# Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology volume 1



## RamistThomist (Jan 6, 2014)

Published by Oxford University Press.

Robert W. Jenson’s systematic theology is refreshingly different from standard models. Loosely drawing upon older medieval and early Reformational loci, Jenson gives us a succinct yet profound model for presenting theology. True, Jenson does cover the standard loci (norms of authority, God, Christology, etc), but Jensons’s theology, either unlike others or more explicitly than others, operates from a common theme. Jensons’s theme is “the identity of God.” The way Jenson works this theme is similar to a musical fugue. As he introduces his theme, he allows it to take upon itself different connotations with each repetition, ending in a stunning climax.

*Norms of Authority*

Jenson’s approach here is very interesting. He doesn’t simply say, “The Baahhbul alone is our authority.” Perhaps we may fault him on that, but neither does he open himself up to immediate counters to that position. He recognizes the inevitability of tradition in the Church’s identity, but he raises a question from that that few do: it was tradition itself in the mid-2nd century that necessitated a formal canon. The implication: tradition, whatever its specific liturgical content may have been, was no longer adequate to the Church’s life by itself.

Jenson adds yet another key to this piece: the Spirit’s life in the church (26ff). Such a move sounds a lot like Eastern Orthodoxy, and it does incorporate a lot of Orthodoxy’s strengths on this point, but Jenson takes it to a different (and utterly more biblical) conclusion: the Spirit’s presence is the in-breaking of the Kingdom, which opens God’s future to God’s people. A Spirit-founded church is a future-moving church.

Jensons’s theme, accordingly,is “the identity of God.” The practice of theology, then, is “speaking this identity,” which is speaking the gospel. Jenson defines the gospel as “Jesus of Nazareth, the one who….is risen from the dead.”

What is God’s identity? Classical theology will say “3 Persons/1 Essence.” This is of course true, but the twilight of classical ontology and the current earthquakes from nihilism force clarification upon the theologian. This is the Church’s opportunity. Jenson identifies God as “The One who brought Israel out of Egypt” (44, quoting Exodus 20:2). The New Testament expands this identity as “The One who raised Jesus from the dead.” God is the one who rescued the Israelite from the dead. It is important to see that God is identified by his events (59). Jenson that follows with several profound meditations on the nature of idolatry.

The music is not yet finished. We have easily established the Father’s identity. We have hinted at (though not fully developed) a connection between the Father’s identity and that of his Son, the Resurrected Israelite. We must now see how these two “connect” in identity without losing their differences, and the role of the Spirit in that connection.

God’s identity is told by his story. In identifying God, we have a dramatis dei personae, “characters of the divine drama” (75). Exegetes have since come to the conclusion that “Son” is often a title for Israel. Yet Israel as a fallen nation cannot live up to that sonship. Another Israelite, God’s Son in a different sense, is with and by whom God is identified. “He is God himself as a participant in Israel’s story” (76). This leads naturally to an extended discussion of the Servant passages. Jenson, contrary to many evangelicals, does not say that the “Servant” is simply code for “Jesus.” He allows the Servant narratives to unfold and in the unfolding we see “Suddenly, the Servant is an individual within Israel” (80). Giving his prophetic speech, rising from the dead, and ushering in eschatological peace, the Church could not help but identify this servant with the Son of David from Nazareth. The next persona in the drama is the Spirit of the Lord. Jenson does not at this point explicate the Spirit’s role-identity.
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How are they One Being?
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Jenson notes that classical pagan ontology identified “god” by metaphysical predicates. Deity is a quality that can be participated in by degrees. To bridge any gap, pagan metaphysicians would invoke relatively divine-human figures to mediate that deity. From this standpoint, Jenson explains the work of the early Christian apologists until Origen and the role of Logos-theology.

Logos had a two-fold meaning: the sense the world makes and the expression of that sense (96). This allowed Justin Martyr to say that the Logos enthietos is eternal relative to God’s being (although there was some equivocation as to his timelessness) but the Logos prophorikos is temporal relative to God’s creating act (97). Besides obvious problems, Justin’s theology could not explain why there should only be one mediator between the divine realm and the temporal one, and not many like in Gnosticism and Paganism.

Origen sharpened this problematic. In Jenson’s beautiful description, Origen “conceived of the work of Father, Son, and Spirit as a sort of inverted stepped cone: the Father gives being to all creatures, the Son opens the knowledge of God to creatures capable of knowledge, and the Spirit performs the purification” (98). Origen perfected and avoided Justin’s starker problems by exploiting a favorite image of classical antiquity: the image. A statue of painting is not its archetype but neither is it not its archetype. “Being an image of something is a distinct mode of being” (98). This allowed antiquity (and early Christians) to posit a descending hierarchy of images.

