The End Is Music
A Companion to Robert W. Jenson’s Theology
Chris E. W. Green
THE END IS MUSIC
A Companion to Robert W. Jenson’s Theology
Cascade Companions
Copyright © 2018 Chris E. W. Green. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9082-1
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9084-5
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9083-8
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Names: Green, Chris E. W., author.
Title: The end is music : A companion to Robert W. Jenson’s theology / Chris E. W. Green.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books | Cascade Companions | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-4982-9082-1 (paperback) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-9084-5 (hardcover) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-9083-8 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: Jenson, Robert W. | Theology.
Classification: BX8080 J44 G74 2018 (print) | BX8080 (ebook).
Manufactured in the U.S.A.September 25, 2018
Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: God
Chapter 2: Truth
Chapter 3: Creation
Chapter 4: Salvation
Chapter 5: Church
Chapter 6: Kingdom
Bibliography
cascade companions
The Christian theological tradition provides an embarrassment of riches: from scripture to modern scholarship, we are blessed with a vast and complex theological inheritance. And yet this feast of traditional riches is too frequently inaccessible to the general reader.
The Cascade Companions series addresses the challenge by publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. They aim to introduce nonspecialist readers to that vital storehouse of authors, documents, themes, histories, arguments, and movements that comprise this heritage with brief yet compelling volumes.
Titles in this series:
Reading Augustine by Jason Byassee
Conflict, Community, and Honor by John H. Elliott
An Introduction to the Desert Fathers by Jason Byassee
Reading Paul by Michael J. Gorman
Theology and Culture by D. Stephen Long
Creation and Evolution by Tatha Wiley
Theological Interpretation of Scripture by Stephen Fowl
Reading Bonhoeffer by Geffrey B. Kelly
Justpeace Ethics by Jarem Sawatsky
Feminism and Christianity by Caryn D. Griswold
Angels, Worms, and Bogeys by Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom
Christianity and Politics by C. C. Pecknold
A Way to Scholasticism by Peter S. Dillard
Theological Theodicy by Daniel Castelo
The Letter to the Hebrews in Social-Scientific Perspective
by David A. deSilva
Basil of Caesarea by Andrew Radde-Galwitz
A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian by Hannah Hunt
Reading John by Christopher W. Skinner
Preface
It is exceedingly difficult to write an adequate introduction or companion to a theologian’s work. This is perhaps especially true in cases where the theologian has written as much as Robert Jenson has written, and when their thought is as demanding and unusual as his certainly, and perhaps notoriously, is. Some would argue that writing about another’s work is also inevitably complicated—if not compromised from the beginning—by either intense dislike for or intense devotion to it. All to say, it is virtually impossible to represent someone’s work fairly. So why try such a thing?
In the first place, there is no better way to honor a theologian’s contribution than by offering a critical and appreciative interpretation of it. I certainly mean to do just that: I owe a debt to Robert Jenson and his theology, and this book is one way of acknowledging that debt. Writing an introduction or companion to another’s work also provides readers who happen to be interested in Jenson the opportunity to gain new perspective on or insight into his work. Anyway, I know that I have learned from others’ readings of Jenson—including those readings I find incredible and appalling, as well as those I find persuasive and enchanting.
On that note, I have to say that I find much of the criticism of Jenson’s work not only unfortunate but even unwarranted. It is something like criticizing the Brooklyn Bridge for not being in London or Saint Paul’s Cathedral for not being built over water. Of course, it goes without saying that I do find serious problems with some of Jenson’s theological claims and maneuvers. But in this book I am trying to describe his work as charitably and faithfully as I can so that it appears in its own best light and as a gift to the church. It may very well be, as Jenson has said, that every theologian’s system is destined to be dismembered piece by piece and used up in ongoing debates. However, this is my attempt to envision the system as a whole and to recommend it as a beautiful, glorious word about the God we adore and the gospel we have been entrusted with. I have, as I said, a debt to him. If I can draw some others into the same indebtedness, then I will be doubly pleased.
Writing about a theology is inseparably bound up with what happens to you when you are reading it. What did the reading do to you? How did it wound? How did it heal? How did it bother? How did it enthuse? How did it confound? How did it illuminate? These are the things that move one to write. What is more, writing a book like this one is perhaps the best way to learn truly how a theology works, how it hangs together as a whole. Readers of Jenson already know that he himself did it with Karl Barth and Jonathan Edwards; so, on this score I am merely imitating him.
I would not have been able to begin this project, much less complete it, without the constant encouragement of my wife, Julie, and feedback from friends—in particular, Steve Wright and Fr. Al Kimel. While on sabbatical, I met weekly with a group of students, colleagues, and friends for an informal seminar on Jenson’s theology. I am deeply indebted to them as well, for their remarks on and proofreading of early drafts of these chapters. In no particular order, then, thanks to Zach Bennett, Justin Arnwine, Fr. Kenneth Tanner, Silas and Abby Sham, Christopher Wayne Brewer, and Danielle Larson. This work is dedicated to you.
