Pannenberg and the Trinity
by Jonathan
I have now read the first two volumes of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology and have just begun the third. This post is largely a review of the first, as there he deals with his doctrine of God and of the Trinity. The second volume treats the doctrine of creation, anthropology, incarnation, and atonement, which I will undoubtedly give some thoughts on at some point.
Pannenberg argues that the Father is the ‘fount’ of deity, or the originator, only inasmuch as he hands lordship to the Son and Spirit and they hand lordship back to him. God’s relation as Father and as Deity is dependent upon the identities of Son and Spirit and their unity with him. This does well by not making deity a sort of ‘emergent property’ of the unity of the three, nor is deity a common quality that the three share. Deity is their nature – it is the fact of their Eternity and of their lordship. He explains the eternity of God in somewhat platonic terms. Eternity is that which transcends time and also encompasses it. Therefore, God comprehends time but is not reducible to temporal sequence. So, God is Eternal and the perichoresis of the trinity is comprised of their mutual submission to the divinity and lordship of the other – namely, the Father’s entrusting of his identity and lordship to the identity and lordship of the Son, the Son reciprocally returning lordship by entrusting his own identity and divinity to the Father. He explains:
As Jesus glorifies the deity of the Father by his sending and in his own relation to the Father, he himself, in corresponding to the claim of the Father, is so at one with the Father that God in eternity is Father only in relation to him. (p. 310)
The Spirit is first identified by the action of raising Jesus from the dead (that is not to say that that is the first action of the Spirit, merely the activity by which the doctrine of the Spirit as a divine hypostasis originates). The Spirit is the power of God in the resurrection – the power of life. Therefore, “for Jesus himself, then, the work of the Spirit was to glorify the Father, as in John, where the Spirit glorifies the Son in his fellowship with the Father, and in this way glorifies the Father as well (6:14).” (p. 316) The Spirit is the unity of the mutual lordship between the Father and Son, and by this relationship the identity and lordship of the Son and Father become dependent also upon the Spirit.
Thus, the doctrine of the trinity is an expression of the “self-distinction and unity” of the internal relations in God. It is also a means of expressing the personal nature of God and of explicating God’s nature as ‘love’. This last point is the main place I would try to challenge Pannenberg’s theory. To explain God’s nature as Love, I need to explain Pannenberg’s conception of the Holy Spirit. For Pannenberg, the Holy Spirit is described as a Field of Force, drawing the metaphor from Michael Faraday’s mathematical developments. One of the activities of the Spirit as a field is that of the unity and power of the Father and Son. As the Spirit is the unity of the trinity, the Spirit’s activities are of love. More directly, the Spirit is the Spirit of Love. So, the Spirit’s nature is love; and inasmuch as the Spirit is the unity of God, God is Love.
This seems lacking to me. Traditionally the Spirit has been defined as love or the love of the Father and the Son, so in this sense he’s in the mainline of the tradition. Nonetheless, the affirmation of God as love is that God is love; ie that God’s essential nature is love, not that part of God’s nature is love or that love is a defining characteristic of one of the hypostases of God. Therefore, I think that he has reduced God’s nature as love too far. The Spirit is, rightly considered, a special manifestation of God’s nature as love but is not the primary locus of the divine love.
To present a constructive alternative, I would draw on the work of moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. His basic argument in The Reasons of Love is this: to love something is to value it. To love someone is to value them and to value what they value. To love someone/something requires that we love ourselves; ie, that we value what we value (and that we value ourselves as someone capable of valuing). Thus, he claims that we cannot love others unless we love ourselves and vice-versa – we cannot love ourselves unless we love someone or something. With this argument, I would supplement Pannenberg by rewriting Barth’s classic trinitarian statement: God loves Himself. God loves Himself through Himself. God loves Himself. And in this sense, the Spirit is not the source or locus of God’s nature as love. God is, essentially, love.
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*Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology vol. 1. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1991
*Frankfurt, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ. 2005
Well written piece. Here is question.
