„Handeln Gottes“

A Reconsideration of a concept of Wolfhart Pannenberg in the Light of Augustine

Abstract

The article focuses upon the German term „Handeln Gottes“. „Handeln“ is not identical with the English term action. Instead, it integrates everything that goes back to God’s agency and thus comprises all actions of God, starting with his creation, ending with the eschatological perfection of the universe. For describing the term in more detail, the use of the term by Wolfhart Pannenberg is considered to be helpful. Pannenberg claimed that two conditions of Modernity must be respected for developing a doctrine about God today, namely: relations should be preferred to substances, and relations belong to dynamic processes whose end only determines the identity of the whole process. A comparison with Augustine elucidates how much of these ideas are already formulated in his writings. Furthermore, Augustine’s concept of time and eternity and his ideas about the active and differentiated presence of God in the universe are discusses as helpful incentives for defining what „Handeln Gottes“ could mean. The term describes God‘s relation to the finite world in its entirety even if this cannot be grasped by human thinking or expressed by human language in any precise manner. Its main character though becomes clear only by the revelation in Christ that is itself a specific type of God’s presence in the finite world and the center of God’s „Handeln“.