Introduction
How (Not) to Read Theology
There are any numbers of ways to read a theologian’s work, some acceptable and others unacceptable; some disciplined, and others lazy; some beneficial and others harmful. At the risk of creating yet another typology,1 I might suggest for heuristic purposes the following forms as characteristic of undisciplined reading: (a) hagiographical readings seek out passages that cast a theologian, her work, or both in the best possible light; at the exact opposite extreme, (b) combative readings seek out passages that (at least seem to) indicate the inadequacy or malignancy of a theological text or system; (c) exploitative readings, the favored strategy of gifted students and deadline-facing scholars, mak
e raids on theological sources in search of “proof texts” that validate or invalidate some aspect of an argument; (d) exploratory readings are less violent, less consumerist, less rushed than these other undisciplined types, wandering more or less aimlessly through various sources with an eye out for anything especially beautiful or particularly useful. Disciplined theological reading, by contrast, takes one or more of the following forms: (e) diagnostic, (f) evaluative, or (g) formative: the first approach works painstakingly to identify the key features of a theologian’s thought as well as the origins of those ideas and the trajectories of their developments over time; the second approach passes judgment on the worthiness or unworthiness of parts or the whole of a theologian’s contribution; and the last posture seeks to engage a theologian’s thought in ways that train the imagination for skillful and faithful theological work.
My own reading of Jenson began as exploration, spurred on by Stanley Hauerwas’s suggestion that Jenson has been one of the most important contemporary theologians. But it quickly turned to something more serious. For years, I read and taught Jenson with theological and spiritual formation in mind—my own, as well as my students’. Eventually, however, thanks to questions from my students that I could not satisfactorily answer, and periodic conversational back-and-forth with friends and colleagues who also were reading Jenson,2 I realized I had to make my way through all of his works again, asking not only what they evoked in and made possible for me, but also how they held together as a whole, and whether or not his system worked on its own terms as an articulation of Christian reality. What I have written here is the upshot of all that reading and the many conversations that it generated along the way.
The Ways of Jenson’s Theology
Jenson’s work is easy to misread, and it often has been misunderstood and misrepresented, even by capable and sympathetic scholars. This should not be too surprising, given how much he published over his career; the peculiarity of his reasoning; his creative interpretations of biblical, theological, and philosophical texts;3 his reluctance to explain what he does not mean; and the density of his writing style. But many misreadings of Jenson result from the failure to appreciate how his thinking works. Unless readers are willing to engage patiently and carefully enough to get some sense of the overall shape and movement of Jenson’s project, the encompassing architecture and its internal dynamics, it will prove exceedingly difficult, if not in fact impossible, to understand any aspect of it.
His project, in one sense, is astonishingly ambitious. As Jenson frequently acknowledged, he attempted nothing less than a revision of the entire sweep of Christian dogmatics, beginning with a dramatic reimagining of what it means for God to be the Trinity revealed in the story the church tells about Jesus. Right from the beginning of his career, he at every turn called into question and offered alternatives to received notions of what it means for God to be who and what the gospel of Jesus’s kingdom claims that he is. But, on closer examination, at the heart of Jenson’s work are a handful of metaphysical and methodological insights that by and large determine the structure and direction of his entire project. In another sense, then, Jenson’s work is remarkably modest. We might say he wants simply to witness what happens to Christian dogma and praxis when these few insights about God and creation are given their full sway.4 Or, as Stephen Wright puts it, using Isaiah Berlin’s famous analogy, Jenson is a hedgehog and not a fox: he knows and cares about only one thing.
Eugene Rogers has described Jenson’s method as “mathematical,” a description that strikes very close to the truth. Jenson often does apply his central commitments like a theorem to whatever theological and ethical concerns grasp his attention. Perhaps a musical analogy works even better than the mathematical one. Take, for example, Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli method, a compositional technique that involves various inversions of a particular chord. Pärt’s music begins with a fundamental note, takes up the triad associated with it, and then moves on to the harmonics made possible by that triad. Throughout the piece, that triad remains the “tonal center,” as what Pärt calls the “melody voice” and “triad voice” complete each other. As Orthodox theologian Peter Bouteneff puts it, once Pärt establishes rules and structures for a given piece, the music (so to speak) composes itself. Jenson’s theology, I’m convinced, works much the same way. Beginning with a set of insights, Jenson works through whatever issue or theme takes his attention (e.g., creation or salvation, pneumatology or eschatology) by asking how these commitments change the usual understanding so that the gospel can be spoken more faithfully here and now.
