Although Mostert’s book is primarily about Pannenberg’s doctrine of God, he consistently places his exposition within the broader renewal of eschatological reflection and so the title is apt: God and the Future. The first chapter sets the stage by tracing the ‘shocking discovery’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of the eschatological nature of the message of Jesus about the kingdom of God. After describing this context, Mostert identifies the main reasons why Pannenberg has placed eschatology into the center of theology. The latter believes that this move is demanded by Christian faith in the coming kingdom of God, that it is required by the importance of the theme of futurity in modern European thought, that it encourages political realism, and that it sheds light on other doctrines such as anthropology. Having established the relevance of eschatology for theology, the rest of the book attempts to establish the plausibility of Pannenberg’s arguments for the futurity of God.

Chapter two, ‘The Appeal of Apocalyptic,’ shows how the basis of Pannenberg’s eschatological theology is his analysis of the ministry, message and resurrection of Jesus, whose emphasis on the kingdom of God as both present and future differentiates him from the general tone of apocalyptic literature. The next two chapters examine the extent to which Pannenberg’s idea of the priority of the future sheds light on the issues of ontology and history. In chapter three, Mostert describes ‘An Ontology of the Whole,’ which he suggests is the single subject of Pannenberg’s scientific, philosophical and theological work. God is the ‘determiner’ of reality as a whole—the creator, redeemer and perfecter of the differentiated totality of history in its universal dimensions. Our understanding of this totality is provisional, and all explanations or claims to truth await final eschatological confirmation. This leads to the fourth chapter, ‘The Ontological Priority of the Future,’ which spells out Pannenberg’s distinctive eschatological ontology. Here Mostert outlines the key concept of ‘anticipation’ and explains the sense in which God ‘is’ the future for Pannenberg. This chapter summarizes the key texts in which Pannenberg deals with these issues and responds to some of the objections that have been raised against the role of the ontological primacy of the future in his theology.

The final two chapters explore what kind of God is the correlate of the futurist ontology that Pannenberg has outlined. In other words, how does Pannenberg think of God’s being and action in relation to the cosmos? Chapter five, ‘The God of the Future,’ explicitly turns to the doctrine of God. Mostert compares Pannenberg’s view to the models of several other theologians, especially process thinkers, in order to clarify the distinctiveness of his understanding of the relation of God to the course of history. This chapter traces the development of Pannenberg’s idea of God through a review of his overall corpus, from some important early articles to the comprehensive presentation of his Systematic Theology. One of the key issues is whether or not Pannenberg’s view of God as the power of the future succeeds as an explanation of the origin and condition of human freedom, or collapses into determinism as some of his critics have argued. Outlining Pannenberg’s way of relating futurity to eternity, and God to time, Mostert argues that his idea of ‘creation from the future’ coherently maintains both the concepts of human freedom and of an all-determining (but not ‘determinist’) God.

The sixth and final chapter, ‘The Reign of the Triune God,’ focuses on the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity for Pannenberg’s whole theology. God’s power and rule over all things and the trinitarian understanding of God are reciprocally related. Once again, Mostert takes the reader through all of the salient places in Pannenberg’s writings in which the kingdom of God announced and manifested in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit is implicitly and explicitly tied to the doctrine of the Trinity. Defending him against his critics, Mostert insists that Pannenberg consistently holds these themes together by thinking of the kingdom of God as the glory of the Trinity.

As Mostert makes clear in a postscript, his book has two overall goals: to explore the whole of Pannenberg’s theology with special attention to its eschatological thematic, and to defend its methodology as an exemplary instance of public theology. On both counts, the author succeeds admirably. His exposition of Pannenberg’s corpus is comprehensive yet carefully focused on the guiding theme of the relation between God and the Future. Mostert’s response to various critics of Pannenberg is based on particular texts, where he identifies aspects of his thought that they appear to have missed. Whether the critics themselves will be convinced remains to be seen. As the author notes, Pannenberg’s theology is self-consciously provisional, and he himself calls for further reconstruction in dialogue with contemporary philosophy and science. This clearly-written and well-argued book comes highly recommended to anyone interested in the future of the idea of the futurity of God.