I agree with your first statement, cornelis. It seems to me that En Sof refers to the eternal life of God "before" He revealed Himself in the creation or to His creatures; and it also seems to stand for the idea of "that part" of God (so to speak) [i.e., that "part" about Himself which God has not yet "told to us" or fully revealed to us] -- which is utterly irreducible to the categories of human experience, thought, or understanding. For He "surpasseth all understanding." Thomas Aquinas makes such a "distinction," if I might call it that, between the utterly transcendent, unknown God (i.e., the tetragrammatical God, the Father) and the God of the Presence (the Logos, God the Son). One God either way; the distinction seems to turn on what the human mind can experience and know of divine nature, as aided by the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. (Still One God.)
Also we have the Shema: "Hear O Israel! The Lord thy God is One." So I don't think either Pannenberg or Newton would agree that we are here speaking of a "Plotinian One" whose "emanation" is evil. For the One God reveals Himself to us as the three Persons of the Holy Trinity.
What Pannenberg is attempting to do in this work is just as its title indicates: He is working towards the development of a theology of nature, or a theology of the creation. And he clearly sees that such a theology would be trinitarian in concept. He feels a dialogue with natural scientists is indispensable to the development of this theology. He writes:
"Perhaps a renewed doctrine of the Trinity would combine the Logos doctrine of the ancient church with contemporary information theory and recognize the activity of the divine spirit in the self-transcendence of life and its evolution [or to borrow a term from science, its "emergence"]. Only a Trinitarian theology is able to meet effectively the emancipation of the concept of the world that Newton had in mind -- that is, the mechanical description of nature that is not only a theoretical construction but takes place in the actual processes of the world itself. A Christian theology of creation will be able to develop a description that does justice to this emancipation of the world process and at the same time removes its disassociation from its divine origin only by way of the theology of the Trinity, in a perspective of the history of salvation. In this way it will also cope with the critique of Leibnitz insofar as as Newton's idea of God was not commensurate with this task. However, a theology of nature must not go back behind Newton's thought on the presence of God with his creatures through space and time, if theology is to avoid the spell of a powerless dualism of spirit and matter."
Ted Peters, Pannenberg's editor, writes of him:
"Perhaps the most startling and dramatic contribution of Wolfhart Pannenberg to recent theological discussion has been the initiative he takes in posing theological questions to natural scientists. Whereas most of the religious community timidly seeks ways to incorporate the worldview of twentieth-century physics and biology by adjusting the religious vision accordingly, Pannenberg has reversed the process. Rather than simply respond to scientific theories as if they come to us prepackaged and complete, the Munich theologican criticizes the scientifc vision of nature as incomplete.... Unless God is properly considered, he argues, a scientific theory cannot fully comprehend the reality of the world it seeks to explain. The natural world is a creature of a creating God, and unless this is understood, the natural world itself cannot be understood."
Man, them's fighting words! :^)
Peters also notes this: "Pannenberg places the eternal logos not in the category of uniform laws of nature but rather in that of contingent events. The logos is not the abstract but the concrete order of the created world. The logos is not a timeless structure; rather, it is the actual historically derived principle by which the created world will attain its unity and fulfillment."
In short, truly it has been said: "The Word was made Flesh...." It seems to me this happened at the Creation (metaphorically speaking), just as it happened at the Incarnation, both events part of the historical world process. Or so it seems to me, FWIW.
Thanks so much for writing, cornelis.
Plotinian--Kabbalist version appears in the 13th c.--emanation is something they struggled against. Gregory is one author who combined trinitarian theology with cosmology and for whom the incarnation is analogous to creation.
We have two extremes, (a) Stoicism--Kant and co. loved the likes of Sextus Empiricus, I hear--with a world-immanent divine force, and (b) Neoplatonist mysticism, with a transcendence that leaves creation limping into the abyss. Both were unacceptable for Christianity which forged right between the two.
Thing is--who created God? It's really very simple. God created the Universe, then He created Himself. What would Aristotle know, he was a botanist.