Wolfhart Pannenberg
Reciprocally Self-Distinguishing Divine Persons
Pannenberg (1928–2014) many years ago wrote “An Autobiographical Sketch”1 in which he discussed aspects of his early childhood in Eastern Germany before, during, and after the Second World War. He spoke movingly of those early years as well as of his subsequent spiritual and intellectual journey until about 1988. His family had left the church already in the 1930s. In 1944 he had begun reading Nietzsche. Then, on January 6, 1945, he took part in what he described as an extraordinary event which occurred while he was taking a long walk home from school: “I found myself absorbed into the light of the setting sun and for one eternal moment dissolved in the light surrounding me.”2 After a time in the army at the age of sixteen, including being a prisoner of war under the British, he continued his studies and began to read Kant. He developed an interest in Christianity and found that his professor of German literature did not seem to fit the more negative description of a Christian that Nietzsche had laid out. Pannenberg wrote, “Contrary to my expectations, this teacher obviously enjoyed and appreciated the fullness of human life in all its forms, which he was not supposed to do, according to Nietzsche’s description of the Christian mind.”3 Pannenberg continued to try to understand his 1945 experience and went on to further studies. In the spring of 1947 he enrolled in philosophy and theology at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. He became fascinated with what he found in his exploration of Christianity and saw that he would spend the rest of his life as a theologian while continuing “philosophical studies with at least equal intensity.”4 Over the ensuing years the list of names of his professors such as Gerhard von Rad reads like a Who’s Who of the then German philosophical and theological academy. In 1955 he was ordained a Lutheran minister in Heidelberg. After a doctoral dissertation on John Duns Scotus and a habilitation-writing on analogy, he taught systematic theology at various German universities, spending many years from 1968 on at the University of Munich. He often taught and lectured in the United States. His work encompasses a wide range of interests from theological anthropology to systematic theology, science, world religions, ecumenism, and beyond. He brought to his study an open Lutheran stance,5 ready to examine even his own tradition’s specific theological positions and to enter into dialogue with others, secular or religious, around the world.
It will be helpful now to alert us to a couple aspects of Pannenberg’s complex trinitarian thought. In rather Schellingian fashion he writes of reciprocally self-distinguishing divine Persons whose unity arises out of their interaction. In that interaction, each of the divine Persons acts in a way recognizable as giving concrete expression to the Hegelian notion that subject or person is constituted relationally as self-dedication one to another, in this case as one to the others.
Pannenberg on Trinity
Pannenberg himself spells out his mature vision of Trinity in critical and creative discussion with earlier and then contemporary trinitarian thinkers. He does this in the first volume of his Systematic Theology,6 published in German in 1988. This more concentrated presentation on Trinity will permit us to focus on it, though his trinitarian thought pervades, and to a great extent structures, all three volumes of his study. But already from early on in his career as a Christian theologian the notion of Trinity was operative in his theology.7 By 1981 he had written that his development of the doctrine of God, which is what his Systematic Theology is about,8 “will be more thoroughly trinitarian than any example I know of.”9
In chapter 5 of the first volume of his Systematic Theology, Pannenberg sketches out the essential lines of his trinitarian thinking. He entitles this chapter quite directly, “The Trinitarian God,” and lays out his argument in four parts. After a briefer review of the first and second parts, we will focus at greater length on the third part, “Distinction and Unity of the Divine Persons,” and on the fourth part, “The World as the History of God and the Unity of the Divine Essence.” We will then draw attention in more explicit fashion to possible Idealist influences on his trinitarian thought.
In the first part of chapter 5, “The God of Jesus and the Beginnings of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (259–80), Pannenberg chooses several New Testament texts. He selects them in order, in a first move, to introduce and ground his basic insight that the three divine Persons are identified there at least initially by the fact that they distinguish themselves from one another. He likewise takes a first look at several major Patristic thinkers who relatively early on in the history of trinitarian thought develop, in various directions, roles and, consequently, identities of the three divine Persons. He pays particular attention to ways in which such Patristic thinkers identify various bases on which they propose to affirm the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit.
Pannenberg begins his reflection in this first part of chapter 5 with reference to Jesus’ message. Jesus announces the kingdom or reign of God is at hand, an announcement inextricably tied in with the notion of the God of Israel as Father (259). Pannenberg finds a witness to this linkage, for example, in the very form and content of the Our Father. For Jesus, Father is the proper name for God (262). Pannenberg insists that this reference to God as Father does not in essence carry with it sexual distinction (261). Rather, it refers to the goodness of God described variously in so many New Testament texts, a number of which Pannenberg cites explicitly.10 Interestingly, he speaks of the Father as the “divine Other in terms of whom Jesus saw himself and to whom he referred his disciples and hearers” (262, emphasis added). Citing further New Testament references, he brings attention to the fact that Jesus stresses the difference between himself and the Father and “distinguishes between the future of God’s rule and its presence with his own coming” (263). Yet Jesus also recognized his closeness to the work of the Father, a closeness justifying his being identified as the Son. Indeed, given the imminence of the coming of the Father’s kingdom, there can be no further expectation of talk about God beyond that of Jesus (264). Furthermore, New Testament references to Jesus as Kyrios indicate the full deity of the Son (265–66). Pannenberg then makes the point that there is a third here, namely, the Spirit of whom Paul and John as well as other New Testament writers variously speak. “The Spirit of God is the mode of God’s presence in Jesus as he formerly was of God’s presence in the prophets or in all creation.” Pannenberg finds further indication of such a third in New Testament reference to the inclusion of believers in the sonship of Jesus, resulting in a Trinity rather than “a biunity of the Father and the Son” (268). But the New Testament speaks of interrelationships without clarifying them (269).
Following on this rather condensed but rich initial New Testament reflection, Pannenberg delights in citing several times the thought of Athanasius, who had written of the cooperation of Spirit and Word in creation. Athanasius and the Cappadocians stressed “the participation of all three hypostases in all divine activity as a consequence and condition of their unity of essence” (271). But this still did not as such give a basis for distinction among the hypostases. Athanasius himself, though not the Cappadocians, argued in addition that the Father would not be the Father without the Son. However, the further conclusion that Jesus was the Son “in self-distinction from the Father on the one side and the Spirit on the other” (273) could only arise, according to Pannenberg, through the historical revelation of the Son. In speaking of one principle in Father, Son, and Spirit, Athanasius had overcome subordinationism by defending the consubstantiality of the three. But, according to Pannenberg, arguing to a divine unity that would capture the essence of the Old Testament insistence on monotheism still remained a challenge for the early Church. More or less exclusive insistence on relations of origin (Ursprungsrelation) and identification of the Father with the divine essence in order to assure divine unity seemed to lead to subordinationism. Athanasius, for his part, had in fact anchored the unity of the Son with the Father not in a relation of origin but “on the logic of the relation that is posited when we call God ‘Father’ ” (278). For Athanasius, the Father could not be thought of as Father without reference to the Son. Consequently, the Son was fully divine. And Athanasius continued this argument, using it in relation to the Spirit as well (279). He applied “the relational conditioning of personal distinction, as mutual conditioning, to the Father as well, so that the Father can be thought of as unbegotten only in relation to the Son” (280). Pannenberg ends this first part of the fifth chapter by saying that we will have to come to affirm the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit in a new and different way beyond what has been done in the ancient past.
