86. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:46.
87. Jenson, Ezekiel, 24.
88. Leithart, “Jenson as Theological Interpreter,” 46.
89. Ibid.
90. Jenson, Ezekiel, 42–43.
91. Jenson, Song of Songs, 77.
92. Jenson, On the Inspiration of Scripture, 53–54.
93. Jenson, “About Dialog, and the Church,” 38.
94. Jenson, “Theological Autobiography,” 54.
95. Jenson, “Aspekte der Christologie,” 114.
96. Ibid.
3
Creation
Being as Communion
The story of Scripture opens with a straightforward dogmatic claim: “In the beginning God created.”97 This claim binds us to confess that God is Creator. But what does the confession actually mean? And how are we to make that confession faithfully in our various times and places? Jenson insists that faithful confession is possible only as we remember who it is that creates and why he does so. Who creates? The triune God revealed by the gospel. Why does he create? Because he delights in what is other than himself. As Jenson says to his granddaughter, Solveig, “All the planets, galaxies, stars, animals, black holes . . . God’s excited by it. He wouldn’t have done it if he were not interested in it.”98 God opens his life joyfully to include us so that we might live, move, and have our being precisely in that joy, which is our strength.
The Time God Has for Us
Jenson’s doctrine of creation begins, ends, and is carried along by his revisionist understanding of time. Or, more precisely, it is carried along by his revisionist understanding of God’s relation to us, which makes time what it is. Following Barth, he finds that the Christian theological tradition wrongly posits eternity as opposed to time—as if God is bracketed out of our lives by time, existing beginninglessly and endlessly beyond the edges of our reality. But Scripture, Jenson insists, requires us to think the relation of eternity and time as analogous instead of dichotomous. God’s life is eternal precisely in that it brackets us in time. Or, to say the same thing another way, eternity names how God is with us in time so that our beginning and our end cohere as one story. Because God is a communion, a lively and dramatic conversation, it is, Jenson contends, “sort of natural” (but only sort of!) that God creates. In a word, then, we are made for communion with God by the communion of God, and we exist just as God makes time for us and we take time for him. This is the heart of Jenson’s doctrine of creation.
The Time God Has for Himself
“God creates by taking time within his eternal time for others than the three who are himself.” In making this claim, Jenson is not suggesting that God is subject to time, of course. But he is saying that God is the subject of time—affording temporality its being, its dynamism, its meaning. Christian dogma requires us to confess that God is not in time as we are; but Jenson wants to add that time is truly in God, fitted to the reality of the divine life and just in that way constructed as a fitting home for us.
Because God takes time for us within the timeliness of his own life, he shares a history with us. And he shares that history with us in such a way that history has not only a source but also a direction and a fulfillment. We might say it like this: the Trinity lives, moves, and has being; therefore, time can move. Time can move; therefore, we can live, move, and have our being from, in, and toward God. God moves in his being from fullness to fullness; indeed, as Trinity, he fulfills and is fulfilled as fullness. Precisely in these movements, we are created, redeemed, and glorified in God as our beginning, our aim, and our end.
We can perhaps get a better grasp of Jenson’s account of God’s “time” if we compare it with Dumitru Staniloae’s view of time’s relation to eternity. Staniloae, like Jenson, holds that time and eternity cannot be simply opposed. If we are to think of God personally, as Scripture declares we must, then we cannot imagine eternity as anything but “a fullness of life . . . the perfect communion which subsists between eternal Persons whose love is inexhaustible.”99
Time is not a sin against eternity, a fall from eternity, something opposed to it. The eternity of God, as life in its plenitude, as an eternal and perfect love between the Persons who are perfectly in union with one another, carries within itself the possibility of time. Time, on the other hand, carries within itself the possibility of eternity which can be realized in communion with God by his grace; for God can enter into a relationship of love with temporal beings.
With all of this Jenson obviously agrees. But he does differ from Staniloae on at least one critical point: for Staniloae, time is interval, and an interval is necessarily a failure of response to love. As he puts it, “Love is the gift of oneself to another, and the waiting for the full return of that gift from the other in response. Only in a complete and immediate response to the offer of love is love fully realised.” The name of that interval in response is “time” and “as such, [it] represents a spiritual distance between persons.” Time, therefore, cannot exist for God because God’s life is love fully realized, love without even the shadow of “spiritual distance.”
Obviously, Jenson would agree that there is no failure of love in God. But he would not accept that an interval in response is necessarily a failure or shortcoming. “Time” is eventfulness, and the interval—the silence between the notes, so to speak—is not failure, but the structure of the event. Anyway, that is what the resurrection of Jesus suggests: Holy Saturday is not a failure within the divine life but the fullness of God’s communion encompassing even the depths of hell.
