His doctoral thesis at Heidelberg was on Edmund Schlink's views on predestination in the works of Duns Scotus, which he submitted in 1953 and published a year later.

Schlink was also instrumental in shaping Pannenberg's approach to theology as an ecumenical enterprise – an emphasis which remained constant throughout his career.

The Hegelian concept of history as an unfolding process in which Spirit and freedom are revealed combines with a Barthian notion of revelation occurring "vertically from above".

[8] A more nuanced, mainly implied, critique came from Jürgen Moltmann, whose philosophical roots lay in the Left Hegelians, Karl Marx and Ernst Bloch, and who proposed and elaborated a Theology of Hope, rather than of prolepsis, as a distinctively Christian response to History.

[citation needed] As disciple of Karl Löwith, Pannenberg continued the debate against Hans Blumenberg in the so-called 'theorem of secularization'.

He rejects traditional Chalcedonian "two-natures" Christology, preferring to view the person of Christ dynamically in light of the resurrection.

[citation needed] Eschatological views of Pannenberg discount the importance of temporal process in the New Creation, time being linked with the sinful present age.

Pannenberg has also defended the theology of American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory.