Word: pannenberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that Pannenberg wants to shun society. He simply fears that a Christianity content merely to echo the activist slogans of the secular world will lose its long-range social influence. To accomplish social good, Christians must first rethink their "spiritual center...
...Lutheran Pannenberg, 47, last week ended a 21-campus tour of the U.S., the most ambitious of his three visits to America, with a talk at Harvard on the relation between the doctrine of God's election and "civil religion." In many speeches during the tour Pannenberg attacked recent styles of Christian social activism. He insists that the church should not think of itself as an agent for curing social ills, which are not "immediately solvable" anyhow. He also has no use for those Christian activists who think that "questions of the meaning of human life...
...Pannenberg speaks from the experience of his youth. Brought up as a Nazi atheist, he fought his way free of Hitlerian nihilism and underwent an intellectual conversion to Christianity. Pannenberg first won renown in the 1960s as a member of the "revelation as history" school in theology. He accused the pre-eminent Protestant thinkers, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Earth, of divorcing Christian faith from history and therefore from rational thought, by ultimately basing their theologies on subjective standards...
...Pannenberg's dispute with the liberal Bultmann over the issue of Christ's resurrection, for example, won him a misleading fundamentalist image. No believer in biblical literalism, Pannenberg nevertheless thinks that Bultmann's evasion of the resurrection as a historical event is rationally untenable. As circumstantial evidence, he cites the early church's unshakable belief in it. Unless Christ actually rose from the grave, Pannenberg reasons, how can a historian plausibly account for the blazing fervor of the early Christians...
Heftiest Work. Pannenberg's treatment of the resurrection stems not from a new orthodoxy, but from his rationalism. Religion, he says, must be studied scientifically; it is not something special that has to be protected by walls of "authority" or reliance on "faith." He spins out his intricate argument in his heftiest work to date, the 450-page Theology and the Philosophy of Science, due out in an English translation later this year...