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I don’t think I have read a more prophetic, life-giving, convicting, or true set of sentences in the past year than these written by Robert Jenson in 1978:
“Personal life occurs only in community. Just so, it can fail, according to either of its aspects, spirit or body.
Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be spirit. I might perhaps still be a sort of abstract mind, perceiving reality beyond myself. But since I would not be drawn or shaken by that reality, I would not be drawn or shaken by what is beyond what I at any moment am. I would be changeless – which were I God, would be fine for me and disastrous for all else, and since I am not God, would be irrelevant to all else and disastrous for me. Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be self-transcendent in time.
Insofar as late-modern ambition is that each of us shall be sole subject in his ‘own’ life, the possibility of spirit is attacked, and must be fought for with increasing explicitness and tenacity. To the exact extent that marriage indeed becomes a revocable arrangement between permanently ‘independent’ individuals, religion becomes self-realization, politics retreat to the ‘privacy of the voting booth,’ and in short the consumer ethic generally triumphs, our life is in the most primitive sense dispirited. Simultaneous lethargy and frenzy is the dominant characteristic of all those persons and groups in which late-modern abstract individualism is most consistently achieved. It is our society’s trick to make egocentricity a virtue; but it will not work, for my alienation from you is my alienation also from myself.
Our reality as spirit for one another is not self-sustaining. It can fail, regularly has, and now often does. If there is spirit that will not fail, we call such spirit God. God’s presence is the coming of such spirit.
Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be body. I would undoubtedly be an organism, and subject to Newton’s laws about masses in space. And we would impinge on each other, in the way of the celebrated billiard balls. But I would not be available to you, nor even to myself; there would just be this organic mass, fundamentally interchangeable with any other, and precisely as incomprehensibly and externally identified with a particular mind as Descartes found it. Were I a fundamentally self-contained entity, I would not be available through time.
Our reality as bodies also can fail. The progressive disembodiment of late-modern civilization is full or ironies – as that Christianity is routinely attacked for, of all things, enmity against the body, often by persons visibly at war even with the organic condition of their own embodiment. Who devalues the body? Those for whom its gestures make no commitments, or those for whom they can make irrevocable commitment? Those who find freedom in casual nakedness, or those who reserve this most visible word for those to whom they have something extraordinary to say? Our society’s frenzy for the body is precisely frenzy for what we lack. Those who refuse all decisive commitment and so withdraw from availability, who have no grasp on the past, who wear instant clothes and make instant love and eat instant food, who forever are seeking identity, flit as wraiths through time, hungering for embodiment.
Body and spirit fail together. Were you pure spirit in my life, you would be nobody in particular, but a nobody who yet gave me orders. That is, you would belong to one of those impersonal but ruling collectives – bureaucratized corporations, militarized government, or the ‘media’ – that do in fact now determine so much of life. Were all others pure spirit in my life, these collectivities would appear to and in me as one and absolute, the dream of totalitarians would be fulfilled – and freedom and spirit too would cease.
The obvious outcome of the last paragraph must be the proposition: if there is body that does not fail, we call such body God. Therewith we have the great offense of Christian discourse about God… For indeed, God is a person; and that means that he is Spirit and Body.”[1]
[1] Robert Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1978), 23-25.
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