A Month Without Jenson

“Death indeed will terminate my story, but it will not conclude it; for it will make all my hopes into might-have-beens and my fears into never-minds, and so make absurd the anticipatory coherences by which I have lived. If I am to have a conclusion, it will have to be a resurrection.” 

—R. W. Jenson (Aug 2, 1930-Sept 5, 2017)

It’s been a month since Robert Jenson left us to the tasks of Christian life: the speaking and hearing of the gospel. These tasks directed all of Jenson’s theology, and press towards questions of culture and life. Jenson refused to indulge the strategy of cultural retreat that attempted theology as though all the modern philosophical movements had not occurred. All contemporary theology jostles in the wake of Kant and Hegel and Heidegger and the rest. We must ask how we can speak the gospel faithfully, but without simply capitulating to modernity. We cannot be premodern, but neither can we be simply modern. Jens’s theology rescued this student of the tradition more than once from the worst excesses of modern theology.

As a young evangelical student, all of my brightest ideas were merely stolen notions taken from the reactionary and modernising evangelicals: a full-throated endorsement of divine passibility, a commitment to divine temporality (arising from a tendency towards univocity), credulity towards the “hellenisation” thesis, and a belief that divine love required libertarian human freedom. Like the worst kind of young evangelical modernist, I sifted through the tradition cynically, believing the ancient Christians to have been enthralled by pagan philosophies.

When my masters degree led me to my first detailed study of Jens’ theology, I presumed that his raging against certain elements of the tradition was animated by the same scepticism as my own. I had always taken Jens as holding to the Athenian captivity of the Church, but I found that his approach to the hellenisation thesis was more nuanced than I had supposed. In one reflection, Jens playfully dismissed the purity of theology by asserting that the boundary between theology and any other discourse is “blessedly ill-defined”.

The task of theology, Jens shows, is not to find its own peculiar pure discourse, but to evangelise—to speak the gospel and see what difference it makes. It would later become a commonplace statement for Jens: the early Christians did not “hellenise” the gospel, they evangelised their own antecedent hellenism. This single observation completely eroded the thrall of the hellenisation thesis for me. I no longer looked to ancient Christianity to see what was uncorrupted that could be salvaged, but to see just how the gospel had shaped the thought-forms of the ancient world. Jens taught me how to see the gospel as the engine driving all Christian discourse.

Startled from my doctrinal slumbers, I decided to make Jens the object of my doctoral studies. Though his theology is undoubtedly revisionist, my study of Jens’ writings revealed to me a deep commitment to the Christian tradition. I was amazed to find that he was only partially modernising, tending to keep the architecture of the tradition in place, while putting up new signs or perhaps offering a coat of paint here and there.

Sometimes the awakenings to Jens’ subtle treatment of the tradition came slowly. Having swallowed Hart’s assertion that Jens denies simplicity, and having witnessed Jens’ vociferous critiques of Augustine, I mistakenly concluded that Hart was right. Knee-to-knee with Jens in Princeton, I tried to provoke him to some remarks on divine simplicity. Jens began, “Of course God doesn’t have parts”, and proceeded to robustly defend the necessity of simplicity for a thoroughly Christian theology. I went home to Sydney and read all of his books again and finally found my error.

It's been a month without Jens—a difficult month for those of us shaped and supported by him and Blanche (and there are many of us). And yet, as he affirmed again and again, we slouch not towards the grave, but towards resurrection. We are each of us drawn forward into God's enjoyable presence, roused to life by the musical harmony of the restless divine activity. Though death may take us, we are each of us remembered by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "And to be remembered there is to live" (On Thinking the Human, 11).

Clerihew for Robert W. Jenson (1930-2017)

Robert W. Jenson – Jens –
Saw creation through a triune lens,
And heard it in the key of Christ,
A very, very, very nice
Prelude to the fugue of Paradise,
Composed by God the Holy, Holy, Holy,
Who, of course, is roly-poly.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
Blessings to beloved Blanche.

Jenson as teacher: an almost-review of A theology in outline

Robert Jenson writes and speaks neatly. Such a gift is rare within the academy. This generation’s greatest baroque theological stylist, David Bentley Hart, once lauded Jenson’s ability to produce “formulations of a positively oracular terseness”, even if this tone contrasts with Hart’s own “taste for the sesquipedalian and pointlessly elaborate.” (Jenson returns the compliment by observing that “Hart never uses one clause where twenty will do”). Such rhetorical reserve may appear casual—and frequently masks both the imaginatively spectacular and fervently orthodox character of Jenson’s theology—but it is in fact the sign of a strictly disciplined teacher.