In the second half of the first part of chapter 5, Pannenberg has reviewed the early history of trinitarian thought, focusing on various attempts to affirm divine unity while assuring an appropriate understanding of the three. Now, in the second part of chapter 5, entitled “The Place of the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Dogmatic Structure and the Problem of Finding a Basis for Trinitarian Statements” (280–99), he continues his, generally speaking, chronologically structured review of thinkers. He moves from High Scholasticism through to Barth in the early twentieth century, finding that most trinitarian thinkers considered provide examples of further, mostly for him unsuccessful, efforts made to ground divine threeness in divine unity.
Of these efforts we can note three approaches in particular. The first is that of Thomas Aquinas. Pannenberg describes him as moving in the Summa theologiae from a consideration of God as first cause of the world, with the notion of divine simplicity as a sort of ongoing regulatory reference, to three divine subsistent relations. He finds in Thomas a series of deductions from first cause to trinitarian statements, deductions which despite careful nuance by Thomas seem for Pannenberg not to be coherent with Thomas’s insistence that we come to know the Trinity only through revelation (288).11
The second approach, of particular importance for us, is the recognition by Pannenberg that it was German Idealism which revived philosophical and theological interest in Trinity. He credits Lessing with having again brought to the fore the notion of spirit “as an expression of the self-understanding of God in self-awareness.” And he goes on to say: “The doctrine of God which was developed in German Idealism on the basis of a philosophy of self-consciousness adopted the thoughts of Lessing and impressively expanded them. In Hegel’s philosophy of the absolute Spirit the renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of self-conscious Spirit took classical form” (292). But for Pannenberg the problem with this Idealist approach and, more generally that of others trying to derive trinitarian distinctions from one divine essence, was that such an approach resulted in a single divine personality, an understanding not compatible with the notion of Trinity (294).12
The third approach to which we should refer was that of thinking of God in terms of love. Pannenberg here considers quite a series of trinitarian thinkers. Among them, he says that Hegel, for example, recognized in love the notion of plurality but was not able to work it out in terms of spirit’s self-consciousness (295). He mentions as well Richard of St. Victor, for whom it is not evident that the divine Persons are truly constituted by love. So often trinitarian theories rooted in the notion of love presuppose a prior subject who loves, rather than three Persons who are love. In that case such theories easily end up in subordinationism. Working with the notion of love is for Pannenberg better than working with the idea of self-consciousness, for it leaves more room for plurality. Yet even the three divine Persons themselves are too easily conceived as subjects who love rather than as themselves each being love as such. In this case, close as the Persons may be, their required independence does not easily allow for the conclusion to unity. Pannenberg is in effect distinguishing between “loving” and “being love,” that is, being “constituted by love,” with only this latter adequately reflecting the Johannine idea (1 John 4:8) that God is love (295–98).
In this second part of chapter 5 Pannenberg continues his argument in the form of a review of various efforts in the history of trinitarian thought to work from a consideration of the divine essence to affirm the unity of the three divine Persons. He concludes, more specifically, that neither the concept of spirit nor the notion of love as such provides an adequate basis for correctly affirming divine unity. Moving in this way from unity to threeness leads to either modalism or subordinationism. In the following part 3 of chapter 5 he will present his own proposal for rightly relating oneness and threeness in God. Here, however, he closes this second part of the chapter with the announcement that to seek a basis for the doctrine of the Trinity we must refer to the way in which the Scriptures present and relate Father, Son, and Spirit in the event of revelation. He sees in this the “material justification for the demand that the doctrine of the Trinity must be based on the biblical witness to revelation or on the economy of salvation” (299).
Pannenberg tellingly focuses on the divine Persons when he entitles the third part of chapter 5 “Distinction and Unity of the Divine Persons” (300–27). Here he develops his core presentation on Trinity in three subsections. He calls the first “The Revelation of God in Jesus Christ as the Starting Point, and the Traditional Terminology of the Doctrine of the Trinity” (300–08). As this first subsection’s title indicates, Pannenberg provides further precision to his conclusion to the previous, second part of chapter 5 and then examines the question of trinitarian terminology, especially in relation to terms used in New Testament texts.
So Pannenberg first repeats and gives greater precision to his position that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be systematically grounded in and developed on the basis of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (300). He recognizes that there are no explicit references in the New Testament to God existing in three Persons. And triadic formulations do not as such provide a sufficient basis for establishing the doctrine of the Trinity (302). He repeats his earlier remark that “Scripture clearly refers separately to the deity of the Son and the Spirit. But even in these passages it is not clear how the deity of the Son and Spirit relate to that of the Father” (302–03). He respects the fact that theologians work with speculative notions such as that of relations of origin as long as doing so does not lead to subordinationism or the identification of the Father as the sole divine subject (303). He then reminds the reader that Barth and, in a more precise way, Hegel had grounded divine self-relationality in self-consciousness, an approach from which he distances himself. He starts from, and roots his own position in, the concrete relationship of Jesus to the Father, repeating his initial remark made at the beginning of chapter 5. There he links together Jesus’ message about the coming of the Kingdom and Jesus’ relation to the Father (304).13
Pannenberg has made it clear that in his reference to revelation he is not going to look for explicitly trinitarian New Testament references. Rather, he will base his doctrine of the Trinity on the New Testament relation of Jesus to the Father and the Spirit. With this clarification in mind, he draws out some implications of his approach for the way in which classical terminology has been used in trinitarian thought. For example, he sees Eastern thought as employing more Johannine terminology when it distinguishes between the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. In the West, medieval speculation commonly refers to the processions of Son and Spirit, with the former described as begetting and the latter as breathing. He considers the references to begetting and breathing problematic in that relevant New Testament texts do not justify referring to eternal begetting or breathing. He does not intend here so much to deny that we can work with such notions. But he warns of the danger that we may excessively simplify the relations among Father, Son, and Spirit by reducing those relations to relations of begetting and breathing (305–07). He thus opens the way to his discussion of multiple relations among Father, Son, and Spirit established through their reciprocal self-distinction.
