Why did narrative theology become so attractive to many theologians in the late twentieth century?

Narrative theology's attraction lies in several areas. First, it mirrors literary approaches to text which were found to be useful in other disciplines. These approaches argue that the reader (and one's imagination) contributes to meaning. Presumably, cuing from the work of Auerbach (p 168), this 'reader response' theory is enhanced by the yield of details (usually historico-critical) in the biblical texts when placed against other ancient documents. Second, the attraction stems from the greater movement in modern theology to place revelation into the context of human experience or encounter (pp 204-205) over that of sheer doctrinal assent or participation in a church form. In this instance, as the reader follows the 'narrative' of God in the bible and life-ministry and resurrection-ascension of Jesus (and preaching or sacrament), the reader is 'met', 'lifted' and 'participates' in that same story of redemption through God's miraculous freedom. This, in turn, seems to solve Lessing's 'ugly ditch' (p 386) wherein the accidental truths of history are deemed lower in explanatory power than the necessary truths of a universal reason.

Narrative theology has become associated with a cluster of theologians called either the 'Yale School' or post-liberals (pp 118-119). Its origins are difficult to trace but usually H R Niebuhr's work The Meaning of Revelation is cited as the major work that incited the movement. This work, in turn, is an attempt to reconcile Karl Barth and the philosopher-historian Ernst Troeltsch. The crux of Niebuhr's argument, in response to historical criticism, is that he presents an alternative understanding of revelation from that of the previous three centuries. In order to restore confidence to revelation Niebuhr proposes to use the analysis of Troeltsch into a context of Barth's theology. From Troeltsch he borrows the concept that humanity is not only 'in time' but that time is in 'humanity'. This means that history is relative in two senses. First, humanity is relative in that interpretation is biased from two loci; namely, the location of the event and its context and the location of the interpreter and their context. However, this double context has led historically to the liberal 'value theology' of A B Ritschl (pp 102, 206) in which the interpreter's 'meaning' supercedes all other 'meanings', including the original context. In this instance, revelation is held captive to the context of the interpreter. To this he adds Barth's Word of God theology (filtered through Brunner) and the 'revelation as presence' model of any knowledge of God (p 204). In the narrative of God in the pre-history and history of Jesus Christ the reader's 'relativity' is overcome by the action of God in bridging the gap between 'then' and 'now'. God's coming in the 'Word' ties together all of our imaginings and reforms our thoughts in our existence thereby aligning them with the true reality of God in Christ. We are lifted into the grand narrative of God's plan.

There are numerous historical predecessors to Niebuhr's work. Two are significant to note. First, R Bultmann's programme of 'demythologization' (pp 563-564) is an attempt to remove the 'myth' - with which historical cultures (usually Judaism and Greek culture) have infected the story of God - from the truth of God as analogous in the teaching, ministry and work of Jesus the Nazarene called the Christ. Here Bultmann (and this is very nuanced) uses biblical criticism, particularly apocalyptical eschatology, as the razor of interpretation. Like Niebuhr, he thinks that one must get beyond the relativity of the source culture of the bible in order to get to the 'core' (kerygma) (p 393). This 'core', in turn, is the true message of God in Christ experienced in our lives. The work of Soren Kierkegaard (p 190) must also be noted as a substantial source for narrative theology. Kierkegaard's genius in criticizing philosophy's hubris, its denial that something or someone might be above, and even the ground of human existence and that truth is given in encounter, is unquestionably one of the major landmarks of modern theological thought. The double movement of original 'core' and present 'encounter' is shared with the narrative theological position.

