Category: Quotation

Quotation

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

Alex Renner

–

–

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.

Quotation

Robert Jenson: The Church is the Presence of Christ

Alex Renner

–

–

“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 himself and by then again introducing German idealism’s subject-object distinction. That the church is the body of Christ, in Paul’s and our sense, means that she is the object in the world as which the risen Christ is an object for the world, an available something as which Christ is there to be addressed and grasped. Where am I to aim my intention, to intend the risen Christ? The first answer must be: to the assembled church, and if I am in the assembly, to the gathering that surrounds me. Thus the primal posture of Christian prayer is not involution with closed eyes but an open posture, with eyes intent upon those speaking for the gathering. Yet we cannot rest with this first answer. In the New Testament, the church and risen Christ are one but can also be distinguished from each other; thus, for example, the church is the risen Christ’s ‘bride’ so that Christ and the church are joined as a couple. We may not so identify the risen Christ with the church as to be unable to refer distinctly to the one and then to the other. Protestants have for just this reason often feared such language as appears in the previous paragraphs. If we say only that the church is personally identical with Christ, it may seem that the church can never need reform or be open to it… Within the gathering we can intend Christ as the community we are, without self-deification, because we jointly intend the identical Christ as the sacramental elements in our midst, which are other than us. Yet again invoking the distinction between community and association, we may say that the church as community is the object-Christ for the world and her own members severally, in that the church as association is objectively confronted within herself by the same Christ… But now a question can no longer be repressed: Why must Christ be embodied for us at all? Why is not a ‘spirital’ – in the vulgar sense – communion enough? That is, why is it not enough privately to think and feel Christ’s presence and to know that others in their privacies do the same? Why do I need to live in the assembled church? Or indeed why is it not enough that the bread and cup move me to inward awareness of the risen Christ and to a deeper feeling of communion with him – as is the understanding of most Protestants and not a few Catholics, whatever the official teaching of their churches? Why must we say the bread and cup are his objective intrusion, his body? Few have probed this question with such passion as Martin Luther. Were Christ’s presence in the assembly disembodied, it would be his presence as God but not his presence as a human, for as a human he is a risen body. And to the posit of Christ’s presence as sheer God, abstracted from his embodied actuality as Jesus, Luther can react only with horror: ‘Don’t give me any of that God!’ It is God’s hiding in human embodiment that is our salvation: Christ’s naked deity – were there in actuality such a thing – would be ‘nothing to do with us’ and just so destruction for us. Our salvation is ‘God incarnate… in whom are all the [divine] treasures… but hidden [emphasis added]’… The church with her sacraments is truly Christ’s availability to us just because Christ takes her as his availability to himself. Where does the risen Christ turn to find himself? To the sacramental gathering of believers. To the question ‘Who am I?’ he answers, ‘I am this community’s head. I am the subject whose objectivity is this community. I am the one who died to gather them.’ And again: ‘I am the subject whose objectivity for this community is the bread and cup around which she gathers’… The metaphysics of Mediterranean antiquity, and for the most part those of subsequent Western tradition, of course do not allow for this simplicity. Therefore they are in error. The usual metaphysics suppose that what can be and what cannot be are determined by abstractly universal principles and never by a particular; thus the question of how the church with her sacraments can be the actual body of the individual human person Jesus can be settled only by argument that does not itself mention his particular personhood or the specific communion of the church. But this supposition of the Greek pagan thinkers is neither revealed nor an otherwise inevitable position. If the gospel is true, precisely the specific personhood of the individual human person Jesus is, by the initiative of the Father and in the freedom of the Spirit, the material determinant of what generally can be and cannot be.”[1]

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume 2: The Works of God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 213-15.

Quotation

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

Alex Renner

–

–

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 speaking about how, in response to Christ-centered wonder, the theologian is then forced to understand himself. He writes:

“The astonishment of the individual carries with it the fact that no one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself… Whatever, however, and whoever I may be in other respects, I have finally and profoundly become a man made to wonder at himself by this wonder of God… This confrontation occurs in even the most timid and untalented attempt to take seriously the subject in which I have become involved or to work theologically at all, whether in the field of exegesis, Church history, dogmatics, or ethics… In one way or another I am obliged to consider the question of the wonder of God. I may perhaps attempt to steal away from the confrontation and preoccupation with this wonder. But I can no longer be released from this confrontation. Theology undoubtedly gives the man who is concern with it something like a character indelebilis, an indelible quality. Whoever has eyes to see will recognize even at a distance the man who has been afflicted and irreparably wounded by theology and the Word of God. He will be recognizable by a certain earnestness and humor, whether genuine or spurious, real or only pretended. But the process and the way in which it was possible for him to become such a man will always be hidden, even from the theologian himself. This process will remain a deeply wondrous enigma and mystery. I no doubt know and recognize myself quite possibly in all my other opinions and inclinations, in all my other real or fancied or desired possibilities. By birth and nature we are indeed all rationalists, empiricists, or romanticists in some osrt of mixture, and we have no occasion to be astonished at ourselves in this respect. All that is simply a fact. But I become, am, and remain something unknown, a different person, a stranger, when I am counted worthy to be permitted and required to wonder with respect to the wonder of God. And this is what happens when I become concerned with theology. How could my existence with this permission and demand to wonder ever become an everyday, familiar, and trite fact? How could this attribute of my existence ever become transparent to me?”[1]

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Barth, Karl. 2022. Karl Barth: Spiritual Writings. Edited by Ashley Cocksworth and W. Travis McMaken. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. 199-200.