Pannenberg moves into theological high gear as he lays out his own approach to divine threeness and oneness in this key second subsection of chapter 5’s third part, “The Reciprocal Self-Distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit as the Concrete Form of Trinitarian Relations” (308–19). Here he starts in a way quite compatible with Lutheran traditions but focuses on the revealed God rather than the hidden God: “God is infinitely above all that is human and creaturely. He may be known only through the Son.” And he adds, “Only through the Father is Jesus known as the Son (Matt. 11:7)” (308). In this second subsection, Pannenberg continues from this quite Lutheran sola scriptura starting point, following an overall method for arguing his theological positions. In that method, generally stated, he cites specific New Testament texts which describe or at least identify the role or roles of the divine Person or Persons under consideration. Then he draws inferences14 from this role or these roles permitting him to speak of mutually self-distinguishing (wechselseitige Selbstunterscheidung) personal relationships, temporal and eternal, to which this role or these roles witness. He bases these inferences on logical analyses of the role or roles identified in the New Testament with reference, as controlling considerations, to the overall notions of God and divine Lordship with which he is working. The fact that Pannenberg presents together a series of New Testament citations, followed by a page or two of further reflection and remarks, and then repeats this pattern serves as a first confirmation of this method as the one according to which he is more generally proceeding.
The first time Pannenberg works with this method or way of proceeding he addresses the question of the Son’s distinguishing himself from the Father and the consequent self-distinguishing of the Father from the Son. A sampling of New Testament texts to which Pannenberg refers (308–10) will give us an idea of how he starts with such texts to establish the Son’s self-distinguishing as a constitutive element of the Son’s relationship to the Father. He begins by recalling that the Son’s role is to glorify the Father, as indicated in the first three verses of the Our Father (Luke 11:2ff, Matt. 6:9–10). He refers as well to John 17:4 and the High Priestly prayer. The Son serves the will of the Father (John 10:36ff) in establishing the lordship of God. And Pannenberg then says, “The title ‘Son’ reflects Jesus’ message of the Father. The reflection of the content of the message falls on his person” (309). He continues with citations from John (for example, 8:18) identifying Jesus as one who distinguishes himself from the Father who witnesses to him. Among many further New Testament indications that Jesus distinguishes himself from the Father, Pannenberg points to Mark 10:18, where Jesus says only one is good, only God alone. He appeals to this and other New Testament references to Jesus’ subordination of himself to the Father in order to continue his argument to the important role the New Testament attributes to Jesus in distinguishing himself from the Father.
With this New Testament witness at hand, Pannenberg moves to establish this role of self-distinguishing as constitutive element in the self-identity of the Son not only on earth but in the eternal God (310–12). For not only does Jesus distinguish himself from God insofar as he is a human person, but he also indicates that he is so close to God in his relation to God and in his sending into the world that “God in eternity is Father only in relation to him.” Since the Father is Father only insofar as He is in relation to the Son, the Son “shares his deity as the eternal counterpart of the Father” (310). Pannenberg brings forth various arguments in favor of this position. Among them we should especially note that for him the eternal God “cannot be directly thought of as from eternity related to a temporal and creaturely reality unless this is itself eternal, as a correlate of the eternal God” (311). The Son receives his divinity in this act of self-distinction from the Father (310). Pannenberg then asks if this does not mean that the Father also distinguishes himself from the Son and is God in and through that self-distinction. He is aware that in traditional trinitarian thought the Father is without origin. But he recalls that already Athanasius had said the Father was not the Father without the Son.15 Pannenberg recognizes that the Father is not begotten and that the relationship of begetting is irreversible. However, he suggests that the “relativity of fatherhood … might well involve a dependence of the Father on the Son and thus be the basis of true reciprocity in the Trinitarian relations” (312).
In working a second time with his method of seeking characterizations of the role or roles of divine Persons in the New Testament, Pannenberg complements the previous reflection with a consideration of the Son’s self-distinguishing from the Father in terms of the Son’s being himself plenipotentiary. He draws attention to a series of New Testament texts which affirm that God has given all power to the risen Christ (Matt. 28:18), indeed to the pre-Easter Jesus (John 5:23). Jesus is the holder of lordship (Phil. 2:9ff, Heb. 2:8). He must reign till all enemies are overcome (1 Cor. 15:24–25) (312–14).
Pannenberg moves from this witnessing to the power of Jesus on to a reflection on the implications of that power for a further understanding of divine lordship. He says the handing over of rule to the Son and its being returned to the Father are, as such, part of the sending of the Son. But by inference from the mutual relations of the historical person of the Son and the Father, we see that handing over and handing back of rule are the fulfillment of that sending, thus defining “intratrinitarian relations between the two.” The Son exercises his lordship in proclaiming the lordship of the Father, an exercise consummated when all is handed over to the Father. Here Pannenberg sees a mutual relationship between Father and Son which, as he mentions, is not indicated by the notion of begetting. The Father begets the Son and hands over lordship to the Son, “so that his kingdom and his own deity are now dependent upon the Son.” For in God rule is not to be distinguished from being. God need not create but if God creates a world, his lordship and consequently his own deity cannot be separated from rule over that world. Indeed, already in the eternal God the Son “freely subjects himself to the lordship of the Father.” And the Father “hands over his lordship to the Son” (313), establishing a reciprocity of relationship between Father and Son. Pannenberg then briefly takes up the question of the relevance of the cross of Jesus. He objects to the rather more direct discussion of the death of God, a discussion taking place at least since the time of Hegel. But he does see in the death of Jesus the “ultimate consequence of his self-distinction from the Father and precisely in so doing showed himself to be the Son of the Father” (314). The death of Jesus challenges the deity not only of Jesus but also that of the Father.16
For a third time Pannenberg again follows, in a general way, his method of moving from New Testament textual witness to further reflection on the implications of that witness (314–19). But here more than in the previous two exercises of that method he tends to interweave reference to New Testament texts with further reflection. In this third exercise, he turns to the question of the relationships between the Spirit, on the one hand, and the Father and Son, on the other. He remarks that the death of Jesus Christ not only raises doubts about the deity of Father and Son but also has implications for the Spirit who as life-giver raises Jesus (314). Among various citations, Pannenberg draws attention to the pre-Pauline formula that the resurrection is the work of the Spirit (Rom. 1:4, 1 Tim. 3:16b). Indeed, the resurrection of the dead is the work of the Spirit (Rom. 8:11). Pannenberg works especially with John, who speaks of the Spirit as another advocate to be sent by the Father (John 14:16). Though the Father acts through the Spirit, it is primarily the Spirit who raises Jesus from the dead. While the resurrection is also an act of the Son, it is by the power of the Spirit that he is raised. The Spirit’s role in the resurrection of Jesus is decisive, although all three Persons are at work. The Spirit is “the creative origin of all life. To that extent we may say that here the Father and the Son are referred to the working of the Spirit.” Pannenberg complements this consideration with considerable further reference to John who, for example, stresses the Spirit’s glorifying the Son (John 16:14) who in turn glorifies the Father (John 17:4). And Jesus prays that the Father will glorify Him. In response, the Father sends the Spirit, who “manifests Jesus as the Son” and glorifies Son and Father in their permanent fellowship. The Spirit’s glorifying not himself but the Son and the Father is a form of “self-distinction which constitutes the Spirit a separate person from the Father and the Son and relates him to both.” The Spirit does not refer to himself (John 16:13) but witnesses to Jesus (John 15:26) and recalls his teaching (John 14:26). The Spirit then is the Spirit of both Father and Son (315).
