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.

DDD (Doodlings Deficit Disorder)

Gadzooks! It’s the 4th of July,
when we boast we’re the gens Domini,
and with napalm and nukes
and a “Put up your dukes!”
we give thanks to the Lord of the Flies.

Thank God for small mercies. Large, and even medium, are out of stock.

The natural state of the human is the inhuman. Even to begin to become human takes time and practice – lots and lots of practice.

How do you begin to change the world for the better? By having no such ambition whatsoever.

Looking for a church? Narrow the field: check if it has a Mission Statement.

I’ve just read Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option. It’s not bad for a first draft.

Write, write, write! You don’t need readers to write. Readers, however, do need writers to read.

Not long ago the “church in exile” was a heuristic with potential for exploring post-Christian ecclesiology. Alas, ignoring the critical element of judgment in Israel’s self-understanding of Babylonian captivity, contemporary Christians have reacted to their loss of status and privilege with bitter resentment and whinging self-pity. [Muffled sound of Jeremiah rolling in his grave.]

Don’t worry if your prayers are interrupted by dreams. It is sufficient that your dreams are interrupted by prayers.

My dear pastor, what if your congregation agrees with everything you say? Then you’re not doing it right.

I hear that progressive Christians are having a heated conversation about whether the Creeds should contain a trigger warning for left-handed people.

“Let you word be ‘Yes, Yes’, or ‘No, No’, or ‘It all depends, It all depends’; anything more than this comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37: Jesus, on second thought).

“Sincerity”, “transparency”, “accountability” – bullshit! What are you hiding?

People who are anyone-phobic usually know fuck-all about the anyone.

Why do I love Wittgenstein? Because of the audacity with which he dives headlong into the chaotic depths of mind and soul, the tenacity with which he excavates nuggets of incandescent clarity, and the posture at once humble, disconsolate, and serene with which he bows to the intractably unsayable.

“Every cloud has a silver lining”, an adage that goes back to gloomy Milton’s Comus: “Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud / Turn forth her silver lining on the night?” [ll. 221-222]. The short answer, Comus, is Yes: clouds are sable all the way down.

“Trump” is a good name for a dog. Wherever the President goes, he barks, licks his balls, and pees on the fire hydrants, right?

Who said, “We’re all in this together”? Was it (a) Emperor Nero (to a visiting delegation of Christians at the Colosseum in July 64); (b) the Commander of Abu Ghraib (at a summer fête for the residents in August 2004); (c) David Cameron (to the people of austerity Britain at the Tory Party Conference in October 2009)? Prize: a “May Contain Traces of Bullshit” tee shirt (compliments of Ben Myers).

You gotta hand it to austerity governments for their environmental friendliness: I mean the conscientious way they recycle the red tape they cut from business and industry by sticking it on the forms filled in by desperate benefit claimants.

It is, of course, good to have an interrogative mind. But asking questions is useless if, as often, you don’t really want to know the answers.

Life’s a kitsch. Then you buy.

The name “Starbucks” is a despicable aspersion on the virtuous first mate of the Pequod. Surely the coffee company should be called “Ahabs”: after all, like the ship’s captain, its product is evil.

How about a name for a nursing home that is neither saccharine nor non-descriptive but tells it like it is? For example: The Baby Powder and Urine, The Children’s Revenge, The Not-on-My Bucket List, or (for the more literary), The One Hundred Years of Hebetude, The Unbearable Nightness of Being, The Hamlet Shuffle.

“Any change?” the cadger asked my wife. “The Change?” she replied (her hearing isn’t so good now). “Been there years ago. Now I’ve got The Decay.”

Young, you sing and dance the songs of passion; older, you whistle the tunes and tap your feet.

The parable of the Good Samaritan: the unexpurgated postscript

… And Jesus concluded, “Which one of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”

He said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

Jesus’ interlocutor (whose name was Monty) said, “You mean, be kind to those in trouble or need?”

“Exactly,” said Jesus, “whoever they are, whoever you are.”

“Ya think?” Monty said. “You finally land the plane, and that’s your point?”

“Don’t you think it’s rather provocative,” suggested Jesus, with a teacher’s indulgence, “that it was a Samaritan, of all people, who showed kindness?”

“And why shouldn’t a Samaritan show kindness?” Monty demanded. “You got a problem with Samaritans?”

“No, of course not,” Jesus replied, a little defensively it must be said. “Don’t you see that …”

“Next you’ll be protesting that some of your best friends are Samaritans,” Monty interrupted.

“No, I was …”

“So you don’t have any Samaritan friends?”

“Well, yes, actually, I do,” countered Jesus. “There’s a woman I met at a well.”

“What’s her name?” Monty asked.

“Er,” hesitated Jesus. “To be honest, I can’t remember. I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t ask? But you hang out together?” Monty pressed.

“Well, no, not exactly,” Jesus conceded.

