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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
In the second half of the twentieth century there was a renaissance of liberalism and a new interest in freedom in modern Western industrialised nations. Theologians responded to the intellectual discourse in various ways while treating the concept of freedom in theology. Here three different engagements with the understanding of freedom and liberalism at the end of the century are introduced. The first is a critique of liberalism and rejection of modern accounts of freedom as autonomy. This account draws upon historical and theological resources in the presentation of modern liberalism as a negative development in theology and in understandings of society. In the article here, this first approach is presented in the context of its social and political orientation and contemporary context in the later twentieth century. While some of the contours of this first approach are viewed critically, one aspect of its intentions is praised. The second example is an adoption of the discourse of modern liberalism and a justification of it with an account of the Reformation as its progenitor. This account draws upon a narrative of progressive liberation in modern human history. The second approach is addressed here in its particular context after the Second World War and in the specific cultural and theological framework of the latter part of the twentieth century. While the revival of modern liberal theology in the latter part of the twentieth century is presented here as a necessary development in the wake of radical early twentieth century anti-liberalism, some of the sweeping claims of this approach are viewed critically. Finally, a third mediatory approach is presented. This general group sought to advance a form of the liberal theological tradition while also theologically challenging Enlightenment conceptions of autonomy. Three brief examples are drawn upon to illustrate this approach. One is concerned with providing orientation for the basic doctrinal question of human freedom and sin. The second example deals with the systematic theological specification of human freedom in the postmodern context and its relation to an understanding of divine freedom. The third example deals with the ethical implications of a theologically grounded understanding of freedom.
1 Werkausgabe, vol. 12 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 134.
2 Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, ‘Im Kampf um Frieden und Freiheit. Über den Zusammenhang von Ideologie und Sozialkultur im Ost-West-Konflikt’, in Hockerts, Hans Günter (ed.), Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftverlag, 2003), p. 36Google Scholar.
3 Winkler, Heinrich August, Geschichte des Westens: Von den Anfängen in der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2009)Google Scholar. See his other important works: Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie (1993); Streitfragen der deutschen Geschichte (1997); Der lange Weg nach Westen, vol. 1, Deutsche Geschichte vom Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik (2000); vol. 2, Deutsche Geschichte vom ‘Dritten Reich’ bis zur Wiedervereinigung 1933–1990 (2000).
4 Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt’ (1980), in idem, Die Moderne – ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophisch-politische Aufsätze 1977–1990 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990)Google Scholar. He developed his communicative theory for the modern world in the early 1980s, cf. idem, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981–2).
5 See also his Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
6 His earlier publication on the self is: Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989)Google Scholar; there he discusses the rise of the ‘disengaged subject’, ‘new sense of freedom’, ‘self-possession’, ‘self-objectification’, ‘dominance of reason’, ‘disengagement’, ‘self-making’, the ‘punctual self’, etc; the term ‘buffered self’ is developed in his A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
7 Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. 164. See also his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
8 Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 1–2.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Cf., Hauerwas, , After Christendom?: How the Church is to Behave if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1991)Google Scholar; idem, Dispatches from the Front: Theological Engagements with the Secular (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); idem, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony: A Provocative Christian Assessment of Culture and Ministry for People Who Know that Something is Wrong (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989).
11 Ockham is well known for his Spartan logical dictum: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate (‘plurality is not to be posited without necessity’), which mirrors his rejection of the simple harmonisation of revelation and Aristotelian philosophy (sc. Aquinas). Scotus before him also contributed to the division of theology and philosophy. He also turned more definitively to the centrality of the will in his doctrine of God. While both Aquinas and Scotus denied the Augustinian account of the necessity of divine illumination for the comprehension of natural truth, Scotus’ account of the principle of individuation begins with the unique instance (haecceitas, ‘thisness’), whereas Aquinas’ begins with the shared materia.