Pannenberg does not accept the notion that the Spirit is the “we” of Father and Son, for this would not acknowledge the proper personhood of the Spirit. He does, though, appreciate Augustine’s thought that the Spirit is the love uniting Father and Son. Augustine’s idea of the Spirit as the bond of union between Father and Son helps bring out the New Testament affirmation that the Son’s relationship to the Father is rooted in the Son’s reception of the Spirit at baptism, in the overall working of the Spirit (Rom. 1:4), and even in Luke’s attribution of Jesus’ birth to conception through the Spirit (Luke 1:35). Pannenberg then brings together various New Testament themes to support his understanding of the Spirit as being part of the eternal fellowship of Father and Son “because he is the condition and medium of their fellowship” (316). Pannenberg takes the occasion to criticize the notion that the Spirit arises from Father and Son, an idea based in an understanding of the Spirit only in terms of a relationship of origin. All Scripture permits us to say is that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and is received by the Son … [who] gives the Spirit to his people.” Father and Son send the Spirit “to incorporate believers into his fellowship with the Father (John 16:7; cf. 14:16; 15:26)” (317). He closes this second subsection of the third part of chapter 5 with the reminder that reciprocity in relations among the divine Persons complements, qualifies, and in a sense replaces at least in its exclusivist formulation the more traditional approach to establishing the identity of the divine Persons only on the basis of relations of origin (319).
The title of Pannenberg’s third subsection of the third part of chapter 5 is “Three Persons but Only One God” (319–27). Here he prolongs his reflection on what he now terms three separate centers of action (selbständiges Aktzentrum, 319), drawing out further implications concerning the question of divine unity. He reiterates that the relations constituting the three divine Persons in their mutual self-distinction are more than relations of origin. The various relations indicated in the New Testament are all constitutive of the divine Persons. He refers again to Athanasius as he says that the Persons are these relations which distinguish them and constitute them in communion. This brings Pannenberg to the question of whether we might “define the relational nexus of the perichoresis more accurately and also show how it relates to the unity of the divine life” (320–21), with each Person being distinct in that Person’s own way.
Pannenberg continues to harken back to Athanasius as he explores ways to ground divine unity appropriately. In reacting against the Arians, Athanasius had affirmed the full deity of the Son, as Pannenberg phrases it: “The Father is not the Father without the Son … he does not have his Godhead without him” (322).17 But, according to Pannenberg Athanasius did not pursue further the rootage of divine unity in the relations constituting the Persons, which is the approach Pannenberg himself takes. Pannenberg does not, however, deny the monarchy of the Father, for he sees this monarchy as being fully established and consummated through the work of the Son and the Spirit (324–25).
With this presentation of the monarchy of the Father achieved through the Son and the Spirit Pannenberg moves to his fourth and final part of chapter 5, “The World as the History of God and the Unity of the Divine Essence” (327–36). Here he says that Barth had not successfully based Trinity on divine revelation in Christ. Rahner was more successful in that he identified the immanent Trinity with the economic Trinity specifically on the basis of the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity. Though Rahner managed to link the incarnation with the whole history of salvation, Pannenberg proposes that Rahner’s thought be extended to include linking incarnation with creation so that it “is brought into the relations of the trinitarian persons and participates in them” (328). Though the Father remains transcendent, when he has freely acted in the world through Son and Spirit “he has made himself [and his deity] dependent upon the course of history” (329). The cross thus questions the deity of both Father and Son. Pannenberg then sees the history of the world as such tied in to the immanent Trinity in light of the handing over of the kingdom to the Son and its being handed back to the Father. And he agrees with Moltmann that the glorifying of Father and Son in history implies the glorification of Father and Son in the eternal Trinity as well.
Though Pannenberg himself disavows the descriptor “panentheistic” for his position, an argument could be made in its favor.18 He rejects the notion that the Trinity’s reality develops through history to an eschatological consummation. Here he is harkening back to his way of thinking earlier on. According to that thinking, at the end of time we will see God was always fully God from the beginning and even before the foundation of the world, though presently we affirm this only in anticipation as rooted in the resurrection of Jesus. “The eschatological future of the consummation of history in the kingdom of God thus has a distinctive function in establishing belief in the trinitarian God if on the basis of this event a decision is made concerning the existence of God from eternity to eternity, i.e., before the foundation of the world” (331–32). For Pannenberg, detaching the Trinity from temporal change, as he puts it, results in a one-sided understanding of Trinity. There is a need to bring together eternal Trinity and the process of history, leading again to the need to rethink in a new way the unity of the three divine Persons. Simply seeing essence and revelation working reciprocally, or appealing to the movement of perichōrēsis as basis for that unity, will not work. Moving from essence to a relation of origin, or neglecting the fact that perichōrēsis presupposes some more fundamental explanation of the unity of the persons (334) does not give us an adequate basis for affirming divine unity. The theme of unity of the divine essence will have to be treated on its own. Pannenberg recognizes the provisional nature of his own thought on Trinity, given his understanding of God in relation to history. His thought is provisional and more anticipatory, both more generally in that all is in a sense provisional until the consummation and more concretely in that he must examine the three divine centers of action through further theological reflection. He then points to their action in creation, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and eschatology, which he treats in the rest of his Systematic Theology. He wants to work “on the basis of a differentiated concept of the unity of the divine essence” beyond, for example, the notion of the divine Persons as individuals in a species or genus, a view he attributes to Basil of Caesarea (336).19 But for our purposes, as we round out somewhat our understanding of his position on divine unity we will have to limit ourselves to further, brief reference to his notions of infinity, field (Feld), and divine love.20
At various points in his Systematic Theology Pannenberg discusses at some length the history of the development of the notion of infinity and its understanding as the true infinite. We can though sense something of his idea of the true infinite by reviewing selected remarks in chapter 6, “The Unity and Attributes of the Divine Essence,” part 6, “The Infinity of God: His Holiness, Eternity, Omnipotence, and Omnipresence,” subsection a, “The Infinity and Holiness of God” (397–401). Here Pannenberg interweaves appreciative remarks concerning Hegel’s multiple understanding of the infinite with his own treatment of the biblical theme of God’s holiness. He acknowledges that the Bible does not speak of God in terms of infinity, though biblical descriptions imply this notion. So we need to refer to the Bible to elucidate it. He then describes the infinite as that which, generally considered, is seen as being over against the finite. But he immediately brings in Hegel’s more specific argument that the true infinite cannot be so conceived. In such a case the infinite would not itself be infinite but merely another something finite (397n126). Though he does not use Hegel’s terminology, he briefly speaks of what Hegel had called the abstract infinite, namely, the empty infinite standing over against the finite, and the bad infinite, the latter being infinite succession in which limit continually returns. However, Pannenberg proposes that the basic understanding of the infinite distinct from anything finite or limited does permit linking it with holiness understood as “separateness from everything profane” (398, see 397–98). He then reviews earlier biblical texts which stress God’s standing apart from the profane. He argues that this standing apart is in fact a way of protecting the profane from divine intrusion that would destroy the profane. In this regard he cites Exod. 19:12, for “contact with the holy brings death.” Through Yahweh’s election, Israel becomes a holy people, permitting the people to be protected by God’s own holiness. In the New Testament, “Jesus has sanctified his own in the truth (John 17:17–19)” (398) and Paul calls the churches “saints.” Pannenberg continues to review biblical texts as he reminds us that beyond judgment the holiness of God implies, and indeed offers, definitive salvation. In the post-exilic period this hope is available to all and then the sending of the Son is to bring the world into “the sphere of the divine holiness” (John 3:16) (399). The holiness of God standing over against the profane world, and embracing it, shows a structural affinity between God’s biblical holiness and the true infinite (400).
Pannenberg again refers to Hegel: “The Infinite that is merely a negation of the finite is not yet truly seen as the Infinite (as Hegel showed), for it is defined by delimitation from something else, i.e., the finite.” The holiness of God is truly infinite because it opposes the profane and enters into it, making it holy. This entrance of divine holiness into the world is mediated by the Son and is also the work of the Spirit. “We also see the structure of the true Infinite in the life of the Spirit. As the Spirit who is identical with the divine essence (John 4:24) he is opposed to the world (Isa. 31:3), but he is also at work in creation as the origin of all life.” Pannenberg closes this brief reflection with a reminder that for him an abstract concept of the true Infinite does not exhaust the biblical notion of the holiness of God and the Spirit. For Pannenberg, God through the Spirit gives existence to the finite. Here one can sense a certain critique of Hegel’s more abstractly formulated notion of the true infinite, though Pannenberg does see affinities, perhaps we could say structural affinities, between the infinite and God’s holiness (400).
Pannenberg’s reference to the Hegelian notion of the true infinite gives us some further idea of what he understands by divine unity, namely, a real inclusivity. Pannenberg works as well with the notion of field taken from modern physics. Concerning field, we can look at a brief but helpful reference, again in chapter 6, and this time in part 4, “God’s Spirituality, Knowledge, and Will.” Modern field theories do not require thinking about “field phenomena as bodily entities,” so we can more easily speak of the Spirit of God in terms of Michael Faraday’s notion of a universal force field. For example, the field’s autonomy does not require speaking of a subject as is needed when thinking of Spirit in terms of mind or nous. “The deity as field can find equal manifestation in all three persons” (383). Pannenberg identifies this divine life or field both with the loving fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit and specifically with the Spirit who grounds and brings about that fellowship. In a more provisional statement, Pannenberg here proposes that the Holy Spirit is the third realization of this field but, for the moment, stresses more that “the living essence of God as Spirit has more the nature of a force field than a subject” (384).21
Finally, we turn now to part 7 of chapter 6, “The Love of God,” and specifically to the first subsection, “a. Love and Trinity” (422–32). Here Pannenberg first reviews aspects of the biblical revelation (422–25). He says that John and Paul locate the basic meaning of Jesus’ history in God’s love for the world and for believers (422). Jesus regarded this love as the reason for which he was sent. Pannenberg recalls various parables which illustrate God’s love for the lost and sees them as revealing the love of the Father for the lost. Early Christians saw this message as characterizing the work and mission of Jesus, giving meaning to His death. Pannenberg then refers briefly to Old Testament prophets who spoke of God’s love for the elect, a shepherd seeking lost sheep. He notes that Jesus saw his own mission in terms of this prophetic vision. What is special about Jesus’ self-understanding is the fact that he sees the lordship of God breaking in with him. Paul, in turn, sees Jesus as expressing not only the love of God expressed in the sending of the Son but also as the love of Christ himself as subject of that love alongside the Father. “One and the same event has two different subjects. Their fellowship finds expression in the unity of the event” (423). Then Pannenberg goes on to remark that the love of God fills us (Rom. 5:5) through the Spirit working in us (424). With Regin Prenter, he remarks that the New Testament speaks not of God as loving, that is, not as one subject, but as being love itself (1 John 4:8 and 4:16) and “calls love the unity of the divine being of Father, Son, and Spirit” (425).22 Pannenberg in effect identifies three subjects of one divine love in the New Testament, setting the stage for his own constructive reflections concerning divine unity as the mutual love of Father, Son, and Spirit.
In the rest of the subsection “Love and Trinity” (425–32), Pannenberg presents what could practically be called a hymn to the Father as love, the Son as love, and the Spirit as love. They are three divine Persons, each a movement of love in a particular and distinct way in line with the relations constituting them. He immediately underscores the fact that there is here no further subject or hypostasis beyond the three divine Persons. This is, in a way, the error he finds in the thought of Barth and Hegel in that they posit a single divine subject. For the divine Persons love one another not in the sense that they love themselves in the other. Rather, more generally speaking, love gives rise to the selfhood of a person. “Each receives his or her self afresh from the other, and since the self-giving is mutual there is no one-sided dependence in the sense of belonging to another” (426–27).
In speaking more directly of God again, Pannenberg appeals anew to 1 John 4:8 and 16 to say that love is the same as the divine essence. “God is Spirit” and “God is love” denote “the same unity of essence by which Father, Son, and Spirit are united in the fellowship of the one God” (427). But love is no separate subject beyond Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “It is the eternal power and deity which lives in the Father, Son, and Spirit through their relations and which constitutes the unity of the one God in the communion of the three persons” (428).
