The Work
Jesus - God and Man (German: Grundzüge der Christologie) was first published in 1964 by Gütersloher Verlagshaus (Gütersloh, Germany). The English translation by Lewis Wilkins and Duane Priebe was published by Westminster Press (Philadelphia) in 1968. The work is approximately 400 pages and is organized into three main parts: the historical question of Jesus's resurrection, the christological problem of Jesus's divine and human natures, and an account of the biblical titles of Jesus (Son of Man, Lord, Logos, Son of God, Word of God) in their historical and theological context.
The book established Wolfhart Pannenberg as one of the most significant systematic theologians of the second half of the twentieth century and introduced 'Christology from below' - beginning with the historical Jesus and arguing up to his divine identity on the basis of the resurrection - as a major methodological approach in twentieth-century systematic theology.
Biblical Engagement
1 Corinthians 15:14 ('And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain') is the book's methodological anchor. Pannenberg reads this verse as Paul's acknowledgment that the entire edifice of Christian faith stands or falls on the historical reality of the resurrection. This is not merely a pious conviction but an epistemological claim: if the resurrection did not happen, Christianity is false. Pannenberg argues that this challenge must be taken seriously as a historical-critical question rather than evaded through a retreat to the interior of faith.
The crucial background is the dominant theological tradition Pannenberg is arguing against: Rudolf Bultmann's demythologization program, which argued that the resurrection narratives are mythological expressions of the disciples' new self-understanding after Jesus's death and that their truth consists in existential transformation rather than historical event. Pannenberg's response is that this move - evacuating the resurrection of historical content - betrays the earliest Christian proclamation, which (as 1 Corinthians 15:14 demonstrates) staked everything on the historical event.
Romans 1:4 ('And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead') is central to Pannenberg's positive Christological argument. He argues that this early creedal formula (probably pre-Pauline, drawn from the earliest Christian confession) identifies the resurrection as the event through which Jesus is designated or declared Son of God - not as a moment of adoption in the biological sense, but as the event that retroactively reveals and confirms what was true of Jesus from the beginning. This retroactive logic (the resurrection looking back to authenticate the pre-Easter Jesus) is one of Pannenberg's most distinctive and influential arguments.
Acts 2:24 ('Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it') presents the resurrection as a divine act - God raising the crucified Jesus - rather than merely a miraculous event. Pannenberg reads the early kerygmatic speeches of Acts as our closest access to the original apostolic proclamation about the resurrection and argues that they consistently present the resurrection as a public, historical event that can be examined and verified rather than a private spiritual experience.
John 2:19 ('Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up') is one of the sayings of Jesus that Pannenberg argues points toward the resurrection as something Jesus himself anticipated - evidence that the resurrection was not an unforeseen correction of a crucifixion that had destroyed the disciples' hopes but the fulfillment of Jesus's own prophetic self-understanding.
Book 2's treatment of the divine and human natures in Christ engages the Chalcedonian formula ('one person, two natures') in relation to Philippians 2:5-11 (the kenosis hymn), Colossians 1:15-20 (the cosmic Christ), and Hebrews 1:1-4 (the Son who is the radiance of God's glory). Pannenberg's treatment of the 'kenosis' question - how the eternal Son can be genuinely human - draws on both the New Testament texts and the history of christological controversy.
Author & Context
Wolfhart Pannenberg was born in 1928 in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) and died in 2014 in Munich. He was educated at the University of Göttingen, the University of Basel (where he encountered Karl Barth), the University of Heidelberg (where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of predestination in Duns Scotus under Edmund Schlink), and the University of Munich. He held professorships at Wuppertal, Mainz, and finally Munich, where he taught systematic theology until his retirement.
Pannenberg was part of a significant circle of young German theologians who met in Heidelberg in the early 1960s to develop an approach to theology grounded in the universal history of reason rather than in the special revelation of the biblical Word (as in Barth) or the inner experience of faith (as in Schleiermacher). This 'Pannenberg Circle' included Rolf Rendtorff and Ulrich Wilckens and produced the manifesto Revelation as History (1961), which argued that God's revelation is constituted by universal history rather than by special verbal revelation.
Jesus - God and Man was the systematic christological application of this program. Pannenberg's insistence on engaging the historical-critical method on its own terms - rather than either rejecting it (as fundamentalists did) or evacuating the kerygma of historical content (as Bultmann did) - made the book a landmark in the dialogue between theology and historical scholarship.