12 Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 9Google Scholar. Richard H. Roberts writes: ‘In effect, the whole of Dr Milbank's argument is a prioristic and consists in the construction of an extended theological circle in which all the justificatory (rather than exploratory) procedures in the four treatises have in effect pre-determined outcomes. In such a constructed context, the reductive construal of sociology as a scientific discipline exclusively in terms of the metanarrative of secular reason is a misleading distortion.’ (Roberts, Richard H., ‘Transcendental Sociology? A Critique of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason’, Scottish Journal of Theology 46 (1993), p. 533CrossRefGoogle Scholar.). He continues: ‘Theology and Social Theory expresses a set of doctrines that should be resisted by both theologians and sociologists, not least because it misconstrues and distorts their respective disciplinary remits.’ (Ibid., p. 534.)
13 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 504, his emphasis.
14 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (1993), p. 314.
15 Ibid., p. 97.
16 ‘It should, in fact, be peculiarly the responsibility of Christian socialists at present, to demonstrate how socialism is grounded in Christianity’ . . . ‘the French, not the Rahnerian version of integralism, provides the basis for a true political theology’. Theology and Social Theory (1993), p. 208. Milbank praises Henri de Lubac's social Catholicism (cf. ibid., p. 226). For Lubac's contribution to Vichy France, cf. Hellman, John, The Knight-Monks of Vichy France: Uriage, 1940–1945 (Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press, 1993), pp. 51–2Google Scholar. Hellman writes: ‘In his lecture on “A Christian Explanation for Our Times”, Father de Lubac criticizes contemporary myths, calling, in his conclusion, for the development of a truly “Catholic” spirit after centuries of individualistic and rationalistic deviation – the “human revolution”. De Lubac described the “Catholic renaissance” that was an element in “the present work of reconstruction” and, citing Beuve-Méry's Esprit article “Révolutions nationales, révolutions humaines”, de Lubac articulated his “dream” of “a generation of young Frenchmen who would take Christianity seriously”. Like his friend Father Teilhard, Father de Lubac also envisaged the Second World War, in a larger context, as marking the passage of the modern man from an epoch of bourgeois individualism to one of personalist community.’ (Ibid., p. 51; cf. Esprit, 98 (March 1941), pp. 281–4. His Uriage lecture ‘L'explication chrétienne de notre temps’ was reprinted as Vocation de la France (Le Puy: Mappus, 1941). See also Hellman, ‘Die katholische nationale Revolution in Frankreich 1922–1944’, in Scherzberg, Lucia (ed.), Vergangenheitsbewältigung im französischen Katholizismus und deutschen Protestantismus (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), pp. 78–101Google Scholar; idem, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc's Ordre Nouveau, 1930–2000 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002).) Milbank also draws upon Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) in his critique of Marx and exposition of French socialism (cf. Theology and Social Theory (1993), pp. 188–203). This figure was important for French fascists. In reference to the revolutionary group, the Proudhonian circle, that later dissolved into Charles Maurras’ fascist Integralism, Zeev Sternhell asks: ‘Why was this group named after Proudhon?’ He goes on: ‘Proudhon, of course, owed his privileged place in L'Action française to what the Maurrassians saw as his antirepublicanism, his anti-Semitism, his loathing of Rousseau, his disdain for the French Revolution, democracy, and parliamentarians, and his championship of the nation, the family, tradition, and the monarchy.’ Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1996), pp. 56–7Google Scholar. He continues: ‘The Sorelians and Maurrassians shared this intellectual revolt against the heritage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution’ (ibid, p. 57). Hellman writes: ‘Father de Lubac liked to point out that while his hero Proudhon was a fierce anti-clerical and critic of the Church he had also been a traditionalist on questions of sexual morality and an admirer of certain “virile” Christian virtues. Lubac also found much that was positive in the thinking of Nietzsche and, to a certain extent, of Marx as well’. Hellman, Knight-Monks, p. 299.