Anticipating Hegel (!), Origen, using this imagic model, can say, “In that God knows himself, there subsists God as the object this knowledge; and in that this knowledge is expressed with divine perfection, God-as-his-own-object in an actual other than God himself” (99). Despite its beauty and profundity, Origen’s problematic was unstable. Beginning from the presuppositions of pagan metaphysics, Origen could not avoid the question “How divine was the Logos, on a spectrum of being of sheer divine and sheer temporality?” Any answer disrupts the inherent subordinationism. Scripture, however, asks different questions: Creator or creature? Origen really couldn’t answer this question, either. Not surprisingly, the Arian crisis soon exploded this problematic.

Discussions of Arianism, Nicea, and Athanasius are well-known, so this section of the essay will be brief. What is important to note is that key terms are beginning to be sharpened. Ousia in early Nicea is what a thing is; hypostasis is the differentiation of it.

Despite the Nicene-Constantinople victory, we must note what they did not accomplish. As Jenson notes, “The Cappadocians acknowledged only relations of origin as constitutive of the divine life. Thus, the eschatological character was suppressed” (108).

How does God’s reality present itself in history? Following Pannenberg (Systematiche Theologie, 3:333-347, quoted in Jenson 109n. 132) Jenson gives an interesting musing that “It is exactly in that Jesus or his Father or the Spirit refers absolutely from himself to one of the others as the One God that he is in a specific way a perfect correlate to that other, and so himself God within and of the history plotted by these referrals.” Jenson will later clinch this argument by sharpening Gregory of Nyssa’s: the term God for Gregory refers to the mutual action of the divine energies, to the perichoretic divine life” (214). This being of God is not a something (and thus we avoid Heidegger’s destruction of classical ontology), but a palable going-on...God is primally hypostatic: to be God the Father, or God the Son or God the Spirit, does not require that there antecedently be something one could call ‘God’” (214, 215; and thus we avoid Tillich’s critique of a quaternity).

Jenson’s discussion of Christology necessarily leads to a rather unique locus in his system: Patrology. This seems odd, since Patrology itself is not an ultimate norm for doing theology and authority. True, but Patrology does function as a grammar of how to do theology, illustrating key moves and problems. Those who ignore Patrology will find themselves unable to explain key problems in Christian theology.

Before we continue the discussion on Patrology, and in keeping with our musical theme, we should not Jenson’s masterful handling of the Holy Spirit and the Filioque debate. It must be admitted that conservative American evangelicals have failed miserably on this point. If I could think of harsher language, I would use it. Jenson begins by noting the problems in Augustine’s formulation: exactly how is one of the three specifically “spirit?” If hypostases are identified by relations of origin (Father-Son), we have a further problem, since no relation appears in the name “Holy Spirit” (147). Jenson then mentions Lossky’s poewrful argument against the West: by positing the Father and Son as a single cause of the Spirit, the West has muted the hypostatic characteristics of both Father and Son.

How can we respond? Before responding, we should briefly note the Eastern position. The Father is the sole monarchy of the Godhead, but this isn’t subordinationist because “terms such as procession and origine are but inappropriate expressions for a reality alien to all becoming, all process, all beginning” (Lossky, A l’image et a la ressemblance de Dieu, 78, quoted in Jenson, 152). Jenson remarks: “This is a vision of God as frozen as any we have encountered, and a new evacuation of Trinitarianism. The trinitarian propositions in their Eastern use fail to describe the Father’s subordinating of the Son and the Spirit, we discover, only because they do not describe any action at all (Jenson, 152).

Lossky’s problem points back to Gregory Palamas. Palamas employs the Cappadocians, but with a subtle difference. The Saints participate in the divine energies, which are the divine life, but not in the divine ousia, deity sheerly as such. The problem, though, is that the Cappadocians were a lot more flexible than Palamas. Their use of the term ousia (Basil probably excepted) does not suggest anything other than the divine life. Here is the problem for Palamas: “It is one thing to say that abstract deity is itself always the same quality, as the Cappadocians did; it is quite another to say that deity taken as God himself is a static essence. Ironically, Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his energies (153). Perhaps most disastrously, Orthodoxy has a tendency to “reify the energies, the moments of the divine life, and at least in the case of the Spirit, the energies replace the person in the historical actuality of salvation” (157).

