Some remarks on Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology, the immanentization of the eschaton and the misinterpretation of the kingdom of God

Keywords: kingdom of God, transcendent reality, eschaton, Wisdom of God, pagan mythology, resurrection body, immanentization, secularization, materialism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Martin Luther, Eric Voegelin, Mircea Eliade, Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Wolfhart Pannenberg (German Lutheran theologian, 1928 – 2014) rejected supernaturalism and formulated a this-worldly interpretation of the Christian faith. He has not much in common with Luther. In Theology and the Kingdom of God (1969) he conveys a theology inspired by Hegelianism. Pannenberg’s message is that God is gradually building the kingdom of God on earth (pp. 53-54). As God exists only in the future, the being of God is in His becoming: “Thus it is necessary to say that, in a restricted but important sense, God does not yet exist. Since his rule and his being are inseparable, God’s being is still in the process of coming to be” (p. 56). Thus, “the coming Kingdom of God implies that God in his very being is the future of the world” (p. 61). The Kingdom is the future good society:

The Kingdom of God, far from being merely a formalistic idea, is the utterly concrete reality of justice and love. But let no one think that the Kingdom of God is therefore primarily concerned with the subjective behavior of individuals, rather than with the institutions of social life. (Pannenberg, 1969, p. 79)

Pannenberg’s Hegelianism is evident, despite his protestations to the contrary, because God is identical with an immanent societal order in the future: “God is not an existing entity but is the future of his coming Kingdom” (p. 70). We are supposed to accept that this is what Jesus means: “In Jesus’ message it is only as future that God is present” (p. 68). Strangely enough, he ascribes a very definite reality to the future. But the idea that God’s reality is merely a future hope conflicts with the bible. In Jesus’ message God is not absent in the present time. How could God answer prayers if He exists only in the future? Furthermore, the bible teaches that the eschatological kingdom of God will be established only when Jesus Christ returns, not before. From a biblical perspective we cannot expect that an earthly Kingdom will gradually emerge, in the way of good societal institutions and loving relationships among people. In fact, the good society must needs cause an increase in evil because evil is parasitic on good (Luther). Pannenberg’s mission is to anchor the Christian faith firmly in history. Thus, he repudiates the traditional mythic conception of reality:

The archetypes of myth arose in the history of man’s experience of divine reality, and just as surely were these myths refuted by the same process of historical change. Only the experience of the God who is the power of an ever-renewed future will do. (Pannenberg, 1969, p. 69)

Christianity is responsible for this development, which led to the reinterpretation of the idea of God, so that “it was necessary to think of creation in reference to the eschaton rather than in reference to a primordial past” (p. 70). It is the Church’s responsibility to continue in this vein:

The Church has the task of demythologizing the political myths of a given time and of sobering up those who become drunk on their possession of power. She also exercises her function in a second and positive way. By witnessing to the future fulfillment of humanity in God’s Kingdom, the Church helps to stir the imagination for social action and to inspire the visions of social change. (Pannenberg, 1969, p. 85)

In truth, Christianity itself builds on well-known mythic archetypes, such as the virgin birth and the ascension (or descension) of the god-man. These are indeed historical events but also mythic images. Revelation does not represent a radical plunge into historical reality. The true picture is that Christianity stands with one foot in mythical reality and the other in historical reality. It is a doubleness that ensures its vitality, because tension creates energy.

Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, explains that mythic regeneration in traditional religion functioned as a defence against the terror of history. Thus, “history was re­fused, ignored, or abolished by the periodic repetition of the Creation and by the periodic regeneration of time…” (Eliade, 1959, p. 111). Judaeo-Christianism managed to transcend the horizon of archetypes and repetition by introducing a new category into religious experience: the category of faith (p. 160). But this new dimension in religious experience, faith, did not entirely abolish traditional conceptions. Faith is merely made possible for each individual Christian (p. 111). Says Eliade:

Periodic regeneration of the Creation is replaced by a single regeneration that will take place in an in illo tempore to come. But the will to put a final and definitive end to history is itself still an antihistorical attitude, exactly as are the other traditional conceptions. (Eliade, 1959, p. 112)

Because the Christian person is regenerated in faith, periodic regeneration of the world is no longer required. Eliade says that “Christianity translates the periodic regeneration of the world into a regeneration of the human individual. But for him who shares in this eternal nunc of the reign of God, history ceases as totally as it does for the man of the archaic cultures, who abolishes it periodically” (p. 129). Nevertheless, Christian culture has retained many pagan traditions, such as New Year’s festivities. A complete historization is out of the question, because mythological ideas are endearing to us.

What occurs in Pannenberg’s theology is a gradual divinization of the world, a step-by-step incarnation of a time-transcendent God. God is the power that will bring the universe to its perfection. This runs exactly counter to John’s Gospel and Augustine’s traditional conception in which Christ’s rule is in the present time, which will continue until the Last Judgment and the advent of the eternal realm in the beyond (Augustine, City of God, xx:7-9). Facts of science contradict the view that the material world can turn into an everlasting paradise. As a matter of fact, the universe is running down following the second law of thermodynamics, and the earth will become uninhabitable in a couple of hundred million years. Eventually the oceans will boil away and the earth will become more like Venus. Pannenberg must have known that the sun has a limited lifespan. So how could he argue that the earth is transforming into a terrestrial paradise that will remain forever?

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985) analyzes the contemporary desire for a re-divinization of society (Voegelin, 1987). Christianity views the completion of history as the transfiguration of time into eternity. In contrast, profane history has no goal, says Augustine. However, in modern times the meaning of history has taken on an entirely intraworldly meaning. It’s a delusion that Voegelin somewhat unfairly associates with Gnosticism, for the reason that the followers have not faith but declare that they know the meaning of existence. It has had catastrophic consequences, incurred by the political mass movements in the modern era. The ideal of immanentization rose to prominence in the late Middle Ages, most notably in Joachim of Fiore, and was later continued in the radical immanentization of the eschaton as it came to expression in Feuerbach and Marx (p. 188).

Voegelin asserts that modern re-divinization has its origins in Christianity itself, deriving from components that were suppressed as heretical by the universal church (p. 107). I suggest rather that the anti-gnosticism of antiquity was a sign that the Church couldn’t uphold the inner tension that was mentioned earlier, resulting in the progressive immanentization of the orthodox faith. While Christianity has its roots in history and maintains a linear concept of time, it has also the powerful symbol of the kingdom of God, a principal theme in the New Testament. Jesus tones down the ideal of the earthly Kingdom and harks back to the illud tempus, the primordial mythic past of plenitude (Eliade, 1959, p. 73). The heavenly realm goes under many names, such as the Otherworld (paganism), Dreamtime (Australia), Svarga (Hinduism), Pure Land (Buddhism). In the message of Jesus and Paul, it means the invisible presence of a higher eternal reality. In the religious tradition worldly reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial world. Eliade says that “neither the objects of the external world nor human acts, properly speaking, have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them” (pp. 3-4). It reminds me of a beautiful folk tale of the moon. In its waxing phase the moon is filled with ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, which is then poured out on earth during its waning phase. It keeps the world alive. Eliade maintains that moon symbolism has much to do with the ubiquitous themes of fertility and regeneration, death and resurrection (p. 86).