Before moving to an analysis of the benefits and foibles of the narrative theology movement, a further consideration as to its occasioning should be explored. This concerns the Enlightenment's continued influence on Christian theology. The basic questions are 'what is the ground for continuity between the first Christians and the present day Christian community?' and, by extension, 'what is the ground for continuity between Jesus Christ and each community?' The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment critique of the bible and history and doctrines of revelation, Christology and the Trinity made it very difficult for theologians to speak of Christ's presence in a direct or immediate fashion. Of course, the role of the church or the bible as direct mediations of revelation held their own problems outside of Roman Catholicism (p 183-189) or forms of fundamentalism (p 202-203). In order to address these questions, theology retreated into models of revelation that tried to articulate how this immediacy could take place given the issues raised. In theology (and initially biblical studies) this meant a general shift of Christology to a form of anthropology, or the investigation of Christ's humanity (or sociology in more recent terms) as the location of any analogy between us, the first Christians and Jesus Christ. This, for example, occasions the pre-occupation with the quest for the 'religious personality' of Jesus (pp 388-391) and the 'exemplarist' Christology of Schleiermacher (p 427-428). The narrative movement with its stress that in the story of the entire Bible one finds the identity of God cuts across the Enlightenment problematic of history and revelation.

The benefits of the movement are the following. First, it does seem to breech several problems in theology, not the least of which is the faith-history axis. In addition to this it also seems to overcome an intrinsic Marcionism (pp 163) in regard to the Old Testament that is found in many forms of Protestantism (i.e., supercessionists). Second, it seems more faithful to the principle of sola Scriptura or the exegesis of the Bible as the source of theological reflection common to the Protestant tradition than more recent forms of theological abstraction. Thirdly, and here also is the point of the gravest contention, it uses Christology as a motif of understanding the divine-human historical intersection as the basis of our meeting God in our history. By relating our story to that story of Christ we become 'involved' in God. This is most pronounced in the field of ethics. Finally, and more abstractly, the movement takes seriously the notion that the protagonist (main character) of the Bible is God and that in the biblical narratives therein one has a 'glance' from the divine point of view. This demonstrates both the grace of God in revealing identity but also the shortcomings, usually in the inappropriate responses of the other human characters, of human knowledge or actions in regard to God's entrance into human history.

The criticisms of the movement revolve around three major areas. First is the apparently absolute claim that in the story of Jesus' prehistory and history one finds the authoritative story of God. This naturally precludes any other forms of narrative or positive religion as places of revelation (see pp 544- 551), as well as denying other possible sources of Christian theology such as tradition. In this latter stress, it remains obstinately Protestant. Second, it circumvents the historical context by denying it any true validity. What is important is the story within a community or between communities, not the question of historical factualness. This has led many to think that what is truly important in theology is religious experience (p 192) or to read the narrative as a metaphor or symbol of greater truths (pp 255-257). Thirdly, and more theologically, it tends to elevate ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) to a central role in deciding what is and what is not revelation or normative. For example, in S Hauerwas' ethics the stress is on the community as the location of validation of the encounter. This collapses Christology - He who is communicated - into the church and raises questions, as in Barth's critique of Gogarten (also D Bonhoeffer and other personalists (p 202)), as to whether God is really free in revelation if God needs to be interpreted via the church, and particularly a church that is still 'fallen'. It is this last point that needs to be most adequately resolved before narrative theology can be rehabilitated.

"The bible alone is the religion of the Protestants" (William Chillingworth). Do you agree with this famous statement?

The technical answer to this question is that the only movement to argue coherently that they stood above 'tradition' was the radical reformation theologians such as T. Müntzer and C. Schwenkfeld (pp 65,187). In this case, they denied any interpretative prism except immediate and individual experience in the reading of the bible. As we have seen, since they were not Protestants, both by definition (p 62) and by self-identification (neither Catholic nor Protestant), Chillingworth's statement is woefully inadequate on a technical basis. However, it is also inadequate conceptually. Despite the magisterial reformer's stress on sola Scriptura, they refused, presumably on the grounds that it would (and did) lead to a radicalized self-interpretation (eisegesis) of the bible, to ignore the role of tradition and reason in their exegesis. In fact, as we have seen, they made great use of tradition in forms of the creeds and patristic fathers in laying out a reasonable approach to understanding the bible. This is not dissimilar to the counter-Reformation.

