Pannenberg was baptized as an infant into the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, but otherwise had virtually no contact with the church in his early years. At about the age of sixteen, however, he had an intensely religious experience he later called his "light experience." Seeking to understand this experience, he began to search through the works of great philosophers and religious thinkers. A high school literature teacher who had been a part of the Confessing Church during World War II encouraged him to take a hard look at Christianity, which resulted in Pannenberg's "intellectual conversion," in which he concluded that Christianity was the best available religious option. This propelled him into his vocation as a theologian.

Pannenberg's epistemology, explained clearly in his shorter essays, is crucial to his theological project. It is heavily influenced by that of one mentor, Edmund Schlink, who proposed a distinction between analogical truth, i.e. a descriptive truth or model, and doxological truth, or truth as immanent in worship. In this way of thinking, theology tries to express doxological truth. As such it is a response to God's self-revelation. Schlink was also instrumental in shaping Pannenberg's approach to theology as an ecumenical enterprise - an emphasis which has remained constant throughout his career.

Pannenberg's understanding of revelation is strongly conditioned by his reading of Karl Barth and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as by a sympathetic reading of Christian and Jewish apocalyptic literature. 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". While Pannenberg adopts a Hegelian understanding of History itself as God's self-revelation, he strongly asserts the Resurrection of Christ as a proleptic revelation of what history is unfolding. Despite its obvious Barthian reference, this approach met with a mainly hostile response from both neo-Orthodox and liberal, Bultmannian theologians in the 1960s, a response which Pannenberg claims surprised him and his associates. 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.

Pannenberg is perhaps best known for Jesus: God and Man in which he constructs a Christology "from below," deriving his dogmatic claims from a critical examination of the life and particularly the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This is his programmatic statement of the notion of "History as Revelation". He rejects traditional Chalcedonian "two-natures" Christology, preferring to view the person of Christ dynamically in light of the resurrection. This focus on the resurrection as the key to Christ's identity has led Pannenberg to defend its historicity, stressing the experience of the risen Christ in the history of the early Church rather than the empty tomb.

Central to Pannenberg's theological career has been his defence of theology as a rigorous academic discipline, one capable of critical interaction with philosophy, history, and most of all, the natural sciences. Pannenberg has also defended the theology of American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory (see Tipler 1989; 1994; 2007).

Pannenberg has been a professor on the faculties of several universities consistently since 1958. Between the years of 1958 and 1961 he was the Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Wuppertal. Between 1961 and 1968 he was a professor in Mainz. He has had several visiting professorships at the University of Chicago (1963), Harvard (1966), and at the Claremont School of Theology (1967), and since 1968 has been Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Munich.

Throughout his career Pannenberg has remained a prolific writer. As of December 2008, his "publication page" on the University of Munich's website lists 645 academic publications to his name.

• 1968. Revelation As History (edited volume). New York: The Macmillan Company.
• 1968. Jesus: God and Man. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
• 1969. Basic Questions in Theology. Westminster Press
• 1969. Theology and the Kingdom of God. Westminster Press.
• 1970. What Is Man? Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
• 1972. The Apostles' Creed in Light of Today's Questions. Westminster Press.
• 1976. Theology and the Philosophy of Science. Westminster Press.
• 1977. Faith and Reality. Westminster Press.
• 1985. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. T&T Clark
• 1988—1994. Systematic Theology. T & T Clark

Online writings

• " God of the Philosophers," First Things, June/July 2007.
• " Letter from Germany," First Things, March 2003.
• " Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," First Things, August/September 2002.
• " Review of Robert W. Jenson's Systematic Theology: Volumes I & II," First Things, May 2000.
• " When Everything is Permitted," First Things, February 1998.
• " The Pope in Germany," First Things, December 1996.
• " How to Think About Secularism," First Things, June/July 1996.
• " Christianity and the West: Ambiguous Past, Uncertain Future," First Things, December 1994.
• " The Present and Future Church," First Things, November 1991.
• " God's Presence in History," Christian Century (March 11, 1981): 260-63.