The End Is Music

by Chris E W Green

  A creature, Jenson insists, following Luther, is nothing other than a created word of God that answers to the uncreated Word whose image we are made to share. We exist at all because we are spoken to and about by God. We can trust this existence ultimately to be good because we are spoken to and about by the Trinity revealed in the life of Jesus. But given that we do so exist, and that the God whom Jesus reveals is both our loving origin and our beatific destiny, we can talk lovingly and beautifully to and about God and to and about one another.

  But we must learn to speak and to listen as God does. Now, in this time between the times, all human speech comes finally either to law or to gospel. The one binds by command and demand; the other frees by unconditional promise. The one determines the present by a closed past; the other determines the present by an open future. For Jenson, the gospel works as gospel only as we (again and again, in new situations and contexts) learn to speak about what God has done in ways that move people toward the glad future they’ve been promised. Any so-called proclamation of the gospel that does not actually effect freedom for others is in fact only “law.”

  We can truly speak as God speaks, because through the resurrection of Jesus all things are possible for us. As Jenson puts it time and again, what will happen (in the end), can happen (in the here and now). Believers can afford the risks of love because the one who is at work among us is present to us from the far side of death, and because we are sure that when all is said and done, he will take us to himself. Where he is, we will be also.

  The Sense of an Ending

  In the end, we, with all creation, will be taken into God. This means we will be judged—not so much rewarded or punished as rectified. “Judgment,” Jenson insists, “is the act that restores the community to its right order.”11 And when God is the judge and all creation is the judged, everyone and everything is once for all put to rights. Now, we pray as we were taught to pray, “Father, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” So long as history lasts, God’s people will continue to pray that prayer. When God finally answers that prayer, history ends (not in termination, but in fulfillment, in translation into God’s own life). Then, God will be through doing all that God has to do for creation to be all that God intended it to be. Then, the joys begin. “The end is music”12—and dancing.

  If these are in fact the conceptual moves that Jenson’s “compositional technique” relies upon, how does he characteristically put them to use? How does his method actually work? A couple of examples should make the point, and prepare the way for closer study of Jenson’s theology. First, in his proposed vision of Christ and Trinity for the Muslim world, Jenson begins with the notion of the prophet in Islamic theology and asks what it would mean if such a prophet, in a departure from received Islamic tradition, were truly risen from the dead and if the spirit of that prophet were in fact God’s own Spirit, so that the prophet spoke from a wholly new creaturely reality both for God to creatures and to God as a creature.13 He concludes that what follows from those two suppositions would be everything required for a faithful Trinitarian and christological confession in Islamic contexts. Second, and similarly, in his reflections on the legitimacy and necessity of prayer to Mary, the Mother of God, Jenson contends that God, in order to be known and loved, must have a space among us, a place where he is available to be seen and heard and touched. Heaven is such a place, he believes, as was Israel’s temple, and, later, Israel’s prophets and, later still, Israel’s scriptures. Last in that line, Mary too is a “created space for God.”14 As mater dei, the “Container of the Uncontainable,” she is in her own person heaven and temple and prophet and scripture. Therefore, Jenson concludes, “After all the Lord’s struggle with his beloved Israel, he finally found a place in Israel that unbelief would not destroy like the Temple, or silence like the prophets, or simply lose, like the Book of the Law before Josiah. This place is a person. To ask Mary to pray for us is to meet him there.”15

  In these examples, the outlines of Jenson’s usual theological moves are perhaps unusually clear. His arguments are not always this tightly drawn, but they do always follow a comparable logic. And once this method, or compositional technique, is understood, Jenson’s work as a whole and in its parts begins to make a more comprehensible sense.

  The Coherence of Jenson’s Project

  Jenson had a long and productive career. As a result, those who are interested in his work have to decide how all that he has written fits together. Is there an early Jenson to be distinguished from a mature Jenson? If so, how does the early work fit with the later work? What changes or developments demark the early and the mature? Does he, as some have suggested, shift away from his radical political and theological beginnings? Does he become over time increasingly conservative and “Catholic”? Does he switch sides in the culture wars?

  As I read him, there is a difference to be made between Jenson’s early and later work. Story and Promise (1973), in my judgment, should be regarded as the first work of the mature Jenson. But the discontinuities from his earlier work are relatively slight and all too easily exaggerated. Politically, he does not repudiate or abandon the radicalism of his youth in relation to issues such as race, militarism, and the American dream, although he does shift his focus to what he deems pressing social and cultural concerns—such as abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage—that bring him into alignment with conservatives on these particular issues.16 Theologically, he refines his articulations over time and takes up engagement with new conversation partners, but he never abandons the core commitments that shaped his earliest works.17 So, at least as I see it, it is best to read Jenson’s work before Story and Promise as groundwork for what comes in that book and after it. And, again as I see it, it is best to read his Systematics and the other dogmatic works alongside the scriptural commentary, the philosophical works, and the cultural criticism. The more widely he is read, the more deeply he can be understood.

  1. For good reason, my friend Tony Hunt laments, “Of the creation of typologies there is no end.”

  2. Especially Stephen Wright, without whose encouragement and direction this book would almost certainly never have been written.

  3. As Pannenberg and others have noted, Jenson is an immensely learned theologian. But it is impossible at times to tell the difference between his innovation and his traditionalism due to the ways he reads other theologians’ works (from Gregory of Nyssa to Jonathan Edwards).

  4. In an early essay, he claims he is “more and more occupied with identifying the simplest, most rudimentary utterances of the faith.”

  5. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:75.

  6. Jenson, “Theological Autobiography,” 47.

  7. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:48.

  8. Jenson, “Theological Autobiography,” 47.

  9. Jenson, “D. Stephen Long’s Saving Karl Barth,” 132.

  10. Jenson thanks his wife, Blanche, for keeping this commitment always on his mind.

  11. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:324.

  12. Ibid., 2:369.

  13. Jenson, “Risen Prophet,” 57–67.

  14. Jenson, “Space for God,” 56.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Jenson differs from these conservatives most, perhaps, in his refusal of the nationalism that characterizes much of their thought.

  17. These developments, or at least the need for them, are often obvious. See, for example, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology,” an early article (published in 1969) that includes the admission that he has just begun the work needed to think through his eschatological claims, and “Bride of Christ,” a late one (published in 2011 Festschrift for Carl Braaten) that acknowledges a major omission in his Systematics. For other examples, see his response in Dialog to H. Paul Santmire’s critique of Religion ag
ainst Itself (1968), his work on Satan, “Evil as Person” (1989), “Second Thoughts about Theologies of Hope” (2000), “Second Thought about Inspiration” (2004), and his renunciation of what he claims is a major pseudo-question in “Ipse Pater Non Est Impassibilis” (2009). See also his own account given in “Reversals,” 30–33.

  1

  God

  Identification & Event

  Christian speech is concerned, first and foremost, with identifying God. As Jenson puts it, everything we have to say about anything is ultimately an elaboration of who and what we understand God to be. And that means we have no hope of proclaiming the gospel faithfully unless we know how to “intend the specific reality”18 that is God. The problem is, there is an endless number of gods on offer; and by itself the word “God” is so elastic that it can be stretched to mean almost anything. Besides all that, we are at every turn tempted to make a God in our own image, a God who fits our needs. The first great religious question, then, is not “Does God exist?” but “Which God is truly God?”19 Out of all the gods described in the various religious and spiritual discourses, which one truly answers to reality? Which one can actually get done for us what the gospel promises?20

  The Events of God’s Identification

  The good news is that the living and true God identifies himself to us. According to Israel’s and the church’s witness, God presents himself to us in particular historical events, making himself available to be known in certain ways at specific times and specific places. For Jenson, this claim about God’s identifiability entails (at least) three critical affirmations: (1) because God makes himself available, we can in and through these events begin to know him, distinguishing him from other putative and so-called gods and from the figments of our own imaginings; (2) because God makes himself available, the events create an identifiable history, a narrative that truly reveals the character of the one who has acted in these ways; and (3) in this availability, God indeed makes himself who and what he is. God, just by being God, both exists and creates and saves what he creates into his own existence. The event of God’s life with God and the event that is God’s life with creation are truly one event. What God is for himself includes what God is for creation. It could not be otherwise if the gospel of Jesus’s incarnation and resurrection is true.

  The apostolic witness given in the New Testament lays down the first rule for all truly Christian identifications of God: “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”21 Again, in Jenson’s formulation, all of these terms are crucial and equally important. We cannot talk about this God without talking about this Israelite Jesus and his being raised from the dead. But we also cannot talk about Jesus, or his people, Israel, without talking about this God who delivers Jesus from the death that had claimed him and all other creatures. And we cannot talk about resurrection without talking about the God of Israel and the promise he keeps in raising Jesus from the grave as he had raised Jesus’s ancestors from Egypt.

  Against the force of much contemporary theological pressure, Jenson contends that God is “intrinsically knowable.”22 But the word God by itself is so ambiguous that it means more or less nothing. Even if we avoid that problem by identifying God with a proper name—say, YHWH or Father, Son, and Spirit—we still need identifying descriptions. Names, in other words, work to identify only as and through story. Or, more precisely, they depend upon the kind of coherence that only dramatics makes possible. Drama, after all, is a narrative carried along by conversation and dialog—and that is exactly the kind of reality that creatures inhabit with God.