Transcendent reality is a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, because it replenishes the world with being. Thus, the symbolic value of the heavenly Kingdom is feminine and nourishing. It compensates for the concrete and legalistic aspects of religion, which are masculine. This dual nature of Christianity is a boon but also a predicament. The kingdom of God has often been misconstrued in worldly terms, something that damages the healthy balance between masculine and feminine spirituality. It is important to remember that God created two realms, namely heaven and earth (Genesis 1:1), the former atemporal and the latter temporal. This duality of Creation is postulated in the metaphysical systems of medieval philosophers Al-Ghazali and Avicenna. In archaic religion, the celestial realm has eternal being and is capable of replenishing the temporal realm, in which being crumbles with the passage of time. Transcendent things have genuine being and are no less bodily than temporal things. In the heavenly realm, bodily nature is perfect and incorruptible. This explains why Jesus Christ ascends to heaven in his body and not as a spirit. It illustrates how Christianity rehabilitated a central concept of archaic religion while also taking a decisive step into historical time.

In the Wisdom Books occurs a feminine personification of the Wisdom of God (Sophia) that has caused consternation among the theologians. She is comparable to the goddess Maat in Egyptian religion, a personification of divine orderedness. She is guardian of the norms for nature and society, in this world and the next. By analogy, the Wisdom of God could be the personified kingdom of God, as the latter carries a feminine symbolic value. She does not belong to the Godhead but is God’s first creation, the personified heavenly kingdom of God. Thus, we must conclude that the immanentization of the kingdom of God is tantamount to a devaluation of the spirit of the feminine. Marie-Louise von Franz analyzes this circumstance in psychological terms:

This pronounced lack of a feminine personification of the unconscious has therefore been compensated by the radical materialism which has gradually taken hold of the Christian tradition. One could say that practically no religion began with such a highly one-sided spiritual accent and has landed, if you think of Communism as the end form of Christian theology, in such an absolutely one-sided materialistic aspect. The swing from one to the other is one of the most striking phenomena we know of in the history of religion; it is due to the fact that from the beginning there was an unawareness, an unbalanced attitude towards the problem of the feminine goddess and therefore of matter, because the feminine Godhead in all religions is always projected into and linked up with the concept of matter. (von Franz, 1980, pp. 212-13)

In my view, the main reason why we use a masculine pronoun for God is because He appears masculine to us. He puts demands on us and requires that we grow up and take responsibility for ourselves and each other. Had we still lived in the Garden, then we would have used a feminine pronoun, because we would associate His caregiving nature with motherliness. It is as simple as that! Life is difficult, and that’s why God appears masculine to us. We mustn’t forget that God is equally feminine; but this realization comes only through faith. If we lack this insight, then the divine feminine plunges into materiality, becomes vulgarized and trivialized. This, in a nutshell, is the critique that Marie-Louise von Franz directs against modernity. Forgetting the divine feminine leads to materialism. The feminine spirit, synonymous with the kingdom of God, is projected onto material society and gives rise to an obsession with material welfare and creating the perfect society on earth, as in the political pseudo-religions of the 20th century. They have caused devastation and continue to do so.

The reason why theologians have had such difficulties with the kingdom of God is because it builds on a concept that is much older than the parallel concept in the Old Testament. It is similar to the Otherworld in pagan religion, which was always close at hand and out of which any bodily form could swiftly appear. Thus, the Ba of the Egyptian mummy took any bodily form during daytime. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (The Book of Coming Forth by Day) tells of a Ba that took pleasure in spending his time as a tree overlooking the Nile. Thus, the ancient Egyptians would not take offense at the stories of a resurrected Jesus appearing out of nowhere. But they would not agree that Jesus is the only one that has acquired a resurrection body.

Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 15:50) and Jesus says: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Yet, by twisting the biblical message most preachers and theologians today espouse an immanent theology of the Kingdom, thereby promoting secularization. Voegelin explains that the inclusion of the Revelation of St. John in the canon had fateful consequences. In consequence, the revolutionary annunciation of the millennium came to be accepted, that is, the period in which Christ would reign with his saints on this earth. Augustine’s dismissal of it as “ridiculous fables” was only effective during the Middle Ages. This fateful decision has also sanctioned the permanent effectiveness within Christianity of the Jewish apocalyptic literature (Voegelin, 1987, pp. 108-109). Accordingly, the modern Christian community becomes focused on religious conduct and doing “kingdom work” while waiting for the great event that hopefully will occur in their lifetime. Such a theology is dead in the water. Voegelin says:

Again there is no eidos of history, because the eschatological supernature is not a nature in the philosophical, immanent sense. The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when Christian transcendental fulfilment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitrary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience. (Voegelin, 1987, p. 120)

Luther, in his preface to the first German translation of the Book of Revelation, said that it is neither apostolic nor prophetic. Thus, it shouldn’t have been included in the canon. Several of the Church Fathers rejected it, too. On the other hand, because the Kingdom is destined to arrive altogether in the future, this view is politically less dangerous than Pannenberg’s immanentism, according to which the earthly Kingdom is growing in the present time. He adopts the materialist perspective and rejects supernaturalism: “The coming Kingdom is not some otherworldly phenomenon; it is the destiny of present society” (Pannenberg, 1969, p. 84). Thus, it is important that the Church realizes its social function, or else “the Church remains only as an institution catering to the religious needs of a fast-diminishing minority that needs that sort of thing” (p. 83). He continues:

The social function of the Church becomes a perverted dynamic that diverts attention from the human situation into the realms of otherworldly fulfillment. Thus the churches that claim to be occupied exclusively with “spiritual” matters, that disdain any involvement in political questions, become bastions of conservatism. The energies that could be channeled into changing the actual life of the society are diverted to a supernatural sphere. (Pannenberg, 1969, pp. 83-84)

It seems, then, that Pannenberg’s theology has much in common with Marxism. Accordingly, he argues that the future of the Kingdom “releases a dynamic in the present that again and again kindles the vision of man and gives meaning to his fervent quest for the political forms of justice and love” (p. 80). True enough, he doesn’t find much faults with Marxism. The Marxist mistake is mainly in “the illusion that the truly humanistic form of society can be achieved definitely by man, and that it can be achieved in a short historic period” (p. 82). Despite all, in Pannenberg’s thought, the attainment of the terrestrial paradise seems to depend on a “fervent quest” among men, despite the fact that it is God’s doing to introduce the political forms of the ideal society.

In Pannenberg’s unconventional ontology of the future the latter is active in the present through anticipation. Thus, we may “understand the apparently teleological phenomena of life by reference to anticipation of the future” (p. 68). The integrity of his entire theological edifice hinges on this concept. Although the eschaton is still future, it has arrived proleptically, by anticipation. God breaks through at a given moment in history, at which point the end of history is decided. It means that the revelation of Christ is a “foretaste” of the impending eschatological truth. It is not God’s decisive intervention in history but only the “anticipatory glimmer” of the Reign of God (p. 133). In Pannenberg, as in Hegel, truth is historical and only historical.

The philosophical and theological problems are insurmountable. God is temporal being. Suffice it to say that this is a concept hard to swallow. That the future determines the present implies an inversion of the causal laws. It is like he changes the meaning of words; the future is the past and the past is the future. A consummation of history when God has become immanent is a baffling idea. It would mean that the material universe stops developing with time; no more creation occurs and nothing essentially new happens. Does the contingent course of history “create” the future God or is everything that happens absolutely determined? The latter view is difficult to combine with complexity theory and quantum indeterminacy.

The experts can’t make heads or tails out of all this. Philip Clayton says that “anticipation in the strong, ‘ontological’ sense — Pannenberg’s prolepsis — invokes a number of notions that are philosophically problematic, enough to cause one to hesitate before basing a system upon it” (Braaten, 1988, p. 141). He also says that “the critical reaction to Pannenberg has been surprisingly silent regarding this notion, perhaps because of a certain mystique surrounding it: commentators apparently assume that it conveys some esoteric theological or philosophical logic with which one is not quite familiar” (p. 129).

