Determining Diving Being

In a few places, I think Swain ( The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology ) simply misses the import of what he reads and quotes. At one point (99) he claims that Pannenberg believes that “the events that unfold between the Father and Jesus do not merely reveal who and what God is (epistemology). They determine who and what God is (ontology).”

In support, he quotes this from Pannenberg’s essay in Jenson’s Festschrift : “The rule or kingdom of the Father is not so external to his deity that he might be God without his kingdom. The world as the object of his lordship might not be necessary to his deity, since its existence owes it origin to his creative freedom, but the existence of the world is not compatible with his deity apart from his lordship over it. Hence lordship goes hand in hand with the deity of God. It has its place already in the intratrinitarian life of God, in the reciprocity of the relation between the Son, who freely subjects himself to the lordship of the Father, and the Father, who hands over his lordship to the Son.”

I don’t think this means what Swain thinks it means.

For starters, there’s that “not so external.” Weasel words, perhaps, but also a recognition that there is a sense in which the rule or kingdom of the Father is external to his deity. It’s just not “so external” that he can be God without His Lordship. In what sense is it external to His deity? Pannenberg explains in the next sentence: The world is not necessary to God, and it is a product of creative freedom. Just that seems enough to refute Swain’s charge; if the world is not necessary to God, and God creates in freedom, how can events of history determine who and what God is?

But there is also a sense, Pannenberg thinks, in which the Lordship of God is internal to God’s deity. Given that the world exists (and it exists only by a free choice and action of God), it is impossible that God would be God without being Lord of the world He made. The counterfactual that Pannenberg implies is this: The world exists; God exists; and yet God is not God of the world. That would belie God’s claim to deity. A world that is not subjected to God’s lordship is a world that is incompatible with God being God. In that sense, God’s lordship over the world is “internal” to God’s deity. Lordship “goes hand in hand with” God’s being God.

The final sentence in the quotation moves the argument a register. Pannenberg is no longer talking about the relationship between God and the world, but the relationship between Father and Son. He is tracing an inner-Trinitarian archetype of God’s relation to the creation. Within the life of God, the Son is subject to the Father, and the Father hands over all he has, including His lordship, to the Son. In the more fully developed argument, Pannenberg claims that the pattern of redemptive history – the Son willingly subjects Himself to the Father’s sending and obeys His Father fully, the Father raises Jesus as Lord, and in the end Jesus offers all to the Father – has its uncreated root in the pattern of life between Father and Son. I don’t have my Pannenberg at my fingertips, but I recall that he links this to an Augustinian conception of the Spirit’s role: As the Spirit is the love exchanged between Father and Son, so He is the glorious Lordship of the Father given to the and returned to the Father.

That may be wrong; Pannenberg may not be on the right track in trying to find the whole of redemptive history pre-contained in the inner-Trinitarian relations. I think he’s on to something. But even if not, what he aims to do, as I understand it, is to know the life of God by paying close attention to the relations of Persons as they are revealed in the economy of redemption. And he doesn’t imply – at least in the quotation Swain provides – that God’s being is determined by the events of history.