One of the really great theologians of the last century. He will be greatly missed. Read it all and there is more there (translation there).
One of the really great theologians of the last century. He will be greatly missed. Read it all and there is more there (translation there).
Pannenberg was the first “serious” theologian I read in detail. (Later I discovered Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas and numerous others, but it all started with Pannenberg.) By focusing on the resurrection of Jesus as the starting point of theology, he challenged both Bultmannian de-mythologization and Barthian Word theology at a time in which eschatology was either ignored or left to the fundamentalists. He also made a strong argument in favor of engaging contemporary culture head on rather than retreating to an intellectual ghetto, insisting that, above all, Christian theology is rational. Sorry to think that his work here is done, but, perhaps more than any modern theologian, he would have agreed with St. Paul that “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Found this from Christianity Today from 1996 by Wolfhart Pannenberg, well worth a read now:
Revelation and Homosexual Experience: What Wolfhart Pannenberg says about this debate in the church.
Sorry, didn’t get the link right:
Revelation and Homosexual Experience: What Wolfhart Pannenberg says about this debate in the church.
Link still doesn’t work, #3.
[Link should now work in #2 and #3 – Elf]
Pannenberg’s article was also published in the US by the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau’s [i]Forum Letter[/i] in 1996 as “[url=http://www.alpb.org/forum/index.php?topic=437.0]You Shall Not Lie with a Male: Standards for Churchly Decision-Making on Homosexuality[/url].” The link is to the ALPB Forum Online, and one need not be a subscriber or registered to read the entire article.
spt+