Jesus, and John the Baptist before him, announced the Kingdom of God as already existing in eternity. The invisible Kingdom is breaking into man’s consciousness, but not into the material world. John the Baptist says “Metanoeite!” (repent; turn around). It is not a call for building the perfect society. It means “open your eyes to the Kingdom.” People must become aware of the already existing heavenly Kingdom and abandon the ideal of the earthly kingdom ruled by a messianic king. There is no way of interpreting the message of Jesus as referring to societal development. But a changed consciousness among the people will indirectly affect the course of history, as people turn away from mundane ideals. It is written in black and white:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)

The gods once wandered the earth, in the time of origins, the illud tempus, when Heaven and Earth were still in embrace (cmp. Genesis 3:8). The gods gathered in the ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan. The world lay in darkness after the demise of the fourth sun, and the gods now decided to create the fifth sun. Nanahuatzin was the poorest, humblest and sickliest among them. He was also the bravest; brave enough to throw himself into the flames of the pyre. And soon he rose as the new sun, Tonatiuh — the new Lord of Heaven and Earth. Reaching the zenit, he required of all the gods that they follow his example and sacrifice themselves in the pyre (cf. Taube, 1993, pp. 41-42). Every kind of thing that exists comes from the sacrifice of a god. Because all the gods sacrificed themselves they no longer inhabit the earth. Heaven and Earth were now divorced.

This is an alternative story of the Fall. Notice the similarities with Jesus Christ, the poor and humble man who sacrificed himself and rose again as the Sol Invictus, an appropriation of an earlier roman sun god. The primordial world is atemporal and remains in eternity. It is the kingdom of God, the cornucopia of mythic archetypes and divine truths. Jesus drew from it when he told his parables. The world of myth conveys being to our world. Jesus calls it “living water.” Without it, the world begins to crumble.

Pannenberg is only one among many theologians that have fallen to materialism. John H. Hick (1922 – 2012) is another example. In The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm (1999) he argues that the transcendental realm denotes an ultimate alterity that is beyond the scope of our human conceptual systems. Myths are “expanded metaphors,” inadequate for expressing deep truths of the transcendental realm. Jesus as truly God and truly man is a mere metaphor. This is the “religiously realistic” view (ch. 26). Religion fulfils an ethical function, and serves to promote spiritual growth (ch. 10). In my view, to drive out the transcendental realm into the pitch-black darkness of radical unknowability is functionally the same as denying its existence. There is no talk of angels in his theology, because it has fallen flat on the ground.

It is likely not God that will materialize in future society, but Hobbes’ Leviathan. But now we must ask ourselves how theology could sink this low. How could it degenerate into materialistic ideology? The theism of the Church Fathers had the advantage that reality was strictly divided into a transcendental realm and a temporal. The former contains divine truth and the latter materialistic and scientific truth. If we make the mistake of mixing the two, then it leads to pseudo-scientific and Gnostic nonsense. It is an affliction that besets the modern era, caused by the declination of the spirit of the feminine. Thus, the understanding of the kingdom of God has been reduced to God’s rule over material creation. It is a paternalistic concept and what characterizes modern Islam. How can the misinterpretation of the Kingdom be rectified? Primarily, Christianity must remain standing on two legs, with one leg in historical time and the other in the kingdom of God, and the tension must be endured. The horizontal bar of the cross signifies the world and the vertical signifies heaven. The Christian person must endure the tension of the cross.