Why does GOD need to love him self? why do we place a human emotional characteristic to GOD, even though GOD says he loves those who do good, but would not the word just be used to relate to human linguistics. So that we may understand the relationship of the doer of good to being “loved,liked,affirmed or rather held in high esteem?.
Also how about this book The Two Babylons Alexander Hislop, ( can be found on the web ) mentions the real concept of trinity. I have only read a few pages.
Thanks
On The Two Babylons, I have not read it, but I just downloaded the pdf so perhaps I will have the chance at some point. As I have yet to read, I won’t comment on it.
You’ve presented a good question, one that opens up a number of doctrinal, epistemological, and linguistic difficulties. First, I would be careful saying that God ‘needs’ to love himself. Applying ‘needs’ to God is more of an anthropomorphism than even that God ‘loves’ or other such attributes. One main linguistic question you’ve brought up concerns the adequacy of human language for discussing God. This has been a conundrum for theologians throughout the ages. The two extreme positions are: 1) if our language is too inadequate, then we simply can say nothing of God. Critique: Isn’t the claim that our language is inadequate for God saying a great deal about God? Inasmuch as this is the case, we seem to have contradicted our first claim. 2) If we allow too direct an application of our language to God, we attribute a great deal of anthropomorphisms to the deity.
The main reason we say that God ‘is’ love (which is somewhat different from saying that God ‘loves’ like we humans ‘love’) is because the Scripture says so.
My basic (and more direct) response to your question would be epistemological. You asked how we apply ‘a human emotional characteristic’ to God. That in itself is an epistemological claim, namely that we know ‘love’ primarily from our ‘emotions’ or from human interactions. I believe that what the Christian doctrine of the divine love, coupled with a good doctrine of creation, claims is that we know love primarily from God, not from humanity. Then, we say that human ability to experience and display love is a secondary phenomenon. GOD is love; inasmuch as this is true, we are able to understand, communicate, and experience love. Then, the word ‘love’ is more adequately used for God then it is for humans, but as long as it is adequate to God there is potential for adequate application to humans as well.
Thank your for the answer.
Is Pannenburg’s sense of time based on creation or sequence of events? If Creation, how does he define time; and if sequence, how would he explain the sequence required by relationships existing outside of time?
Working on my own assumptions of time (as defined by a sequence of events/actions), I should think it difficult to explain how the very descriptor and revelation of God (love) would be nullified if/when God transcended time, since love would require relationship, and relationship events/actions.
Your critique of Pannenburg seems not only fair, but calls to mind a labyrinth with a straight path through the middle. It may be revelatory to discover what lies in the maze, but to forget the central path just makes you look foolish! With all due respect, I feel Pannenburg would slap his forehead and say, “You got me Jon.”
Thanks Tyler, I do hope my criticism is fair. He is very brilliant.
As for time, I struggled to understand his concept of time, because he worked with somewhat of a platonistic dualism for time. I think he sees time as only a part of the material/created world. But I don’t know that God would be considered atemporal in the strict sense, for Pannenberg does claim that God as Eternal encompasses time. For God’s exclusion from time, Pannenberg talks about the fairly traditional notion – traceable to Augustine – that with the act of creation time began. Consequently, it is nonsense to inquire about what happened ‘before’ creation.
Your question remains – how can God sustain relationships (ad intra & ad extra) if the very notion of relationship includes events/actions which therefore necessitates time. How? I’m not sure about how to deal with this question, but I know there are two delimiting issues: 1) God is not properly so called (at least not traditionally) if there is something about God that has not yet obtained; ie, God is ‘incomplete’. 2) For humans to have genuine free-will and for God to have genuine relationship with us (and, trinitarianly, within God’s self) there should be a certain amount of ‘openness’ for the future – genuine openness.
What I would propose would be pretty complex and would take too much space for a comment… But you are right to point out that it’s an odd position for Mr. Pannenberg.
read the first part then got a little lost. you are too smart for me jon.
[...] recall from my review of Pannenberg’s doctrine of the Trinity that the triune life consists in mutual submission. The father and the son reciprocally hand [...]