4 - Totality, finitude and history

Summary

Truth in essence can only be one.

(Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology, II)

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms ± in short, a sum of human relations which have been politically and rhetorically enhanced, transposed and embellished, and which after long use seem binding to a people.

(Nietzsche, Werke, III)

Interpretation can never be brought to an end, simply because there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom everything is already interpretation.

(Foucault, Nietzsche: Cahiers du Royaument No. 6)

In the last, chapter we reviewed three approaches to the theology of history. The theology of history is a clear candidate for the mediating link between universal and particular in political theology, since such theodicies could claim to promote a universal explanation or meta-narrative of the historical process while at the same time being enmeshed in the particularities of specific societies, their histories and their practices.

In this chapter, I want to push the discussion a bit further by taking up the point made towards the end of the previous chapter about whether a theology of history makes too extreme a set of demands on human finitude. I shall do this first of all by looking at the work of Pannenberg in this respect, since to some extent his own views about a universal or theology of history arise out of a response to Hegel.