Pannenberg on the Idea of God in Secular Society

I have been returning to Pannenberg from time to time over the past 10 years, and most of the time I find him ten steps ahead of me, at least (which gives me pause about those times when I am convinced he's simply mistaken). Recently I've found myself going through his Systematic Theology, mostly Volume 1, and I found this excerpt that opens Chapter 2:

Chapter 2

The Concept of God and the Question of Its Truth

1. The Word "God"

In earlier cultures the words "God" and "gods" had a more or less clearly defined place in the cultural world and human vocabulary. They were used in relation to the final foundations of social and cosmic order and to the courts which guarantee them, to which due honor, attention, and address are to be paid. In modern secular cultures the word "God" has increasingly lost this function, at any rate in the public mind.

    The Reality denoted by the term has thus become uncertain. In the context of a public consciousness that is emancipated from religion, statements about God that presuppose his reality no longer count as factual statements. [footnote removed] This applies to the statements of traditional philosophical theology no less than to those of Christian tradition and proclamation. In the context of a secular public culture the statements seem to be mere assertions whose truth has yet to be shown. Without testing, their truth, or the truth of their propositional content, is no longer plausible or credible or beyond dispute. Individuals may accept it by a subjective decision, but the public mind in a secular culture will accede to the truth of such assertions only when they are secular in content and can appeal to academic authority, e.g., that of sociologists or psychologists. It will not do so if they are statements about God even though they are more acutely presented than is often the case with the modish theses of scholars in the humanities. In the public mind statements about God are mere assertions which are ascribed to the subjectivity of the speaker and the truth claim of which not only needs to be generally tested before it can be accepted but is for the most part set aside in advance, the belief being that the testing will lead nowhere and that the truth claims of statements about God are not even worth discussing publicly.

    Even more incisive is a second change which can be viewed as a result of the first. With the fading of the concept of God and its function for humanity in the public consciousness of a culture that has become religiously indifferent, the existence of God has not only become doubtful but the content of the concept of God has also become unclear. In the discussion of the word "God" which introduces his Foundations of Christian Faith, Karl Rahner said that this word has become as enigmatic for us today as a blank face. [footnote removed] For this very reason it perhaps seems worth discussing to those who are aware of its significance in the history of human culture. But it can also have the appearance of an abacadabra which has no place in our sober modern world.

(that was pp.63-34 of Volume 1)

Further, Pannenberg later notes that

As Ian Ramsey said, the word "God in the singular is a key word in a religiously grounded view of the world. It does not primarily describe the content of individual perceptions, nor does it function within such descriptions. It makes possible an ultimate explanation of the being of the world as a whole, namely, by creation. In this way it is also the expression and basis of the unconditional commitment which is bound up with religious experience. [footnote removed]

Recollection of this function is still connected with the word "God" even in the context of modern secularism. If the word ["God"] is like a blank face to us, it reminds us by its very strangeness of the lack of meaning in modern life, in which the theme of life's unity and totality is missing and the wholeness of human existence has become an unanswered question. What would happen were the word to vanish altogether? Karl Rahner has rightly answered that then we would no longer be confronted by the one totality of reality or the one totality of our own existence. The word "God," and that word alone, does this. [footnote removed]

(that was from pp. 70-71)

One consequence of this is that, without the word "God," the unity of the world falls apart, and dissolves into something else. Man cannot be at the center, even if we describe the world anthropocentrically. Anthropology brackets the human relation of the world as central: man studies himself, and displaces himself; man is explained in terms of other elemental things, particles, chemicals, forces, history, drives, culture. These elemental things de-center the human as a historical accident, as not central to the explanation of the world or the things in the world. What they fundamentally are is unavailable, we can only know them as they are to us. So we wind up with a multiplicity of models for the world and ourselves, models which do not fit together in a larger whole. 

This is, of course, reflected in our architecture, and in the form of modern life in general. I have tried to pay attention to this in the series of posts titled The Tower and the Wastes. Any comprehensive unity, and any notion of God that has public recognition, will not be possible as long as The Void holds sway.

 

Comments

[joe]

I believe that part of this problem originates in a casual disregard for the commandment: "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." How often do we see someone writing "OMG" or invoking the Holy Name as an index of mild surprise? It makes me very uneasy. It should make anyone very uneasy.