62. Ibid., I.10.
63. Jenson, Ezekiel, 63.
64. Jenson, Canon and Creed, 92.
65. Against Heresies III.22.3; Jenson depends heavily on Douglas Farrow’s reading of Irenaeus’s Trinitarian metaphysics. Thanks to Fr. Al Kimel for reminding me of this connection, and for directing me to Fr. John Behr’s thoughts on this passage in Irenaeus.
66. Behr, Irenaeus of Lyon, 146–47.
67. Behr, Mystery of Christ, 90–91.
68. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:217.
69. One of Jenson’s favorite bits from Luther.
70. Jenson, Song of Songs, 77.
71. Jenson, Song of Songs, 46.
72. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:217.
73. Ibid., 1:66 (italics original).
74. Jenson, Ezekiel, 87.
75. It was a comment made in a journal reflection; there was no topic assigned or title. It was submitted in January 2015.
2
Truth
Method & Meaning
In the opening of his Systematics, Jenson devotes relatively little attention to methodology, holding that his theological commitments prohibit lengthy prolegomena. But this in fact belies how critical theological method is to him and his work. As he himself acknowledges, from his earliest work to his last, he is at every turn concerned with getting the gospel said at a particular time in a way that performs for its speakers and hearers what it promises. But he is concerned also with doing theology in a way that can be translated beyond his own time and place. As a result, his approach is every bit as constructive methodologically as it is revisionary theologically, and he has as much to teach us about how to think as about what and why to believe.
At the heart of Jenson’s theological method is a conviction about the truth and its relation to God as dramatic event, a conviction that owes much to Jenson’s reading of Thomas Aquinas. Early in his Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas asks whether or not God is personally to be regarded as the truth. And he answers that not only is truth to be found in God, but that God himself is to be regarded as “supreme and primary truth.” “God” and “truth” ultimately name the same reality, although of course they do so in distinct registers. This must be so, Jenson concludes, because as Saint Thomas makes clear, only in God is the relationship of true propositions and true realities perfectly at-one-ed: “not only is his being conformed to his thought of himself, but his being is identical with his act of thus knowing himself.”76 God is the truth of truth, the reality that makes truth true.
How God is the Truth
Many, if not most, of Jenson’s deepest and most central theological convictions came to him early in his career—as this one certainly did. In an essay published in 1961, when Jenson was teaching at Luther College, he writes, “the truth is God-revealing-himself, God-present-to-me, deus loquens. Truth, that is, occurs. It occurs when God interrupts my flight from him and places himself in my way as the unavoidably decisive pole of my life. Truth is Jesus.”77 More than forty years later, while leading the Center for Theological Inquiry, he makes more or less exactly the same claim: “God is knowing, or as we are more likely to say, truth. Thus Godhead as truth is founded in intersubjectivity, precisely as he is as love. In God, therefore, that reality is known and reality is loved are aspects of the one fact of the triune intersubjectivity.”78
Jenson being Jenson, of course, he has to work out the movements of that intersubjectivity across the triune processions. So, unlike Saint Thomas, who considers the truth as existing either in the mind (in intellectu) or in things (in re), Jenson holds that truth’s “decisive location” is in speech (in sermone).79 Analogy to the doctrine of the Trinity is ready at hand; the Father does not merely think; the Father speaks. And what he speaks is the Son who is his “Word.” And the Word, according to Scripture, is not mere Logos but Jesus, showing that the truth is not mere rationality, but “mutual communication”—just as the Gospel stories about Jesus’s life suggest. The Spirit is the freedom that makes it so the Father and Son are free to love each other freely, keeping either from making the other a mere object, and so enslaving and demeaning one another.
The God of the gospel is eternally in actual converse within himself, is eternally sermo. And this discourse is the truth itself because it is the very being of God, in whom—just as Thomas worked it out—Veritas in intellectu and Veritas in re are not distinct. In general, speech is the link between intellect and the things intellect knows and wills; thus actual speech is the home of veritas, first in God and thereupon in us.80
How the Truth Happens to Us
In this light, it is easy to see why Jenson regards lively conversation as “the first home of truth.”81 On his view, this lively conversation is foundationally intra-Trinitarian: God-to-God. Then, derivatively, it is conversation extra-Trinitarianly: God the Trinity, “speaks” to us, to me. And that is how the truth is known: God speaks and by speaking awakens response-ability.