So what is Jenson’s solution? By way of clarification, he explains Hegel’s famous “I-thou/Master-slave” analogy. If you and I are to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our discourse. If I am present, I am a subject whom you have as my object. But if I am not an object for you as subject, if I somehow evade that, I enslave you. I am not reciprocally available to you (155).

How then, can this mutual availability happen? How is an I-Thou relationship possible without becoming a struggle for power? (Jenson notes with humor that postmodernism carried out this program under a tutelage of horror!) Jenson, in perhaps an unacknowledged Augustinian strain,notes, “there is freely given love...a third party in the meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou. Thus, if you and I are to be free for one another, someone must be our liberator (okay, granted this isn’t the best term--JA)...If I am to be your object and you mine, so that we may be subjects for each other, there has to be one for whom we are both objects, and whose intention for us is our love for each other. The theological conclusion is obvious.

Still, it does not fully answer the Filioque debate, at least not here. Jenson tentatively works toward a Western answer. The debate over the Filioque is misplaced. If God is indeed the God of the future, and we see Cappadocian hints of an ever-forward moving futurity in God, then does it not make more sense to see the better question as “The Spirit is the End and Goal of all God’s ways”? East and West debate over the beginning Archimedean point when they should be discussing the divine goal as the Spirit’s Archimedean point” (157). Quoting Pannenberg again, “The fault of the Filioque is that the true Augustinian insight that the Spirit is the fellowship of the Son and Father ‘was formulated in terms of relations of origin’” (Pannenberg, I: 347, quoted in Jenson, 157 n. 67).

Jenson has an interesting, yet ultimately unsatisfying chapter on the atonement. He accepts many of the criticisms of Anselm: strictly speaking, on Anselm’s view there is no need for the Resurrection. Upon the death of Christ the transaction is complete. Theology, unfortunately, remains incomplete. Even more pointedly, “The New Testament speaks of God’s action to reconcile us to himself, and nowhere of God’s being reconciled to us” (186). The problem, however, with these subjective critiques of Anselm, and the theories they represent, fail to say how Jesus’s death accomplished anything specific.

After a brief and interesting discussion of the Christus Victor model, Jenson proposes a liturgical understanding of the atonement: the church’s primal way of understanding the atonement is that we live this narrative (189). “We rehearse the Word-event in our lives.” I am not exactly sure how he describes his proposal. He gives an interesting outline of public liturgies during Passion week and ends with an admittedly interesting suggestion: “If a theological proposition is one that says, ‘To be saying the gospel, let us say F rather than G,’ and if the gospel is spoken in language and by more embodied sorts of signs, by sacrament and sacrifice, then we must expect theology to take the form of ritual rubrics” (190). This isn’t wrong, per se, and I can attest to the power of liturgy in my own life, but one suspects that Jenson himself isn’t entirely free from the critique he offered of subjective models: precisely what happened on the cross? He answers it was Israel’s denouement of her Scriptures” (183). Very good and well said, but what does that have to do with me?

We must wait for the Resurrection for the answer to that question. He asserts that it accomplishes our reconciliation to God. With this we agree, but we suspect Scripture has said much more.

Jenson concludes his book with summary chapters on Spirit, Jesus, and the Being of the One God, incorporating much critical scholarship and noting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

*Conclusion*:

Astute readers will notice some similarities between Jenson’s approach and that of David Bentley Hart. Both theologians write musically. There are some differences, to be sure. Hart, for the most part, accepts classical ontology; Jenson does not. Jenson, further, is sympathetic to those in the Reformed tradition (see his spirited defense of Jonathan Edwards). Hart’s vitriol towards Calvinism is well-known. Most importantly, perhaps, is that Jenson can write in a coherent and readable (if sometimes dense) manner. Hart cannot.

*Appendix: God and the Future*

Our God is different from the Pagan gods because he is not afraid of “time.” God’s acting in salvation for his people is an acting in time, “not defending against the future, but securing it” (67). Gregory of Nyssa was on the verge of completely dismantling classical metaphysics hold on God-doctrine. Identifying the divine ousia as infinity, Gregory took it a step forward and identified it as temporal infinity, a future-oriented infinity (infinity qua infinity would dissipate into nothingness, the temptation of absolute models of simplicity). According to Jenson, “The Arians err defining God as having no beginning, when they should define God as having no end” (216). In Jenson’s succint pjhrase, “The Father is the whence of the divine life; The Spirit is the whither, and the Son the specious present” (218-219). The way in which the whence and the whither are one, the way in which the Triune God is eternal, is by the events in Jesus’s death and resurrection” (219).


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