Pannenberg - Revelation pt. 3

March 13, 2008

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It is only the self-revelation of God that creates the possibility for meaningful theological language, because without it theological statements do not amount to more than the presumptuous utterances of human subjectivity. Only the self-revelation of God can make Christian proclamation a viable enterprise. Divine revelation is not a theme in all religions, so examining how it came to occupy the center of our faith is part of proving its divine origin. In the Old Testament the content revealed was not the subject of God himself, but the experience of God’s action. There are key transitions in the History of Israel like the revealing of the divine name as the one who will show oneself in one’s historical acts, the movement from monolatry to monotheism, and the prophetic’s transition to apocalyptic. The revelation of God comes to be understood as a provisional self-disclosure. The action of revelation always comes based on previous knowledge and with it there is some continuity and discontinuity, but each event is itself provisional. It is in the latter prophetic into the apocalyptic framework that an eschatological awareness of revelation is developed. Weiss demonstrated that apocalypticism speaks of the disclosure of the eschatological future which in its coming will define God for all creation, but is anticipated in the apocalyptic community. For Christianity the eschaton was revealed, not in word alone, but in the event of Jesus Christ as an act of universal revelation it awaits fulfillment. The apocalyptic event of Jesus thus combines the provisional and definitive features of the Kingdom message to the Easter message. The Christian message of Easter saw the confirmation of Jesus’ message of the coming rule of God and could then proclaim Jesus as the future revelation of God made present, while still anticipating its arrival. This apocalyptic view of revelation contains within it the debatability of the reality of God, which for Pannenberg is a necessary addition to systematic theology. In Christian theology the theme of revelation has for much its history lost its groundedness in the history of Jesus, as the incarnation came to be described as an epiphany. In the Hellenistic environment the revelation of God in Jesus Christ was not the foundational basis for theological reflection, but through the concept of the logos became the goal of theological argument. Later, during the enlightenment, there was a detachment of the Word of God from the text of scripture as the scripture principle was dismantled by historical criticisms. This theological query eventually became the ground for reintroducing the concept of revelation as the basis for Christian theology. The revelation of God must have God as its source making it necessarily self-revelation. God’s self-revelation is not experienced directly, but mediated through God’s action in history and so it remains indirect revelation. This thesis of revelation, for Pannenberg, seeks to unite the diverse biblical witness and enable coherent theological discussion on the Word of God. Pannenberg sees the identification of the Word with the self-revelation of God as inconsistent with the biblical affirmation of God’s historical, indirect, and provisional revelation. The only possible way to make this connection is for the Word to be the total revelation of God, which is only possible at the end of history. The self-revelation of God must be historically meditated because the biblical concept of God’s self-revelation is always an action, and thus the thesis of the indirectness of God’s self-revelation has the systematic function of integrating the various experiences of revelation to which the biblical writings bear witness. History can become the demonstration of God only at its end, so the end becomes the only place the Word of God is fully demonstrable. Within this framework Pannenberg returns to a thesis developed earlier in Revelation as History that “in light of its historical effects the revelation of God is open to anyone who has eyes to see and does not need any supplementary interpretation.” If the Word of God is understood as foretelling, forthtelling, and report the category of report makes possible the inclusion of the reporting of the history of God in Jesus. In Jesus, the future of God is not merely disclosed in advance with the coming of Jesus but already an event to be reported without its ceasing to be the future. In the reporting of the event of the history of Jesus Christ the event is not merely present as speech, but present as event since the content of this report is the future of God. Here, the human speech can present the reality of God made fully known proleptically in Christ and in this sense the words are no longer human but the Word of God. It is then God’s historical revelation proleptically present in Jesus Christ that is the Word of God for all creation. Here, Pannenberg’s understanding of the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ as the Word of God gives the revelatory foundation for developing a systematic theology in Trinitarian form.

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