That the bible needs to be interpreted has been plain to every generation of Christians, presumably even before the canonized collection of the text, as evidenced by some of Paul's epistles. Early considerations on how to interpret focused on two centers in Alexandria and Antioch, or the 'Jewish' and 'Greek' populations of early Christians. The Alexandrian school emphasized the role of allegory in order to flesh out the deeper meaning of texts. Contrary to caricature this approach was not unregulated but seemed to follow older traditions of the meanings of allegories. Nonetheless, the natural egress for this style is a form of eisegesis. The Antiochene School stressed the historical context over allegory. Biblical passages were to be interpreted in regard to their context or to whom they were addressed. Its natural egress is to become pre-occupied with the New Testament by understanding the Old Testament as a superseded covenant and tends towards a form of Marcionism or supersessionism of Christianity over Judaism. Unfortunately, much of the West's anti-Semitism seems to find some root in this latter tendency. Most other approaches to biblical interpretation flow from these two polarities with various theologians and periods parsing the extremes into median positions. For example, Ambrose and his student Augustine articulated integrations of the two (literal and allegorical) with a third sense located in the plain moral sense of a passage. The medieval theologians followed suit adding another sub-group in the anagogical sense that dealt with promises in the New Jerusalem.

The Reformation seems to have resurrected the conflation. Luther's medieval approach (heavily invested in the allegorical-tropological- anagogical) ran directly opposite to the humanist stress, via Erasmus and Zwingli, on the literal meaning (kernel). The flashpoint for this conflation, amongst other theological reasons such as the communicatio idiomatum (pp 364), is the Eucharist (pp 522-528). Luther's literalism and his openness to mystical readings thought that the 'is' in 'This is my body' plainly meant that Christ was in the bread. Zwingli, on the other hand, argued that while the words 'literally' indicated a relation, the intent of the passage was to represent that the bread represents Christ's body.

The modern period has complicated biblical interpretation even more gravely by adding what has come to be known as 'higher criticism' with the critique of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's stress on rationality denatured the supernatural in the bible so that one could only read the bible as an example of universally accepted, meaning reasonable, truths. As David Hume pointed out, miracles, by definition, seem to be precluded from such a reading. The soteriological aspect of Christianity is quickly replaced by other readings. Thinkers such as G W H Hegel and F C Baur using a philosophy of history tried a solution to the rational approach. The bible in this approach is read as an allegory for the rise or manifestation of Spirit (God) in all of human history. Some 'history', such as in the case of Jesus, more clearly mimics Spirit in history and are more valuable. The major difficulty in this Hegelian approach is that the relationship between history and the bible is not clear-cut in that it is assumed that a proper philosophical analysis of history as the location of God's Spirit must precede and indeed interpret the biblical text. Following this the move to a 'sociological' approach is easily made. In this case, 'religion' becomes the dominant theme of study rather than 'ideas' such as Spirit. The bible is naught more than a specific example of humanity's need to express its own intrinsic religiosity. This religiosity, in turn, is filtered through new categories such as cultural anthropology, psychology and even simple biology.

It is a gross simplification to present the magisterial reformers as rejecting tradition for revelation (one-source theory) in comparison to the Roman Catholics who held to a 'two-source' theory of tradition and revelation (see question 6). The magisterial reformers in their writings (and certainly in their confessional works) never rejected the role of tradition in assisting the interpretation of the bible. The important caveat to this was that any interpretative tradition, especially as manifested in real practices such as clerical marriage, had to be consistent with the bible. The magisterial reformers never elevated private judgment above tradition as a general rule of interpretation. In this sense, they never held radically 'the bible alone'.

How would you distinguish between a 'rational' and a 'rationalist' approach to theology?

