Anticipation and the Trinity: A Response to Philip Clayton?s Critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Prolepsis

This article responds to Philip Clayton's critiques of Wolfhart Pannenberg's theological concept of anticipation (prolepsis). Clayton complains that Pannenberg's usage of anticipation is unsystematic and too ontological. Over against Clayton, I argue here that Pannenberg's concept of anticipation is coherently integrated into his doctrine of the Trinity. I further contend that anticipation is a necessary implication of Pannenberg's futuristic ontology, because anticipation is the only way we in the present can acknowledge that God's eschatological fulfillment constitutes the really real.