Time, Narrative, and Self-Understanding
To make sense of our lives, at least as a whole, as a history, we have to think narratively. The literary theorist Jonathan Culler explains: “The model for historical explanation is . . . the logic of stories: the way a story shows how something came to happen.”100 Jenson is convinced that this is so because the God who makes time is himself a dramatic event that “moves” not from less to more or better to best, but from fullness to fullness, from glory to glory. Hence, the very characteristics of temporal experience—its dramatic movement, its irreversibility, its tripartite structure—reveal something to us both about the God who makes time for us and about what we ourselves are as creatures of this peculiar God.
The Creator/Creature Distinction
More than a few critics—some charitable and others anything but—have complained that Jenson blurs the distinction between Creator and creature by his revisioning of God’s relation to time. They take him to mean that God is changed by creation, made into a different God over time by what he does in time. But of course Jenson means no such thing. As he maintains at every turn, there is God and there is everything else. “Before there is the creature, there is God and nothing. And this nothing is not the kind that can be the antecedent of something. God and only God is the creature’s antecedent.”101 And like Aquinas and others in the dogmatic tradition, he holds that “everything else” is there at all only because God, who is beyond existence, freely decides that it should be so. He also agrees with Rahner, although he would surely phrase it differently: “We and the existents of our world really and truly are different from God not in spite of, but because we are established in being by God.”102 And he agrees with Kathryn Tanner as well: “Relations with God are utterly non-competitive because God, from beyond this plane of created reality, brings about the whole plane of creaturely being and activity in his goodness.”103
Truth be told, Jenson’s affirmation of the Creator/creation distinction could hardly be more forcefully stated. He goes so far as to insist that even “transcendence” cannot accurately explain the Creator’s difference,104 because God’s otherness from creation is not analogous to any reality, and for that very reason is not something God has to safeguard or secure. Human beings transcend the rest of creation by reason
of their share in the image of God. God, however, does not transcend creation. As Maximus would say it, God is beyond all creaturely relations, and therefore absolutely without comparison. For example, we should not say that God is wiser than human beings. No, God is the Creator of wisdom itself, so his wisdom cannot but seem like so much foolishness to us, and only by being caught up in his folly are we made truly wise. And the same goes for all the divine attributes.
In Jenson’s account, then, the Creator/creature difference is one that God makes just by being God. Specifically, in his own words, it is one that “God enforces by taking action.”105 But we must take pains to be as clear as possible: this “taking action” does not mark a change in God. This is so for two reasons: first, as Aquinas makes clear, unless there is a creation, there is nothing for any change to happen to; second, God, simply by being himself for creation, necessarily, inevitably enacts the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and what he has made.
God enacts the difference between himself and creation especially in the event of incarnation, which realizes for us what God determines himself to be. Taking up creatureliness as his own, assuming humanity to himself, God ensures once and for all that there is a difference between himself and creation—and that that difference is perfectly good for us. In Jesus, the divine and the human, the Creatorly and the creaturely, are at-one-ed—and exactly so the difference between God and creation is effected. In the language of Chalcedon, it is precisely because the Creator and creature are inseparably joined in Christ that they are also not confused or altered in any way. Jesus, the Word, is the truth for God as well as for us. God is God in Christ. Creation is creation in Christ. In the language of Saint Paul, precisely because the fullness of God dwells in Christ, he holds all things together.
The Movements of Time and the Movements of God
Jenson formulates his doctrine by following Barth’s pathbreaking insight: God’s eternity is different from time only in that there is perfect peace between source, movement, and goal (not in that there is no movement at all).106 In this way, creaturely time is regarded as a time within the eternal “time” of the divine life, “a ‘distention’ in the life that is God and just so the . . . horizon of all events that are not God.”107 And this distention, this making room, makes it so that creatures can exist in the integrity given to them without being absorbed into or undone by the gravity of the divine life. Although Jenson himself never uses this image, we might say that creation is possible because God fasts from himself “in a gift of unconditional hospitality.”108 Or, to come closer to Jenson’s usual way of talking, we might say that God creates so that there will be others to share in the feast that is his life.
Typically, my students picture the relation of God, eternity, and time something along these lines: in Eternity Past, the Trinity, conceived as three individual centers of consciousness, foresaw how time would work out as creatures abused their freedom, and recognized the need for some means of salvation first to be accomplished for and then to be offered to those who would respond faithfully. After creating, God has remained mainly withdrawn and observing, only occasionally intervening in time to make sure that what has been foreseen and predetermined does in fact take place. Particularly in the incarnation, and especially in the events of Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, God became more fully involved, sending his Son to die and raising him from the dead as the necessary means of salvation. In the time since Jesus’s death and resurrection, all those who believe in Jesus are saved, and are immediately joined in the work of helping others find that same salvation as well. Now, everyone awaits the end of time when Jesus “comes back,” initiating Eternity Future with the event of Last Judgment, sorting the “sheep” and “goats” into their respective destinies in heaven and hell.
