Product Review

In this collection of impressive lectures, Wolf hart Pannenberg expounds and interprets the Apostles' Creed "in the light of today's questions". First of all, we must find out what it meant to those who originally recited it, and then ask what it may mean for the modern Christian "in the context of the problems and convictions of the present-day understanding of reality'. Everything must start from the Lord himself, and the author holds that his message of thg kingdom was, without qualif ication, eschatological. Indeed the central theme of the whole book-and some readers will certainly find it hard to take-is that "the world's Creator is its future". Therefore its meaning is held in "God's future" or the End-lime, realized already in Jesus, through his resurrection and exaltation as Lord. yet to be fulfilled in a redeemed creation.Here we have no diluted Christianity made palatable for the mass-media, but what the author presents as the thing itself, in its challenging, pristine strangeness and distinctiveness. Yet all the way it is closely related to the everyday thinking of twentieth-century men, and to Christian life in a pluralist society.