Wolfhart Pannenberg for Sino-Christian Theology: A Third Way between Liu Xiaofeng and He Guanghu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the reception to date and constructive potential of the late German Lutheran theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928–2014), for Sino-Christian Theology. While Pannenberg’s voice has not been as prominent as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jürgen Moltmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, I argue that his programme’s overall apologetic interests, interdisciplinary emphases, focus upon history, and framing of the public nature of truth carry relevance for Sino-Christian theological construction, especially when considered in the light of the contrasting proposals by two of the movement’s more prominent figures: Liu Xiaofeng (b. 1956) and He Guanghu (b. 1950). Specifically, I argue that Pannenberg’s programme can serve as a mediating third way for Sino-Christian Theology between Liu’s suprahistorical revelational positivism and He’s principled religious pluralism. Insofar as Pannenberg’s programme is often accused of being overly Western and Eurocentric in its reading and application of Christianity’s developmental history, I propose also that Pannenberg’s own thought contains internal resources which can help correct this alleged problem. Though Sino-Christian Theology as an academic modality of discursive engagement has come upon challenging times over the last couple decades, Pannenberg’s voice is still relevant in providing mediating correctives to the approaches put forward by Liu and He.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".