Pannenberg continues in the rest of this subsection to bring out various aspects of the mutual relations constituting Father, Son, and Spirit insofar as these relations are ones of love as self-gift one to the other. For example, the Father gives all to the Son who receives all in loving obedience to the Father. The Spirit is self-gift to Father and Son as the one who glorifies them and, in so doing, constitutes them in divine fellowship. In comparing the divine Persons to human persons, Pannenberg says that the divine Persons are fully constituted by their specific mutual relations, “thus their existence as persons is coincident with the divine love” (431). He ends the section “Love and Trinity” by saying that “divine love constitutes the concrete unity of the divine life in the distinction of its personal manifestations and relations … and … consummates the monarchy of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit” (432).23
Idealist Family Resemblances
Pannenberg has long been thought of as having maintained Hegel’s notion of history as the history of God, transforming Hegel’s final-causality-oriented notion of God, as movement of spirit, into an eschatological understanding of God. In this understanding God is the power of the future proleptically active in the present and especially in the resurrection of Jesus.24 While this observation concerning the transformation proposedly made by Pannenberg may well be true, he is not simply a Hegelian. Schelling as well had worked out an end-oriented and indeed future-oriented understanding of Trinity moving toward a renewal, in Schelling’s case, of an initial unity of being lost with creation. And though Pannenberg clearly reflects the general Idealist thrust toward a culminating end, he interacts with many different theological, philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and scientific traditions regarding history and the wider question of Trinity. To some extent at least these traditions have themselves mediated various Idealist themes and approaches to Pannenberg and others of his generation. On the theological scene, for example, post-Idealist thinkers such as Dorner, Barth, and Rahner, themselves influenced by Idealist thought, have in turn had great influence on Pannenberg, who is deeply cognizant of such theological traditions.25 For present purposes, however, it will be sufficient to acknowledge several comments regarding possible Idealist influence on Pannenberg’s thought. Then we will focus at greater length on examples of what we could call family resemblances between Pannenberg’s thought on Trinity and that of German Idealists, whether that Idealist thought may have influenced Pannenberg more directly or as mediated through others. We will note as well his profound knowledge of Idealist traditions, the noting of which facilitates and reinforces our recognition of these family resemblances.
Many of us admire Pannenberg’s true theological virtuosity while admitting the need for a great deal more study of the relationships between the thought of Pannenberg and that of Hegel and especially Schelling. On reading his thought on Trinity we quickly come to recognize the great-great-grand paternity, so to speak, of Hegel and Schelling in Pannenberg’s theology. By way of brief entry into this complex question of an Idealist intellectual paternity of so rich and creative a thinker as Pannenberg, especially with reference to Hegel, we should note, for example, that Iain Taylor26 argues against stressing too much a Hegelian influence. Though Taylor himself refers little to Schelling, he notes Samuel M. Powell’s Hegelian reading of Pannenberg in Powell’s The Trinity in German Thought. He acknowledges Powell’s insight into the Hegelian character of Pannenberg’s understanding of person in terms of self-donation, and cites to this effect Pannenberg in Jesus—God and Man.27 On the other hand, he rejects Powell’s Hegelian interpretation of Pannenberg on the historicity of God’s being.28 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen’s brief remarks are also helpful: “While there is no reason to deny the importance of some ideas of Hegel to Pannenberg’s systematic reflection—which he himself freely acknowledges—it is also a fact that he uses Hegelian resources critically and at times is critical of some ideas of Hegel.”29 Again, Klaus Vechtel discusses the wider relationship between Pannenberg and quite a range of philosophers. In the first part of Trinität und Zukunft, entitled “Philosophie und Offenbarung,” Vechtel frequently refers to Hegel and to Pannenberg’s critique of Hegel.30 In the second part, entitled “Trinität und Zukunft,”31 he presents Pannenberg’s trinitarian thought and refers, among philosophers, to Hegel but seemingly not to Schelling.32 Here in this second part, one of Vechtel’s major concerns is to underscore the fact that Pannenberg rejects Hegel’s idea, as Pannenberg understands it, that God or the infinite needs finitude to develop into the fullness of Godself.33 He notes that Pannenberg grounds this rejection in his own trinitarian thought.34
Following on these examples of references to several discussions of Pannenberg especially in relation to Hegel, we can now focus at greater length on several examples of family resemblances between Pannenberg’s thought on Trinity and that of German Idealists. As we have seen, Pannenberg critiqued Barth for not really letting Scripture provide the content of his notion of revelation. In a way reminiscent of Schelling, Pannenberg himself works extensively with a wide variety of Scriptural witnesses as well as with various theological traditions to describe the mutual, interrelational activity of Father, Son, and Spirit. He refers to these three as centers of action whose distinctive features emerge more clearly in the world-historical move from creation to eschatological consummation. His proposal to follow the development of Father, Son, and Spirit in their relationships with one another and with creation recalls Schelling’s way of conceiving the three divine potencies on their way to personhood, as does his affirmation of divine unity fully established only at the eschaton. For Schelling, this is the reestablishment of full divine unity of being which had been lost at the moment of creation, a reestablishment rooted in the interpersonal relations among the three divine potencies become Persons. For Pannenberg this is the divine unity established through the mutual relations of love among Father, Son, and Spirit.35
In emphasizing the variety of ways in which the three divine Persons interact in divine revelation, Pannenberg takes an important step beyond what is for so many trinitarian thinkers the more traditional and accepted way of understanding the three Persons. That way of understanding involves speaking more or less exclusively in terms of relations of origin.36 Without denying these relations, he goes on to explore the richness with which he sees Scripture describing mutual relations between each of the divine Persons and among them in their multiform interaction with one another (308–19).37 But whereas Schelling spoke of shared divine being, Pannenberg speaks more of shared kingdom and lordship. As we have seen, for Pannenberg the Father gives rise to the Son and yet is Father only in relation to the generation and sending of the Son. The Father depends on the Son to carry out the Father’s reign. The Son both accepts lordship from the Father and submits himself to the Father’s lordship. Each bears witness to the other.38 And the Spirit not only comes from the Father but glorifies Father and Son and bears witness to the Father by bringing to fullness the Son’s revelation of the Father. In and through his analysis of these and other mutual relations witnessed to in the Scriptures, Pannenberg identifies an interrelated movement among the three Persons which is formally but not materially common to them. Though each remains truly different one from the other, this formally common movement is one of self-constitution through self-gift one to the other and discovery, in love, of who one is in and through the other.39 As we will recall, Pannenberg rejects the idea that “the one loves self in the other instead of loving the other as other” (426). Yet he has in fact transferred Hegel’s overall idea of subjectivity as self-development through otherness from God as such, essentially a monosubjectivally formulated development, to each of the three divine Persons in their mutual, intersubjectival action. Pannenberg speaks of person in three ways: as movement in which the self comes to its fuller self through the other; as movement of mutual self-distinguishing from others; as movement of self-gift to the other or others. Though with regard to Hegel it would generally be better to speak in terms of subjectivity rather than personhood, Pannenberg has in effect teased out these various meanings of person or subject, the first found more explicitly and the second and third perhaps more implicitly in Hegel’s thought.40
With reference to Pannenberg on the notion of person, it will be helpful to recall more explicitly what he himself had written earlier on about Hegel and Hegel’s notion of person in Jesus—God and Man, published in German already in 1964:
In his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity in his Philosophy of Religion, Hegel was the first to so elaborate the concept of “person” in such a way that God’s unity becomes understandable precisely from the reciprocity of the divine Persons. … He [God] shows himself to be such [personal] in his revelation as Father in relation to the Son, who as the Son of the Father belongs indissolubly to the divinity of God. … Father, Son, and Spirit confront one another as three distinguished subjects, three Persons. … Through this profound thought that the essence of the person is to exist in self-dedication to another person, Hegel understood the unity in the Trinity as the unity of reciprocal self-dedication.41
In the full text, here cited only in part, Pannenberg had made several references to God as person and to God’s personality, remarks which he would revise in his later trinitarian thought and which have not been included in this citation. This phrasing, including reference to God’s personality, would rather be more reminiscent of aspects of Schelling’s later thought. There Schelling strove to defend initial divine personhood and spoke of it as three potencies becoming tri-personal. Pannenberg then says: “With the exception of the problematic derivation of the Trinity from the concept of Spirit that Hegel shared with tradition, his idea is especially suited to the relation of Jesus to the Father and of the Father to him, as well as to that of the Spirit, who glorifies both, to the Father and the Son, as it is expressed in the New Testament.”42
Already here in this earlier study Pannenberg indicates an affinity, dare we say a family resemblance, between, on the one hand, his understanding of Hegel on person and self-distinction and, on the other, what we have seen as his later working with the notion of three divine Persons. In this later work he speaks of the three divine Persons who, in their mutual relations, distinguish themselves from one another and, in that distinguishing as self-gift, provide the basis for divine unity in love. It may also well be, however, that Pannenberg attributes more to Hegel regarding the concrete working out of self-differentiation among the divine Persons than would be warranted. The concrete self-differentiation to which Pannenberg refers surely has greater affinity to the thought and approach of Schelling, especially in Pannenberg’s heavy stress on difference and differentiation in the divine.43
In his mature systematic presentation, then, for Pannenberg the triune God is not one subject acting in three distinct ways. Rather, the triune God is three distinct divine subjects as centers of action moving, through the mutual relations and interaction that they are, to a final consummation at the end of time. In this final consummation Pannenberg insists on the continuing distinction among the three centers of action, thus recalling Dorner’s insistence that the three divine modes of being remain distinct as Persons in the final divine unity. In fact, Schelling, Dorner, and Pannenberg all find it important, in working out their thought on Trinity, to emphasize this ongoing and finally perduring distinctness of the three.
Among other family resemblances between the trinitarian thought of Schelling and that of Pannenberg, we could briefly note that both stress divine freedom, though Schelling does this more radically than Pannenberg.44 For Schelling the Father will eventually become Lord while for Pannenberg the Father’s lordship over creation will be established through the action of Son and Spirit. For Schelling and for Pannenberg the Father remains outside the temporal reality of creation. Schelling speaks of the Father giving up his divinity whereas Pannenberg speaks of the Father giving up his lordship. Schelling, as does Hegel though differently, identifies God’s being with God’s kingdom or lordship, and so does Pannenberg. Schelling speaks of our experiencing divine glorification in its fullness only at the end of time, though it has occurred already now in the Resurrection. Pannenberg points to the Resurrection as proleptic realization of the fullness of divine lordship to be established finally and fully along with divine unity only in the future. For Schelling the role of the Spirit is the glorification of Father and Son at the end of time, one of the roles Pannenberg as well attributes to the Spirit. Hegel, Schelling, and Pannenberg all attribute to the Spirit a more inclusive or including consummatory role.
As we have seen, in describing the consummation of world history and the activity of the three divine Persons in that history Pannenberg employs the scientific notion of a field.45 He in fact proposes, more generally, to “conceive of the ‘spiritual’ nature of the one God in Father, Son, and Spirit in terms of a field of power rather than in terms of a single divine subject or person.”46 This field is God’s essence as movement of interpersonal love occurring, and when referring to God in relation to the world Pannenberg would say acting, in, through and, more radically, as the divine Persons. It comes cumulatively, through and as the Holy Spirit, to full realization as the triune unity of love. This triune unity finally includes all that has occurred in history. So Pannenberg sees history as the history of God, who becomes what Hegel had called the true infinite. For Hegel this true infinite took the form of an inclusive movement of subjectivity: love on the level of religion and self-thinking thought in philosophy. For Schelling the infinite was an inclusive movement of three freely willing divine potencies become divine Persons through restoring and then sharing in the fullness of divine being. And now for Pannenberg the true infinite is a field constituted by the interpersonal love of the three divine Persons as movements of love. They are persons or subjects from eternity to eternity.47
We can further identify family resemblances by recalling again the general approach according to which Schelling, but especially Hegel, have each in his own way brought so many philosophical and theological notions together in one overall extended movement of subjectivity. Pannenberg joins with others, including Barth, who have taken up this Idealist approach. Pannenberg does it, however, without tying it to a single movement of divine subjectivity. He brings together in one overall movement, even if worked out in terms of the mutual relations of three centers of activity, such notions as divine being, kingdom and lordship, revelation and history, creation and reconciliation, eschatology and Parousia or final consummation.48 Underlying this general approach is the shift in emphasis, with the Idealists, from a so-called substance-based thinking to subject-based thinking. In the case of Pannenberg, this subject-based thinking takes the form of relation-based thinking. The divine Persons are understood as subjects constituted by their reciprocally self-distinguishing relations structured as movements of self-giving love. The divine Persons act in the world in line with these relations understood as expressions of divine love. This notion of subjectivity can be characterized in a certain general sense as one of intersubjectivity as long as intersubjectivity is not understood to mean relations between already existing subjects. It is this stress on subjectivity rather than substance which permits Pannenberg to establish divine unity on the basis of reciprocal self-distinction taking the form of love as self-gift to the other. With his multifaceted and diversely applied notion of divine love, Pannenberg has brought together, without reference to an underlying substance, notions of divine essence, existence, person, and unity while, as a further development of Rahner’s rule, intimately linking immanent and economic Trinity.49
Pannenberg has, with major corrective moves, creatively interwoven various Idealist themes in such a way that it is often hard to identify more specifically whether the direct source of a specific insight or approach might be Hegel, Schelling, or Idealist patterns of thought more generally considered. Furthermore, in most cases he traces the various theological positions he embraces back to ideas he finds at least implied in Scriptural witnesses to the multiple roles of the three divine Persons and in further theological developments over the course of the history of Christian thought. At times he is in agreement with these developments, at others he offers corrective remarks, and sometimes distances himself from them. However, even in these various cases it would be difficult to see how he could have entered into such critical and constructive dialogue without having taken some inspiration, whether regarding overall approaches or concerning specific points, from post-Kantian German Idealist thought in its various forms. This is especially true with regard to the inference from New Testament descriptions of the roles of Father, Son, and Spirit to their reciprocally constituting self-distinguishing relations in the temporal sphere and, consequently, in eternity.
