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REVELATION AS HISTORY by Wolfhart -- Ed. Pannenberg

REVELATION AS HISTORY

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Pub Date: Oct. 14th, 1968
Publisher: Macmillan

The five papers in this collection represent an effort by five theologians to bridge the gap between systematic theology and exegesis. Pannenberg's introductory piece describes the theme and its exegetical implications. The next two chapters (by Rolf Rendtorff and Ulrich Wilkens, respectively) discuss the concept of revelation first among the ancient Israelites and then among the primitive Christians. The fourth essay (by Dr., Pannenberg) and the fifth (by Dr. Rendtorff) are both, properly speaking, concluding pieces, the former coalescing the dicta of the preceding chapters into the ""dogmatic theses"" of systematic theology, and the latter discussing the impact of the problem of revelation on the concept of the Church. Overall, what the book proposes is nothing less than a basic reinterpretation of the concept of revelation, which is no longer be to understood as a ""supernatural disclosure,"" but as a temporal -- and perennially incompleted -- process of history, it is a proposal that will strike a spark among serious theologians, both Protestant and Catholic, who will see in this book one of those ""seminal works"" of theological importance for the future.