Enjoying Wolfhart Pannenberg's Metaphysics & the Idea of God with a glass of @MJBrewery's African Amber 
In the first chapter, Pannenberg asks whether Metaphysics or a "science of God" are possible. Quoting Martin Heidegger "Therefore, theology should 'avoid the application of any sort of philosophical system.'"
Pannenberg says "Heidegger may have found himself in agreement with Rudolf Bultmann, but he stood in sharp opposition to the theological tradition and, in the theology of his time, to Karl Barth."
Pannenberg's contrast of Bultmann and Barth is disputed by @dwcongdon's masterpiece The Mission of Demythologization.
Karl Barth's argument for theological science is presented in his Church Dogmatics I/1
Pannenberg goes on to accuse Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack and others of claiming Christianity departed from its original message via it's hellenization
A point disputed by Hand Küng by showing that early Jewish Christianity's disappearance from the world.
However Pannenberg makes an excellent argument that Christianity was not prevented by hellenization, because it's mission to the gentiles was its raison d'etre.
Pannenberg says "The appeal to the philosophers' teaching concerning the one God was the condition for the emergence of a Gentile church at all. We must therefore conclude that the connection between Christian faith and Hellenistic though in general—and connection between...
...the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers in particular—does not represent a foreign infiltration into the original Christian message, but rather belongs to it's very foundations. "
No doubt Pascal and Tertullian are turning in their graves.