Academics are often maligned for their delight in linguistic obfuscation. We will, we are told, always find the most difficult way to say something. Such judgements represent a deplorable misconstrual of the situation. Explaining a complex idea by the employment of technical and complicated language is easy. The great challenge is disciplining oneself to say something plainly. Why do academics speak and write incomprehensibly? Because we are not clever enough to speak neatly. Colouring inside the lines is beyond us.

Given this situation, there is no task more difficult for the professional theologian than teaching an introductory course in theology. In our cowardice, many of us take the painless option by giving a comprehensive historical survey of the discipline liberally peppered with Latin axioms and eloquent anecdotes: providing the students with dates, technical formulae, and names to memorise. The more difficult way to teach theology is to inhabit the world of these thinkers and their arguments, and attempt to speak plainly of their concerns and ours. This is how Robert Jenson teaches.

And we owe our thanks to Adam Eitel for allowing us to see this clearly as he invites us to sit with him in Jenson’s classroom during a series of undergraduate lectures given at Princeton University in 2008. The manuscript of these lectures, A Theology in Outline: Can these bones live?, shows that Jenson’s skill for “oracular terseness” extends to his extemporaneous teaching (as Eitel describes it in his introduction).

This is not Jenson’s systematics in brief. It is rather a public performance of Christian theology. Jenson describes it in his preface as something of a taster of Christian thought intended to whet the appetite. For this reason, the book bears more in common with a catechism than a standard academic introduction to theology. What Jenson introduces us to here is not theology as an academic discipline, but as a vocation. What do we receive from the tradition and the great thinkers of Christianity, “from Augustine to Hildegard of Bingen to Barth”? The exhortation to pray.

Jenson follows his usual method of explaining the tradition while simultaneously reinterpreting it and presenting it as a living option for present life. There is no need to summarise Jenson’s arguments: the book is short enough, so just read it yourself. Rather, it is Jenson in the mode of a teacher that is of particular interest. In all of his writing, Jenson asks us to evaluate how we undertake the theological task. 

A typology suggests itself here. Take a basic Christian claim: “Jesus is Lord”. Theology done in the usual way will consider this to be a densely-packed idea needing to be unfurled into elaborate theological rhetoric. Jenson’s theology, on the other hand, treats “Jesus is Lord” as a large billowing idea that needs to be compressed into theological claims to be shared. It is this compressive character of Jenson’s theology that leads Hart to write that a single phrase of Jenson’s might “detonate” if mishandled. Rather than expending his energy by expressing simple ideas through grand flourishes, Jenson saves the grandness and the energy for the ideas themselves.

This, I suggest, is what we learn from Jenson as a teacher. The basic stuff of Christian faith is conceptually grand: “Christ is risen”, “this is my body”, “your sins are forgiven” and so on. Moreover, they are grand in a metaphysical sense. Metaphysics is not to be contrasted with existence: “when we begin doing metaphysics—that is, when we begin asking questions like ‘what is it “to be”?’—we are not just playing empty word games. The questions we ask and the answers we give both express and shape the way we perceive and act in the world" (p. 108). Our metaphysical construal of such claims is the manner by which we decide how we will live. As Jenson treats the gospel, any word spoken about Jesus is simultaneously a telling of our own stories. A grand story, Jenson suggests, is one that makes room for all of us. Theologians might do well to foster more audacity in their thinking, and then they may be enabled to write neatly of the things of God.

A postscript on the “comprehensive” bibliography:

Eitel has enlisted the help of Keith Johnson to compile a very good list of academic works published by Jenson for inclusion in this volume, but it is a shame that it is not as “comprehensive” as advertised. Two of Jenson’s ALPB books are missing, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse, and On the Inspiration of Scripture. His book, Lutheranism, co-authored with the late Eric Gritsch is omitted, as is the volume of essays that Jens and I produced together, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation. While essays from The Futurist Option (co-authored with Carl Braaten) appear, the book itself has no entry. Seemingly by design, Jenson’s occasional writings are left off the list (published letters and his many captivating editorials written for Dialog). And a significant number of essays are nowhere to be found: “What kind of God can make a covenant?”, “Deus est ipsa pulchritudo”, and many others. This does not reflect poorly on Eitel or Johnson, since Jenson himself has lost track of his publications. But it does seem that researchers wanting access to all of Jenson's writings will have to continue compiling their own lists.

