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I just finished reading Robert Jenson’s magisterial Systematic Theology. It was a frustrating, beautiful, doxological, and blessed read. More than many books I have read over the last few years, this one has stirred my affections for (and questions about) Christ all over again.
Having read over the summer the logic-laden The Humility of the Eternal Son by Bruce McCormack, who gives the highest praises to Jenson, I was on the lookout for a doctrinal study that encouraged a praise break or two in the midst of its theologizing. Jenson was the perfect for this.
Although in relation to the typical Protestant systematic it is rather tiny, Jenson’s Systematic Theology is deserving of a step-by-step series of blogs on some of its main ideas.
ST: Prolegomena
Jenson’s big idea, developed from Barth, is that God’s being as event disallows any sort of otherworldliness on the part of God. For God to be Himself as Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Spirit, is to be no more and no less than exactly what we receive in the biblical testimony. In other words, to play on a maxim coined by Torrance concerning Barth, there is no God behind the back of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as reported about in the Bible. For Jenson, this makes moot any point of ontological speculation concerning God’s being as separated from the narrated events of the life of Jesus Christ. To Jenson, the question What is God? can only be answered by appeal to the specificity of the Lord’s life, growth, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. God’s being is nothing other than the event of Christ’s life.
With this, of course, comes a total reversal (and rejection) of classical categories of divine and human being. Jenson writes, “Were God identified by Israel’s Exodus or Jesus’s Resurrection, without being identified with them, the identification would be a revelation ontologically other than God himself. The revealing events would be our clues to God, but would not be God. And this, of course, is the normal pattern of religion: where deity reveals itself is not where it is. At Delphi, one hears Apollo’s voice but does not meet him; indeed, the very notion of meeting Apollo in his own guise would have been oxymoronic.”[1] Jenson is even more of an actualist than Barth. For Jenson, the only true sort of being is actualized, eventful, specific being. The entire tradition’s tendency to posit a God otherwise in existence then how he is specifically existent in Christ, the Father, and the Spirit, and also as precisely that God recorded in Scripture, has been a false trajectory to Jenson. Actualism secures the certainty of God’s identification, and disallows any God-talk separated from his living activity as this biblical God. The Post-Barthians are very adamant on this point. God does not exist except as this event.
He continues, “God is not only identified by Exodus and Resurrection; he is identified with them… For the doctrine of Trinity is but a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ… For if a systematically developed discourse about God precedes the exposition of Trinity, there is danger that a nontrinitarian identification of God may be hidden in that discourse, to confuse all that follows. Western theology’s late-medieval and modern tradition has tended to treat first of God simply as he is God and only thereafter of his Trinity.”[2]
Jenson undoubtedly takes Barth a step further from where he himself was willing to go. There is debate on this point, but Barth does still speak about there being room for God to be Himself apart and without a creation. For Jenson, to even entertain the question of what God would be apart from His life with us in Christ is a moot point: God’s being is being-with-us. Period. There is no place to speak about God other than as actual in Christ. Here Jenson follows Barth in another way: by positing the doctrine of the Trinity as not simply the metaphysical makeup of the specific God Christians worship, but as the entire doctrinal matrix within which the whole body of Christian belief finds its intelligibility. Without the organizing principle of the Trinity to bestow meaning on each part of the Christian faith’s interconnected system, the faith becomes exactly what many (Christians and non-Christians alike) are convinced it is: an outdated, intellectually-stagnant group of mythological beliefs about a world and a God that no longer exists.
ST: The Being of God
Jenson’s entire project is geared towards dismantling the Ancient Ontology upon which the doctrines of Christianity have always been based. Jenson sees the reception of Christian doctrine – and centrally the doctrine of the Trinity – as unnecessarily tied to ancient Platonic and Aristotelian ways of philosophizing about the world. In a way, Jenson is completely orthodox: he maintains all of the traditional Christian doctrines “intact” in respect to their intellectual content. Yet, their metaphysical foundation has completely shifted. Now, it is not the ontological picture given by Plato or Aristotle that determines what can or cannot be said about Christ and his being true God from true God, but Hegel and Heidegger. The entire Systematic Theology is devoted to explicating Jenson’s new picture, where God’s being is event.
In support of this, he writes, “The analyses and formulas usually thought of as ‘the’ doctrine of Trinity – for example, ‘three persons of one divine nature’ – were devised during a particular if decisive part of the effort’s historical course: when the gospel’s identification of God had directly to interpret and be interpreted by the antecedent theology of Mediterranean antiquity. Had the mission’s initial history led through a culture other than that schooled by the Greeks, analogous but differently directed enforcements of God’s biblical identity would have had to appear, and the mission continues to require trinitarian reflection that derives from that then carried out more by analogy than by implication.”[3]
And: “‘Being’ is not a biblical concept, or one with which Christian theology must necessarily have been involved, had the gospel’s history been different than it is. If we could abstract from the actual history, we could, of the biblical God, say ‘God is good’ and ‘God is just’ and continue with such propositions at need, without making an issue of the ‘is.’ And the teaching that God is one could remain the simple denial that anyone but JHWH is God. But ‘being’ was a central concept of the theology with which the gospel came into essential conversation in Mediterranean antiquity. Thus the concept has become an inextricable determinant of the actual Christian doctrine of God.”[4]
I am convinced that Jenson proposes what can best be described as a missionary theory of theological language, one I was introduced to in college and which has stuck with me ever since. Jenson sees theological language as necessarily subject to change depending on the people to whom it is directed. The Church stays stagnant when it thinks its task is something other than to contextualize doctrinal statements to fit in to the social, political, and philosophical imaginations of those to whom it speaks the Gospel. This Gospel may and does offend those imaginations, but at the very least it must be comprehensible to the people it seeks to reach, even if, as is often the case, in reaching them it is despised and rejected.
This is probably the benefit I see in Jenson, overall. Although he rejects the philosophical undergirding of the ways Christian doctrine has been taught and understood in the past, he does so not out of a petty hatred for antiquity (that much is out of the question) but out of a concern to reach the people of the modern world. The content stays the same: the God revealed in Jesus Christ is still very much the Triune God of Scripture. It is the dressing in which he is presented that is changed. Yet, is not that exactly what missionaries do, change their language and forms of expression to show forth their God as beautiful to the people to whom they are called to witness?
[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.
[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.
[3] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 90.
[4] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207.
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