In the High Middle Ages, the kingdom of God had not yet acquired the this-worldly and future dimension that is so typical for the modern interpretations. The exception is Joachim of Fiore and his followers, whose heretical views have resurfaced in modern theology. The Kingdom was still identified with the Church, but also with a place beyond time and history. Albertus Magnus, in his commentary on Matthew, places it squarely in the beyond by identifying it with God himself (cf. Viviano, 1988, p. 69). The final demise of the concept came with Martin Luther’s theory of the Two Kingdoms, where it has lost all transcendental meaning. For Luther, the kingdom of God stands in dialectical opposition to the kingdom of the world (LW 33:227). This completely negates the ancient view according to which the celestial realm replenishes the world with being. The two kingdoms constitute of believers and nonbelievers. Thus, the kingdom of God is a worldly community comprising “all the true believers who are in Christ and under Christ” (LW 45:88). Luther also employs the terms ‘regiments’ and ‘ecclesiae.’ The two regiments are both subject to the one rule of God, which preempts the dualistic view that the world is ruled over by the devil (Temporal Authority, LW 45). With his right hand God rules by the Gospel and with the left hand by the law. Societal authority also fulfils God’s rule, but not with the same principles as the Church. But this doesn’t mean that the devil has no kingdom to rule. Regardless, the kingdom of God has thereby become immanent, even if Luther regards the community of believers as spiritual.

In Luther, there is no separation of holy and profane anymore, because God is present in all of creation, coequally in church, household, and state. He relies on the argument that all of creation is God’s good creation, thereby ignoring the traditional conception of the celestial realm as God’s true and permanent Creation. Whereas, in the temporal realm, everything decays with time. In keeping with his immanentist agenda, Luther insists that the resurrection occurs in our body of flesh and blood, which is by nature unfit for heaven and cannot enter the abode of angels. Instead, it will be endowed with extraordinary powers on this earth. This contradicts Paul, who says that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But Luther understands him to mean humanity as first created, not after the Fall. It is an implausible argument (cf. Batka, 2014, p. 360). In truth, the resurrection body is a genuine body that can live and breathe in heaven, like Christ’s body.

Luther’s own version of the immanentization of the eschaton cannot work. He did not know that the material world is wearing down with time and cannot continue forever. It must be so, or else the universe couldn’t function. It will take a very long time, but life is bound to go extinct. Long thereafter the sun will die. Luther should have relied on Isaiah 65:17 where God promises to create a new earth. Thus, the resurrection will take place on this new earth that is similar to the earth of primordial times, also known as the kingdom of God. The circle is then closed. Is the story of Adam and Eve literally true? It is, in a sense, because the Garden of Eden belongs to God’s first Creation.

We are forced to conclude that Luther has introduced into his brilliant body of work a serious error, which has had damaging repercussions. It has infected theology with unsound ideas of the immanent Kingdom, thereby contributing to the secularization process and the rise of materialist ideology. The kingdom of God has lost all appeal in Luther’s theology. It is just boring. Luther did indeed have a mystical side; but it is given no place in the theoretical framework. Many have testified to the boredom of Lutheran orthodoxy and how the faith leads to worry and melancholy. I have suggested that Luther’s theology be complemented with a good understanding of summum bonum (Winther, 2022). In Christian philosophy, it is defined as the righteous life; a life led in communion with God according to Christian ideals while at the same time creating a little paradise for ourselves. Instead of bringing the entire heavenly Kingdom down to earth we should remain content with creating a little holy space in our lives. We must differ between holy and profane, just like historical mankind always did.

© Mats Winther (2024 Sept.)


References

Augustine, St. (1998). (Dyson, R. W., transl.) The City of God against the Pagans. Cambridge University Press. (De Civitate Dei.)

Batka, L. & Dingel, I. & Kolb, R. (eds.) (2014). The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology. Oxford University Press.

Braaten, C. E. & Clayton, P. (eds.) (1988). The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg. Augsburg Publishing House.

Eliade, M. (1959). Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Harper Torchbooks.

Franz, M-L von (1980). Alchemy. Inner City Books.

Hick, J. H. (1999). The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm. Oneworld Publications.

Pannenberg, W. (1969). Theology and the Kingdom of God. The Westminster Press.

Taube, K. (1993). Aztec and Maya Myths. British Museum Press.

Viviano, B. T. (1988). The Kingdom of God in History. Michael Glazier.

Voegelin, E. (1987). The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. The University of Chicago Press. (1952)

Winther, M. (2022). ‘An Assessment of the Theology of Carl Gustav Jung’. (here)