This paper employs the postcolonial concepts of mimicry and hybridity to interpret Wolfhart Pannenberg's understanding of the violence done to Jesus on the cross and the subversive reconciliatory love that it engenders. According to Pannenberg, although the man Jesus was crucified as blasphemer of the Jewish law, the resurrection vindicated Jesus so that the ones accusing Jesus were retroactively deemed to be the actual blasphemers. As a result, Jesus ended up dying not for his own alleged breaking of the law, but as an inclusive substitute for all blasphemers of God (through amour propre) deserving death. Thus, the resurrection confirmed Jesus’ divine identity and his earthly teaching that love supersedes and transforms the law. Applying the concept of mimicry to Pannenberg, on the cross the symbolic and semiotic are held together in tension for in mimicry the “not‐quite sameness” menaces the colonizer. The cross, ostensibly a symbolic sign of abjection, is mimicked by the suffering of Jesus and subverted through a practice of inclusive semiotic love which recapitulates sinful human life toward a life of transformed autonomy. Pannenberg displays a pseudo postcolonial understanding of subverting oppressive law into love. However, on account of his futurist ontology, the eschatological totality is underscored relative to formative experiences, leaving him vulnerable to postcolonial critiques of essentialism, which can reinscribe colonialism. I contend that Pannenberg employs a strategy of “strategic particularism” in which concepts such as mimicry and hybridity are helpful as hermeneutical tools but ultimately provisional and temporary relative to the whole.
This article interprets Bonhoeffer's interrelated dialectic of faith and obedience through the Lutheran doctrine of communicatio idiomatum. As the church community concretely practices faith and obedience in Christ's person, this, I argue, involves participating in Christ's human and divine natures as the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection dialectically work together. As Christ's humanity is communicated divine attributes, acts of human obedience incur and involve faith; similarly, just as Christ's divinity is communicated human attributes, the act of faith involves and motivates concrete acts of obedience.
This article argues that Wolfhart Pannenberg’s doctrine of resurrection can be demonstrated as science. I utilize the so-called “soft” sciences (history and anthropology) alongside the “hard” sciences (cosmology and neuroscience) to demonstrate the rationality of the ostensibly miraculous resurrection. In the discussion, I argue against empiricists who posit the impossibility of the resurrection on account of analogy to favor Pannenberg’s approach of contingency and human exocentricity. Paralleling the shift in Pannenberg’s own theological approach from anthropology to the Trinity, I also argue that Pannenberg’s focus on the hard sciences in his later career reflects his concern for a more “objective” approach. Related to the hard sciences, I take the principle of continuity/discontinuity which touches on issues such as contingency, field theory, time and eternity, and various cosmological theories to demonstrate the scientific possibility of the resurrection that is both this worldly and other worldly. Moreover, using neuroscientific insights, I argue that the resurrection is not an immortality of the soul but a new body, consistent with modern science’s emphasis on physicalism, lifted by a scientifically explained exocentric field. In the discussion, I argue that Pannenberg is a modified Kuhnian who underscores evidence and facts but also the context from which they emerge.
This article interprets Wolfhart Pannenberg’s ecclesiology through a postfoundational framework. Pannenberg’s postfoundational theological methodology, based around the centrality of sub ratione Dei, is a dialectical relationship between the ‘from below’ movement of context (‘true infinite’) and the ‘from above’ movement of universal truth (Trinity) which reflects the differentiation-in-unity found in the immanent and economic Trinity. Accordingly, this article argues, Pannenberg’s ecclesiology, including his understanding of church essence (its role in creation and its constitutive members) and its activities (baptism, Eucharist, ministry) displays postfoundational relations between the particular and the universal bridging the divide between the secular and the sacred, the past, present, and future, and individual and community. In the discussion, concepts such as Christ’s ‘person,’ ‘transignification,’ Christocentric election, and social trinitarianism are used to move the discussion past modern dualism and postmodern relativism and toward postfoundational relationality.
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