Jenson about Barth on Jenson on Barth: a review-anecdote

In a “review” of D. Stephen Long’s Saving Karl Barth published in Pro Ecclesia last year, Robert Jenson offers a corrective and an anecdote. Long, like many others, takes exception to Bruce McCormack’s view that II/2 forms the metaphysical centre of Barth’s theology. Students of Jenson will know that Jenson himself made the same claim—well before McCormack—in his PhD, which was revised and published as Alpha and Omega. Long claims that there is “no positive statement by Barth of II/2’s centrality.” Jenson is amused at this argument, since “there is in fact such a statement, and I am its most direct witness.”

In the summer of 1959 we moved our young family from Heidelberg to Basel in hope of my consulting Barth himself during the final drafting of my Heidelberg dissertation, which was on ‘The Election of Jesus Christ in the Theology of Karl Barth.’ Barth was open to this, reading a final version before we returned to Heidelberg. In it I argued, as bluntly as possible, that his doctrine of election in II/2 upended traditional understandings of the relation between time and eternity and thus inaugurated an innovative ontology, and that this complex was then—for better or worse—the ruling center of his subsequent theology. Barth invited me to his study, and after some conversation said, "Aber Herr Jenson—Sie haben mich verstanden," "But Mr. Jenson—you have understood me." A bit later an interviewer for the Christian Century asked Barth if anyone had grasped the real center of his thinking. Barth answered that there was ‘one, a young American.’ Subsequently I was identified by name in the journal as the one—not by me.

McCormack's theology is hardly identical to Jenson's, but they accord the same status to II/2. The result, Jenson claims, is that Barth's imprimatur extends to McCormack on at least this point. One who wishes to disagree with McCormack’s central thesis about election, Jenson concludes, is not discrediting McCormack, but “it is Barth’s teaching that is thus discredited.”

And so the Barth-wars continue.

Know-it-all heretics

Eunomius has everything figured out. Which pretty much summarises everything that is wrong with his theology. Divinity is, Eunomius claims, unbegottenness (which is why he thinks that the Son cannot be divine). Basil is aghast: “How much arrogance and pride would it take for someone to think that he has discovered the very substance of God?” (Against Eunomius, 1.12). Eunomius is like every other heretic: an aggravating know-it-all.

Arius is certain that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father. Apollinaris, agreeing that Arius must be wrong, knows that Christ can be fully divine so long as he is not fully human. Nestorius, going with the dismissal of Apollinaris, figures out how the divine and the human natures interact in Jesus (even in Mary’s womb!). Eutyches, standing with the church in rejecting Nestorius, solves the metaphysical problem of two natures (or one or three—the numbers all blend together). The early christological heretics all claim to understand the relation of the divine to the human in Christ. Each heretic solves the problem with confidence, but the church confidently keeps the problems and so keeps the faith.

The orthodox tradition maintains the tension between the knowable and the unknowable in its affirmations. We cannot know what divinity is in itself, just as we hardly understand the nature of humanity, but it seems necessary to say—if salvation is real—that Christ is fully divine and fully human and that these two “natures” are not merely pressed up against each other or mixed together, but are somehow united in the person of Jesus Christ. But orthodox theology rarely attempts to specify that “somehow”.

The heretics prefer to iron out the creases in their doctrines of God and Christ, leaving a smooth surface where everything is laid bare. But the orthodox tradition leaves the bedsheets in a crumpled pile, with hidden and mysterious crevices. Ironing the divine linen is an impossible task, for God is like a fitted sheet—accomodating yet unwieldy. Talk about God will always have hidden depths and untidy corners. “Heretics were too clever by half, thinking they could know God precisely so as to define the divine Being in all exactitude” (Frances Young, God’s Presence, 253).

