be sure, has an
anthropocentric element inherent within it, but to that anthropocentric
methodological element you have wedded an anthropocentric worldview, which
not only is not intrinsic to the method but even hinders its effectiveness. Your
anthropocentric worldview precludes any consideration of a transcendent reality
and consequently contradicts the very requirements of historical research itself.
Furthermore your conception of the principle of analogy which is a valuable tool
for gaining knowledge is posited on the postulate of the universal similarity of all
historical phenomena, thus again denying the insight of history itself that events
are contingent and that history is the place of the arrival of the new, the unique,
the unforeseen. The principle of analogy is not wrong but the application is.
Rather than using it to determine the similarities of the respective phenomena,
use it to delineate their differences, their uniqueness.
Furthermore your principle of development denies the contingency of events and
the genuine openness of the future. Your model of history as a self-contained,
unfolding entity beyond which hovers the absolute, known only relatively within
the course of development is an inadequate model in the light of historical
science itself.
At this point Pannenberg addresses Barth and argues that it is not Barth’s
conception of history as encounter that is wrong but only his submission to
positivistic historiography as being the legitimate conception of historical science.
By his divorce of historical science from revelational history, Barth has
introduced an unendurable contradiction into his theological enterprise. Such a
contradiction has been responsible for the feeling as expressed by James Barr:
“Though I still feel that it is Barth’s God whom I seek to worship, the intellectual
framework of Barth’s theology has in my consciousness to a very great extent
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page17
collapsed in ruins.”10 Barth, Pannenberg would affirm, has begun to speak as a
Christian before he has justified his speaking as a theologian, in fact, without
recognizing the legitimacy of such a procedure, or even denying its possibility.
Barth, in one sense, can be recognized as nothing if not bold. It is a question
however if he was bold enough. In a world, a cultural situation, that is largely
determined in its intellectual milieu by atheistic thinking, can the theologian
speak seriously of God unless he has at least created the “room” for such talk by
an immanent critique of atheistic thought itself? If the existence of God cannot be
demonstrated, at least the acids of atheistic thought can be neutralized and a
theological conception of reality can be demonstrated to be rationally as
justifiable as an atheistic conception. Indeed, in Pannenberg’s thought we would
even claim that the theological conception is shown to be more rational. However
that may be, to think the matter through to its limits so that one is placed before
the alternatives is no little gain. Human rationality reaches its limits but that is
true not only for theological thought, but for atheistic as well. A rational choice is
not necessarily a choice in which every piece of data is explained, every mystery
disclosed. It is rather a choice in the face of all possible evidence. It is a choice
made in the light of the widest possible understanding of reality. In this respect it
can be maintained that the commitment of oneself to the God revealed in Jesus
Christ is grounded upon a rational decision—a decision made in the light of all
possible evidence.
In this way theology stands in the middle of the sciences seeking to unify all truth
through its relation to the God who is source, ground, and goal of truth. The
universal function of theology is once again asserted and the world of fragmentary experience, specialized knowledge unrelated to the whole of reality, is
brought into relation to him who is the Truth.
The theologian claims no quarter. He demands no “eye of faith,” no special
inspiration. He proposes his model, a model constructed out of the requirements
of the respective sciences themselves. He then submits his model to impartial
testing by the phenomena dealt with in the individual sciences. He brings the
results before the bar of rational judgment. Should a competing and
contradictory model prove more adequate, he has no recourse. But should his
model pass the test, then he has demonstrated that a theological conception of
reality is in fact rationally defensible. Is the risk too great? No, not if, when he
speaks of God, he is speaking of the Creator of the whole of reality who will bring
all things to consummation. Then the model will be verified. And if it is not? Then
he must cease to be a theologian, for then there will be no theology.
Is not the task too arduous? Certainly it is arduous, but have not the most
profound thought and the most profound thinkers arisen out of the Christian
tradition over the course of the centuries? The magnitude of the challenge is no
deterrent. Much rather, if in the modern period the church has alienated the best
minds, it is not because she demanded too much but too little. A call to serious
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page18
intellectual pursuit of truth will not offend but the lack of it certainly will— and
has.
Thesis II. Dogmatic theology must rethink the entire theological spectrum of
truth from the perspective of historical thinking.
Harnack’s criticism of the Hellenization of the gospel has a validity which can
hardly be denied. Rather than judging this “translation” negatively as he did, we
can understand today that the Greek metaphysical conceptuality was the most
effective means at hand for expressing the central truth of the Christ-event, “God
with us.” In the history of the transmission of traditions this was a necessary and
effective new stage. It entailed nonetheless grave difficulties because an event
actualized in a tradition that for centuries had been nurtured on the idea of the
dynamic relationship of God and man in the historical process which was moving
toward consummation had to be translated into meaningful terms for a culture
that had been fully indoctrinated with the metaphysical categories of Plato and
Aristotle and their successors. In such a setting, that which formed the
culminating point of God’s self-disclosure in Jesus—his resurrection from the
dead— there was formed an untranslatable conception which could only be
announced, proclaimed, but scarcely comprehended. In such an environment the
emphasis soon shifted to the coming of the Son of God, the idea of Incarnation.
Such a conception did allow the message of God’s presence with man in Jesus to
be expressed, but as the Christological controversy vividly demonstrates, it
brought in its wake insoluble problems which plague us to the present.11 The
church lived for centuries undisturbed by the irreconcilable contradictions of
Chalcedon because Christian theology has been conceptualized by means of
Greek metaphysical categories and thus the central idea of Incarnation
communicated the Christian message.
The crisis of theology today is not in the first instance a crisis of Christian belief
but a crisis of Christian theological formulation which could not help but collapse
when the Greek metaphysics in terms of which it was framed was undermined.
This occurred through the rise of modern thought becoming particularly
damaging to traditional theology through the rise of historical thinking which
undercut the unquestioned authority of Scripture. The reaction of Christian
theology to the crisis created by modern thought has often been defensive,
evidencing an underlying insecurity. At other times it has sought so desperately
to accommodate itself to modern thinking that it has given up its own central
affirmation of God’s presence in Jesus, thus robbing the world of its one source of
hope in the God of the future. These two extreme reactions can be found again
and again over the past two centuries. On the one hand there has been a jealous
guarding of traditional conceptuality: incarnation—true God—true man; three in
one—coequal and co-eternal; inspired, infallible Scripture, etc., under the
mistaken notion that God and his truth were cradled in the respective
stammering human attempts to express it. On the other hand, there was an
uncritical acceptance of modern thought, positivistically orientated, which from
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page19
the beginning practically shut out the possibility of a transcendent reality, let
alone a God present in the causal nexus that defined reality.
Where lies a solution? Is it not significant that western thinking, believing itself
now to be free from the archaic metaphysical bondage of theology, has discovered
reality as history? And furthermore it has been shown, for example, by Lowith
that the conception of reality as history moving toward an End “is rooted in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition. Is it not possible that we are in a position today to
rethink such basic conceptions as the Trinity, the natures of Christ, and the
Consummation and come to more fruitful results than has perhaps been the case
in the long tradition of Christian thinking ?
Thesis III. All Christological statements must be made from the perspective of
the resurrection.
Barth begins with the given of the Incarnation, Jesus, truly God and truly man.
The question, how do you know this?, is simply out of place. If we know it we
need not ask, and if we do not know it, it is futile to ask. The life of Jesus plays
itself out between the twin miracles of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, both
wholly the work of God, neither accessible to human judgment, examination or
confirmation. From this everything follows. Prior to this there can be no
discussion.
Bultmann starts with the kerygma. In response to the proclamation you either
say “yes” or “no” but you may not ask “Why should I?” or “Is it true?” Either
question is already proof that revelation has not occurred.
Even the Post-Bultmannians who feel uneasy with this approach are looking
everywhere for a basis for the kerygma except in the one place that Bultmann and
almost all New Testament scholars agree it is located, namely, in the resurrection
of Jesus Christ. Ebeling and Fuchs are retreading the paths of Herrmann,
Bornkamm speaks of Jesus’ authority, Kasemann of his message, but none of
them seriously considers the one place in which every kerygmatic utterance is
rooted.