The German theological context was dominated by Barth and Bultmann. Pannenberg was arguing against both: against Barth's theological positivism (which grounded theology in the Word of God proclaimed in Scripture and the church, largely insulated from historical-critical questioning) and against Bultmann's existentialist reductionism (which evacuated the kerygma of historical content). His alternative was to argue that the resurrection can be defended as a historical event through the methods of historical scholarship itself.
Structure and Argument
Part 1, 'The Knowledge of Jesus's Divinity,' addresses the resurrection as the basis of all Christological claims. Pannenberg argues that the resurrection appearances and the empty tomb are historically defensible events, drawing on Paul's testimony in 1 Corinthians 15 (written approximately twenty years after the resurrection, preserving earlier tradition that takes us still closer to the events) and the convergence of independent resurrection traditions in the Gospels.
His treatment of the resurrection draws on the Jewish apocalyptic concept of the general resurrection of the dead at the end of history. Within this framework, the resurrection of Jesus represents the anticipated arrival of the end in the midst of history - a proleptic event in which the eschatological future has broken into the present. This framework allows Pannenberg to argue that the resurrection is not merely a supernatural anomaly but the decisive moment in universal history.
Part 2, 'The Divinity of Jesus and His Unity with God,' addresses the classical christological questions of the person of Christ, the relationship between the pre-existent Son and the historical Jesus, and the relationship between the divine and human natures. Pannenberg's approach is consistently 'from below' - beginning with the historical Jesus as attested by the Synoptic tradition and working up to the affirmation of his divine identity through the resurrection.
Part 3, 'Jesus the Man,' addresses the soteriological meaning of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, with particular attention to the atonement and the representative significance of Jesus as the 'Last Adam' in Paul's theology (Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22).
Critical Reception
The book was immediately recognized as a significant contribution and has been continuously in print. It revived interest in the relationship between historical scholarship and systematic theology and generated a substantial secondary literature.
Karl Barth's response was largely negative: he maintained that Pannenberg's attempt to ground theology in historical reason rather than in revealed Scripture represented a dangerous return to nineteenth-century liberal theology. Bultmann's followers questioned whether Pannenberg's historical argument for the resurrection was adequate - the debate about whether historical-critical method can establish the truth of a resurrection continues in New Testament scholarship.
N.T. Wright's later work on the resurrection (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003) builds directly on Pannenberg's argument and provides a more detailed historical-critical defense of the bodily resurrection that supports Pannenberg's theological claims.
Theological Significance
The book's most significant theological contribution is its demonstration that the historical and the theological cannot be separated in Christology: the person of Christ is not known in abstraction from the historical Jesus, and the historical Jesus is not theologically significant in abstraction from his resurrection. This insistence on the necessary connection between historical particularity and theological claim has shaped every subsequent major Christology.
Pannenberg's 'retroactive' logic - the resurrection as the event that retroactively reveals and confirms the pre-Easter Jesus's divine identity - has been particularly influential. It provides a way of affirming both the genuine humanity of the historical Jesus and the genuine divinity of the eternal Son without collapsing either into the other.
Legacy
The book initiated the broad shift toward resurrection-centered Christology that has characterized mainstream academic theology since the 1970s. Wright's historical work, Robert Jenson's trinitarian theology, and much of the contemporary evangelical engagement with historical Jesus scholarship all build on Pannenberg's foundation. His later three-volume Systematic Theology (1988-1993) developed the christological framework of Jesus - God and Man into a comprehensive account of Christian doctrine.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study 1 Corinthians 15:1-58 (Paul's account of the resurrection, the most detailed in the New Testament), Romans 1:1-7 (the pre-Pauline creedal formula citing the resurrection as the declaration of sonship), Acts 2:14-36 (Peter's Pentecost sermon, the earliest kerygmatic proclamation), Philippians 2:5-11 (the kenosis hymn), Colossians 1:15-20 (the cosmic Christ), and Romans 5:12-21 (Christ as Last Adam).
Further Reading
- E. Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (1973) - the first comprehensive English account of Pannenberg's theological program, essential for understanding Jesus - God and Man in context. - N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) - the most detailed historical-critical defense of the resurrection in the tradition Pannenberg initiated; a complementary and in many ways more thorough historical argument. - Stanley Grenz, Reason for Hope: The Systematic Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (2nd ed. 2005) - a thorough and accessible account of Pannenberg's mature systematic theology, showing how Jesus - God and Man fits into the larger framework.