When Jenson describes God as speaking he means exactly that. As the Gospels reveal, the Father speaks to the Son and about him: “In Mark’s account of Jesus’s baptism, the Father addresses him as his Son, and indeed this address seems to be the Father’s eternal begetting; Matthew and Luke then report that bystanders heard the address.” And what happens in the history of Jesus is what is happening in the drama of the divine life: John 17 records an entire speech of the Son to the Father, which is intended to be overheard by the disciples, and John 12:27–28 is an actual dialogue between the Son and his Father, also for the sake of those who will overhear it. Jenson insists we must not interpret these exchanges as events only in the life of the “economic” Trinity, “for the obtrusively incarnate speaker in John directly identifies himself as the Word who antedates Abraham, and prays for the glory he had with the Father before creation.”82
The truth must happen to us. And it must happen in ways that free us to interact, to respond, to engage with God and with one another. And because God is the truth, the truth happens only as God happens: “grace” is just another way of naming the activity of the Spirit in our lives. Therefore, conversation, the lively exchange of truth-in-love, is quite literally everything. We exist at all only because we are addressed eternally by God, and we come into the fullness of life just as we respond in time to God by addressing one another lovingly and truthfully. As Jenson contends, I am myself only by God’s intrusions—the “hey, you!” or “hold it!” that he speaks so that I may transcend myself entirely in the freedom given to engage God and neighbor lovingly.
The End of Theology
The work of theology, then, is always in service of the gospel by which God addresses us. As Jenson often said, theology is “maintenance of a message,” which precisely to be itself can never be spoken or heard the same way twice. The gospel, if it is truly the Word of God, performs what it promises and enacts what it declares. But if the human speaking of that Word is to be faithful, it must identify God rightly and articulate the gospel clearly. The work of theology is the work of finding the articulation of the gospel for a particular time and place that identifies God rightly for the people of that time and place so that they can hear the Word that calls them to life.
Early in his career, before he had finished the PhD, Jenson found himself agreeing with Bultmann: faith is openness to the future. But a question nagged him: what is the content of that future? Bultmann, he was convinced, had no good answer to the question, and so was contending for a groundless and objectless faith—or, worse, a self-grounded and self-desired faith. Departing from Bultmann, therefore, Jenson works to describe the future that the gospel opens, convinced that only insofar as such a description is made is it possible to talk faithfully about faith.83 In turn, he came to see that the work of theology is the work of shaping that description so that it is as true, as sou
nd, as is possible.
The Truth and Philosophy
Kate Sonderegger, among others, finds Jenson’s work too revisionist, too dismissive of the classical metaphysical tradition. Among other things, she faults him for rejecting Hellenistic philosophy and its place in Christian dogmatics. But in truth, he does not reject it tout court, even though he thinks the patristic project of gospelizing Hellenism is an ongoing, unfinished project, and that not every culture and people needs to accept Greek philosophical frames of reference in order to believe the gospel faithfully. His vision is near to Staniloae’s:
In Christianity, there are two conceptions of God, one which comes from the Bible and which belongs to Christian life and experience, and the other which comes from Greek philosophy. The first presents God as the living God, full of concern and interest for humankind. The second presents God as unmoved and immoveable. Eastern Orthodoxy has made a great effort to combine and harmonise the two conceptions. It has sought to reconcile both these ways of thinking about God.84
Jenson differs from Staniloae in that he is less concerned with harmonizing Scripture and the Greek metaphysics of timelessness than with revising the Hellenistic tradition in ways that better fit the ontology suggested in the scriptural metanarrative. But he does not want to replace the tradition or eradicate it altogether; indeed, he thinks that for Christians formed in the Western tradition, the concepts and language of Hellenistic philosophy are now a necessary part of witness to the gospel (as it would not be for Christians formed in Eastern traditions, or for Jews or Muslims).85
The Truth and the Scriptures
Jenson believes that theology accomplishes its end, generation after generation, in various missionary contexts, only as it reads the Scriptures in conversation with the Christian dogmatic tradition. In the Spirit’s wisdom, canon—“the total narrative by which Scripture identifies God”86—and creed are “matched puzzle pieces,” and only as they are matched rightly can theology find the language necessary to describe the future faith desires and claims as its own.
