The Existence of the Church
In her unique availability as mediating community, the church exists in three modes: as the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Spirit. These three modalities coinhere in one reality. As Jenson reads them, the figures—people, body, temple—perfectly explicate one another.159 All three are upheld in existence by anticipation of creation’s deifying end in God:
God’s one People will not gather until the last day; therefore the church can now be the People of God only in anticipation of that gathering, as the community that lives by what God will eschatologically make of it. The church is the Body of that Christ whose bodily departure to God’s right hand his disciples once witnessed, and whose return of like fashion we must still await. The church is the Temple of that Spirit whose very reality among us is “down-payment,” “arrabon.”160
First, the church is the temple of the Spirit in the sense that the church is a place the Spirit makes of God’s people as foretaste or foreglimpse of the eschatological kingdom. John of Damascus says that the Spirit rests on the body of the Son, the totus Christus. Second, the church is the people of God in the sense that she has to be one as God is one and holy as God is holy in order to be truly apostolic and catholic.161 That is, if the church hopes to “run with God,” to live with the one whom the prophets and apostles lovingly feared, then the church has to be radically different from everything else in creation.162 Finally, the church is the body of Christ in that she is how the risen and ascended Jesus is yet available to be seen and heard as well as to be touched and spoken to by those whom he loves.
Notice how all of this assumes that the church with her Lord is simply the totus Christus. The church, in short, is “the fullness of him who fills all things with himself,” the authority to which God subjects all things (Eph 1:22–23). In Jenson’s own words, the church is Christ “as Christ is in the world and therefore available in the world.” That means, among other things, that if the world wants to rid itself of Christ and the God he reveals, then it has to persecute the church because that is where Christ can be touched. Conversely, if the world wants to learn from Christ and to worship the God he reveals, “all it has to do is listen to the church, because again that is the thing as which he is to be found.”163 What happens to Christ happens to his body. What happens to his body happens to him.
Of course, not all of the churches—and none of them all of the time—are everything the church is revealed in Scripture and declared at every Eucharist-event to be. To be faithful, we must be spurred on, wooed toward the fullness of Christ’s stature as the perfection of all things. “We rely on the church as on the presence of God, [but] we do so just in that the church within herself directs us to a presence of God that is not identical with herself.”164 And far too often, she fails even to do this.
How can Jenson say both that the church is Christ’s body, one Spirit with him as surely as Eve was one flesh with Adam, and that the church is often deeply unfaithful? To ask the same question another way, if it is true, as Jenson often insists, that the mystery of the church is that God’s Spirit is her spirit, then how can it be that the churches fail? And what can Christ do about the failures of his own body? Jenson typically addresses this problem on two fronts at once: first, he talks about Christ’s correction of the church as a kind of “self-discipline,” and he talks about the church as also the bride of Christ, who is wooed into faithful oneness with her groom:
The identity of Christ embodied for the church with Christ embodied as the church is constituted in that the one embodiment anticipates itself in the other. Thus Paul’s bridal metaphor is eschatological: what is now is the engagement and Paul’s care for its success, the wedding itself is the consummation to come. In this, he joins the Revelation, where the Old Testament’s discourse of Israel as the Lord’s bride massively resurfaces, but now in unambiguously eschatological context: the final event of the Revelation’s drama is “the marriage of the Lamb,” for which “his Bride has made herself ready” (Rev. 19:7).165
The Ministries of the Church
The church is a community with a message. In other words, it exists just to get the gospel said in the world for God’s and the world’s sake. The church delivers that message both to God and to the world and gets it said in words visible and audible—that is, in sacraments and in preaching, and in the culture that makes the celebration of the sacraments and preaching intelligible.
For Jenson, as for Luther, these public kerygmatic ministries of the church are the heart of the ascended Christ’s ongoing work in the world. “The consecrated bread and cup on the altar, the mouth of the preacher and the open page of the Scripture, the basin or torrent of water—and however many other sacramental signa there may be . . . mark the earthly places to which we may look to be looking to heaven, to the whence of God’s coming; they are the created markers setting the boundary within creation which God rends to come to us.”166 And they must get said as promise and not as law. Otherwise, they are not truly what they must be.
