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132 How Can We Know the Christian Scriptures Are True?
leaps into it-knows-not-what. That is not New Testament faith, as we
will see in a moment.
But Pannenberg did not offer an adequate solution to the problem of
the average nonhistorian who needs solid ground under the feet of his
faith if he is going to venture all on Christ. No doubt one of the reasons
I was sensitive to the inadequacy of Pannenberg’s position is that Daniel
Fuller, the most influential teacher I had in seminary, brought it to my
attention. Three years before I became his student, he had written in
Easter Faith and History,
If historical reasoning is the only way by which men can attain faith,
then faith becomes the possibility for only the few who can think historically,
and faith for the common man is possible only if he is willing
to commit himself to the authority of a priesthood of historians.
Pannenberg, it will be remembered, wants to make faith the
possibility for all men by having what is, virtually, a priesthood of
historians. Theology’s task as he sees it, is to assert the credibility of
the Christian proclamation, so that laymen can believe it because
of the authority that the theologian, with special historical skills,
can provide. 6
Pannenberg puts it like this:
Believing trust can also arise in such a way that the believer does not
always have to prove on his own the trustworthiness of the knowledge
presupposed therein. It is the special task of theology to do this.
Not every individual Christian needs to undertake this task. He can
trust on the assumption that things are in order with respect to the
ground of his trust. This point of view presupposes, of course, an atmosphere
of confidence in the reliability of the Christian tradition. 7
This seemed to me an inadequate response to the problem the average
layman faces in coming to faith in what the Bible teaches. His eternal
life is at stake. It will not do to say, “He can trust on the assumption
that things are in order with respect to the ground of his trust.” Given
the vast and numerous disagreements in the scholarly world about the
6
Fuller, Easter Faith and History, 237–38.
7
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Insight and Faith,” in Basic Questions in Theology, vol. 2, trans. George H. Kehm
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 33.