517 - Anthropology in Theological Perspective

Anthropology in Theological Perspective
By Wolfhart Pannenberg
Philadelphia, Westminster, 1995. 552 pp. $39.95.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich, is arguably the most original and systematic of living theologians. In the creative development of the themes of resurrection, hope, future, and history that is associated with his name and project, he has often indicated the importance of anthropology for a Christian theology that is both faithful to biblical tradition and truly contemporary. And in this major work he probes, in comprehensive fashion, the sciences of the human for their religious implications, particularly in relation to the Christian motifs of the human being as image of God and sinner. The result is a powerful fundamental theology which confronts directly the charge of Christianity's atheist critics that theology is "mere" anthropology, that is, human illusion.

Pannenberg analyzes the history of the modern sciences of the human plus contemporary research and debate in biology, psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, and philosophy of history. At the same time, he subjects the methods and findings of these sciences to a theological scrutiny that takes seriously the importance of the phenomenon of religion in the phylogenetic emergence of the human. This critical appropriation of anthropological research, he insists, "is not to be confused with the theological search for a 'point of contact' in the self-understanding of the human person," associated with Emil Brunner in his famous debate with Karl Barth and which, in Pannenberg's interpretation, meant that theology related itself to anthropology as something outside, fixed, and very different from itself. Rather, his effort at critical appropriation is "to lay theological claim to the human phenomena described in the anthropological disciplines" by accepting the secular descriptions as provisional versions that need "to be expanded and deepened by showing that the anthropological datum itself contains a further and theologically relevant dimension."

Image of God and sin provide the guiding theological themes as Pannenberg examines modern philosophical anthropologies (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen). He finds his most important clue in the work of J. G. Herder, for whom the idea of the image of God functions to describe the "unfinished humanity of human beings." Thus emerges a problem that recurs analogously in the findings of each of the human sciences: human beings accomplish their destiny only in the course of their life-histories, through their openness to the world; yet if they are able to accomplish this destiny, "they would have to be already what they still are to

518 - Anthropology in Theological Perspective

become." This paradox of human openness or exocentricity appears in the data of psychology, for example, where the self is formed only gradually in the social web of family and community and yet it is the self which from the beginning performs this achievement. Thus, Pannenberg argues for the necessity of a deeper dimension, a given wholeness that founds the unfinished, essentially open nature of the human. This is the relevance of the theological motif of image of God as destiny. The relevance of the sin motif is shown in that polar opposite to human exocentricity that appears as alienation or brokenness and is rooted in human centrality. Exocentricity and centrality are "anthropological constants" needed to explain the empirical results of research on questions of self and ego, identity and non-identity, the acquisition of language, the character of social institutions, political life, and so on. Studies of imagination, for example, reveal that the notion of "inspiration" from the outside goes hand in hand with the human task of creativity from the inside. In the phenomenon of creativity, there is no competition between "outside" and "inside" but rather a cooperative venture which (like the relation between God and the person) points to that which is already given in conjunction with the human task of accomplishment in time. And in each discipline, phenomena of alienation or sin similarly appear.

The given wholeness or unity within the unfinished historicity and brokenness of the human, which analyses of all the human sciences reveal as necessary to the formation of the individual human being and to human culture, is known by anticipation and finds expression in myth and cult. It further suggests the contemporary relevance of the traditional Christian understanding of divine providence. Thus, at every level of the study of the human, Pannenberg finds those aporias which require for their explanation the religious context of meaning that Christian tradition names as image of God, sin, providence, spirit, Holy Spirit.

An overview can only hint at the richness of detail that readers will find in Pannenberg's long-awaited Anthropology. Some areas that I found especially illuminating were cult and play, the development of conscience, feeling, dialogical personalism, basic trust, the ecstatic character of conversation, and the relation of religion to political life and society. Pannenberg's familiarity with American social science is impressive; he is especially indebted to G. H. Mead. Those familiar with Pannenberg's work on revelation, history, and Christology will delight in the systematic coherence of his theological perspectives. There are some disappointments; for example, his failure to deal more thoroughly with the question of women, which does not emerge in the early stages but only very briefly under the rubric of marriage as a social institution. Further, while he can be critical of the Christian tradition, as in his nuanced discussion of the history of the doctrine of sin, he expresses no criticism of the Pauline notion of the image of God as especially present in the male. But such lacunae are noticed because his comprehensiveness

520 - Anthropology in Theological Perspective

leads one to expect so much. And there is much here indeed. Pannenberg's Anthropology is well worth its intimidating price.

Anne E. Carr
University of Chicago Divinity School
Chicago, Illinois