This little book will be as offensive to some Christian and Jewish believers as it certainly will be to determined secularists. That, plus a demanding style of presentation, will keep Pannenberg's Human Nature, Election, and History (Westminster; 116 pp.; $4.95) off anybody's best seller list, but that may be just as well. Arguments that relentlessly probe first principles and aim to upset our most deeply rooted assumptions need to be conditioned, as it were, in smaller and more disciplined discussion before they are readied for popular dissemination. Such a statement may seem frightfully elitist, but it would in no way embarrass Wolfhart Pannenberg.