The End Is Music
Page 4
We need, first, to bear in mind the ways that Jenson uses the language of “person.” In Jenson’s account, “person” is being used of God in two different senses. In keeping with received usage, it refers to what the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinctly in relation to each other. But it also refers to what the Father, Son, and Spirit are inseparably in relation to creation. In the first sense, there are three persons. In the second, there is one.
What is the logic that unites these uses? Jenson argues that all persons, whether the divine one or the human ones, are in fact persons just insofar as their experiences have narrative coherence. What distinguishes the personal from all personal creatures is that God’s narrative coherence is identical with himself at every point. In other words, God is who he is just in being faithful to himself. How he is both entirely determines and is determined entirely by who he is. On this point, Jenson is not far removed from Thomas Aquinas: the divine essence and the divine existence are one. God is God’s own reason for existence. God is who he is precisely because he freely decides to be what he is.56 And in the same way, history is what it is because God, Father, Son, and Spirit, has decided freely to be for us and not against us or without us.
Second, we need to distinguish the notion of person from the notion of identity. We can state it in a formula: because God is personally involved in time with created persons, he has a particular identity. The nature of temporal existence, at least as Jenson understands it, requires this distinction. A person can enter into conversation and partnership with other persons only insofar as they have a reliable identity. “There are many putative gods and many putative lords . . . the true God tells which one he is.”57
Jenson holds that unlike the God of Israel, the God whom the church worships, pagan gods have no regard for their identities. Their deity consists precisely in their immunity from time, so they have no need to maintain an identity. Even if initially their worship uses apparently identifying names and descriptions, eventually these names and descriptions, as well as the identities that they serve, are abandoned as worshipers learn to transcend earthly/temporal/bodily restrictions.58 The God of the Scriptures, however, never transcends his identity. Indeed, in the language of the Pentateuch, he is jealous of his identity. He is who he says he is, and he does everything he must to make sure we can trust what he has revealed about himself. This must be so, Jenson believes, for the gospel to be reliably good news. If God transcends his identity, if he is other than who he says he is, if he at any point is other than what he has shown himself to be, then he is finally unidentifiable and the genuine mutuality that the gospel promises is simply impossible.
It is worth lingering over these claims, because they are near the heart of Jenson’s theology. As he sees it, God, in creating a history for us and sharing that history with us, is always being faithful to himself, and precisely in that way he both reveals his identity to and effects his identity for himself and for us. Notice: what God does for himself and what God does for us are one and the same. But this is not to say that God is dependent on creation, or that God is somehow altered by creatures into a truer, more beautiful God. It is to say, instead, that God freely decides to be our God, freely determines to be with us rather than without us. We know this is so in the event of incarnation: God makes himself—for himself, and for us—available and identifiable in the Word-made-flesh. Therefore, we know the Father in the same way he knows himself: in the Son.
Creation & Change
Does not talking in these ways suggest that God is dependent on creation for his existence and identification? Or that God is changed by his engagements in and with creatures? No. Nothing can keep God from being the God he determines to be for us, and neither creation nor incarnation should be thought to constitute a change of any kind in God. In keeping with these commitments, Jenson again and again insists that God is not made to be God by what creation does to him, but by what he does in history for himself and for us.59 God is the God he is because of what he does for us, not what we do for him. Creating and the taking up of creatureliness as his own do not make God a different God from what he would have been otherwise—precisely because there is and can be no “otherwise.” As Jenson insists, “we must indeed think that God remains himself, come what may in his history with us.” But even so, we must not allow ourselves to think God remains faithful to himself by immunity to or relational distance from our reality and us. In fact, as Kathryn Tanner explains, precisely because God is not one being among beings, one agent among other agents, God can be closer to us than we are to ourselves or to each other.60 In human-to-human interaction, we have always to fear the risks of engagement and influence. But we do not have to fear that from God.
A comparison may help make the point. Maximus insists that God, the Creator of all being, is not a being—and precisely for that reason he cannot be an origin, an intermediary state, or a consummation. God does not cause and is not affected by causes or effects, all of which are creaturely and so fall entirely under the sway of his sovereignty.61 One might think this contradicts Jenson’s account, but in fact the two accounts harmonize beautifully.
God is the origin, intermediary state and consummation of all created things, but as acting upon things not as acted upon, which is also the case where everything else we call Him is concerned. He is origin as Creator, intermediary state as provident ruler, and consummation as final end. For, as Scripture says, “All things are from Him and through Him, and have Him as their goal” (Rom 11: 36).62
With all of this Jenson agrees. He would only add that God acts even in being acted upon. As he has said, God suffers freely, which means that unlike creatures, God does not suffer the fact that he suffers. Therefore, God is in all things as source, guide, and goal by acting (as Creator) even within, as well as without and upon, creation. The Father, acting without time; the Spirit, acting upon time; and the Son, within time, freely acting and being acted upon as a creature in divine communion with the Father in the Spirit. In that ever-active acting-and-being-acted-upon, the Trinity creates, saves, and consummates all things. Even when God is at our mercy, he is merciful.
Contingency & Faithfulness
Talking in this way helps us to see how we can affirm (as Scripture seems to indicate) that God truly is affected by what happens with and to us without in any way compromising who or what he is. Assuming humanity as his own, he enters fully into creaturely existence, into the cause-and-effect eventualities of history, so that we experience him as he is in his personal identity. This is necessary for us, because “our only hope is God’s personal stake in the good he wills for us.”63 And it is possible for God because Jesus, the Word, is both God and with God as another than God. Just in that Jesus is the Son of the Father through the Spirit it is possible that what happens with him and to him determines the nature of creaturely reality. In Jenson’s own words, “the contingency of the world is founded in the contingency of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection . . . [T]he contingently particular story of Jesus is the universal truth of created reality.”
It is because Jesus was truly tempted and so might have fallen, and because the Father was not compelled to raise Jesus from the death to which his steadfastness brought him, and because this contingently faithful and rescued person is the eternal Son for whom all things were created (Col. 1:15–20) that all created being might not have been.64
If this seems weirdly speculative and unorthodox, consider what Irenaeus said about the Logos: “Since he who saves already existed, it was necessary that he who would be saved should come into existence, that the one who saves should not exist in vain.”65 Fr. John Behr, commenting on this passage, admits that it might jar modern theological sensibilities. But he insists that Irenaeus’s statement is in fact in keeping with the Orthodox tradition, and he lauds him for theologizing “strictly from within the economy, from what can in fact be known and spoken about . . . of God’s activity and revelation in Chri
st.”66 And Behr concludes, with Irenaeus and so, at least in part, with Jenson, that the crucifixion of Jesus grounds the existence of the world.
Theologically speaking, creation and its history begins with the Passion of Christ and from this “once for all” work looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light, making everything new. Christian cosmology, elaborated as it must be from the perspective of the Cross, sees the Cross as impregnated in the very structure of creation . . . The power of God revealed in and through the Cross brought creation into being and sustains it in existence . . . Just as the date of the Passion in antiquity was considered to be 25 March (which . . . was the basis for calculating the date of his nativity, nine months later), so also in antiquity 25 March was considered to be the very date of creation, the Creation which revolves around the axis of the eternal, immovable Cross. As paradoxical as it might sound, one can say, theologically, that creation and salvation were effected simultaneously on that day, 25 March, A.D. 33, when Christ gave himself for the life of the world.67
For Jenson, then, God is faithful within the contingencies of time. Indeed, faithfulness would be meaningless otherwise. If the incarnation is what the gospel claims it to be, then God does not protect himself from time, but makes commitments in time and remains faithful to them across time.68 Jesus, God the Word, really did present himself to the Patriarchs. He really did write the Ten Words for Moses and Israel. He really did speak through the prophets. He really did take on flesh in the womb of Mary. He really did “mewl and puke on his mother’s lap.”69 He really was tempted by Satan in the wilderness. He really was afraid in the garden. He really did die on the cross.70 If we tell the story any other way, we rob it of its authenticity and immediacy, and therefore strip it of its power to transform us. God, as John Webster reminds us, is the holy one in our midst. God shares a history with us, lives in this present with us, finds himself in our reality just so that we might find ourselves in his—without in any way losing himself to the ravages of time or the powers of sin and death. God triunely makes himself invulnerably vulnerable to contingencies in order to save creation from death by means of those very contingencies. Through it all, in it all, God is truly with us, sharing our history with us and allowing us to share his. And, as Jenson would have it, only a thrice-holy God could do something so strange. Because the Father wills it so and because the Spirit brings it to completion, the Son is free to enter fully into our history, assuming our humanity, submitting to our history’s realities—even to the humiliation of torture and execution and the horror of death.