17 Cf. Buckley, Michael J., At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; see also, idem, The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998). The programmatic publication appeared in 1999: Milbank, John, Pickstock, Catherine and Ward, Graham (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The editors name the following individuals as influential: Donald Mackinnon, Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash, David Ford, Janet Soskice, Tim Jenkins, Lewis Ayres, Stanley Hauerwas, David Burrell, Michael Buckley, Walter Ong and Gillian Rose. Besides the editors, some of the other individuals who have contributed, in one way or another, are Frederick C. Bauerschmidt, John Betz, Daniel M. Bell, Phillip Blond, David Burrell, William T. Cavanaugh, Conor Cunningham, William Desmond, Peter M. Chandler, Louis Dupré, Michael Hanby, David B. Hart, Laurence P. Hemming, D. Stephen Long, Gerard Loughlin, John Montag, David Moss, Simon Oliver, Tracey Rowland, Steven Shakespeare and James K. A. Smith. The views of these individuals are of course widely divergent.
18 See the critical review of the book in 1989: Force, James E., ‘The Origins of Modern Atheism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 50 (1989), pp. 153–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He writes of ‘Buckley's polemical bias’ (p. 155): ‘The fact that Buckley ignores such seminal figures as Spinoza, Hobbes, and the English Deists, all of whom play an important role in the modern movement of Biblical criticism, betrays a narrowly epistemological focus which may indeed have something to do with the partial background of modern atheism but which, when presented as the whole story, gives a misleading representation of what is going on in the emergence of modern atheism. When he ignores these early modern Biblical critics, Buckley ignores a strain within modern thought which is instrumental to the origins of modern atheism.’ (Ibid., p. 154.) He continues: ‘Buckley's account underplays the direct influence of the historical tradition of Biblical criticism’ (ibid., p. 161). He cites Berman, David, A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell (London: Croom Helm, 1988)Google Scholar: ‘There was, particularly in the Restoration period, an explosion of atheism, largely confined to the upper classes and based primarily on the thought of Hobbes. This upper-class Hobbesian atheism was not published or publicly avowed in any straightforward manner; hence it is difficult to identify. But it existed, and the failure to recognise it must distort any intellectual history of the seventeenth century in Britain.’ (Berman, History of Atheism, p. 48; cited in Force, ‘Origins of Modern Atheism’, p. 155.) Force continues: ‘Buckley ignores the sort of society in which his writers are writing, the conventional forms of literary discourse they choose, their social class and political allegiance, and most significantly, the nature of the religious controversies in which they are engaged. Buckley's central methodological point of departure is the logical autonomy of his chosen texts. Buckley exhibits the logical linkage in his list of six typical figures whose overly rational, non-theological apologetics pave the way for the full blown atheism of Diderot and Holbach. He tailors his narrative to illustrate “the inward conceptual necessity of unfolding determinations and necessity”’. (Force, ‘Origins of Modern Atheism’, p. 157; Force cites Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, p. 340.) Buckley also ignores the socio-political and cultural backgrounds to the rise of atheism. The new biblical studies, which were central to the secular project, emerged in a context in which the role of the official religion was losing ground in society (cf. Force, ‘Origins of Modern Atheism’, p. 158).
19 New Blackfriars 76 (1995), pp. 325–43.
20 As David Curtis argues, the overarching metanarrative which located the problems of the early twentieth century in a larger decline and fall story from the Middle Ages had become lieu commun among Catholic intellectuals in the 1930s in France; cf. ‘True and False Modernity: Catholicism and Communist Marxism in 1930s France’, in Chadwick, Kay (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, pp. 73–96; see also Nicholas Atkin, ‘Ralliés and résistants: Catholics in Vichy France, 1940–44’, ibid., pp. 97–118. The same can be said of many German Catholic intellectuals from the early twentieth century; cf. Arnold, Claus, ‘“Gegenintellektuelle” und kirchlicher Antimodernismus vor 1914’, in Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm (ed.), Intellektuellen-Götter: Das religiöse Laboratorium der klassischen Moderne (München: Oldenbourg, 2009), pp. 21–38Google Scholar; Böhm, Irmingard, ‘Modernismus und Antimodernismus’, in Coreth, Emerichet al. (eds), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Graz: Styria, 1988)Google Scholar; Bröckling, Ulrich, Katholische Intellektuelle in der Weimarer Republik: Zeitkritik und Gesellschaftstheorie bei Walter Dirks, Romano Guardini, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Michel und Heinrich Mertens (Munich: Fink, 1993)Google Scholar.