At the risk of oversimplification and conceptual elision, we can perhaps figure the determinative moves of Jenson’s “compositional technique” in the following statements: (a) he holds to an understanding of God’s being as, like a meaningful conversation or a good story, an inherently lively and dramatic event; in his own words, “God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit”;5 (b) he insists that creaturely reality is “bespoken reality,” determined to be meaningful and good just by the dramatic coherence of the divine conversation about us and dialog with us, an insistence that requires (c) a revisionary metaphysical account of God’s being in relation to creation as not timeless but timely; in this scheme, God is not sheer duration, but lively presence, and creation exists just as the time God takes for us; (d) he contends, in affirmation of the traditional Creator/creature distinction, that our history with God is also God’s history with us, and (e) he upholds with the strictest Cyrillean christological logic that God has decided to be freely and fully available to and identified with creation in that history in the person of the Israelite Jesus, who is head of the totus Christus, an identification so absolute and comprehensive that (f) whatever happens to Jesus thereby happens to all creatures as they are drawn by the Spirit into his own relation to the Father—even now by anticipation of what is promised in the end.
Identifying God
Jenson is concerned above all with identifying God, a concern born from struggles to keep his faith through his undergraduate studies.6 From the very beginning of his career, therefore, he insisted that the gospel is good news only if we know who is presented to us in the gospel-proclamation. As he often put it, the news that, say, Stalin is raised from the dead would not be good for many, and certainly not for everyone and everything. That question, of course, forces another, which the young Jenson also recognized: how is this one true God identifiable? Where do we find him? How do we distinguish him from all the other possible gods? For identification to take place, Jenson concluded, God must make himself concretely available; that is, as he would say later, “he must be present to [us] in [our] space.”7 And to do that, God must be embodied for us so that we are able to point to him and say, “There is God.” For God to be so available, therefore, everything depended on the presence to us of the risen Christ “concrete in time and space, centrally on the Eucharistic table.”8 In coming to these commitments, Jenson was “Lutheran” even before he read Luther, and he continued to hold to them throughout his career.
Time and the Event of Being Present
Jenson’s doctoral work at Heidelberg (under the direction of Peter Brunner) focused on the doctrine of election in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Jenson was the first to recognize that the notion of eternity’s relation to time in CD II/1 is the “ruling center” of Barth’s work, and that the doctrine radically “upend[s] traditional understandings of the relation between time and eternity and thus inaugurate[s] an innovative ontology.”9 Jenson’s development of Barth’s doctrine was from the beginning the ruling center of his own project as well, and energized his attempts at carrying out the innovative ontology Barth inaugurated.
During this same time, Jenson adopted Brunner’s “bit of speculation” that God’s history with creatures is God’s own history, which when paired with Barth’s radical notion of God’s relation to time yielded for Jenson an understanding of God’s life as a
dramatic event—a happening with a beginning, a dramatic development full of “detours” and other surprises, and a fulfilling end. Jenson was convinced that however strange such a claim may seem at first, and whatever reworking of received metaphysics and theological assumptions it requires, it is nonetheless necessary to maintain. Most of his work, therefore, has been concerned with showing why it is necessary, and how such a vision of God’s life might be articulated intelligibly and faithfully.
Sheer availability does not make identification possible, however. Learning for human beings is always temporal, so God must live with us over time in such a way that we may learn what he is like. Only after we have lived with God long enough and closely enough to be able testify to his character can we answer faithfully the questions put to us about his identity. In the history of Israel, and especially in the life and death of a certain trouble-making Galilean peasant, God does in fact live with us in ways that can be known, as he makes himself available to be seen and to be heard, present to act and to be acted on.
All history happens within the unfolding of the will of God, to be sure, but by God’s will only certain events within that history reveal God to us. God is identified not only in these certain events but also with them. Ultimately, Jesus’s life (a life that includes Israel’s and the church’s) is the particular history that speaks of God, and it does so precisely because the events of Jesus’s life are simply the events of God being God in reach of us. Therefore, whatever we learn of God, we necessarily learn it from Jesus and what happens with him.
Telling the Story Promisingly
Because God’s life is itself dramatic, his history with us makes a story, one with a recognizable (if at times bizarrely twisted) plot.10 It is that story that is given to us when Israel’s Scriptures are read in ways fitted to the New Testament’s witness to Jesus. And it is knowing that story that in turn enables our witness to God. When we are asked how to identify the true God, the story gives us an answer: God is whoever delivered Israel from Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead. When we are asked how we know that this God is good and wise and just, the story gives us an answer: because in Christ’s sufferings he triumphs over injustice, evil, and death, and because in Christ’s victory he opens the future to us with the unconditional promise of a share in his own abundant life.
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