109. Knight, “Time and Persons in the Economy of God,” 131
110. Ibid.
111. Many readers sense a Hegelianism lurking behind these claims, but as Wright (Dogmatic Aesthetics, 116) makes clear, “Hegel does influence Jenson—in so much as Hegel depicts history as having direction and sense—[but] he neither determines Jenson’s Christology nor causes Jenson to collapse the finite into the infinite.”
112. Moltmann, “What is Time?,” 31
113. This is not far from Aquinas’s view of what happens to human nature in the fall.
114. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 53.
115. Ibid., 54.
116. Ibid., 57.
117. Jenson, God after God, 171.
118. Jenson, On Knowledge of Things Hoped For, 233.
119. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:73.
120. Jenson, Ezekiel, 76.
121. Ibid., 49.
122. Ibid., 77.
123. Jenson, “Episode: Robert Jenson.”
124. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:35.
125. Jenson, “Praying Animal,” 319 (italics original).
126. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:38. See also Wright, “Creator Sings.”
127. Jenson, “What If It Were True?” 13.
128. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 71.
129. See Lash, Holiness, Speech, and Silence.
130. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 10.
131. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 37.
132. Jenson, “Bride of Christ,” 4.
133. Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 41.
134. Ware, The Orthodox Way, 12.
135. Quoted in ibid.
136. Wright, “Creator Sings,” 979.
137. Jenson, Story and Promise, 44.
138. Jenson, “Aspects of a Doctrine of Creation,” 22.
4
Salvation
Story & Promise
Jenson never tired of reminding his readers that the gospel is “the story about Jesus, told as a promise.” And that grace is nothing but God acting savingly on us. But what does the story promise? And how does God fulfill that promise gracefully? The story promises a future in God. Or, to say the same thing another way, it promises God’s future to creation as its own.139 And God fulfills that promise by taking creaturely reality up into his life and thereby transforming it. Salvation, in other words, is participatory and theotic. As Jenson says it, “deification is our end.”140
The Promise of God
Drawing on his Lutheran inheritance, Jenson distinguishes two types of discourse: one, “law,” which binds the future to the past; the other, “gospel,” which binds the past to the future. Law throws us back on ourselves and on our own understanding of the past.141 Gospel, by contrast, throws us onto God and neighbor, and to the Spirit’s revelation of the future. Hence, law talk has one pattern: if you do x, then y. And gospel talk has another, rival pattern: because God has done x, therefore y. Law, by its very structure, imposes stipulations and conditions. But the gospel, by its very structure, obliterates them. Because it binds the past to the future and not the other way around, it is offered in the present absolutely and unconditionally. It promises, no matter what has happened and no matter your present state, the future is now open for your good.
For Jenson, the what of the gospel is inseparable from the how of its sharing; form and content are one and the same. Hence, the gospel must be presented freshly each time. As he says in Story and Promise—the work that marks the beginning of his mature thought—“precisely to be itself, the gospel is never told the same way twice.” Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, to be sure. But the way we tell his story must change (without ever becoming a different story), because the same formulas that worked yesterday to set people free, today and tomorrow will simply bind them to the (religious) past. “‘Jesus in Israel’ is a narrative . . . When it is told in any mode, and when the real hopes and fears of those who speak and hear it are discussed at the same time, and when the two manners of speaking mutually interpret one another, the gospel takes place.”142 Jenson provides a telltale example:
“We are justified by faith alone,” said Luther, and liberated four generations. When preachers say these words today, supposing themselves to be following Luther, they bind us to the terrible law of having to save ourselves by the quality of our sincerity, for that is what “faith” has come to mean since the eighteenth century. And who knows what “justified” might mean, without lengthy explanations?143
This is why the church must always give attention to theology, finding more faithful ways of speaking the gospel in particular times and places—work that is never finished, for obvious reasons. Maintaining the church’s message necessitates finding new modes of speaking the gospel that are coherent both with the canonical Scriptures and the Christian dogmatic tradition, as well as effective in concrete situations for particular people, addressing their concerns and fears, their ambitions and desires. Needless to say, Jenson risks putting forward his own work as an exemplary attempt—or series of attempts—at just that kind of coherent effectiveness.
The Erotics of Salvation
God desires to save us: this is the heart, the taproot, or the leitmotif of Jenson’s soteriology. As he puts it in his commentary on Song of Songs, “in the Song’s allegory—and indeed in the Scriptures generally—it is not so much God who is fascinating and terrible for us, as we who are fascinating and terrible for God.”144 This fascination, this desire, comes at great cost: God is “overwhelmed in his fascination, even unto death on a cross.” Religion—our common-sense structures of meaning and the pietistic technologies that they require—has it exactly backward: we do not desire a God who must be appeased to receive us graciously; God desires us who are too afraid or too confused or too indifferent to know how to respond rightly to the grace we have been given. Jenson admits that “all religion is doubtless in some way lovesickness for the one God,” but he nevertheless maintains that it stands under the judgment of God revealed in “the baby ‘mewling and puking’ in his mother’s lap, to quote Martin Luther, or the man on the cross, ‘without form or comeliness, that we should desire him.’”145 When the gospel comes, religion comes undone.