We can, at least indirectly, further ground and justify our more spontaneous, initial recognition of various family resemblances or intellectual kinship between Pannenberg’s trinitarian thought and that especially of Hegel and Schelling by acknowledging Pannenberg’s great familiarity with German Idealist thought. We can confirm Pannenberg’s profound and even appreciative familiarity with Idealist trinitarian thought and Idealist thought in general by noting examples of remarks Pannenberg has made concerning Hegel and Schelling in some of his own writings and then by citing several attestations, coming from those who have known him or met him, to his profound knowledge of Idealist thought.
Early on Pannenberg had referred to Hegel and both the earlier and the later Schelling in his introduction to the volume he edited, Revelation as History.50 That Pannenberg continued an intense interest in Hegel is witnessed to by the fact that he invited Ludger Oeing-Hanhoff to treat of the theme of the reception and critique of Hegel’s trinitarian thought in a presentation to the Protestant Theological Faculty of the University of Munich in 1976.51 Pannenberg’s own in-depth understanding of Hegel is evident in his impressive 1970 study, “The Significance of Christianity in the Philosophy of Hegel.”52 We should note as well his later study, “La Doctrina de la Trinidad en Hegel y su recepción en la teologia alemana.”53 In this article Pannenberg first provides a helpful overview of Hegel on Trinity and then reviews the history of Western trinitarian thought. He refers back briefly but of course insightfully to Augustine, Aquinas, and Spinoza, then forward from Hegel through Marheineke and especially Dorner to Barth, Rahner, Jüngel, and Moltmann. He stresses Dorner’s mediation of Hegel to Barth, who then influences Rahner in his affirmation that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa. Jüngel in turn links Barth’s thought on Trinity and revelation more explicitly with the cross and Moltmann takes this linkage up in the form of a social model of the Trinity.54 We, naturally enough, easily situate Pannenberg and his extraordinarily creative trinitarian thought in this lineage as well.
Along with these references to Pannenberg’s study of Idealist thought and especially that of Hegel, we can cite enlightening personal anecdotes concerning Pannenberg and his great interest in Idealist thought. For example, Robert W. Jenson provides a particularly pertinent witness to Pannenberg’s knowledge of and being at home in Idealist thought:
I began my study at Heidelberg just as Pannenberg was beginning his teaching. My first semester, he lectured on nineteenth-century Protestant theology, which for most of the semester meant Fichte and Schelling and Schleiermacher and Hegel. … It was apparent that here was the lecturer’s intellectual and even spiritual milieu; for all his sometimes pointed critique, he was at home with and indeed loved these thinkers. When he disagreed with any of them, it was in the way that they disagreed with each other.55
I myself also remember fondly the occasion on which, early in my research prior to writing a doctoral dissertation on Hegel on Trinity, I submitted to Prof. Dr. Pannenberg a series of questions written in my best German and also in English. Later, when he kindly received me in his office in Munich, he thanked me for sending the questions in both German and English because he was not sure he would have understood my written German. In any case, it was clear from our conversation that he had a deep and detailed understanding of Hegel. Still, Winfried Corduan56 recounts that in discussion Pannenberg was uncomfortable with the idea of identifying a Hegelian rootage to his thought, referencing instead Duns Scotus. In this regard we can perhaps give Pannenberg almost the last word:
I … had to teach courses concerned with … modern history of Protestant theology. It was in this connection that I came to appreciate the importance of Hegel’s thought in the development of modern theology, but mainly as a challenge to theology. I never became a Hegelian … Because my publications also gave evidence of this [his prolonged study of Hegel], the tenacious prejudice of my alleged Hegelianism developed, and it effectively concealed the more important philosophical roots of my thought.57
Unlike Hegel, Pannenberg did indeed reject the direct linkage of the doctrine of God as spirit with the notion of nous or mind and consciousness. He opted instead for a more inclusive form of the notion of God as spirit. That more inclusive form was for him Trinity as consisting of three divine Persons who were reciprocally self-distinguishing centers of action.58 We might, however, be permitted to think that his prolonged study of Hegel left him with a seemingly rather spontaneous reflex to work with more formally speaking Hegelian approaches and dynamics as he developed his doctrine of God. And with his emphasis on love as self-gift, Pannenberg was able to present the three self-distinguishing divine centers of action as actively present, directly for Son and Spirit and more indirectly for the Father through Son and Spirit, in the world and moving toward the final establishment of the monarchy of the Father. Though I would say his idea of three divine Persons interacting in creation and history recalls Schelling’s approach, his emphasis on love as self-gift permitted him to speak of this movement without making an explicit, more Schellingian reference to divine Persons as the realization of divine potencies.59 Pannenberg’s trinitarian thought shows, in many ways, family resemblances with that of Hegel and Schelling as well as with that of Barth and Rahner—quite an intellectual lineage.
Barth, Rahner, and Pannenberg—three who in their trinitarian thought give clear witness to post-Kantian Idealist influence in Germany over the course of the twentieth century. Each one of them, but especially Pannenberg with his profound knowledge of Idealist trinitarian thought, witnesses to both Hegelian and Schellingian influences. Barth, Rahner, and Pannenberg exemplify, and have thereby given more specific content to, what we have spoken of as family resemblances among themselves and, especially important here, between their thought and that of post-Kantian German Idealists. Generally speaking, Barth and Rahner lean more toward the Hegelian, essentially monosubjectival approach to understanding Trinity. In his intersubjectival approach Pannenberg tends more toward, and perhaps moves beyond, the Schellingian approach to Trinity, which latter is itself in a way already intersubjectival. It has often been said that Western trinitarian thought stressed more the oneness of God whereas Eastern trinitarian thought emphasized more the threeness in God.60 Hegel, Barth, and Rahner have, each in his own way, continued this Western stress on oneness. But now especially Schelling and Pannenberg have, in ways often particular to each of them, led a move to bring into the very heart of Western trinitarian thinking a special stress on temporally and eternally parallel threeness. Western trinitarian thinking can never again be described so monolithically in terms of focus on oneness. In both cases, namely, whether one stresses oneness or threeness in thinking God as triune, post-Kantian German Idealism continues to influence such subsequent philosophical and theological reflection. It does this both on its own, namely, on the basis of the power of its insights as presented and, in more mediated fashion, through such nineteenth-century trinitarian thinkers as Marheineke, Dorner, and Solovyov. That influence continues, further mediated now, among others, through Barth, Rahner, and Pannenberg, who are themselves extraordinarily creative twentieth-century German theologians.61