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Constructive and Critical Functions of Christian Eschatology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Wolfhart Pannenberg
Wolfhart Pannenberg
Affiliation:
University of Munich
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Extract

The last two decades witnessed a boom of eschatology in theological discussions. It emerged mainly from the impact of Jürgen Moltmann's theology of hope. But a recovery of the eschatological concern in systematic theology has been due for some time, since Johannes Weiss' successful thesis of 1892 that Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God was not primarily a program for moral or social action, but had its roots in Jewish apocalypticism and envisaged a cosmic catastrophe that would occur when God in the imminent future would replace this present world by the new creation of his own kingdom without any human ado. Three decades later, in 1922, Karl Barth wrote in the second edition of his commentary on Romans: “A Christianity that does not thoroughly and without remainder consist of eschatology, would be thoroughly and totally devoid of Christ.” Strong words. And yet it proved difficult to reappropriate to modern theology the new exegetical insight concerning the basic importance of eschatology within the framework of Jesus' message and teaching. There was too deep a chasm separating the evolutionary outlook of the modern mind from the otherworldliness of apocalyptic expectations that focused on the imminent and catastrophic end of the present world. Thus it was no accident that Barth and Bultmann recovered the apocalyptic urgency of Jesus' message at the price of stripping it of its temporal prospect of a final future of this world. In 1964, Jürgen Moltmann aptly criticized such a detemporalization of eschatology for removing its very core. But the restoration of the apocalyptic outlook towards future fulfillment in Moltmann's own work turned out to focus more on certain political consequences, which he and his followers derived from the eschatological hope, than on the transcendent content of the biblical hope itself. Concerning the basis of eschatological faith in Moltmann's work, John Hick could pass the somewhat harsh verdict: “that basis is in practice relegated to the periphery of his thought and reduced to a mere uncritical use of biblical mythology” to the effect that “all the problems facing Christian eschatology in the twentieth century are systematically ignored.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 119 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984

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References

1 Weiss, Johannes, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892; 3d ed. Hahn, F.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964) esp. 69ff, 82ff, 96ff, 105ff. See also the preface to the third edition by Rudolf Bultmann, v–vi.Google Scholar

2 Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief (2d ed.; München: Kaiser, 1922) 298 (my translation).Google Scholar

3 Moltmann, Jürgen, Theologie der Hoffnung (München: Kaiser, 1964) 43ff, 49–50Google Scholar; cf. idem, Theology of Hope (trans. Leitch, James; New York: Harper & Row, 1967) 50–69.Google Scholar

4 Hick, John, Death and Eternal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976) 214.Google Scholar

5 Rahner, Karl, “Theologische Prinzipien der Hermeneutik eschatologischer Aussagen,” in Schriften zur Theologie (Einsiedeln/Zürich/Köln: Benziger, 1961) 401–28, esp. 422–23.Google Scholar

6 Althaus, Paul, Die letzlen Dinge (1922; 4th ed.; Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1933) 34ff.Google Scholar

7 See Cornehl, Peter, Die Zukunft der Versöhnung: Eschatologie und Emanzipation in der Aufklärung, bei Hegel und in der Hegelschen Schule (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971) 54, 56ff, 73ff.Google Scholar

8 Kant, Immanuel, Der Streit der Fakultäten (1798; Kant Werke 7; Berlin: Druck, 1907) 40Google Scholar; cf. idem, “The Contest of Faculties,” in Kant's Political Writings (ed. Reiss, H.; trans. H. B. Nisbet; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

9 Cullmann, Oscar, “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead: The Witness of the New Testament,” in Stendahl, Krister, ed., Immortality and Resurrection (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 9–53.Google Scholar

10 On this subject see esp. Athenagoras De resurrectione 12–15; see also Barnard, Leslie William, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Theologie historique 18; Paris: Beauchesne, 1972).Google Scholar

11 Thomas Aquinas Summa contra gentiles 4.81ff.

12 Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 215ff.

13 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963) 3. 400, 402–3.Google Scholar The ambiguity of the term “essentification,” which Tillich derived from Schelling, is due to the notion of essence as referring to the property of a thing prior to its “existence” in temporal history, while on the other hand Tillich tries to preserve in the state of essentification the harvest of historical experience. This intention, however, could only succeed and the ambiguity of the term “essentification” be overcome, if the essence of the thing itself would be conceived as dependent on its historical process, especially on its result, to the effect that the thing is present in the course of its becoming only by anticipation.

14 Quotes by Hick, John from my What Is Man? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970) 81.Google Scholar

15 Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Königsberg, 1781; 2d ed. 1787 [=B]) B 461Google Scholar; cf. idem, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Smith, Norman Kemp; New York: St. Martin's, 1929).Google Scholar

16 See Thunberg, Lars, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor (Lund: Gleerup, 1965) 54ff.Google Scholar