21 From 1922 to March 1933, Italy, Bulgaria, Spain, Turkey, Albania, Poland, Portugal, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Romania, Germany and Austria transformed into new authoritarian governments.
22 Ivan T. Berend writes: ‘In the changing international environment, what happened was the replacement of East–West rivalry by a rising global rivalry: a creeping Atlantic rivalry among postwar allies, dramatic Asian–Western competition, and a rising Islamic–Western conflict, which gradually became manifest during the decades after the end of the Cold War. These new economic-political trends strongly influenced politics and developed a new European self-confidence in the closing decades of the twentieth century. European-American relations became more equal, but were also characterized by more conflicts. Anti-Americanism also gained ground.’ (Europe since 1980 (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), p. 61.) ‘One may also speak about ideological anti-Americanism, or the rejection of the absolute supremacy of the neo-liberal, market fundamentalist, and neo-conservative ideologies that became dominate during the 1980s under Reagan.’ (Ibid., p. 62.) See also, Friedman, Lester D. (ed.), Fires were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: Wallflower Press, 2006)Google Scholar; as he remarks in the preface to the 1st edn (1993) about Thatcher era cinematography: ‘Many of these films directly attacked the Thatcher government, seeing her free-market philosophy as a callous disregard for everyone but the entrepreneurial buccaneers who plunder the economy’. (Ibid., p. xiv.) See also: Golsan, Richard J., ‘France: From Anti-Americanism and Americanization to the “American Enemy”’ in Stephan, Alexander (ed.), The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 44–68Google Scholar.
23 ‘Die enge Verknüpfung von Protestantismus, individueller Freiheit, Selbstdenken und sittlicher Tugend bestimmt die intensiven Protestantismusdiskurse in der sogenannten “Sattelzeit” (Reinhart Koselleck), den Jahrzehnten zwischen 1770–1830, bis in die harten fundamentalpolitischen Auseinandersetzungen um die Legitimität der Französischen Revolution hinein.’ Der Protestantismus: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 2006), p. 15. Cf. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm and Tanner, Klaus, ‘Einleitung – Protestantische Freiheit’, in idem (eds), Protestantische Identität heute (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus Mohn, 1992), pp. 13–24Google Scholar; Graf, , ‘Ist bürgerlich-protestantische Freiheit ökumenisch verallgemeinerbar? Zum Streit um das protestantische Verständnis von Freiheit’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 89 (1992), pp. 121–38Google Scholar.
24 Barth, Ulrich, Aufgeklärter Protestantismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004)Google Scholar, pp. 53, 94. Cf., idem, ‘Die Geburt religiöser Autonomie. Luthers Ablaßthesen von 1517’, in von Scheliha, Arnulf and Schröder, Markus (eds), Das protestantische Prinzip: Historische und systematische Studien zum Protestantismusbegriff (Stuttgart and Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1998), pp. 3–37Google Scholar.