Theology, with rare exceptions, has never claimed to be an 'irrational' discipline although privileging revelation as a means to truth regarding ultimately realities such as God, human destiny and so forth. Three models of how revelation and reason interact are generally given, with a fourth being intrinsically inferred. The three models are as follows. Theology is a rational discipline (scientia in Latin and wissenschaft in German) wherein human reasoning serves in an ancillary manner in supporting and exploring revelation. This model has been the most consistent model throughout Christian history. Second, theology is a 'republication' or 'rehearsal' of the insights of reason. Mid seventeenth century deism, for example, argued that if theology was truly rational that it must be measured against the plumbline of that same reason. In this case, reason evaluates revelation but does not entirely eradicate it. Instead, reason forces revelation to conform or rehabilitates revelation in light of the claims of reason. The logical extension of this position is that theology is redundant to reason's claim of omnicompetence. This third position is the position of the Enlightenment rationalists in which revelation is refused any privileged position and thereby, by definition, reduced to a non-role in the adjudication of human truths and existence in general. The final position, inferred from the above, is that faith is 'irrational', a form of fideism, usually associated with mystical writings wherein validation is found exclusively in personal experience. Therefore, 'rational' refers to the first of our models; namely, the use of reason in explicating and systematizing revelation and as such it is theologically neutral. 'Rationalism', on the other hand, is the claim that revelation is irrelevant in the exploration of truth and that the only means of evaluation of any claim, including that of revealed truths, is found in the faculty of human reason alone. A 'rationalist' approach privileges the prescriptive role of reason while a 'rational' approach privileges a descriptive role for reason in ordering revelation.

Why has the Enlightenment approach to human reason come under criticism?

There are a myriad of explanations as to why the Enlightenment's great project seems to have failed (although many theologians, especially feminist, black and other non-mainstream theologians, would still claim theology is still stuck on answering the Enlightenment's proposal on the grounds or possibility of theology). From philosophy and not theology itself, however, came the major criticism. The claim that there exists a pristine faculty called 'reason', based on a foundation that is 'immediate' and therefore universally accessible seems implausible to many philosophers. This foundation, it is argued, fails on two accounts. First, the presupposition of an un-mediated (immediate) ground fails to account for the role of the subject in thinking despite Kant's best efforts to unify the analytic and synthetic in thought. The turn to the subjective undermines claims of any absolute. Second, the description of rationality itself is not a coherent concept with rationalist proposals varying as to the nature of this 'universal rationality'. If the rationalists could not agree as to the nature of this universal foundation, it is argued, then surely that must point to the erosion of their claim of its existence. Both of these epistemological points have gravely challenged any form of rationalism.

From theology itself came another tack in the dismissal of rationalism. The variance of the rationalist theological system from Christian belief and praxis meant that one or the other must change in order to have any resemblance to the other. Rationalist Christianity, as in Kant, became naught more than belief in human values (p 182) and little resembled traditional Christian forms. This in neo-Kantian form, as found especially in A B Ritschl, came to be known as liberal Protestantism (pp 101-104). In this case, what seemed to be the 'universal' foundation of reasonable theology were only the values of a given society. Christianity becomes a form of a dominant, and for many oppressive, ideological construct thereby losing its counter-cultural or otherworldly focus, detaching itself from the praxis of the church as the people of God. In this critique what is 'rational' is 'religion', the human attempt to discern 'good and evil' based on reason. This, as argued by Barth and Bonhoeffer, is the biblical understanding of 'idolatry', in which God is recast in terms of human construction and even projection (pp 542-543). What is needed is the inversion of the paradigm, a criticism of the church (and thereby to the wider culture) that is part of a greater fallen (idolatrous) cultural milieu by the revelation of God in Christ or a 'religionless Christianity'.

Why did Irenaeus find tradition such an important resource for his arguments against his Gnostic critics?