Rowan Williams points out that the word “heresy” comes from the Greek hairesis, which connotes making a choice that creates division—“a heresy in St Paul is… choosing to belong to this little group rather than the whole fellowship” (“What is Heresy Today?”). The heretic is the one who looks at the doctrine of God and says “I understand this” or “I can prove that this is so” in such a way as to exclude all other understandings. The creeds, by contrast, were written to establish unity within the church through prayer, contemplation, and interpretation. To riff on Robert Jenson, there is nothing as capacious as a creed.

The future of angelology

I love a theologian who loves angels, but few today seem to know what to say about the angels. “How are we to steer a way… between the far too interesting mythology of the ancients and the far too uninteresting demythologisation of most of the moderns?”, Barth asks (CD III/3:369).

The angels present us with a fixed epistemological barrier to theological enquiry. Claus Westermann, with surprising certainty, claims that “angels are as inaccessible as God himself” (God’s Angels Need no Wings, 19). In the angels we see the limits of our knowledge. They are a startling reminder of the impossibility of human comprehension—a sign of the outer vistas of knowledge. We simply don’t know what to do with angels—which doesn’t matter so much I suppose, so long as they know what to do with us.

Angels are creatures who do not fit in the world. It is clear that their world is not our world, which is why those who speak with their language require an interpreter. Every theological interaction with the angels, Robert Jenson observes, involves some at least minimal amount of demythologising—while scripture tells of their “spatial coming and going, the main tradition has conceptualized them as disembodied subjectivities” (ST 2:119).

Dionysius the Areopagite extends the stories of scripture to fill out an entire hierarchy of celestial beings. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, angels are incorporeal (Oration 29), and so transcend material creation (cf Aquinas ST 1.51.2). They are, Ian McFarland writes, creatures of the invisible creation referred to in the Nicene Creed. They are a reminder that “creation is not limited to the phenomenal world that is subject to scientific observation” (From Nothing, 75).

Nevertheless, scripture speaks of them primarily as material agents—travelling, singing, eating, killing. Even in these corporeal manifestations, Jenson argues, the angels function as a sign of the impossibility of the coming of God’s kingdom according to the usual patterns of historical causality. Angels enter the scene only when virgins fall pregnant or hungry lions pretend to be sated. This is why, Jenson reasons, “the Revelation is one long display of angels” (ST 2:125). They are the creaturely excess that is a sign of divine activity in creation, but they are as ineffable as that very activity. Even when met by angels, “the gate of heaven mercifully does not open” to us (Jenson, ST 2:127). Despite our best attempts to demythologise the angels, or to translate them into theological principles, they persist in scripture as agents. The angelic narratives defy reduction.

Every redefinition of angels is a claim to know the deep structure of the world—a denial that the reality of the world, and God’s way with it, is impenetrably dark. The biblical stories preserve the mystery of angels in a way that our typologies and reductions do not: “we may trust them as we dare not trust our conceptual explanations” (Jenson, ST 2:127).

Rowan Williams once argued that to reword a poem is to change its meaning. A poem enters into the world to expose the strangeness of language and the mystery of reality. Angels are the poems of scripture. They enter into a situation to expose the strangeness of God’s activity and the mystery of creation. We cannot remove them from the narratives without the internal sense of the story breaking down. To demythologise them is to destroy their meaning.

The future of angelology, then, must be in attentiveness to scripture, and the way that angels interrupt the linkages of immanent historical causality. We can speak of them only as we speak of any mystery: as pure poetry.

The Divine Unity: Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology

The first volume of Katherine Sonderegger’s new Systematic Theology is nearing release, and the curious can sample the preface and first chapter of the book on Fortress’ website. 

It looks like an unmissable volume—if only because she resolutely refuses to begin with Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity. “This theology is neither Christomorphic nor Christocentric” (p. xvii). 

In her preface, Sonderegger observes that “Modern Christian theology has shown an allergy to questions about Deity—what God is” (p. xi). She sets out in this volume to explore the perfections of God through the foundational perfection: divine oneness—“oneness governs the Divine Perfections: all in the doctrine of God must serve, set forth, and conform to the transcendent Unity of God” (p. xiv). 

While some modern theologians have depicted the renewed emphasis on the doctrine of the Trinity as the victory of scripture over philosophy, Sonderegger points to the priority of divine oneness in scripture. There is nothing more scriptural, she observes, than monotheism. This marks a departure from the modern trend of beginning with the Trinity. The beloved doctrine of the modern West will have to wait until volume 2.