25 Barth, Aufgeklärter Protestantismus, p. 94.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 85.
28 Ibid., p. 396.
29 Cf. KD, IV/1, para. 60, ‘Des Menschen Hochmut und Fall’. Liberal accounts of freedom and liberalism are brought into stark contrast to ‘true freedom’, that is the ‘freedom of faith and obedience’, in the later 1920s as well. In Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf (1927), while addressing ‘Die Freiheit des Gewissens’ (§22), Barth turns to ‘die wahre Freiheit, die Freiheit des Glaubens und des Gehorsams’ in relation to the Spirit in scripture: ‘Wo dieser Geist ist, da ist Freiheit [vgl. 2. Kor. 3, 17]. Von dorther kommen alle Freiheiten. Dort ist aber auch ihre Grenze. Losgelöst von der Freiheit Gottes in seinem Wort, als abstrakte statt als konkrete Freiheit des Gewissens, würden alle unsere Freiheiten beziehungsloser Liberalismus, Subjektivismus, Spiritualismus, Symbolismus sein.’ (Karl Barth, Die christliche Dogmatik im Entwurf, vol. 1, Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes, Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik (1927), [GA II.14], ed. Gerhard Sauter (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1982), p. 530.) Elsewhere Barth speaks of faith and obedience, again in contrast to liberalism, ‘Liberalismus, der die Kirche angreift’. (Ibid., p. 503.)
30 It was not always so popular, however. The article on ‘Liberalismus. III. Theologischer und kirchlicher Liberalismus’, from 1960, authored by the Marburg theologian Hans Graß, in the 3rd edn of the encyclopedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, claims that the contemporary meaning of liberalism in ‘Kirche und Gemeinde ist gering’, although there are some signs of its life in ‘bestimmten Bildungsschichten’, which nevertheless lack organisation. Although liberalism was not dominant in the church, it did not lack theologians in 1960: ‘[es] fehlt . . . nicht an Theologen, welche das liberale Gedankengut in neuer Weise geltend machen’. Referring to Hirsch, a few Swiss theologians (M. Werner, F. Buri, U. Neuenschwander), Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), he claims that the new liberal theology, in contrast to the old one, ‘hat den falschen Optimismus und Fortschrittsglauben preisgegeben’, and knows more now about the ‘Abgründigkeit Gottes’, the world, history and man. He goes on to claim that it has been influenced by Existenzphilosophie and attempts to overcome ‘Objektivierungen der Dogmatik, die Mythologie des biblischen Zeugnisses und die Theologie der Heilsgeschichte’. (Hans Graß, ‘Liberalismus. III. Theologischer und kirchlicher Liberalismus’, vol. 4, p. 354.) Four decades later, things look different; in 2002, Graf writes in the 4th edn of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, in the article on ‘Liberale Theologie’ (‘III. Systematisch-theologisch’, vol. 5, pp. 312–13) about the term emerging in the battles of the nineteenth and twentieth century against theological conservatism; the movement sought to legitimitise the ‘bürgerliche Wertorientierungen’, thus the Holy Scriptures are de-positivised (‘entpositiviert’) through a historical critique while the claim upon absolute truth is questioned. As an alternative programme, he claims that experience-related, new interpretations of old symbols are constructed, or related to new subjectivity philosophy or aesthetic ideas. Graf holds that the close relationship between liberal theology and the ‘Project der Moderne’ kept it nevertheless in a precarious situation in the early part of the twentieth century, for it potentially, and often in actuality, affirmed traditional patriarchal social structures. Thus in spite of the openness for the diversity of individual ways of believing, many proponents of liberal theology remained embedded in anti-pluralistic integration thinking. He claims that first in the 1960s this begins to change as liberal theology opens up more to democratic thinking and pluralism, while offering a counter vision of Christianity to that of Neo-Orthodoxy. In the 1970s this continues to develop as various classics of liberal theology are newly edited, such as the Schleiermacher edn, and the edn of Troeltsch's work. In relation to these theologians’ ‘Glaubenslehren’, systematic liberal theology concentrates on the concept of religion as an awareness of difference (Differenzbewußtsein), which permits the individual a freedom to think, and, as is carefully added in a sub-clause, also in the sense of self-limitation. (‘III. Systematisch-theologisch’, p. 313.)
31 For an example of feminist theologians’ treatment of freedom at this time, compare Loades, Ann (ed.), Feminist Theology: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1990), pp. 72–89Google Scholar, 194–254; for an example of liberation theologians’ treatment, see Ellacuría, Ignacio (ed.), Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), pp. 143–7Google Scholar, 296–309, 465–7.