The heart of Irenaeus' argument against the Gnostics was that one could not interpret the bible according to whim, individual stress or dominant cultural value. Tradition was not merely the handing over of text but also and centrally a handing over of a certain way of interpreting and applying those texts. Tradition was 'faithful' transmission of the apostolic understanding of what it meant to be the church in creed and in praxis (see Irenaeus and liturgical tradition pp 188-189). Irenaeus (and Vincent of Lérins) extended this concept to that of 'catholicity', the consensus of the public church across time and place as to the meaning and life of the church's confession that 'Jesus Christ is the Lord'. Tradition, then, is a public function reflecting a consensus on the church's mission in the world, as seen in the church's antiquity, in proclaiming and living in response to the lordship of Jesus Christ in its midst. This public function for Irenaeus secured against the Gnostic (by definition 'secret truths') claims of exclusive or privileged additional revelation that differed from either the apostolic witness of the bible or the present practice or liturgical life of the church. Finally, it is clear that in this understanding tradition is not the source of additional revelation (the so-called dual source theory of tradition) as tradition strives to be faithful to originating revelation.

Outline the teaching of the Council of Trent on the relation of Scripture and Tradition.

This is a tricky question for it has been the focus of much work in recent years to revisit Trent in order to ascertain and clarify ambiguities on both Roman Catholic and Protestant scholarship as to the meaning of Trent's 'Scripture and Tradition' as sources of revelation. Historically, and perhaps polemically charged, the Protestant understanding of Trent was that the Council, in response to the Protestant movement, scripture was not to be regarded as the only source of revelation and that tradition must also be accorded the same status as a location of revelation. This has been commonly referred to as a 'dual-source theory of tradition' wherein Scripture and a developing ecclesiocentric tradition are both markers of consensus, antiquity (apostolicity) and catholicity. Presumably in this critique much of the emphasis is on church forms rejected by the Protestant church as non-Scriptural such as the number and nature of the sacraments, clerical celibacy and the necessity of membership in order to gain eternal life. The Roman Catholic understanding of Trent has undergone a radical shift beginning with Vatican II with many Roman Catholic theologians, such as A Dulles, arguing that Trent's intention was never a two-source theory at all but something along the lines of the single source theory held by Irenaeus and shared by the magisterial reformers.

The issue as to the intent of Trent remains at present in dispute. The stress between Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians continues to be the ranking of tradition and the Bible in theology. Many Roman Catholic theologians mollifying the Trent assertion of Scripture and tradition nonetheless work with a distinction of tradition not as an interpretative framework or as an apology of church institution but as a liturgical or practical response to revelation. In this case, worship as seen in church forms of liturgy (lex orandi) are primary theological reflections while theological discourse (Scripture and creed as lex credendi) become secondary (or at least co-equal) to traditional liturgical forms. For some Protestants, this is a rehabilitation of Trent and the raising of tradition, albeit in liturgical practice, to the status of revelation.

Outline Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of experience-based theologies. How persuasive do you find his argument? What theologies do you think are the most vulnerable to his critiques?

Feuerbach's critique of experience-based theologies has continued to be dominating in theology and religious studies if only for the penetration of his thought on the axis on which theologies of experience turn. Feuerbach's contention that religious feeling, by definition, is human feeling strikes the heart of the experiential models thesis that in the experience of God humanity finds some concord with divinity itself. Or in his words 'the divine essence,' or our experience of it, is 'nothing more than an expression of the nature of feeling' itself. There is, for Feuerbach, no reason to appeal to the supernatural in order to explain what is natural or even self-evident - that humans have feelings and therefore any theology that starts with human feeling is anthropology and not theology. Of course, it is his understanding of the nature of these feelings that makes Feuerbach's argument so compelling. Feuerbach thought that what was commonly expressed as religious experience was nothing more than a projection of human nature, albeit an idealized human nature arising from a deep sense of alienation. The dissemination of Feuerbach's theory of projectionism has been popularized in psychological terms, especially in light of Freudian theory (p 423, 541) and surpassed by Marx's adoption of some of the key Hegelian notions (pp 538-540). Clearly any theology which starts from human experience is particularly vulnerable to Feuerbach's critique. To understand these, it is better to understand how some theologians have tried to circumvent Feuerbach.

