Introductory

If one were to seek a contemporary Protestant dogmatician in Germany engaged by the problems usually associated under the term ‘natural theology’, it would be to the work of Pannenberg that one would most readily turn. For more, perhaps, than any other, Pannenberg has sought in his dogmatic work to engage in dialogue with disciplines other than theology. His early work What is Man?, for example, co-ordinates its theological affirmations with insights derived from philosophical and social anthropology, and from the human and natural sciences. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret Pannenberg as merely envisaging Christian theology as concerned with religious implications drawn from our inspection of the world of nature and human history: his understanding of the relationship between the Christian faith and the natural order is more dialectical than such a characterisation would suggest, and he speaks of the ‘confrontation of the Christian faith with the contemporary experience of reality’. Pannenberg is more properly understood from the direction of his understanding of revelation as an occurrence within man's experience of nature and history.

Pannenberg's writing frequently orients itself by a resolutely critical departure from Barth's work, and, indeed, it is not uncommon to find Barth presented as the determined foe of any search for signs of God in the natural order.