The sample from the first chapter is rich and interesting. Sonderegger enters into extended engagement with Jenson as a prime example of a doctrine of God that “conjoins divine identity, narrative, Trinity, philo-Judaism, and anti-Hellenism” (p. 7). Jenson’s theology is worth examining, she argues, because Jenson insists that “its defiant starting point in the doctrine of the Trinity moves it not away [from], … but closer to the law, observance, and piety of rabbinic Judaism” (p. 7). However, she finds the sidelining of oneness in his treatment dissatisfying. Against Jenson and his comrades Sonderegger argues that the foundational form of the Old Testament is not “narrative” or “story”, but Torah (p. 11). Israel’s scripture teaches divine oneness as a metaphysical commitment.

Whereas Barth, Jenson, and others have suggested that a purely monadic God would be an idol, Sonderegger argues that according to scripture a visible God would be more idolatrous. God’s invisibility is what sets the true God apart from idols (pp. 17-21). How she will reconcile this with christology and the iconoclast controversy remains to be seen.

While it is questionable to offer a critique based on a short sample—a bit like reviewing a movie after having watched only the trailer—a question did keep coming to mind. Sonderegger has decided to avoid treating God as triune in this volume in order to redress the oversight of the unity of God in modern theology. However, I am not quite convinced that the unity of God has been overlooked in the modern renewal of the doctrine of the Trinity. It seems to me that for Jenson (and perhaps for Barth and others), the unity of the divine being is a presupposition that needs to be converted by an encounter with divine revelation. That certain theologians prefer to begin with the doctrine of the Trinity does not necessarily mean, as Sonderegger argues, “that the Oneness of God comes under heavy threat” (p. 9). However, she is right that the current theological climate makes it difficult to know what we can/should say about the oneness of God.

Sonderegger’s prose is alive with scriptural allusions and spiritual insights. Most compelling is her reflection on the spiritual and theological importance of God’s humility: “So humble is this God that He will lay Himself down in our knowledge, making our paths straight, illumining our darkness, raising up the creature in His own ineffable Light… This is the exceeding Goodness of our God, His Lowliness, that He will come to us, and make His dwelling there” (p. xx).

I look forward to reading the full volume. It seems to me that her attentiveness to scripture and to spiritual practices is to be celebrated and emulated. If doing so problematises received models or methods for theology, so be it.

Robert W. Jenson, Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse

A guest-review by Steve Wright

This year I spent Reformation Day with Robert Jenson’s latest book: Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse (sample chapter here). At only eighty pages, I had expected to spend an hour with it. But like his previous publication with the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, A Large Catechism, it took me longer to read than expected because of the urgent need to pray or giggle.

My wife commented that these ten slogans sound like “Protestant slogans”. She may be right. The exception is finitum capax infiniti, which is “exclusively Lutheran... because nobody else has agreed with it” (p. 55).

The subtitle is misleading. Jenson frequently gestures to the ambiguity or confusion of certain slogans, not simply to their “use” or “abuse”. This ambiguity is sometimes terminal (as seems to be the case for sola Scriptura). Slogans, we are told, are a necessary shorthand that emerges over time to signify a complex of propositions and practises. Despite the word’s stigma, slogans have a positive function. The problem with slogans is that they tend to develop a certain independence as they age, becoming untethered and paddling to foreign shores.

An example of this untethering is the frequent attempts by some Lutheran theologians to categorise all reality under the rubrics “law” or “gospel”. Jenson argues that it should be clear that this use of “gospel” has drifted from the story of Jesus. What was a history is now a generalised concept. Reframing the dialectic as “death” and “resurrection” does not help. Death and resurrection are not a dialectical pair, but moments in the history of Christ’s life (pp. 35-36).

This book is delightful for many reasons. Jenson takes almost every opportunity afforded him to disagree with Melanchthon. Although on one occasion he finds himself required begrudgingly to give Melanchthon his “partial due” for identifying the Spirit with the gift the Spirit brings (p. 46).

Jenson has been described as the perfecter of the footnote; clearly this was a reference to the dynamic perfection of the East. Like our Lord’s wine, he has brought out his finest well after the guests have gotten a little tipsy from his systematics. Whether he is confessing his enduring awe for Augustine, comparing the proliferation of trendy religion in the second century with California, or denying that Lutherans have ever taught anything that could be called consubstantiation, his footnotes always delight. He even works in a reference to a theology blog (sorry Ben, not this one).

