Pannenberg on the Resurrection and Historical Method

Abstract

Even the most casual observer of the contemporary theological scene knows that Wolfhart Pannenberg's theology relies heavily on the resurrection of Jesus as a genuinely historical event. The peculiarity of this is that a theologian who has accurately been called a ‘rationalist’ should so forthrightly embrace a claim that the entire thrust of post-Enlightenment theology has seemingly undermined. But Pannenberg himself contends that his reliance on the resurrection is not legitimated by the subterfuge of an existential ‘moment’ or ‘leap of faith’; instead, he argues for the acceptance of the resurrection on purely historical grounds. This argument implicitly rests on Pannenberg's conviction that ‘the truth is one’ and that the theologian's worst mistake is to cut the ties between theology and secular disciplines and modes of inquiry, a conviction that has recently received its most forceful statement in Pannenberg's Theology and the Philosophy of Science. This means that, insofar as belief in the resurrection of Jesus entails a claim about a past event, the standard methods by which we normally adjudicate claims about the past must be brought into play. Accordingly, the resurrection of Jesus is for Pannenberg not a ‘faith claim’, for ‘faith cannot ascertain anything certain about events of the past that would perhaps be inaccessible to the historian’. Instead, the resurrection of Jesus must be understood as the best historical explanation accounting for the New Testament witness and the rise of Christianity.