Sacraments, as Jenson describes them, are signs that get done what they signify. And what they signify is an anticipated reality—the reality of the kingdom. They are signs of this age that indicate and just so mediate a reality of the age to come. “A Christian sacrament brings into the present some aspect of the future promised by the gospel.”167 As he articulates it in his commentary on the Song, “Where the Lord comes, in the reading of Torah or the celebration of Eucharist or in any of a hundred events of his ‘real presence’ among his people, something of the final and first-intended fulfillment opens to our experience; we are in ‘the gate of heaven,’ as Martin Luther described the church.”168
Baptism is the sacrament that creates the church, as birth is the event that determines the human community. According to the New Testament, baptism “saves” (1 Pet 1:3–21). And it is in baptism that believers are joined in the fellowship of Christ’s disciples and just so into God’s own life (Matt 28:19). This means that the fullness of the Christian life is anticipated in the event of baptism: for example, the church is a community of those who have been justified and sanctified; therefore, baptism’s work is described in the Scriptures as justifying and sanctifying (1 Cor 1:26–31; 6:8–11); the church is a community of priests and prophets; therefore, baptism is described as “the anointing by which priests and prophets are made” (Heb 10:22; 1 John 2:18–27); the church is persecuted but victorious; therefore, baptism is described as “incorporation into the risen Christ’s own body and into dying and rising with and in him” (Rom 6:1–11). All this means believers are always trying to “catch up” to their baptism, hoping to realize in their lives the fullness of the reality brought to bear on them in the waters of blessing.
Eucharist is the sacrament of Christ’s present embodiment for his people, the means by which he constitutes them as his body for the sake of the world. If the world wants to find Christ, then it must look to the church. If the church wants to find Christ, it must look to the Eucharist: “the place where he can be found, where he can be located, is the bread and cup on the table or on the altar.”169 Not as a second body alongside the church, but as that same body in a different mode of availability.
Again, the Eucharist is a meal that makes a promise: “The meal-fellowship of the Supper is the acted-out promise of the last fellowship. To be brought into the fellowship of this Supper is to anticipate belonging to the fellowship of the kingdom.”170 If we eat the meal in any other spirit, coming to the Table out of mere ritualism or self-seeking, we consume judgment on ourselves. For example, if the cup is not shared spiritedly, joyfully, then everything is lost. And the same is true if we refuse to live together the covenant the thanksgiving-cup makes for us.171
In the Eucharist, Christ is present in a way that joins him to his own people so that he and his body are at-one-ed, and so that each member is thereby at-one-ed with the other members. Just as the bread is
bread and yet body because it has become through the Spirit a sign of eschatological reality, and just as the wine is wine and yet blood because it has been transformed by its very reality as Spirit-baptized sign, so the church is the church and yet Christ’s body, and Christ is God and yet creature. In short, the Eucharist is the sign that makes the church the church, just as the church is the sign that makes the world the world.
Ordination is the sacrament that centers the Christian community in its continuity with the apostles and its fidelity to the message entrusted to its care. But even if there should be an order of ministry—bishops, in succession, flanked by deacons and presbyters—only God is sovereign, and all believers are invited into “common parliament with him, that is, to common prayer.”172 Just at this point, the church’s difference from all worldly order and disorder comes to the fore:
In the church, the inner flaw of all this world’s polities, our inevitable lust to dominate, is broken, because the One from whom we would here seek to wrest freedom cannot be dominated. In the church, all the baptized are invited to the table, where the host so gives himself to them that they have nothing more to wrest from him or from one another.”173
Preaching, as Jenson regards it, is a word-event that makes the gospel happen for speaker and hearers alike. As such, it is the proof of any theology. In his own preaching, Jenson models what he takes to be the criterion for faithful preaching: wrestling with the plain christological sense of whatever texts the lectionary assigns in the effort to awaken in hearers the kind of faith that radically alters their relation to their own past, opening them to possibilities before unimaginable of loving others. Preaching, in other words, must be the happening of the good news. For a sermon to be truly a Word of God, hearers must not merely think or feel differently—they must be moved in fact by the Spirit toward Christ as their Lord and toward his Father.
The church, as Jenson understands it, is something like a culture that stands in contrast with all other cultures, existing over against all worldly orders and disorders. In the language of Ephesians and Colossians, the church is a witness against the powers of this age because it is subject only to Christ, who has dethroned the powers in his death and resurrection, and who has been established by the Spirit as Lord of all. But what kind of culture is the church? Jenson notes that ethnography uses culture to name all the practices and customs that hold a community together across time and space. The church has such practices and customs—including, for example, preaching, Eucharist, baptism, intercessory prayer, ordination—although of course they are adapted to the needs of particular communities in particular contexts.174 Above all, the church is a culture of revolution, participating in whatever penultimate revolutions prove necessary, in full knowledge that Jesus is the only revolutionary who can guarantee a revolution that does not in the end defeat itself.
Only the one could create a real revolution who would have lived in freedom to the end of the established structures—without abandoning the historical, human reality mediated in these structures. That is to say, only the one could make a revolution who would have freely given up his life and would have died of his complete acceptance of the hating, alienated, and counter-revolutionary fellow human beings. There will be revolution when it is made by a loving one who died for his love. We who say that Jesus is risen, say that there is such a man, and expect the revolution. For this very reason, we are free to use revolutionary pathos in penultimate “revolutions” without disappointment.175
In other words, the church is revolutionary most of all in its participation in worldly revolutions, because it alone never forgets that Christ alone can overturn all evil for the good of all. And it is that hope that constitutes the meaning of the longed-for kingdom of God.
159. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:190.
160. Jenson, “Church as Communio,” 2.
161. This aligns the church with Israel in nonsupersessionist way. The church is not the people of God instead of or in competition with Israel, but alongside Israel.
162. Jenson, heology in Outline, 94.
163. Ibid., 97.
164. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:167.
165. Jenson, “Bride of Christ,” 4.
166. Jenson, “On the Ascension,” 335.
167. Jenson, Ezekiel, 57. Against the pressure of most Protestantism, especially in the United States, Jenson argues that the Christian faith is inherently, necessarily sacramental. A version of the faith that denies sacramentality is necessarily deviant.
168. Jenson, Song of Songs, 35.
169. Jenson, Theology in Outline, 85.
170. Jenson, Visible Words, 79.
171. Ibid., 83.
172 Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 44.
173. Ibid.
174. For an example of how Jenson expects this adaptation to play out in a non-Western society, see Jenson, “Risen Prophet.”
175. Jenson, ““Aspekte der Christologie,” 115.
6
Kingdom
The End as Music
From the beginning of his career, from long before he knew the term theology of hope or the movement it names, Jenson was a theologian of hope. The entire force of his theology arises from the expectation that God has made time for us, and that the gospel promises God’s future as the fulfillment of our history. The end of our history must be truly an ending—like the ending of a good story. And the end of our history must be somehow also a beginning (although, of course, of a radically different kind from what we have come to know as beginnings). All this can take place only because God himself is inherently dramatic, and “he shares our history in time as his history,” so directing the drama as beginning, goal, and guide.176
The Coming of the End
But how does that end come? And what happens in its coming? It comes as manifestation, judgment, reconciliation, fulfillment, and bliss: all of these at once, and each because of the others. And this manifold end can come about only by a divine work that effects creation’s translation into God’s own life.
Manifestation
Scripture promises that the Father’s “manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ” will be brought about “at the right time” (1 Tim 6:14). But Jenson’s account of God’s relation to time makes it clear that Christ’s “manifestation” is not an event within time, or even after time, but an event that happens to time. Instead of the terminus of God’s grace, Christ’s “manifestation” is its telos.
Jesus’s coming in glory necessarily alters the very structures of reality. The apocalyptic moment at time’s end is no less decisive than the primordial moment at time’s beginning. And like that beginning, that end is not one moment among other moments but the final, consummating moment that happens to all moments. For Jenson, the manifestation or appearing of Christ is not a moment after all other moments, but the moment in which all moments, all events, are drawn into the light of the divine glory where they are truly what they are.
The Gospels show that even before his glorification, Jesus’s incarnate presence affected everyone and everything around him. How much more so in the End, when he is presenced in glory? How could his glorious appearing, his all-revealing manifestation, not alter time itself in such a way that all times—and everything that happened in them—are opened to him? When the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom all things hold together, makes himself known in this manner, everything hidden must be revealed, everything lost must be found, everything broken must be healed, everything wrong must be righted.
Judgment
“I will be cured without being eradicated.”177 That is the promise of the Last Judgment. And only such a judgment, enacted by the triune God, could both bring our history to fulfillment and open up a new history for us. The judgment that Christ’s appearing effects
is not merely a reckoning for wrongs done, or merely a delivery of final verdicts on the state of our character, not a simple weighing of balances or dispensing of grades. Instead, it is a generative event, the “moment” in which God acts unrestrictedly and fully on creation. In this way, God consummates what he has already initiated in Israel and the church.
Reconciliation
Jesus is the truth; therefore, for him to be present to all creation in the fullness of his glory means that justice—that which is most fitting, most true given the goodness and beauty of God—is both indisputably clear and irreversibly accomplished. Delivering judgment, Christ reorders creation rightly. In fact, this “setting right,” Jenson insists, is “the content of the eternal event of bliss.”178 We tend to imagine the ending judgment as effecting separations. But what if we were to think of it as an alpha point of “the eternal expansion of one great reconciling”?179
Jenson is abundantly clear: such reconciling will and could come about only as the perfect realization of God’s holiness. God’s justice must be done; therefore, no sin or injustice—not even an “idle word”!—can be ignored or forgotten. All sinners must give account for their sins. All sinned-against must receive the justice they deserve. If in Christ we know that God is light and that in him there’s no darkness at all, if eternal life is nothing less than being taken up into God, if in the end all the works of the enemy must be destroyed, then we must at last become righteous just as he is righteous—“very light of very light.” Sanctification is the condition of our existence.
The End Is Music Page 9