“So you met this Samaritan woman, you don’t know her name, you don’t hang out together, yet you say she’s a friend of yours?” Monty smirked.

“Well, okay then,” Jesus backtracked, “she’s an acquaintance.”

“Just as I thought,” Monty declared. “Anyone else?”

“Well,” Jesus replied, trying to regain the initiative, “I recently healed a Samaritan – of eczema, as I recall. I saw him twice.”

“Twice, is it? As a patient? I guess that makes him a bosom buddy,” said Monty, ratcheting up the sarcasm.

“Well, no, but …”

“Another ‘acquaintance’ then?” Monty was relentless.

“Well, yes, but look,” an exasperated Jesus began to explain, “what I was doing was telling a story about a Samaritan to make a point about kindness and prejudice.”

“So it never happened. It’s fake news.” Monty was merciless.

“No, no, no” Jesus said shaking his head, “you’re making a category mistake.”

“A what?”

“A category mistake,” repeated Jesus. “It’s a semantic error in which …” he continued, then paused. Looking up from the bottom of a huge hole, he decided to stop digging. “Never mind,” he said.

“Okay, okay, tell me this,” Monty asked, going for the jugular. “Are any of your disciples Samaritans?”

Now completely discombobulated, Jesus sighed, “No, but …”

“Yes-but, no-but,” mocked Monty. “So you’ve got no friends who are Samaritans, and no disciples who are Samaritans, yet you bang on about a good Samaritan in a made-up story. You’re all mouth, aren’t you, Jesus? ‘Samaritan Lives Matter’.” Not to mention that you have a go at two fellow Jews in your little fable – two Jewish clerics – low-hanging fruit, or what? I mean talk about ethnic and religious profiling. What, are you some sort of self-loathing Israelite?”

“Now hang on …” Jesus remonstrated.

But Monty stopped him again. “I suppose the next thing you’re going to tell me is that you know some Roman who, iconically, has great faith.”

“Well, now that you mention it …”

Holy feet

I have today been required to reconsider every word I have ever spoken against natural theology. The reason? I have been reading scripture. One single verse of scripture can send shivers down the spine of any volume of dogmatics. Entire shelves of theology flee to cower in the darker corners of the library when confronted by an isolated pericope. Old Karl Barth thought that scripture upsets our inherited knowledge of God and morality, but my reading today has merely confirmed that which every Australian child knows: the perfection of bare feet.

In scripture, the highest theological idea is revealed in the lowest human extremity. The bare foot is the essence of human innocence. It is surprising to the point of embarrassment that I should even have to write this out, for the truth lies deeply embedded in our language. A shod foot is but one syllable short of being shoddy. It is only certain other Germanic languages that are confused on this matter, with the infernal similarity between the Dutch schooen (shoe) and the German schön (Is it any wonder that this was the language of Heidegger and Nietzsche?).

One could derive the entire doctrine of holiness from the unshod feet of Moses. Origen suggested that we interpret scripture allegorically when the plain sense is problematic. One may allegorise the Mountain, the Golden Calf, Moses’ shining face, but the one element of the narrative impossible to allegorise or demythologise is the perfect bareness of Moses’ feet. Calvin provides the correct interpretation: “If any prefer the deeper meaning (anagoge,) that God cannot be heard until we have put off our earthly thoughts, I object not to it; only let the natural sense stand first, that Moses was commanded to put off his shoes, as a preparation to listen with greater reverence to God.”

Moses could hear the voice of God only in his natural edenic state, unshod. This, of course, is the great scandal of humanity’s alienation from paradise: when Eve and her husband wished to hide from the garden-wandering God, they covered themselves. Genesis is silent on the precise nature of their covering only because it was so very obvious: they covered their feet.

The encased foot is humanity’s attempt to demarcate the natural from the human, to form a protective layer around the human soul. But in doing so we have trapped ourselves inside a claustrophobic space, sweaty and putrid. The evangelist goes to such lengths to describe the pavement of the heavenly city in the Apocalypse, because his hearers imagined themselves casting off their fallen footwear and running into God’s holy brightness. How else are we to enter the kingdom, after all, but as children at play?

Sydney conference on sin and grace: Theology Connect 2018

The next Theology Connect conference will be coming to Sydney in July 2018. The theme is sin and grace in Christian theology, with keynotes by Kelly Kapic, Alan Torrance, Simon Chan. There's a call for papers, so why not come visit our nice little town and give us a paper? If you bring your bicycle I will even give you a free guided tour!

If you haven't heard of Theology Connect, there's a review and some pictures of the last one, and a while back I did an interview with Chris Green about the conference series. It looks like they've traded the uber-funky industrial setting for a church venue; but apart from that I'm sure it will be an excellent event. Personally I would go just to hear Simon Chan whose work I admire very much. I'm using his book on Grassroots Asian Theology in my contextual theology seminar this semester (I reviewed it here in case you're interested).

Here's a promo video for the conference: