To identify the gospel’s God, we must identify Jesus. And to do that, we have to acknowledge the ways that God’s self-revelation is temporally structured. The temptation is to abstract to a timeless God, a God beyond our history, a God unaffected by what happens in time. But such a God could not and would not take on flesh as one of us. Such a God could not and would not suffer and die for us. Such a God could not and would not share an identity with us. If the gospel is true, then God simply cannot be sheerly immune to time, essentially and necessarily removed from our history. God, by his own free decision, must share a history with us, so that what happens to us happens to him, and vice versa. “The reality of Christ, his death, resurrection, and present Lordship, is not merely a set of events within what is created by some other act of God. It is a Trinitarian identity of the one act of God by which the world is.”33
Jesus
This is perhaps best expressed in a characteristic Jensonian axiom: God is what happens with Jesus. What are we to make of this claim? Basically this: Jesus, living in our time as one of us, experienced God as his “past” and his “future,” that is, as the transcendent givenness and the transcendent goal that afforded his life its definition. And because Jesus himself is God-as-a-creature, his experience determines the reality of all other creatures. Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, both trusts in God as the ground of his being and hopes in God as the realization of his fullness, and just so lives lovingly with God in the present. By living in that way, he draws us into his own share in the divine life. Said another way, the enfleshed Word is not only God but also another than God, and therefore enjoys a unique relation to the Father and to the Spirit—the very relation we are created to share. It is precisely because of the eternal difference in the divine life between Father, Son, and Spirit that Jesus can remain one with the Father even in “the most radical state of ‘otherness’ from God or separation from God.” Without this divine identity-in-difference, God’s life could not “open” to that which is not-God. Creation—and, of course, salvation—would be strictly impossible.
Jenson holds, in his own words, to a “hyper-Cyrillean” Christology.34 He wants, at every point, to keep the focus on Jesus, the enfleshed Son. He maintains it as axiomatic: Christology begins not with an account of the two natures and their interaction but with the life-events of “the one protagonist of the gospels.”35 Above all, we must avoid separating the Word from Jesus. The Word does not “become flesh” in the sense that he becomes someone he was not. The gospel requires us to insist that Jesus and the Word are one and the same person, however difficult it may be to explain how that can be so.
In whatever way the Son may antecede his conception by Mary, we must not posit the Son’s antecedent subsistence in such fashion as to make the incarnation the addition of the human Jesus to a Son who was himself without him. By the dogma, Mary is the mother of God the Son, she is Theotokos, and not of a man who is united with God the Son, however firmly. Thus the church confesses that God the Son was himself conceived when Mary became pregnant—even if theology often labors to evade this confession’s more alarming entailments. That Mary is Theotokos indeed disrupts the linear time-line or pseudo time-line on which we Westerners automatically—and usually subliminally—locate every event, even the birth of God the Son; but that disruption is all to the theological good.36
One other Jensonian christological axiom needs to be noted. Just as surely as Jenson’s work is dependent on his understanding of Barth’s doctrine of election,37 it is dependent on his development of Augustine’s doctrine of the totus Christus. God freely has decided that he would rather not be God at all than to be God without us. And just for that reason, God’s history cannot be lived and his story cannot be told without the parts we play in it. There has to be an Israel to be delivered, and a pharaoh for Israel to be delivered from. There have to be “rulers of this present age” to crucify Jesus, and a death for Jesus to be resurrected from. God’s sovereign life with us makes a history, and in that history God makes himself real to us, and in that history we become what we’re promised to be.
Jenson’s Christology has serious pneumatological implications, which we can anticipate here by drawing attention to one defining feature. The Father finds his “I” in the Son, and so does the Spirit: God, after all, is not three I’s but one. The Father does not know himself and the Son and the Spirit. The Father knows himself only in the Son by the Spirit. The same holds for the Spirit, as well; but of course the Spirit finds himself in Jesus differently than the Father does. The Father knows Jesus as “the Beloved,” the “only-begotten Son,” and so knows himself as loving, begetting Father. The Spirit knows Jesus as the totus Christus, and so recognizes himself as the Freedom that exists in the relations of Jesus to the Father and to the members of his community. The Son knows himself as the Father’s beloved, as the bearer of the Spirit, and knows us as members of his beloved, Spirit-baptized body. Because he is not ashamed to call us his own, we share his relation to the Father in the Spirit.
Father
God is Father in that God is the givenness of reality—both for himself and for us. The “one ultimate fact” is the “mere Fatherhood of God the Father.”38 “The existence of the Father is the ultimate sheer fact, the contingency so absolute as to be a necessity.”39 On this front, Jenson is following a dominant tradition in Orthodox theology (as expressed, for example, in John of Damascus’s Expositio fidei: “We believe in one Father, the beginning and cause of all, begotten of no one, without cause or generation, alone subsisting”). Jenson holds that we can know that God’s Fatherhood is ultimate because of what the Scriptures tell us about Jesus’s life: he lived and died over against God as the transcendent horizon of his and all other reality. The Jesus narratively described in the Gospels is one who knows himself and everything else only in relation to the Father’s will—what already is true because of that will, and what in the end will be true because of that will. Particularly in his prayers, Jesus shows that the Father is the “source of all being that neither we nor yet God himself can get behind, for reasons or for other explanations.”40 For creatures, as well as for God himself, there is no getting behind the Father as Father—because the Spirit frees the Father to speak the Word. Circular? Yes, of course. And the circularity is precisely to the point.
According to Jenson, the Father is above all the one who speaks and so is spoken to. Creation, for example, is what it is just because it is commanded to exist in anticipation of its soon-to-be realized purpose; this commanding is the Father’s peculiar contribution to the Triune act of creating.41 Not only in relation to creation, but also in relation to himself God is a speaker: Jesus, the Word, is nothing but the one the Father “speaks.” And precisely by being himself, through the Spirit’s gift, the Son makes the Father who he is; the word makes the speaker as surely as the speaker makes the word. This is why, living among us, Jesus reveals the Father no less as he speaks to the Father in prayer than when he speaks for the Father in teaching and prophecy, in command and promise. The Word, having taken our humanity as his own, calls on the Father from creaturely need—for himself, no doubt, but always also for us—fitting those needs and petitions to the fullness and joy of the divine conversation. In him, then, we see that intercessory prayer is the characteristic human activity. We are never more ourselves than when we are calling on the one who has called us into being for the sake of others.
We might ask if it is necessary to call the first identity of God “Father.” But, controversially, Jenson insists that it is. Why? Because the Scriptures present Jesus himself speaking to and about God in this way. No doubt, Jesus did so contingently, within a particular socioreligious context and under peculiar linguistic conditions. Still, we should not distance ourselves from the practice: to do so would be to take leave of Jesus and so of the faith.
That Jesus addressed God as “Father” was . . . a matter of using the term of filial address that would in fact pick o
ut the God upon whom he intended to call. Of the possible individuating terms of filial address, “father” rather than “mother” was required, because Jesus’ God was the God of Israel. Israel could not, for reasons given in every step of its history with God and still as compelling for Israel as ever, address the Lord as “mother,” this being the appropriated address to the principle deity alternative, then as now, to the Lord: the god/ess of fertility religion.42
Jenson has been criticized on this point by those (rightly) troubled by patriarchal, misogynistic uses of “Father” language.43 But he would agree with Sarah Coakley’s reading of Aquinas: “Father” is used appropriately only as it names one of the three identities of God. When used to describe an aspect of God’s relation to us—that is, when it is used as a metaphor—it is technically inappropriate: no less or more so than other metaphors.44 In other words, the name “Father” is necessary, because it joins us to the truth of Jesus’s own life as the Scriptures give it to us. But the metaphor “father,” while also canonical, is no more or less useful than any other such metaphors. The Father is no more fatherly than he is motherly. The Trinity is no more or less like a parent than he is like a song or a bird or a windstorm. We should not forget that the name has no figurative content. It simply points to, singles out, the transcendent source Jesus knew so intimately and makes known to us with that same intimacy. What John Damascene says in his exposition of the Orthodox faith about the notion of procession applies also to the names of the divine relations: “we have learned there is a difference between generation and procession, but the nature of that difference we in no wise understand.” “Father,” in other words names a difference not only from “Son” and “Spirit” in the divine processions, but also a difference from all analogies, including fatherhood. We have no idea what that difference entails, which is the very reason we must insist upon it.
The Spirit
Jenson’s theology is radically christocentric, as even a cursory reading of his work makes plain. But, as already suggested, it is just as thoroughly pneumatological. We might say, in fact, that everything Jenson wants to say about the Father he takes from what he believes about Jesus, and that everything he believes about Jesus comes from what he takes to be true of the Spirit. At the risk of drawing too fine a difference, we might say that for Jenson Jesus is central but the Spirit is primary.
This Spirit-logic comes clearest, perhaps, in Jenson’s account of the divine processions. In classical models, the Father begets the Son and breaths the Spirit, and is not himself begotten or breathed. John of Damascus (Exposito fidei I.8.), yet again, is exemplary:
The Father is without cause and unborn, for he is derived from nothing but derives from himself his being. Nor does he derive a single quality from another. Rather, he is himself the beginning and cause of the existence of all things in a definite and natural manner. The Son is derived from the Father after the manner of generation, and the Holy Spirit likewise is derived from the Father, yet not after the manner of generation, but after that of procession.
Jenson, as we have seen, agrees that the Father is Source, the “ultimate fact” of God’s reality and creation’s. But, unlike Damascene, Jenson insists that the Father who breathes the Spirit is also freed by the Spirit for that very breathing. On this account, the tradition’s description of the divine processions is, in Jenson’s judgment, badly malformed. He offers a corrective: of the Trinitarian identities, the Spirit has “metaphysical priority” because, as Scripture says, God is Spirit (John 4:24). And drawing on the Augustinian notion of the nexus amoris, Jenson argues that precisely because the Spirit is the one who “intends love,” the Father and the Son—the two who are the “immediate objects of his intention”—are freed to love each other “with a love that is identical with the Spirit’s gift of himself to each of them.”45 God’s life, we might say, “moves” from a beginning to an end, an end that makes the beginning possible—indeed, God just is that “movement.” Whatever we want to say about the divine attributes applies to that dynamism, that movement, that event. And of the three dynamics of that one movement, the Spirit has primacy in the sense that the Spirit is the fullness of God, the final realization of all God’s purposes.
What does this mean for an account of the divine processions? In Jenson’s words, “The Father begets the Son and freely breathes the Spirit; the Spirit liberates the Father for the Son and the Son from and for the Father; the Son is begotten and liberated, and so reconciles the Father with the future his Spirit is.”46
In Jenson’s logic, it is precisely as the realization of God’s fullness and the final future of creation that the Spirit frees the Father to be the primal beginning as both begetter of the Son and the author of creation. What makes God God is precisely that the divine end and the divine beginning are one, a oneness that is like the oneness of a good story, which is “an ordering by the outcome of the narrated events.” A story’s “animating spirit” is its power “to liberate each specious present from mere predictabilities, from being the mere consequence of what has gone before, and open it to itself, to itself as what that present is precisely not yet.”47
The Metaphysics of God’s Identities
Obviously, for this model to work, there must be some sense in which God’s own life is storied and storyable. On Jenson’s account, “the dynamism of God’s life is a narrative causation in and so of God.”48 And talking in that way requires a radical revisioning of what we mean when we speak of God’s attributes. In particular, it requires reworking how we speak about God’s relation to time and to events within time. And that revisioning of metaphysics is just what Jenson is concerned with doing. His project, at its center, is the attempt at letting the gospel, and the Scripture’s witness to it, set the terms for Christian metaphysics. In fact, as he sees it, this has always been the project of the Christian theological tradition, and he aims to think along with that tradition, even while at points he finds it necessary to critique and rework aspects of it deeply. He certainly is not interested in simply re-stating it, but he is equally uninterested in out-and-out rejection of it.
Eternity & Time
Everyone experiences the passage of time, and sooner or later we all realize (consciously or not) that that passage threatens us. We exist at all only insofar as a future remains open for us. At some point, as time keeps passing, there will be no more future; everything will have passed into the past, and we will be no more. Jenson believes that because of this experience of temporality, and the dread that it generates, we all need—and so seek out for ourselves—a god who can give us an “eternity” that transcends time and so brackets our lives in that transcendence. A god, by Jenson’s definition, is “reality in which the ever-threatening divorce of past and future is averted, in which what we have been and what we must or will be somehow rhyme to make a coherent whole.”49 The real question, therefore, is how any particular god transcends time, and what that transcendence means for us as the creatures of that god.
My students usually think of eternity as the kind of time (and heaven as the kind of space) in which God lives. As they imagine it, eternity is more or less temporality without beginning or end. But by Jenson’s definition, eternity names the way that a god can be relied on to guarantee survival into one kind of future or another. For our lives to have meaning, we have to have a god to bank on.50 In the Western tradition, people have tended to imagine gods who remain impervious to time’s passing. Think, for example, of Aristotle’s First Mover or Plotinus’s One. It would be absurd, even blasphemous, to depict these gods as “negotiating with Abraham or dining with Israel’s elders.” It would be just as absurd to depict humans seeing these gods from behind, as the book of Exodus pictures Moses seeing the God of Israel.51 Such gods, however magnificent, cannot communicate with creatures and so cannot share a history with them, much less make covenant with them. The God of the gospel, however, does communicate and does make covenant with creatures. In
Jensonian terms, the transcendence that the gospel reveals is eternal in that it makes sense of our lives by weaving past, present, and future together into a story. The God of the gospel can do this because, as Father, Son, and Spirit, he bounds our existence—and so can bind it into a meaningful whole.
That brings us face-to-face with perhaps Jenson’s most controversial claim: God’s identity is “set by what he does in time.”52 It is, he says, “the metaphysically fundamental fact of Israel’s and the church’s faith that its God is freely but, just so, truly self-identified by, and so with, contingent created temporal events.” In particular, the events of Jesus’s life are determinative—not only for creatures, but also for the Creator. God’s reality is determined in what happens with Mary’s son. In fact, in Jenson’s phrasing, God just is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit.53
The doctrine of Trinity is at its root the insistence that the history God has with his people, plotted by the relations of its dramatis personae, is not only our life but his. In his history with us, precisely as Israel’s Scripture plots it, God is the Author of the story, and a personal Doer and Sufferer within the story, and the Breath of Life that enlivens and binds the two—in Christian jargon, he is Father, Son/Logos and Spirit. The doctrine of Trinity, right to the farthest reaches of its dialectical development, is merely the conceptualized insistence that God is not Father, Son/Logos and Spirit only for us, but for himself.54
It is easy to mistake Jenson’s meaning. Even otherwise capable theologians—like George Hunsinger and Oliver Crisp, for example—have published uncomfortably bad critiques of Jenson’s systematics, largely because they could not make sense of what he wants to say about God’s being in relation to creaturely existence.55 So how are we to understand him? How do we avoid their mistakes?
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