It is here that Pannenberg makes a most significant contribution. He has dared to
assert once again that you cannot ground New Testament Christology anywhere
but where the New Testament itself grounds it. In so doing he has made progress
possible in several areas where thought had reached an impasse. Perhaps the
most crucial area is that of the natures of Christ. The long and bitter
Christological struggles need not be recounted here. It is sufficient to say that
Chalcedonian Christology is not a solution but represents an impasse, a
compromise between conceptions which are logically irreconciliable. We
understand the problem and we comprehend the intention, but what person
would ever suggest that Chalcedon represents an intelligible and satisfying
conclusion?
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page20
We would suggest that perhaps the problem lies in the inability of Greek
conceptuality to express a phenomenon which was essentially historical. In the
intellectual milieu of the Greek world the appearance of the Servant of God, the
Messiah, was proclaimed in conceptuality which culminated in incarnational
Christology and with incarnational Christology the whole problem of the divine
and human presented itself but with no possibility of solution.
We would ask, in terms of the Old Testament, in terms of the Messianic
expectation, why must Jesus be God? In fact, is the Messiah as God really true to
the Old Testament tradition? Chalcedonian Christology has such a long and
impressive tradition that we often never question what biblical imperative there
is for the divinity of the Messiah. The answer, of course, is not to reject
Chalcedon, as does Bultmann because he is so determined by positivistic thinking
that he cannot conceive of Jesus as anything more than a man, let alone his
resurrection. If we must choose between Barth or Bultmann, we must choose
Barth, for between the signs of the Virgin Birth and Resurrection God is present
in history, but Barth can assert this only as an assertion and is utterly unable to
say more about how we can understand incarnation.
It is the incarnation as a starting point that is wrong. To start there is to be cut off
immediately from all rational reflection. Revelational positivism is inevitable.
Incarnation is a valid idea if it is recognized to be a step in the interpretive
tradition leading from Jesus, an interpretation of an historical phenomenon that
occurred in a Jewish apocalyptic setting rooted in the Old Testament tradition.
Pannenberg has argued powerfully that Jesus must be understood in his own
context and that in that context the resurrection “spoke.” One of his great
contributions is his calling in question of the fact, meaning bifurcation. The fact
in its historical context bears its own meaning. In the tradition expecting the
final intervention of God at the End raising the dead, the resurrection of one
who had been dead and buried meant the End had arrived.
He has also quite rightly seen that resurrection did not carry that meaning in
another context. Consequently translation was necessary. This brings us to the
one point where we feel Pannenberg has not completely followed through on his
own insights. He has recognized that an End-expectation and coming judgment
are necessary presuppositions for a meaningful belief in resurrection and that
consequently Paul stressed these matters to the Gentiles. He has further
discussed how in our day resurrection can be meaningful as a more adequate
conception of the immortality of the soul. The one thing he has been unable to do
is to show how resurrection was translated meaningfully in the first century. The
fact is that it was not. Is not Paul’s Athenian experience evidence of an
indissolvable offense that adhered to the Christian message as heard by the
Greek? Resurrection was the key and resurrection was untranslatable into the
conceptuality of Greek metaphysics.
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page21
Is not this the reason that the focus shifted from resurrection to incarnation in
terms of which God’s intervention into human history was powerfully expressed?
God’s intervention, yes, but then the Messiah must have been God. Is not this
why Jesus must be God? Thinking which utilizes Greek metaphysical
conceptuality can only conceive of God’s presence in history in terms of
incarnation. However, such was not the case with Hebrew thought. God would
bring future deliverance through his Servant—David’s Son! God did not have to
“enter” history for the Israelites. History was his domain—no self-contained,
independent entity set over against him. In his holiness he ever dwelt in the
midst of his people.
Why the modern crisis of theology? Is it not rather the crisis of metaphysics? And
why the crisis of metaphysics? Is it not occasioned by the rise of historical
thinking? What is the answer then? It must be obvious. We ought to recognize
incarnational Christology as no longer a meaningful interpretation of the
historical self-disclosure of God in his servant Jesus, the Messiah. Paradoxically
Greek metaphysical thinking in terms of which the Christian tradition has
formulated its faith has fallen into disrepute making it possible once again to
understand Jesus and his resurrection historically, as was the case for Peter and
Paul.
But this raises another question regarding Pannenberg. He has thought through
the matter of natural law and has sought to show that the resurrection is not
really a “break” in nature. Here we are uneasy. That in its context it had meaning
we grant. But was it not also a “break” in historical continuity even for a Paul? To
be sure, all historical phenomena are unique and history is the place of the new, it
is irruptive. But still the resurrection cannot be leveled down to being an event
next to others. Now if, as the apocalyptic tradition expected, with the resurrection
of Jesus the End of history was in fact arrived at, then the historical process
would have unfolded with no “break” in its continuity. Or if, as Bultmann holds,
there was no resurrection, then the historical process still continues with no
“break.” But if it happened, as Pannenberg claims it happened—and we think he
is right—namely, that what Paul thought was the beginning of a fast-approaching
End, was really—as we know 2000 years later— an isolated, proleptic occurrence
of a still future End, then there has occurred in the midst of the historical
continuum a radical, indissolvable “break,” an act of God which is unique, in a
sense “more unique” than the uniqueness of historical phenomena in general.
Pannenberg has acknowledged the problem of identifying the resurrection of one
man with the expectation of the resurrection of all men. That is just the point.
The expectation of the resurrection of all men was indeed the presupposition for
finding meaning in Jesus’ resurrection. But, the resurrection of Jesus
nevertheless shattered apocalyptic preconceptions also. It was to Jew and Greek
alike an unforeseen, unforseeable self-disclosure of the God who remains free
and sovereign even in his historical self-revelation.
© Grand Valley State University
�Theological Conception of Reality as History
Richard A. Rhem
Page22
Why has Barth been able to speak so powerfully the truth of the Christian faith to
his generation? Because he said what the gospel wants to say: “God with us.” Why
does such a powerful witness engender such sharp reaction? Is it not because
while saying what the gospel wants to say, he has utilized a metaphysical
conceptuality which no longer commands respect?
We come back to our question why Jesus must be God. If God anointed his
Servant, the Messiah, to proclaim his Kingdom and announce the new age and
then raised him from the dead as a confirmation of that message and of his
Servant, what does it add to the matter if Jesus were divine? If Jesus were God
then resurrection is not quite so amazing. But if Jesus is my brother because a
man like me and if God raised him from the dead, then something truly amazing
has occurred. The New Age has dawned in the midst of the Old. Then while still
struggling in the old aeon, I have a real basis for Hope. Then I live in anticipation.
That is, I live by faith.
If this is the case then I can understand the Apostle who wrote: On the human
level he was born of David’s stock, but on the level of the Spirit—The Holy
Spirit—he was declared Son of God by a mighty act in that he rose from the dead.
. . Jesus Christ our Lord. (Rom. l: 3b-4, NEB).
1Karl
Barth, The Humanity of God, Richmond, 1960, p. 19.
2Ernst
Troeltsch, Die Bedeutung der Gescbichtlichkeit fesu fur dem Glauben,
Tubingen,1911, p. 11.
3Karl
Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.2 Edinburgh, 1960, p. 284.
4Rudolph
Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, London, 1953, pp. 13ff.
5“Die
Krise des Schriftprinzips,” Grundfragen Systematischer Theologie,
Gottingen, 1967, p. 11.
6Ibid.
7“Die
Aufnahme des philosophisches Gottesbegriffs,” Grundfragen .... pp. 308f.
8Ibid.,
9”Die
p. 297.
Krise des Schriftprinzips,” Grundfragen …, p. 20.
10James
Baar, Old and New in Interpretation, SCM, 1966, p. 12.
11Cf.
H. Berkhof, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Richmond, 1964, for his daring
challenge to traditional Trinitarian conceptuality.
© Grand Valley State University
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
KII-01
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1981-2014
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
text/pdf
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RA-4-19721001
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1972-10-01
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Title
A name given to the resource
A Theological Conception of Reality as History - Some Aspects of the Thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
The Reformed Review; a journal of the seminaries of the Reformed Church in America
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard A. Rhem
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
A language of the resource
eng
Description
An account of the resource
Article created, delivered, or published by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 1, 1972 entitled "A Theological Conception of Reality as History - Some Aspects of the Thinking of Wolfhart Pannenberg", it appeared in Reformed Review, pp. 178-188. Tags: History of Theology, Historical Thinking, Truth, Eschatology, Revelation.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Eschatology
Historical Thinking
History of Theology
Revelation
Truth