God is not made to be other than he is by this share in our history. For all the ways that he wants to qualify it, Jenson affirms the notion of God’s impassibility: “God is indeed impassible in the sense that external events cannot alter his personal identity or character.” And he also affirms divine simplicity, so long as we do not allow it to subvert the doctrine of the Trinity.71 And he also affirms divine aseity and immutability, so long as these notions do not tempt us to think that God is securely removed from the happenings of our history, disengaged from us and our lives. God is (truly!) with us. “God is not eternal in that he adamantly remains as he began, but in that he always creatively opens to what he will be; not in that he hangs on, but in that he gives and receives; not in that he perfectly persists, but in that he perfectly anticipates.”72
Anticipation & Existence
Because God’s being is event, his identity is grounded not in persistence against the changes of time (as found in pagan philosophies) but (as the logic of the gospel requires) in anticipation of the fullness of time. In Jenson’s own formulation, “Since the Lord’s self-identity is constituted in dramatic coherence, it is established not from the beginning but from the end, not at birth but at death, not in persistence but in anticipation.”73 Even for God, “the future is not the present, yet it has presence.”74 But what sense does this make? Why does Jenson want to insist that the gospel calls for thinking in these terms? It seems he is convinced that to be human is, above all, to live in time, to be caught up in the movement from past to future through a present that exerts irresistible pressure on us. We must make sense of our lives as a whole, one way or another, somehow knitting our future to our past in a present-tense storied account. The promise of the gospel is that God does in fact make sense of our lives, and that he can do so because he is before our past and after our future, and just in that way present to us in our present.
Jenson’s language is no doubt eccentric, but what he wants to articulate is perhaps not that unfamiliar to us if we hear it in other terms. Take, for example, these reflections from one of my students:
God’s kingdom was, is, and is coming. His kingdom is no less his kingdom in the beginning than it is in the end . . . He is the king in the prophets, the king in the new and living way, and the king in the kingdom coming . . . So, is the kingdom really something that is not yet? Maybe historically, in the king we are already there. His testimony is the spirit of prophecy.75
The point, at least as I take it, is relatively straightforward: the kingdom is the realization of God’s will in fullness, and for God that fullness is always already there. But not in a way that leaves God in stasis. God’s life is lively, dynamic, dramatic. But it moves changelessly, from fullness to fullness.
The key, at least from a Jensonian perspective, is in that last line of my student’s comment: God is the God of prophecy, a God who speaks to us from the eschatological past about an eschatological future that for us no less than for the first hearers is our present. Prophecy, in other words, is not about historical prediction, but about an anticipation in history of the coming of God in eschatological fullness. In our present, whenever that is, the triune God comes at us from all directions. If we go forward, anticipating the future, he is there; if we go backward, remembering the past, he is present; if we turn to the left hand, or to the right, he is both arriving and already arrived.
18. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:42.
19. Jenson, Large Catechism, 7.
20. As Jenson liked to put it in German, “Was heisst, Gott?”
21. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:63.
22. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:224.
23. Jenson, “The Father, He,” 99.
24. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:64.
25. Nichol, Exodus and Resurrection, 33.
26. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:221.
27. Moltmann, Crucified God, 365.
28. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:222.
29. Ibid.
30. Jenson, “Hidden and Triune God,” 7.
31. Jenson, “Three Identities in One Action,” 2.
32. Ibid., 4.
33. Jenson, “Creation as Triune Act,” 41.
34. Jenson, “Theological Autobiography,” 47.
35. Jenson, “Conceptus . . . De Spiritu Sancto,” 104.
36. Jenson, “Once More the Logos Asarkos,” 130–31. Jenson means that we must not say, as for example Kathryn Tanner in her Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, that Jesus is a “version” of the Word.
37. As seen in Jenson, Alpha and Omega; and Jenson, God after God.
38. Jenson, “Hidden and Triune God,” 9.
39. Jenson, “On Truth and God: 2,” 52.
40. Jenson, “Hidden and Triune God,” 9.
41. Jenson, “Creation as a Triune Act,” 41.
42. Jenson, “The Father, He,” 104.
43. A misogyny that Jenson names and confronts in The Triune Identity and elsewhere.
44. Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self, 324.
45. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:158.
46. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:161.
<
br /> 47. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:159.
48. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:160.
49. Jenson, “Praying Animal,” 312.
50. Here, Jenson’s work is resonant with the vision of meaning in George Steiner’s Real Presences.
51. Jenson, “What Kind of God Can Make a Covenant,” 5.
52. Jenson, Large Catechism, 8.
53. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:47.
54. Jenson, “What Kind of God Can Make a Covenant,” 18.
55. Hunsinger, “Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology”; Crisp, “Robert Jenson on the Pre-Existence of Christ.”
56. Jenson, Canon and Creed, 92.
57. Jenson, Large Catechism, 7.
58. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:47.
59. See Wright, Dogmatic Aesthetics, 102–18. I would only add that what many take for “Hegelianism” in Jenson comes instead from a narrative reading of Israel’s scriptures that finds in Israel’s eschatological hope the reconciliation of otherwise hopelessly contrasting visions of Israel’s calling and destiny. See, for example, Jenson, Ezekiel, 238–39.
60. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 2–4.
61. Maximus, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology I.4.