  “The uniqueness of God is narratively established.”23 And so we have to know the determining events of the divine history with us if we hope to recognize the one the divine name actually identifies. This is why, for Jenson, telling the one story that the Scriptures tell is nothing less than mandatory for those who wish to worship the God revealed in Christ. Without that story, Christian claims about God’s being, purpose, and character, as well as the biblical accounts of divine action and the invocations and petitions found in the church’s spiritual and liturgical traditions, are simply irreconcilably conflicted.24 If, then, we hope to speak the same gospel the prophets and apostles spoke, if we hope to identify for ourselves and for the others the God the canonical Scriptures specify, then we must let the story of what happened with Israel and with Jesus, as Israel-in-person, determine our claims from first to last.

  The Identification of God as Event

  Jenson holds that the Scriptures tell one story because there is one story to be told. And there is one story to be told because God is one. Or, as Andrew Nichol puts it, “there is one story because there is one God whose very act and being provides the narrative coherence in what appears an otherwise disparate story.”25 In a word, dramatic coherence is possible for our history because God’s life is itself dramatically coherent. God’s own life has a narrative structure: this is the significance of the Trinitarian relations. Therefore, as God happens to creation, history itself becomes meaningful and storyable.

  In Jenson’s vision, God is identifiable with and by events in our history because God’s own life is event,26 the (only) kind of uncreated event that creates without in any way violating either its own integrity or the integrity of what it creates. But what does it mean to talk about God in these terms? And how does such talk matter for the church’s preaching and prayer? A difference between Jenson and Moltmann on this score proves instructive. As Moltmann articulates it,

  there is in fact no “personal God” projected in heaven. But there are persons in God: the Son, the Father, and the Spirit. In that case one does not simply pray to God as a heavenly Thou, but prays in God. One does not pray to an event but in this event. One prays through the Son to the Father in the Spirit.27

  Jenson, by contrast, holds that we pray both in and to God. The “persons” of the Trinity are precisely in the structure of their mutual relations one personal God. He holds to this commitment because he believes that the language of the Scriptures demands it, as does the religious and spiritual life mandated by the gospel. “The Bible’s language about God is drastically personal”:28 God is said to change his mind, to act and react, to make threats and then to withdraw them, to make promises and then fulfill them in utterly surprising ways. So, if we reject all this language as simply inappropriately anthropomorphic, we cannot rightly identify or know the God of the Scriptures.

  But how can an event be a person? As Jenson sees it, a person, whether divine or human, is quite simply many events as one event, many occasions drawn together as one coherent happening. That is, a person is someone whose story, when finished, makes sense as a whole. We know through the incarnation-event that this is true both of God and of human beings, and we know that only because God is a person in that sense that we can be persons at all. God, by being personal, creates persons who can be personal with each other as well as with him. For us, nothing is more personal than prayers of need. And for God, nothing is more personal than responses to those needs and the prayers they generate. Therefore, as Jenson will say again and again, “unabashed petitionary prayer is the one decisively appropriate creaturely act over against the one true God.”29 Prayer names the way creatures enter into the conversation that God personally is, dialoging with each other and with him.

  The Identities of God’s Act

  When speaking of God, Jenson as a rule prefers the language of “identities” to “persons.” There are, he wants to say, three identities in the one act of God. Hence, to speak meaningfully about the one God, we have to work out all our statements in three interconnected ways. If we hope to say how God is good, for example, we have to say that God is good like a giver is good, good like a gift is good, and good like the outcome of a gift given and received is good. Or, if we hope to talk about God as love, we have to “run the predicate across all three identities” by saying how that love is the begi
nning (“Father”), presence (Jesus), and fulfilment (“Spirit”) of all things. Insofar as we remain faithful to the gospel, we won’t speak of God as “love-in-general.” We will, instead, insist that God is Jesus’s love—the love he shares with the Father and with us in the one Spirit—as the source and goal of our lives. The same pattern holds true for all Christian theologizing. Whatever the doctrine of divine simplicity is taken to mean, it cannot mean that the triune identities make no difference for talking about God.30

  Jenson insists that Christians necessarily specify God by appeal to these three identities precisely because time, which fundamentally conditions human existence, has three identities. In the Scriptures we find that “God is . . . identified by a narrative that uses the tense-structure of ordinary language, rather than by time-neutral characters, as in ‘God is whoever is omnipotent.’”31 As creatures, we are bounded in time by God, who as our Creator, is our past, present, and future. In Pauline language, we come from Christ, are held together in him, and are ultimately reconciled into our destiny with him. Therefore, attempts to identify the gospel’s God require us to “point with all three of time’s arrows.”32 God not only gives us time—a beginning and an end that open up a present—but also gives our lives in that time meaning and purpose. God gives us a good beginning and a good end “rhymed” in a good present.