Needless to say, Jenson rejects this model—even its sophisticated versions. First, as we have already seen, he holds that God is conditioned by nothing except God; therefore, “eternity” does nothing more or less than identify the way that the living God relates to us in the time he has made for us. Eternity and time, therefore, are not antithetically related to one another—not any more than divinity and humanity are. Once this is understood, there is no need to posit an Eternity Past that (temporally?) precedes time, or an Eternity Future that (temporally?) succeeds it. And by doing away with that dual time line, we find ourselves freed up to reimagine what it means for God to act in and upon creation.
As Jenson sees it, we must find a way to say that God, in his fullness, is presently with us—he shares our “now.” Indeed, God is wherever God is at work, and it is only because God is at work that we have a now at all. The God who is with us and at work upon us is the eternal and triune God—the God who not only foreknows and predestines but who also postknows and postdestines, knowing us and acting for us as the beginning and as the end, and just in that way giving us the time we need to be the creatures we are called to be.
Providence & Election: How Time is Good for Us
Time, at least in Jenson’s description, is the deepest creaturely reality, the creature’s most basic created condition. Space and matter, after all, must be present to matter for us. And, of course, the same holds for other people as well. And it holds even for God. If “time is the means by which we conceptualize our locatedness among other people,”109 then even God must be present for us to commune with him. In fact, to trust in God is to trust that he will be present whenever we truly need him, and that he will make it so that what we experience in the present is finally good for us.
Whatever else it might mean, to say that God is faithful is to say that his care for us is timely. In Knight’s words, God does not give us people—or any other creatures—faster than we can receive them.110 God gives what we need just when we need it.
As we have already noted, Jenson agrees with long-accepted Christian wisdom: time has a dramatic movement from a source toward an end along a meaningful line of development.111 Time, in other words, is to be regarded as historical. It can be narrated as a story—or it will be so narratable when all is said and done. What is more, that movement is both irreversible and tripartite. Creaturely existence in time is a movement from the past through the present into the future, which of course first becomes the present and then turns into the past. As a result of this irreversible movement, the past as past always lies unalterably behind us, closed to our powers, inaccessible to us except in the imaginations of memory. And the future as future always lies before us, open to various potential realizations, unreal except in the imaginations of anticipation. As Moltmann says, “the future becomes the past, but the past cannot become the future again . . . Whatever is future is possible, whatever is present is real, and whatever is past is necessary because it is unchangeable.”112
As Jenson reads them, time’s three arrows—and the necessity, contingency, and reality they bespeak—point beyond themselves to the dramatic, tripartite life of the God who is their Creator. God is the one who makes the possible possible, the necessary necessary, and the real real because God is the source, guide, and goal of our past, present, and future. And God makes all this so precisely because that is what we need in order to be the creatures he calls us to be, creatures made for communion with him and with all things in him. Time has triune structure and inexorable movement so we might be made over time into creatures apt for full communion with one another and with God.
In such a construal, time itself remains even after the fall a gift, a good, at least structurally. Playing fast and loose with Heideggarian terms, we might say that time is ontologically untouched by sin, even while ontically it is corrupted by the twisting of our memory, our anticipation, and our presence to one another and to God.113 How can this be so? Because time, ontologically speaking, is nothing other than the divine energies making being possible for us. Or, to rephrase, God determines what time is by how he is present for us, and for obvious reasons sin and death cannot alter
that determination. But so long as we remain estranged from God and from our true selves, so long as we are enslaved to sin, so long as death is at work in us, we cannot receive that determination graciously. Salvation, then, names how God works to refit us to time, remaking and then conforming our being to his image so we are apt to receive the gift that time is for us.
Borrowing from Jonathan Edwards, Jenson’s metaphysics, at its roots, depends on a deceptively simple claim: “what is real is real because Love loves it.”114 Creatures have no “substance” except God’s “grasp” of them.115 Reality, essentially, is nothing but God’s attention given to what is other than God. And because that God is triune as Father, Son, and Spirit, that attention envelops us as a love that is eternally before all things and after all things, always delivering us from nothingness, calling us into deeper and deeper communion with one another. And, in turn, if the gospel is true, we grasp the reality that grasps us just in the eucharistic celebration where we (sharing with God and with one another the creatures of bread and wine) are brought as close as possible in this life to the fullness of the purpose we share with Christ.116
In one of his centuries on love, Maximus says that time has “three divisions,” and that faith belongs to all three (past, present, future), hope to one (future), and love with the other two (past, present). Why does love not belong to all three? Because the future has no reality for us: we cannot love what is not. The same does not hold for God, however. God has neither faith nor hope, because God is not subject to time as we are but is its creator, guide, and consummator. So, to say that God is love is to say that God loves us before, during, and after everything that happens to us. That is, at least in part, what it means to say that God is love. In Jenson’s own words,
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