Freed from the fear of death that makes religion powerful, we are freed to respond to the God who loves us. Once our eyes are opened, we see that indeed the Lord is simply lovable—lovely, comely, beautiful, desirable—and that our salvation is union with him, “a union for which sexual union provides an analogy.” Coming to desire God just as we are desired by him—this is the story of our salvation. Or, as Bernard of Clairvaux has it, the deepest saintliness is in loving ourselves for God’s sake.
Needless to say, God’s eros does not overwhelm God in the same way that our eros overwhelms us. God is driven by nothing but God. God is never controlled by anything other than his own will. But his desires are ecstatic in some sense: he is taken out of himself—into himself: these are the very “movements” that make the divine life lively. God desires God, and therefore in desiring us, God is simply being true to himself. And by being true to himself, God delivers us from our fear, our confusion, our indifference.
Paul claims he received his call “in hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before times eternal, but in his own time manifested his word in the message of the gospel.” (Titus 1:2–3). Notice that “before” creation—in “times eternal”—God promises the hope of eternal life. To whom could God make such a promise? Only to himself, of course. Therefore, Jenson concludes, the one who justifies the ungodly must be triune. And justification itself must be a “triune event,” as the righteous Father speaks the word
of forgiveness and reconciliation, the Son, Jesus, entails the event of that reconciliation in his life, death, and resurrection, and the Spirit brings about the fulfillment of all righteousness—both for God and for us.146
“While We Were Yet Sinners”
Scripture insists that God loves us precisely as sinners, as creatures made ugly by our own wrongdoing. Thinking in these terms commits Jenson to a version of supralapsarianism: the incarnation, as he understands it, is “neither an emergency measure nor construable apart from sin . . . the gospel of forgiveness is not an afterthought.”147 But what sense does it make to say that God purposes sin and yet is not the cause of evil and is not himself wicked? Jenson follows Barth: God purposes sin only as negation, as that which is overcome by Christ’s death and life. Evil is nothing—a nothing that goodness makes possible precisely by destroying it.
Does this not make God a moral monster? Or, at least, does it not show he is irreconcilably self-conflicted? No, Jenson says, because God’s character as triune spirit of love is made known in devotion to that which is radically other than himself. In this sense, the sinner loved by a holy God is a nearer analog to the triune life than the saint who shares in God’s holiness. But of course in another sense, the saint who shares in God’s divine-human holiness is no longer a mere analog to the triune life: she embodies it and is embodied in it. Hence, when all is said and done, only those who are aware of their state as simultaneously saint and sinner can fully articulate to the rest of creation what it is for God to be God.
“He Justifies the Ungodly”
We are justified, Jenson says, by “God’s sheer declaration.” But what, exactly, is declared? Not just that we are forgiven. What is declared is the final judgment about us: “the word of the gospel . . . is the eschatological judgment let out ahead of time.”148 God says we are now what in truth we shall only be then. We are already what we are not yet.
The divine declaration is not merely forensic or juridical. Jenson holds that there is no “legal fiction” involved, because God cannot lie, since what the Father speaks, happens, through the Spirit in the life of the Son.149 Following a “Finnish” reading of Luther, Jenson argues that the declaration of justification effects the union of the hearer’s heart with the gospel-word, and precisely in that way the union of the believer with Christ, “who is speaker and content of that word.”150 As Mannerma says, “in the ontological mutuality of word and faith, Christ and the believing soul make but one entity, so that when God—the Father!—attributes Christ’s divine righteousness to the believer, he is only registering the truth.”151
“We Die With Him”
We are not yet done with paradoxes. God is death’s opponent.152 And yet he defeats death—and the fear of death—for us by dying, and by incorporating us into that death.
Cross and resurrection are the fact, and that puts love and death into a new relation. Does the gift of love lead to the death of the lover? Yes, it led Christ to death for us. Does the desire of love lead to death of the beloved? Yes, Christ’s desire for us took and takes us with him into death: “we have been buried with him by baptism into death” (Rom. 6.4).153
But because Christ has passed through death, and now lives and loves with death behind him, we can live boldly: “We can take the risk of giving ourselves to the beloved and of loving the beloved’s own self,” because we know that even if this leads to death for us—and it inevitably must—it is merely “death unto new life.” A share in Christ’s already-inaugurated resurrection awaits; therefore, we have nothing to fear. If it is true that “our only hope is God’s personal stake in the good he wills for us,”154 then we have all hope, because God has taken that personal stake into death—and beyond.
It is easy to get lost in this tangle. But if it seems that Jenson has drifted free of Scripture into sheer speculation, consider what Paul says in Romans (11:29–32):
For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. For as in time past you were disobedient, but now have received mercy through their disobedience, even so have they also now been disobedient, that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has shut up all in disobedience, that he might have mercy on all.
Clearly, Paul is convinced that God is involved in the hurly-burly of history, acting in ways none of us can trace, using the disobedience of the many for the good of the few, and the obedience of the few for the salvation of the many. And how does God accomplish this mystery? By the wisdom revealed in the cross, the wisdom of divine foolishness.
The Satisfaction of God
Salvation, for Jenson, is theosis. But we cannot understand what it means for us to be delivered from sin and death into the life of God unless and until we have some sense of what the life of God is and how it happens. For example, if we do not know what it is for God to be righteous, how can we understand what it means for God to make us righteous? Whatever we do, we must not trust our commonsense understanding of righteousness. We must, instead, look to the story of Jesus, the story told by the canonical Scriptures, and ask what that tells us about God. And what the story tells us, at least as Jenson reads it, is that righteousness names actual faithfulness in and to community. “As this occurs in God, the Trinitarian tradition calls it perichoresis.”155 As this occurs outwith God, we call it salvation. Just as God creates a history to share with us, so God delivers us from the mere contingencies of history by sharing his life with us. What satisfies God is God; and that is precisely what satisfies us, as well. God being true to himself and being true to us are the same event.
Here, Jenson sides with (his reading of) the Cappadocians over against (his reading of) Saint Augustine and the majority view of the Western theological tradition:
Augustine’s God has no room in himself for us; he cannot bless us with himself. He can only bless us in our externality to him, with “created” gifts, with restorations and improvements of our own human nature. If God is as Western theology normally thinks him, then to “become Gods” could indeed only mean an alteration of natures . . . an intrusion on God’s uniqueness.156
But if the Cappadocians (and a minority of Western theologians, including Jenson’s beloved Jonathan Edwards) were right, then we do not share the nature of God, but the tripersonal, dramatic life of God. Jenson summarizes it so: “we can become God because the true God, the triune God whose unity is founded by his mutual plurality, has room in himself for others.”157 As he puts it in his Systematics, God is roomy, and can include us in his life without violating either his nature or ours, his creatorliness or our creatureliness. In the language of Scripture, God is our life, so that we are truly hidden in Christ’s experience within the happening of the divine being. “The difference of Creator and creature is eternal, but precisely because God is the infinite Creator, there can be no limit to the modes and degrees of creatures’ promised participation in his life.”158
And that brings us to the doctrine of the church.
139. Jenson says his dissatisfaction with so-called dialectical theology is its refusal to accept that promise has actual content, that it can be fulfilled without being negated.
140. Jenson, “Aspects of a Doctrine of Creation,” 23.
141. Jenson, Knowledge of Things Hoped For, 232.
142. Jenson, “Aspekte der Christologie,” 115.
143. Jenson, Story and Promise, 11.
144. Jenson, Song of Songs, 67.
145. Ibid.
146. Jenson, “Justification as Triune Event,” 426.
147. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 1:73.
148. Jenson, “Theosis,” 112.
149. Jenson, Song of Songs, 45.
150. Jenson, “Theosis,” 112.
151 Quoted in Jenson, “Justification as a Triune Event,” 425.
152. Jenson, Systemati
c Theology, 1:66.
153. Jenson, Song of Songs, 95.
154. Jenson, Ezekiel, 63.
155. Jenson, “Justification as Triune Event,” 426.
156. Jenson, “Theosis,” 110.
157. Ibid., 109–10.
158. Jenson, “Church as Communio.”
5
Church
Anticipation & Availability
The church, as Jenson regards it, is an anticipation of the kingdom, a kind of prefiguration of the age to come, an embodiment now of the promise that is not yet realized for all creation. As such, the church is the availability of Christ to the world, and the church’s ministries mark the nexus of time and eternity, earth and heaven, past and future where God is personally encountered by those he graciously draws to himself in faith. All creatures are moved by God to their end, to be sure. But the church is doubly moved, because as the body of Christ it is a creature that through its ministries mediates the movement of the other creatures toward God. That is to say, the church shares in Christ’s mission, and so exists for the sake of bringing the world to awareness of the hope that has been given it in his resurrection. The church is nothing but this mission, as it is nothing but the ministry of Christ taking a particular communal shape.
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