God’s eternity is not that for him everything is already past, but that in love everything is still open, including the past. His eternity is that he can never be surpassed, never caught up with. He anticipates the future in the sense that however we press forward in time, we always find that God has already been there and is now ahead calling us on.117
Theodicy and Theosis: How Time Makes a History
Because God’s love is triply harmonious, like a fugue, the time God makes for us makes a history. Or, again, it will make a history when God’s will is finally done on earth as it already is in heaven where Christ, risen from among the dead, is reckoned as Lord. For now, however, the coherent story of creation cannot be told. Or, better, it cannot be told as gospel but only as law—except insofar as we read creation’s history “by faith and not by sight.”
As things currently stand in our world, salvation and damnation, both God’s Yes and God’s No, are enacted both-at-once; therefore, “[history’s] very essence is self-contradiction.” Creation, caught in the agonized conflicts of law and grace, death and life, sin and righteousness, shame and peace, remains “irreducibly ambiguous and at odds with itself.”118 Whatever we might want to think, the arc of history does not bend toward justice. If, then, history is to end in justice, it must be bent to that shape. History, like we ourselves, must be justified by grace. And this can happen only as the final realization of the Father’s bespeaking of reality for us in Christ’s actions within time and the Spirit’s actions upon it. Only so may what has already happened to Jesus happen to everyone and everything. That is, creation is justified only eschatologically.
The world as we know it—the world as it now stands, short of its eschatological transformation—is constituted by violence and death. This is true of the physical universe, as well as the political, social, and cultural/religious realities that make up its history. All creatures, and all the histories we might tell of creation as a whole or in part, are at this point like Israel’s David: hopelessly stained with blood. And, for some reason that we simply cannot fathom, God intends it to be so—or so Jenson, like Luther, believes. Evil and sin, violence and death, wickedness and corruption have been intended by God—although only so that Christ might triumph over them for us.119
Be that as it may, until God’s will is realized entirely, God remains involved in the violence of history. God, Scripture says, is “a man of war” (Exod 15:3). And Jenson concludes that it must be so: “had the Lord not fought for—and against—his people of Israel, he could have had no people within actual history, and so no Christ of that people and so no church of that Christ.”120 “God does not rule only from without the rough and tumble of history but also from within it.”121
But so long as God is involved in the violence of history, we cannot tell how he is or is not complicit in that violence. As Jenson himself admits,
It must be acknowledged: God’s continuing involvement in the violence of history is indeed a reason to turn one’s back on “the God of history”—as many Jews did after the Shoah. As Martin Luther once said, if we observe how God rules history and judge by any standard known to us, we must conclude “that either God is wicked or God is not” (aut malum esse deum aut nihil esse deum).122
Whatever we make of these claims, we should take time to notice that Jenson is not simply following Barth’s re-working of Calvin. In a way neither Barth nor Calvin would put it, Jenson wants to insist that all things happen within the happening of God’s will, but not quite simply as that happening. So long as history remains short of its end, God’s will is still unfolding. Hence, his involvement in that history is not what we at first sight take it to be. He is not in fact complicit in the evil he allows, but only when everything is said and done, only when the story is fully told, will we be able to see that for the truth that it is.
God wills to be victorious for us, and for us to be “more than conquerors” in him. Therefore, he allows enemies—sin and death—as the necessary shadow-side of that victory. To say that they are shadows, that they have no being as creatures do, is not to say they are not powerful. “There is a war on between God and evil.” The injustice and violence that makes our world what it is are nothing but “the stain of human angelic violence against God and against one another.” War between nations is never merely “politics by other means”: such violence happens as demons rise up against God. For now, God works with the grain of the universe, naturally and supernaturally, to keep these demonic forces from fulfilling their hellish purpose. So, for example, when asked why some are healed and some are not, Jenson answers:
Because that is the will of the Lord. You know that I have Parkinson’s disease. Now that is a degenerative disease. So that isn’t reversible. Nevertheless, I pray to be healed, and one has to live with that. As to why there is so much suffering in the world, so much evil, that’s the famous theodicy question, and in my judgment it is the only good reason not to believe in God. To say despite all the suffering in the world, God is good: that’s as far as we can go.123
Notice, Jenson accepts that it is God’s will, at least in some sense, for some to be healed and others not. And yet he also believes that we can and should pray for healing, for the miraculous, even when we have no good reason to hope for it. This is because whatever comes to us in this life, we live in hope of the eschatological accomplishment of God’s will. We live awaiting the goodness of God to be accomplished; therefore, it is possible for us to pray in spite of our experiences of suffering and loss, even in spite of our commonsense awareness that our prayers are sure to go unanswered. We are confident that when God’s will is finally done, our prayers—even the most outlandish and foolish ones—will be answered truly and wisely, in ways far beyond anything we could have desired or even dared to imagine.
The Time We Have for God
As we have seen, Jenson’s theology of creation holds that creatures are made, redeemed, and glorified not only for communion with God but also by communion with him. God has opened up space within the timeliness of his own life so that we might have time for him, as well as time for one another. We are, in other words, made roomy by the roominess of God’s grace, and as we become like him, we become truly ourselves.
Addressing God
All this is so, Jenson insists, because God is conversational, the lively back-and-forth that makes everything what it is. God, being God, makes creation by turning the conversation that is his life from himself to creatures. If in one way, the triune conversation makes God God—“In the beginning was the Word”—then in a different way, it makes creation creation—“God said, let there be . . . and there was.”
“To be, as a creature, is to be mentioned in the triune moral conversation, as something other than those who conduct it.”124 In other words, we exist because we are invoked. And that invocation, that prayer, holds us in being and moves us toward fullness. Creation, to be itself, needs to be talked about. And the good news is that God is endlessly talkative, and his conversation is never either aimless or incoherent. God does not ramble.
The Answering Creature
Jenson makes much of the fact that in the Genesis creation narrative God creates, first, in the third person: “Let there be . . .” Then, creating human beings, God shifts to speaking in the first person plural: “Let us make . . .” In Jenson’s reading, this shift from third person to first reveals, not only that God is talkative, but also that God talks about us, and then talks to us, so that we might talk about and to him in response. In a word, therefore, it is precisely our answerability to God that makes us what and who we are. According to Trinitarian dogma,
God rightly identified . . . is to and from all eternity both subject and object of an address and its response; indeed, his being is specifiable as conversation. Thus the more precise form of the claim that all but God is by God’s word is the claim that all but God is by and in its place in the triune conversation. Stated metaphy
sically, the final Christian insight into reality is that all reality is intended in a consciousness and a freedom and that this personhood is not abstract but constituted in address and answer, as are all persons.125
Because God speaks about us and to us, we can speak back to God and from and for God to one another and the rest of creation. But there remains this difference between God’s speech and ours: what God says happens just because God says it; what we say is at best a petition for God to speak or a praise for what God has spoken. In other words, God’s speech is illocutionary, ours locutionary. “When we say, ‘Creatures are,’ we give thanks, but when God says, ‘Creatures are,’ he creates.”126
Our personal answerability to God reveals itself most impressively in prayer, in our invocation of the God who invokes us. In fact, for Jenson, the human being is, more than anything else, “the praying animal.” Prayer, he argues, is nothing less than person-to-person communication, talking with God. “Speaking up in the divine conversation.” And because God is not impersonal but a tripersonal “omnipotent conversation,” we can expect answers to our prayers, whether we put them to God as petitions—“Father, I want you to do this”—or as praise—“Father, thank you for what you have done.”
Freedom and Possibility
We are who and what we are because God is who and what he is. Because we can talk to God, we can talk also with one another. Because we can hear from God, we can also listen to one another. These statements are deceptively simple. And the critical truth to which they point, at least in Jenson’s vision, is this: we are created to know God and ourselves the same way God knows himself and us. So, if God knows himself as a timeless essence or nature, then petitionary prayer makes little sense, if any. But if God knows himself tripersonally and dramatically, then we may be present to God with God, understood within his own self-understanding, so that he is both his own and ours—just as the risen but not yet ascended Jesus said to Mary Magdalene in the garden.
Once we have come to realize that our knowledge of God is so personal, we can no longer imagine that God’s deity is a hindrance to his communion with us. And this realization changes everything about our understanding of prayer:
Then our cries for help are not alien to his absolute freedom but rather constitutive of it, just as my freedom is constituted by your addresses to me, and yours by mine. Then my telling him of my situation is not alien to his omniscience; rather this conversation between us is constitutive of his omniscience. Then his presence where two or three are gathered is not an instance of his general everywhereness but just the other way around. Then precisely humble petitionary prayer is the greatest honor we may show him.127
The radical dependence on God that prayer bespeaks is in fact what effects our freedom and the possibility of a true identity across time. Here, Jenson is radically Edwardsian: “I am identical with myself across time, both now and in the Kingdom, not by virtue of what is within me but by virtue of what I am within, by virtue of specific location in the unbroken life of Father, Son, and Spirit.”128 That is, we are what we are, not because have a certain substance or nature, but because we are persons ever and always called into personhood by a personal God. To be a creature at all is to be in every way related to God; to live, to move, and to have being just within the movements of God’s own life.
So much modern and contemporary theology struggles to make sense of the relation of divine and human agency. As Nicholas Lash and others have shown, the Enlightenment, for all its many gifts, forced on us a way of accounting for God that imagines him as one agent among other agents, and so (at least theoretically) locatable and identifiable in the same way as everyone and everything else in existence.129 But when God is conceived of in this way, God’s freedom and our freedom are perceived to be impossibly at odds. For obvious reasons, this contradiction is most acute in modern Christologies. Christ, we moderns find ourselves thinking, cannot be both truly, fully human and divine. So we tend toward kenoticizing God—as if Christ gives up his divinity so that his humanity can function freely—or toward historicizing God—as if Christ’s human experience alters God for the better.130
In spite of the fact that he is almost always looped into the latter category by his readers, Jenson in fact refuses to take either of these paths. Drawing on Augustine, among others, he insists that “between God’s will and a creature’s will there is no zero-sum game, because God’s deciding something in the manner of God and my deciding the same thing in the manner of a creature are not on the same plane of being.”131 What we do, we freely do—only and just because God does it. That is to say, it is precisely because God’s will is absolute that our freedom is authentic. “It is precisely a divine will that cannot fail that enables creaturely freedom—indeed, nothing short of such a will could do so unlikely a thing.”132
Jenson’s Edwardsian account of human being—that our essence is nothing but God’s grasp of us, God’s word about us—means that human freedom is not a possession or attribute, but “something that happens to us” by the happening that is God’s life. We are free because God invokes and provokes us, because we are in community with the Trinity. As Jenson frames it in his Systematics, “The freedom by which we as persons participate in the divine life is the very Spirit that evokes all life, all the dynamic processes of creation.” We are rapt by God into a share in his freedom.133
Election: How Time Saves Us
This rapture takes place always in the now of encounter with God, as Christ makes himself present to us—above all, in the liturgical, charismatic, missional, and diaconal ministries of the church; the preaching of the evangel; and the celebration of the sacraments. Framing the issue thus makes it so that many of the familiar problems about predestination and election are rendered moot. So, if someone were to ask, “How do I know I am among the elect?” the confessor’s right answer must be, “You know because I am about to absolve you, and my doing that is God’s eternal act of decision about you.” Romans 1:4 testifies to the right-now-ness and sacramentality of election: Christ’s being raised from the dead does not merely confirm what was already true otherwise. It is the enactment of the truth coming to be in and for God, and precisely in that way also in and for creation.
Traditionally, emphasis falls on the need to hold together divine transcendence and immanence. For example, as Kallistos Ware puts it, there are two “poles” in our experience of God: “God is further from us, and nearer to us, than anything else.”134 Paradoxically, the nearer we come to one of these poles, the more forcefully we find ourselves drawn to the other. It is true, as Nicholas Cabasilas hymns, that God is “more affectionate than any friend, / more just than any ruler, / more loving than any father, / more a part of us than our own limbs, / more necessary to us than our own heart.”135 But it is also true that the one who approaches is truly unapproachable. He is both the light of the world and the light that we cannot draw near to—and the one because of the other.
So far, so familiar. But Jenson unsurprisingly makes a more direct, and more radical claim. Citing John of Damascus, he insists that we are nothing less than “co-embodiments of Christ.” Flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. Construing God’s relation to creation in these “hyper-Cyrillian” terms makes it abundantly clear that God’s freedom is never and could never be compromised by engagement with creatures. As Stephen Wright explains, “God is transcendent precisely in his immanence. No dialectic is required . . . Every immanent encounter between God and creation is that of the Singer to the song. There is no need to protect God from the contingency of history, as the triune God transcends history, not by removal from it, but by every divine encounter with it.”136
It is the living Christ, the transcendent and immanent one, the risen and crucified one, who is present to us in immediate encounter of mutual availability as the coherence of the Father’s and the Spirit’s love for us. And because he is resurrected, he may surprise us—as only the living do. The gospel�
�s claim, “Christ is risen,” means nothing less than that “we may await surprises dramatically appropriate to his life of unconditional hope” and surprises “dramatically appropriate also as the fulfillment of our life, in all its individuality, glory, and alienation.”137 Because Christ is alive, living on the far side of death, and because the Spirit comes to us from that time, that future, we can be sure that everything that the Father desires for us will be delightfully accomplished.
In this way, Jenson’s doctrine of creation anticipates both his soteriology and his eschatology: if at first, before the beginning, there was only God and nothing, then at last, after the end, creation must find its fulfilment in God or its dissolution in nothingness.138 For creation to find that fulfilment in God it must be transfigured, made apt for that fulfilment. And this is precisely what God has brought about in Jesus for us.
97. Jenson, “Aspects of a Doctrine of Creation,” 17.
98. Jenson, Conversations with Poppi about God, 43.
99. Staniloae, Eternity and Time, 7.
100. Culler, Literary Theory, 19.
101. Jenson, “Aspects of the Doctrine of Creation,” 22.
102. Rahner, Foundations of the Christian Faith, 79.
103. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 4.
104. Here, Jenson’s use of the term differs from, say, Kathryn Tanner’s. She would agree that God’s relation to creation is noncompetitive.
105. Jenson, “Creator and Creature,” 219.
106. For one recent example of Jenson’s use of this insight, see Jenson, Ezekiel, 87.
107. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:35.
108. Augustine, “Creation as Perichoretic Trinitarian Conversation,” 101.
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