Throughout Jenson maintains his career-long argument that the object of theology must be “God himself in his own visibility and disgrace” (p.39). That is, Christ destroyed on the cross and raised again. Though internalised through faith, we will always encounter this God through an external Word. So much for subjective faith. Faith is “a strange kind of knowledge, more like a dark cloud around its object than a bright transparency.” If we look inward to find Christ “we will only enter a cloud of unknowing” (p. 20).

What then, must we do to keep theological slogans moored? If the only legitimate use of slogans is when they are tethered to God in Christ, then the imperative is clear. We must immerse ourselves in the narrative of the triune God. We are to “fill the church with Scripture” (p. 80). 

Robert Jenson and the Wesleyans

One of my brilliant PhD students, Steve Wright, has a new article in The Heythrop Journal, titled "The Creator Sings: A Wesleyan Rethinking of Transcendence with Robert Jenson". Here's an excerpt:

To exist is to be mentioned by God; or, may I hazard, to be sung by God. The act of creation sets us in relation to God while concurrently distinguishing us from God.... The gratuity of the moment of creation is irreducibly aesthetic, the beauty of God manifests when perfect harmonious discourse opens up to include new players.... When Jenson analyses the specific role of the Father in creation he abstracts to the ‘sheer musicality’ of divine conversation: '... to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music.' ... 

God creates by communication, the priestly narrative tells us as much. Jenson's particular modification of this tradition is to assert the beauty of this communication as the fundamental manner of creaturely being. The relation between Creator and creature is not that between archetype and ectype so as to require the mediation of an image, but that between Singer and song. Because the relation is that between a vocalist and the thing vocalised, the distinction is ‘one which God enforces by taking action’. Nor is this a violent exertion of power, as though God were wrestling the cosmos, but the beautiful outward motion of God's internal love: the gratuitous pouring out of the sufficient being of God in order for the contingent creation to flourish. God is not merely the passive archetype of creaturely being, but the vocal Creator as the triune harmony opens up to sing of creatures and in this singing to create them.... 

Here is the point: as the transcendent Creator who speaks being with illocutionary force, God is transcendent precisely in his immanence. No dialectic is required. The triune God embraces all created being by opening up the eternal perichoretic harmony and so encounters creation as Creator. Every immanent encounter between God and creation is that of the Singer to the song. There is no need to protect God from the contingency of history, as the triune God transcends history, not by removal from it, but by every divine encounter with it.

And speaking of Jenson and the Wesleyans, Peter Leithart points to Robert Jenson's Pro Ecclesia review of Nate Kerr's Christ, History and Apocalyptic. Jenson thinks that Nate's book represents "the perfection of what Barth might have come to think if he had not been so concerned for Scripture"!

Why I am (finally) going to read Herbert McCabe

I’ve been meaning to read a bit of Herbert McCabe ever since Kim’s posts – but somehow I’ve just never gotten around to it. But when I read Halden’s new post, McCabe was suddenly pushed straight to the top of my must-read list. Here are some of the passages Halden quotes from McCabe’s book God Matters:

“The story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history, or enacted sacramentally in our history, so that it becomes story…. The historical mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal mission of the Son from the Father; the historical outpouring of the Spirit in virtue of the passion, death, and ascension of Jesus is nothing but the eternal outpouring of the Spirit from the Father through the Son. Watching, so to say, the story of Jesus, we are watching the processions of the Trinity.”

“There was, from the point of view of God’s life, no such thing as a moment at which the eternal Son of God was not Jesus of Nazareth…. The eternal life of Jesus as such could not precede, follow or be simultaneous with his human life. There is no story of God ‘before’ the story of Jesus.”

Which is exactly what Barthian thinkers like Jüngel, Jenson and McCormack have been telling us as well. The “pre-existence” of the Son is always and only the pre-existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth. The trinitarian relations exist not as a hidden “depth” lurking behind the history of Jesus, but precisely as the surface on which this history is enacted.

