Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Semiotic Doctrine of the Church: A Peircean Corrective

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to explore and critique Wolfhart Pannenberg’s use of semiotic concepts in his understanding and explanation of the church. He defines the church as “the fellowship of individual believers,” and a “sign of the future fellowship of humanity under God’s reign,” i. e. the future Kingdom of God. As he continues to articulate his doctrine of the church, Pannenberg employs semiotic concepts to articulate this notion of the church as a sign of the Kingdom of God. In this paper, I aim to explore Pannenberg’s use of semiotic concepts as they concern his understanding of the church and provide critique and a new way forward of understanding the church as a sign of the Kingdom of God. Though Pannenberg is right to employ semiotic concepts and terminology to expound upon and clarify this concept, he is wrong in the semiotic model of the sign and approach he chooses to employ. In what follows, I first summarize and explicate Pannenberg’s semiotic understanding of the church, and then I provide a critique and corrective of his semiotic preferences with the semiotic work of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.