Blog Posts

  • Embodiment, Presence, Modernity: A Selection from Robert Jenson’s “Visible Words”

    – – 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…

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  • Robert Jenson and the Logos Asarkos

    – – Bruce McCormack’s landmark study on Christology, The Humility of the Eternal Son, leans heavily on the work of Robert Jenson to disprove the tradition’s positing of a bifurcated “Christological Subject.” He claims that this idea argues that there are two identities in God the Son: the “Eternal Son,” conceived as an identity of…

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  • Robert Jenson: The Church is the Presence of Christ

    – – “Plainly, for Paul the concept of personal embodiment is not itself a biological concept. We may discover what sort of concept it then is, and simultaneously declare our own usage, by first recalling our general interpretation that for Paul a person’s embodiment is his or her availability to other persons and thereupon to her or…

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  • Josef Pieper’s What is a Feast?

    Josef Pieper was a philosopher who sought to recover the classical Christian tradition’s theological and philosophical foci. In conversation (or perhaps debate) with the form of mainstream existentialist thought that arose after the end of World War II – the form of thought that sought to completely flip the script on the West’s self-understanding –…

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  • The Son of the Father: T.F. Torrance on the Divinity of Jesus

    – – T.F. Torrance is one of those theologians you can confidently say is a pretty homogenous writer when his whole corpus is considered. If you have read one of his books on theology – unless it is a highly specific monograph or journal article or something of the sort – you have read them…

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  • The Scriptural Christ is the True Christ

    – – There are many Jesus Christs that roam this world. There is the Muslim Christ – the one who did not die on the cross, who paved the way for Muhammad, who taught profoundly of a god; there is the Buddhist Christ, the person whose teachings pointed to the self-negation at the heart of…

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  • The Self-Understanding of the Theologian in Karl Barth’s The Christian Life

    – – There is a blessed chapter in the Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Barth, called Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings, where Barth is talking about the concept of wonder in relation to the discipline of theology. After claiming that Jesus Christ is the event that causes continuous wonder in the theologian, he turns to…

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  • Karl Barth’s Pastoral Encouragements and Warnings in Two of His Later Letters

    – – Recently I finished reading a compendium of letters written by Barth during the last seven years of his life. The collection is filled with insider information on Barth’s dealings and correspondences, and it gives the reader rather interesting access to all of his personal and theological preoccupations leading up to his death. For…

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  • Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: The (New) Triune Relations

    – – Robert Jenson is known for many things: his emphasis on the sacraments, his theological creativity, his reliance on Hegel, his reliance on Barth, his ability to speak theology concisely, and the list goes on. One aspect of his theology I have not seen touched on as much, however, are the new relations he…

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  • Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: Eschatology as the Triune Unity

    – – Robert Jenson was a masterful theologian who sought to think within the bounds of theologia and, within those bounds, to receive the Christian tradition in fresh if unorthodox ways. He writes this awesome statement: “This is sometimes the way of theology: to take a plain phenomenon of the gospel’s narrative that causes difficulty…

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