32 At least since his edited work Offenbarung als Geschichte (1961), Pannenberg has represented a new school of post or perhaps reform-Barthian theology; Schwöbel has called this text a ‘programmatic statement of a new theological conception’. (Schwöbel, Christoph, ‘Wolfhart Pannenberg’, in Ford, David and Muers, Rachel (eds), The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918 (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), p. 129.)Google Scholar The novel idea, found in the various essays from this volume, represented by various disciplines in theology, was that God reveals himself indirectly through his acts in history, pace Barth and Bultmann, who held to more unmediated accounts of revelation. (Other members of the interdisciplinary new school, which later went in different directions: Rolf Rendtorff, Klaus Koch, Ulrich Wilckens, Dietrich Rössler, Martin Elze and Trutz Rendtorff, cf. Schwöbel, ‘Wolfhart Pannenberg’, p. 145.)
33 In a decisive passage, Pannenberg writes in response: ‘Daß jeder Mensch in seinem Bewußtsein immer schon unthematisch auf Gott ebenso wie auf das Gute bezogen ist, und zwar auf Gott als den letzten Horizont des Guten, in welchem das Leben des Menschen allein zur Vollendung seiner Bestimmung finden kann, ist eine unerläßliche Voraussetzung dafür, in einem allgemein anthropologischen Sinne von Sünde reden zu können. Wenn der Mensch Gottes Geschöpf ist, so ist Sünde ebenso Selbstverfehlung und also Verlust substantieller Freiheit wie Übertretung des göttlichen Willens. Zur Konkretisierung der Verwiesenheit auf Gott und auf das Gute aber sind die Menschen in den Raum geschichtlicher Erfahrung gestellt, der der Raum der Suche nach der eigenen Identität und damit zugleich auch Raum möglicher Verführung, aber auch des Anrufs zur Entscheidung für das wahrhaft Gute ist.’ Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Beiträge zur systematischen Theologie, vol. 2, Natur und Mensch – und die Zukunft der Schöpfung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), p. 245Google Scholar. See the critical background review to which Pannenberg responds: Pröpper, Thomas, ‘Das Faktum der Sünde und die Konstitution menschlicher Identität’, Theologische Quartalschrift 170 (1990), pp. 267–89Google Scholar. See also Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Anthropologie in theologischer Perspektive (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983)Google Scholar, and also his Systematische Theologie, vol. 2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), pp. 277–93. For a summary, cf. Wenz, Gunther, Wolfhart Pannenbergs Systematische Theologie: Ein einführender Bericht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), pp. 150–1Google Scholar. See also Oswald Bayer's treatment of freedom in the 1990s: Freiheit als Antwort: Zur theologischen Ethik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995). He overcomes the characterisation of freedom as autonomy in setting it in a dialogical and responsive framework as ‘answer’, and then later pairs freedom and reverence (Ehrfurcht) together (pp. 74–5).
34 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Imago Libertatis: Freiheit des Menschen und Freiheit Gottes’, in idem, Gott in Beziehung, Studien zur Dogmatik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), pp. 227–56; cf. idem, ‘Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom’, in Gunton, Colin E. (ed.), God and Freedom: Essays in Systematic and Historical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 57–81Google Scholar.
35 Schwöbel, ‘Imago Libertatis: Freiheit des Menschen und Freiheit Gottes’, p. 227.
36 Ibid., p. 228.
37 Ibid., p. 230.
38 Ibid., p. 234.
39 Ibid., pp. 244–5.
40 Ibid., pp. 249–50.
41 Ibid., p. 252. He draws upon Pannenberg's Anthropologie in theologischer Perspektive in the ninth thesis.
42 Ibid., pp. 253–4.
43 Ibid., pp. 255–6. He draws upon Albrecht Ritschl's Unterricht in der christlichen Religion (1875) in his discourse on love.
44 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), p. 129.
45 Ibid., p. 156.
46 Ibid., p. 158.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid. See also his recent publication, Faith and Its Critics (Oxford: OUP, 2009).