Robert Jenson and the question of being

In case you hadn’t heard, Robert Jenson happens to be one of the two or three best theologians in the world today. And here’s why:

“So what is it to be? … To be God is to anticipate a future self by an inexhaustible interpretive relation to an other that God himself is; to be a creature is to anticipate a future self, by a finite interpretive relation to an other that the creature is not…. Being is interpretive relatedness across time; that is, to be is to rise from the dead. Such is the description of reality that coheres with trinitarian doctrine of God.”

—Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God according to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 182.

Pannenberg's eschatological ontology

The new issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie includes my article on Pannenberg, entitled: “The Difference Totality Makes: Reconsidering Pannenberg’s Eschatological Ontology” NZSTh 49:2 (2007), 141-55. (If you’d like a copy, just email me.)

In the essay, I try to bring Pannenberg’s eschatological thought into conversation with the work of David Bentley Hart and Robert W. Jenson. Here’s the abstract:

“Wolfhart Pannenberg’s eschatological ontology has been criticised for undermining the goodness and reality of finite creaturely differentiation. Drawing on David Bentley Hart’s recent ontological proposal, this article explores the critique of Pannenberg’s ontology, and offers a defence of Pannenberg’s depiction of the relation between difference and totality, especially as it is presented in his 1988 work, Metaphysics and the Idea of God. In this work, Pannenberg articulates a structured relation between difference and totality in which individual finite particularities are preserved and affirmed within a coherent semantic whole. Creaturely differences are not sublated or eliminated in the eschatological totality, but are integrated into a harmonious totality of meaning. This view of the semantic function of totality can be further clarified by connecting Pannenberg’s ontological vision with Robert W. Jenson’s model of the eschatological consummation as a narrative conclusion to the drama of finite reality.”

The same issue of NZSTh also includes Paul Molnar’s critical response to Bruce McCormack: “Can the Electing God Be God without Us? Some Implications of Bruce McCormack’s Understanding of Barth’s Doctrine of Election for the Doctrine of the Trinity” (pp. 199-222).

A new book on Robert Jenson

Andy alerts us to an exciting forthcoming book from Paternoster: Scott Swain, God According to the Gospel: Biblical Narrative and the Identity of God in the Theology of Robert Jenson (Paternoster Theological Monographs series, forthcoming 2007). I can’t wait!

Three lectures by Robert W. Jenson

Earlier this month, Robert W. Jenson delivered the Grider-Winget Holiness Lectures at Nazarene Theological Seminary. He spoke on “the inspiration of scripture,” and Dave Belcher has kindly posted summaries of each of the three lectures: lecture 1, lecture 2, lecture 3. The third lecture looks especially interesting – and apparently this material will later be published by Brazos Press.

Inhabitatio Dei

In case you had’t noticed, the very best theological blogging at the moment is taking place over at Halden’s blog, Inhabitatio Dei. Halden is in the midst of a brilliant series on radical trinitarianism, and yesterday he posted a wonderfully grumpy polemic against Radical Orthodoxy, as well as a probing critique of George Hunsinger’s reading of Robert Jenson.

Speaking of Jenson-criticism, I recently posted a critique of Oliver Crisp’s reading of Jenson, and I pointed out that Crisp’s article “hasn’t made the necessary imaginative effort of entering into the writer’s own thought, in order to critique that thought from within.”

Well, if you want to read a much better critique of Jenson – a critique arising from a real engagement with Jenson – then you should check out Paul Cumin’s excellent new article: “Robert Jenson and the Spirit of It All: Or, You (Sometimes) Wonder Where Everything Else Went,” Scottish Journal of Theology 60:2 (2007), 161-79.

A rejoinder from Oliver Crisp

Yesterday I posted a brief critique of Oliver Crisp’s new article on Robert Jenson; and I invited Crisp to offer his own rejoinder to my critique. Here’s his rejoinder:

It seems to me that whether a particular theological argument is coherent or not is of utmost importance. Part of the reason for writing this piece was that it seemed to me that the obvious resources Jenson could have availed himself of (viz. recent philosophical work on these matters by metaphysicians) he was unable to avail himself of, because of his views about the nature of metaphysics. The result is that what he comes up with does not work.

As I hope came out in the article, I am an admirer of Jenson’s theology, which is provocative and insightful. But, as Jenson himself admits, it is the fate of any theological system to be dismembered and analysed. I was simply subjecting one aspect of his thinking to such analysis to see whether it made better sense than traditional ways of thinking about this matter. In my estimation, it did not. Naturally, this is not the only important matter one could discuss with respect to Jenson's work. But – to repeat – if all truth is God’s truth, it surely matters if a particular view advanced by a leading theologian as an alternative to other, traditional accounts of a particular doctrine, is not a more complete, or satisfying, or coherent alternative. To that extent, I think the essay was worth writing.