Jenson’s “Nicene theory” of interpretation is concerned with discerning the “christological plain sense.” And it does so on the presumption that “both the biblical text and the church’s trinitarian and christological teachings are true.”87 On this point Peter Leithart gets Jenson exactly right:
Scripture plays a generative as well as a regulative role in theology. And for Jenson, these two operations go together: The oddities of the Bible’s narrative of God and his ways with creation give rise to puzzles to which Jenson offers conceptual solution, but those solutions must in turn be coherent with the Bible’s narrative. All of Jenson’s characteristic novelties—the peculiarities of his Trinitarian thought, his denial of the logos asarkos, his construal of beginning and end, of protology and eschatology—arise from his attempts to make theological, analytical, and metaphysical sense of Scripture.88
As Leithart makes clear, Jenson refuses the standard moves of “classical theism” because they essentially treat “the biblical God” as nothing more than an anthropomorphic analog to the real God. Against those habits, Jenson aims to turn “the specifics of the Bible into a critique of the presumed fundamental theology.”89
Jenson’s commentary work (on Song of Songs and Ezekiel) shows that he is trained as a modern interpreter. But his hermeneutics finally has more in common with precritical exegesis: he is concerned above all with the theological import of the text as it is given to us. So, for example, when he reads about the divine self-disclosure at Sinai, he acknowledges he is aware that Exodus’s description “can be picked apart into sources, and all interesting tensions thus removed.” But this, he insists, is completely beside the theological point. And when he reads Ezekiel’s vision of the throne, he asks why the one envisioned looks like a man, and answers: “because the second person of the Trinity is a man—Jesus of Nazareth.”90 Finally, when reading the description of God’s passions in Song of Songs, he concludes: “No part of Scripture makes sense if our reading is controlled by the dogma that to be God is simply to be without passion, and the theological allegory solicited by the Song least of all.”91
As I have said, most of Jenson’s theological commitments took shape early in his career, but not so his view of the Scripture’s inspiration. Throughout the bulk of his work, he assumes that a doctrine of inspiration is unnecessary, if not also impossible. But eventually he came to see that only by the Spirit’s intervention can Scripture be what the gospel suggests it is: prophetic narrative and narratival prophecy. How does this inspiration work? First, by the Spirit’s guidance of events determined by God to be told for the good of God’s people through time. Then, by bringing to speech God’s Word so that a specific plot to history becomes recognizable. And, finally, by the Spirit’s guidance of the writing down and preservation of these writings in a way that makes a whole narrative.92
The Beginning of Theology
Jenson discovered the need for theology early in his studies. He recalls coming to Luther Seminary “well fitted in most ways but one”: he was not sure he really believed the gospel, as he thought he had to do. Given that he intended to invest his life in the ministry, and because his mind was soaked in reading Kierkegaard, he found the problem overwhelming. Then, while researching for a paper, he found in the writings of Carl Rosenius, the Swedish Lutheran, the argument that “sin” is the same as unbelief in the forgiveness the gospel promises. In that moment, the importance—the indispensability—of theological work hit him with force: “It was a fundamental liberation; a step of theological argument let a word of ‘gospel’ be said where before there had only been ‘law.’ I have been convinced of the necessity of theology ever since, and with a consistent purpose.”93
Rowan Williams has remarked that a theologian must be prepared to speak both for and to a particular ecclesial tradition. If they cannot do both equally well, then they cannot serve the church as a whole. For his part, Jenson is a recognizable Lutheran theologian. Much of his career was spent training Lutheran ministers and shaping official Lutheran intra- and extra-denominational dialogues. But he is clear that he was called to think and to write for the church catholic: “theology must be written for the undivided church that the Spirit will surely someday grant.”94 Any other theology runs the risk of impeding the Spirit’s work.
Jenson, of course, is postmodern enough to realize that theology is always done in a specific context for particular people. His own project is self-consciously done for and offered to a late-modern, pluralistic audience in the Western cultural tradition, which is why he finds it necessary to begin his christological reflections and constructions not with “human nature” or “the historical Jesus” but with “narrative,” by which he means, “a set of temporally distinguishable events whose togetherness to the set is determined as follows: each successive item, except the first one, must be dramatically appropriate to the preceding one, and every successive item, except the latter, must be dramatically open.”95 From this point, Jenson can take “Jesus in Israel” as a narrative, and then conclude:
When it is told in any sort, and when the real hopes and fears of those who speak respectively are discussed at the same time, and when the two manners of speaking mutually interpret themselves, the gospel takes place. Or else, gospel happens in so far as this mutual interpretation becomes effective in a certain way; that is to say, in so far as an appellation occurs which attributes a new temporal structure to those who are addressed.96
Jenson knows that because it is context-specific, no theology can be translated whole cloth into another context. Hence, people will have to make what they can of his project, adapting it as they can in attempts to maintain the message of the gospel in their time and place. Theologians, he says, do what they can to serve the church, trusting the Holy Spirit to make of their work something more than they could possibly intend or dare to hope for themselves. Their work is like bread cast on the water
s; if others find it, and are fed by it, then God is to be praised.
Finally, given Jenson’s emphasis on dialog and conversation, it is fitting that so much of his work was birthed out of deep theological friendships—perhaps especially with Carl Braaten; with his granddaughter, Solveig; and with his wife, Blanche, whom he insisted deserved coauthor credit on all of his works. On numerous occasions, Jenson praised his most famous teacher, Karl Barth, for the respect he showed his students—the greatness of the man somehow indicated by the graciousness with which he engaged those who came to learn from him. From my own experiences with Jens (as he invited us to call him), I have come to see that he too was a theologian whose work not only coheres systematically, but also cohered personally—he lived the life of faith he described, and all of us are the richer for it.
76. Jenson, “On Truth and God: 1,” 387.
77. Jenson, “Liberating Truth and Liberal Education,” 213.
78. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 54.
79. Jenson, “On Truth and God: 2,” 51.
80. Ibid., 54.
81. Jenson, Conversations with Poppi about God, 10.
82. Jenson, “On Truth and God: 2,” 52.
83. Jenson, “Theological Autobiography,” 48.
84. Staniloae, Eternity and Time, 6.
85. See Jenson, “Toward a Christian Theology of Israel,” 43–56; and Jenson, “The Risen Prophet,” 57–67.
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