Theologies that seems particularly resistant to Feuerbach fall into two camps. The first camp, exemplified by Barth, refuses to grant the basic contention that what is primary in theology is the expression of religious experience. Instead, what is primary in Barth is God's action towards us, in that act God becomes the ground of religious experience independent of human subjectivity but subsuming it nonetheless to make it real. The initial primary resource in the Barth's defense is his 'negative, general anthropology'. Arguing that Feuerbach, despite his advances over his idealist contemporaries with his intrinsic materialism, never fully carried out his anthropological realism to its logical conclusion Barth notes that Feuerbach denies what is really true of humanity - sin and death. Feuerbach's 'essence of humanity' is an abstraction of the same ilk as any idealist because he refuses to treat the difference between a Holy everlasting God and fallen finite human. The latter is the true singular human, Feuerbach's human essence an abstraction (itself an act of faith or hope) in its projection of the genus. Barth carries forward Feuerbach's own drive for realism about man even more radically, until the human condition itself showed that to identify the essence of God with the essence of man is 'the illusion of all illusions. Barth merely points to an anthropological realism - sinfulness and finitude - which makes any postulate or predication of divinity to humanity laughable.

This anthropological realism is shared with Feuerbach's basic materialism. Barth's confrontation now assumes a 'positive anthropology based on Christology'. No longer does Barth succumb to negative statements about humanity but bases a new affirmation in Christology's gracious act of God. To avoid the trap of anthropocentrism in such an affirmation Barth employs Reformed notions of 'exaltation' over Feuerbach's (and Lutheran) 'deification'. Even when exalted through Christ humanity remains creaturely, the 'Calvinist correction' in which the humanity of Jesus Christ is not worshipped is operative. Exaltation is derivative, based on a prior act of divine condescension so that the basic subject in this twofold movement remains the Son of God. Of course, this security is the doctrine of election. Exaltation of humanity to fellowship with God is not the 'deification' of Feuerbach's human in this scheme. In the early Barth the stress was on the human condition as the refutation of Feuerbach with references to God remaining peripheral and undeveloped. Now the central appeal is to God, breaking out of the question on whether the life of Jesus Christ really reveals God or whether our confession of Him is merely projectionism. Barth's referral to 'the manifest radiance' that Jesus Christ reveals stems from God's own self-character and is an appeal not to external considerations but to internal considerations within the assertion of revelation itself. In the finding external verification for revelation, one gives way to Feuerbach's anthropological considerations on the possibility of revelation, while in the 'manifest radiance theology of God in Christ' one has a 'theo-logical' answer. The gracious self-giving of God reveals the whole of the Divine self, to see Jesus is to see God. Barth attempts to 'break the methodological root' of Feuerbach by denying the grounds of Feuerbach's premises.

The Feuerbachian charge of theological illusion would appear to confine Barth's modes of response to a dilemma. Either his negative anthropology prevents deification of man but leaves the accusation of illusion about God untouched, or his affirmation of the reality of God beyond Feuerbach's divinity of man appeals so exclusively to its own theological circle that Feuerbach could not recognize its authority and Barth cannot acknowledge Feuerbach's skeptical question. To answer this Barth uses the doctrine of the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity names God, the God who is the same as His act of concrete revelation in Jesus Christ. This fulfils 'Feuerbach's demand by having a sensuous foundation for knowledge of and speech about God that is neither anthropology nor cosmology. For Barth, the doctrine of the Trinity always refers to the God who is known concretely and sensuously in Jesus. For Barth, 'God reveals Himself as Lord' is a dual statement about God not only as providential ruler or creator but is transferred to an epistemological category of 'eternal Subject'. God is 'sovereign over any knowledge of Him.' God's concrete revelation has 'its reality and truth wholly and in every respect - i.e., ontically and noetically - within itself.' Or in a well-known aphorism, God is Revealer, Revelation and Revealedness, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or subject predicate and object of the revelation event. Even in the subjective side of revelation, wherein humans come to know and to experience God it is God who remains Subject. This denies all human synergism, knowledge of God is possible only by God's action making revelation real for human beings and seeming answers Feuerbach's call for a sensuous base for claims of knowledge, even knowledge of God.

The second camp that attempts to circumvent Feuerbach is seen in the work of W Pannenberg. In this example, Pannenberg takes the position that the 'internalization' of theology to subjective experience, even in Barth, is apt to fall prey to Feuerbach's critique of human projectionism. His solution is to adopt a position that revelation occurs not in human subjectivity, and therefore feeling, but rather in the verifiable and public forum of history (pp 207-208).

Arguing that unless you unify revelation/history and faith/reason you have a fundamental dualism creating a 'ghetto' of faith above and beyond other human disciplines: '[Barth's] theology has been walled off against any mixture of 'natural', non-theological and non-Christian knowledge.' For Pannenberg, Faith is personal commitment to God whose action is seen indirectly through historical evidences and as a result open to confirmation. In particular, Pannenberg is motivated to resolve Lessing's claim 'the accidental truths of history cannot become the necessary truths of reason", the so-called 'ugly ditch', wherein in the particular of Jesus Christ in the Christian worldview makes exactly that kind of claim to ALL of reality.

There is simply no 'medium of revelation that is distinct from God himself.' To maintain any notion of particularity, finitude in revelation, is to pollute the divine essence and to make revelation less than divine self-disclosure. The basic equation in German idealism, and carried in Barth, is that somehow the unmediated divine Spirit reveals itself to the human spirit so that both are conflated. This is Feuerbach's challenge once more.

If revelation is totally unique [meaning not understandable naturally and in itself complete], the implication of 'self-revelation', then there cannot be any other forms of revelation available in any other context except in that one singular event: or 'a multiplicity of revelation implies a discrediting of any particular event.' The problem is that all theologians want to speak, in at least terms of Scripture, proclamation and natural theology, of revelations of God. These are 'indirect' or mediated manifestations of God. The key question becomes how does the primary and unique revelation in Christ relate to these derivative revelations? The usual options, over and against Barth, in Schelling and P Tillich (divine immanence in finite as proof of transcendence) and P. Althaus and E. Brunner (distinction between revelation of God and salvation) still run into the problem of verification. They all postulate a point of contact (wortmächtigkeit) in the human person which is the nexus of complete, if symbolic, divine self-manifestation. This reintroduces Feuerbach's supposition that theology is anthropology.

Pannenberg argues that every individual act of God is an indirect or partial revelation of God; and, history and nature are made up of an infinite possibility of acts. This leads to two conclusions: (1) all of nature and history is God (panentheism/pantheism or idealism). This is the move made in German theology, beginning with Herder, Hegel and the early Schelling, carried through Schleiermacher, which ultimately undermines the exclusivity of Jesus Christ; or (2) God can then only be understood from the end of history, when all is done, and humanity finally is reconciled into the unity of its basis in divinity (D. F. Strauss). The difficulty here is that the particular of Jesus Christ is lost for the universal genus of humanity as the locus of divine play.

Pannenberg transmutes the second conclusion, that to understand God's history, and in particular Jesus Christ, is to understand history from the end. This is consistent with the idealist programme but Pannenberg turns Strauss on his head. For Strauss, revelation (and human destiny) was made possible or intelligible by the unity of the God-man. Or because God reconciles the infinite in the finite, the finite is a part of God's self-abnegation and reconciliation. Pannenberg argues the opposite; the God-man is made possible or knowable by the unity of revelation in history. The universal history of God makes the saving event known; not the saving event makes it possible for the knowledge of the history of God. The universal history of humanity and nature, as exposed by E Troeltsch, is not then vulnerable to a claim of absoluteness as found in Hegel and fostered in present dialectical and orthodox theology.

Given that history is only understood from the end, and that Jesus Christ makes a claim of universal applicability as God's revelation, how does one reconcile the two? Pannenberg argues that Jesus Christ as the resurrected One is the eschatological prism of the end of history, therefore becoming a guide for understanding of all the remainder of history. History, and especially the resurrection, becomes the place of verification for revelation's materiality and answer to Feuerbach's charge of projectionism.