Interpersonal Trust in God in the Context of Eschatological Provisionality

Abstract

“Trusting in God” is a concept that has long been overshadowed by the concept of faith in the history of theology and has not received any further analytical elaboration. In this article, a contemporary understanding of trusting in God is developed, which takes into account both the current insights of philosophical research on trust and is theologically substantiated. When trust is here introduced as a complex interpersonal and transtemporal practice and transferred to the topos of trust in God, certain emphatic ideas of how to trust in God must be rejected at the same time. Rather, trusting in God constitutes a reciprocal relationship in which (among other things) concrete human expectations towards God play a role. This understanding is embedded in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s research program of revelation as history, which adopts an eschatological perspective.