Oliver Crisp on Robert Jenson

The other day I mentioned Oliver D. Crisp’s new critique of Robert W. Jenson: “Robert Jenson on the Pre-Existence of Christ,” Modern Theology 23:1 (2007), 27-45.

Oliver Crisp is an impressive young British scholar, and he’s emerging as a significant new voice in the contemporary theological conversation. He’s a very fine interpreter of American theologians like Jonathan Edwards and W. G. T. Shedd, and he has been doing some important work on the doctrine of sin.

So it’s a shame I can’t be more positive about his new paper on Jenson. In this paper, Crisp’s argument is (in a nutshell) that Jenson’s thought is incoherent. His recurring criticism is: “I cannot make sense of what Jenson says” (p. 44).

The main problem with this critique, in my view, is that it lacks imagination. Crisp has his own set of classical doctrinal and metaphysical categories, which differ pretty radically from the categories of Jenson’s own thought. And when Jenson’s ideas cannot be interpreted in the light of these ready-made categories, Crisp simply protests that Jenson doesn’t make sense. For example, one of Jenson’s central themes – that ontology is structured eschatologically and narratively – is said to be senseless: “it seems intuitively obvious that no being that is temporal can constitute its own past and present from its future. This just makes no sense” (p. 42).

Certainly this is one way of critiquing a writer; but it’s not a very interesting way, since such a critique has not yet made the necessary imaginative effort of entering into the writer’s own thought, in order to critique that thought from within.

The bread and cup

“[W]hat the bread and cup as visible words specifically say, is precisely something about the embodiment of Christ in the life of the church. That Christ is indeed present as body, that he is not in our midst as a disembodied pure spirit, is itself an essential part of the gospel proclamation. If Christ were not present in the body, every gospel-address would be false.”

—Robert W. Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), p. 107.

Robert W. Jenson

I’ve long been disappointed at the lack of online information about “America’s theologian,” Robert W. Jenson. The existing wikipedia page for Jenson was very brief and sketchy, so I’ve now re-written his whole wikipedia page.

At the moment, I’ve just written a general biographical narrative, and I’ve tried to highlight some of Jenson’s main influences and developments. At a later date, I might also try to add another section summarising some of the central themes of his theology (e.g. election, time and eternity, Lutheran christology, ecumenical ecclesiology, etc.).

If you happen to be a Jenson-expert, you might like to make some further additions or modifications to the page as well!

Robert W. Jenson: A Large Catechism

Rummaging around in a dark corner of the Princeton library, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a little book by Robert W. Jenson that I hadn’t seen before: A Large Catechism (Delhi, NY: ALPB, 1991), 62 pp. Drawing on Luther’s Larger Catechism, Jenson discusses the main topics of a traditional catechism: the ten commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments. Here are some highlights:

“In our fallen religion, we think salvation would be escape from temporal existence, from the threats and opportunities of an open future…. But the true God is the one coming as the future rushes upon us; he is life rather than release from life. His very identity is set by what he does in time” (p. 8).

“God, according to all the Scriptures, is above all the great Speaker; he is his own Word, and never relates to others by mere force, but always by personal address. That he creates something new means that he expands the field of his conversation…. That he creates, means that Father, Son and Spirit among themselves mention others than themselves: they speak together of … the great sea beasts, and so there are the great sea beasts for them to discuss. God converses the world into being” (pp. 21-22).

“The Spirit is the Power of the End, God as his own and our Fulfillment rushing upon us” (p. 30).

“‘Sanctification’ … is often misunderstood as a progress, kicked off, as it were, by baptism. This has obviously to be false. Baptism initiates into the life which God’s three persons, Father, Son and Spirit, live among themselves; what would we progress to from that? Rather, sanctification is the continual return to baptism…. Baptism is always there as a fact in my past; I can always, as Luther said, ‘creep’ back to it and begin anew” (p. 50).

“The bread and wine are … the appetizer of the great Wedding Supper. Let the bread therefore be hearty and the wine the best affordable” (pp. 58-59).