Quotation

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

Alex Renner

–

–

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 example, I did not know that he was virtually absorbed in the developments of the Second Vatican Council, which was transpiring in the mid-60s; the theologians who were a part of that council, furthermore, were highly influenced by – or at least aware of – Barth’s theology, and sent him an invitation to be an outside observer to the council’s proceedings.

For the purposes of this post, I saw fit to lay before you two letters, both pastoral in nature, which Barth sent to two troubled individuals who had reached out to him about two very different problems.

The first letter was written in late December of 1961, and is a response to a German prisoner whom Barth was fairly sure was contemplating taking his own life. The pastoral counsel Barth offers is a balm to the heart. It reads:

“Dear N.N.,
Your letter of the thirteenth reached me yesterday and moved me greatly. Partly because you refer to my good friend Gertrud Staewen but above all because Christmas is upon us, I hasten to make at least a short reply.
Since you obviously want something from me, you cannot be serious in expecting me to judge you harshly. But can I give you any supporting counsel?
You say you plunge deeply into the Bible in vain. You say you also pray in vain. You are clearly thinking of a ‘final step’ but you shrink back from it. Have I understood you correctly?
First regarding your prayers. How do you know they are in vain? God has His own time and He may well know the right moment to lift the double shadow that now lies over your life. Therefore, do not stop praying. 
It could also be that He will answer you in a very different way from what you have in mind in your prayers. Hold unshakably fast to one thing. He loves you even now as the one you now are… And listen closely: it might well be that He will not lift this shadow from you, possibly will never do so your whole life, just because from all eternity He has appointed you to be His friend as He is yours, just because He wants you as the man whose only option it is to love Him in return and give Him alone the glory there in the depths from which He will not raise you.
Get me right: I am not saying that this has to be so, that the shadows cannot disperse. But I see and know that there are shadows in the lives of all of us, not the same as those under which you sigh, but in their way oppressive ones too, which will not disperse, and which perhaps in God’s will must not disperse, so that we may be held in the place where, as those who are loved by God, we can only love Him back and praise Him.
Thus, even if this is His mind and will for you, in no case must you think of that final step. May your hope not be a tiny flame but a big and strong one, even then, I say, and perhaps precisely then; no, not perhaps but certainly, for what God chooses for us children of men is always the best.
Can you follow me? Perhaps you can if you read the Christmas story in Luke’s Gospel, not deeply but very simply, with the thought that every word there, and every word in the Twenty-Third Psalm too, is meant for you too, and especially for you.

With friendly greetings and all good wishes,

Yours,
KARL BARTH.”[1]

The second letter was written five years later, in early December, in response to a German pastor (who was also a former student) who was prompting Barth to be more responsive and appreciative of certain ecclesiastical-political goings-on. The shift changes in this one. Gentle, comforting Barth has been put away and, in his place, the reprimanding, disapproving, fatherly Barth now comes to the fore. It reads:

“Dear Pastor,

            Your urgent letter of 2 November still lies unanswered in front of me and so (for the last week) does your fiery poem ‘Germany’s Path,’ which points in the same direction. I thank you for them. Excuse me if I am brief. I am no longer able to draw up longer statements.

            This brings me at once to your wish, which you have even presented to me in the form of a citation to appear before the judgment seat of the Lord of the church. Amidst all the speaking and shouting in Germany, loud enough as it is, you want me to issue a kind of roar of the lion of Judah in the style of certain utterances at the beginning of the thirties. Dear pastor, you are not going to hear this roar. ‘For everything there is a season and a time.’ That I am not at one with Bultmann and his followers I have shown publicly and clearly not only in my booklet Ein Versuch, ihn zu verstehen but also in the whole C.D., especially the last volumes. And C.D. is in fact being read quietly much more, and more attentively, than you seem to realize. And since the good Lord, in spite of reports to the contrary, is not dead, I am not concerned, let alone do I feel constrained, to act as the defender of his cause in a confessional movement… For one thing I have other and more useful things to do. 
            This brings me to the second thing concerning yourself. As you tell me, you have just come from three months of persistent depression in the hospital, and you have already had other periods like it. After this ‘down’ you are not in an ‘up.’ Good, thank God for it, but see that worse does not befall you. It is not thanking God, nor is it good therapy, to use this ‘up’ to proclaim the status confessionis hodie, to imitate Luther at Worms or Luther against Erasmus, to compose thoughtlessly generalizing articles and paltry battle-songs, to write me (and assuredly not only me) such fiery letters, to pour suspicion on all who do not rant with you, indeed, to punish them in advance with your scorn, etc. Instead you should be watching and praying and working at the place where you have been called and set, you should be reading holy scripture and the hymn-book, you should be studying carefully with a pencil in your hand the theological growth springing up around you to see whether there might not be some good grain among the tares. Lighting your pipe and not letting it go out, but refilling and rekindling it, you should not constantly orient yourself only to the enemy – e.g., to seninely simplistic statements such as those recently made bt the great man of Marburg in the Spiegel – but to the matter in relation to which there seem to be friends and enemies. Then in the modesty in which is true power… you should preach good sermons in X, give good confirmation lessons, do good pastoral work – as good as God wills in giving you the Holy Spirit and as well as you yourself can achieve with heart and mind and mouth. Do you not see that this little stone is the one thing you are charged with, but it is a solid stone in the wall against which the waves or bubbles of the modern mode will break just as surely as in other forms in the history of theology and the church they have always broken sooner or later? Dear pastor, if you will not accept and practice this, then you yourself will become the preacher of another Gospel for which I can take no responsibility. You will accomplish nothing with it except to make martyrs of your anger those people who do not deserve to be taken seriously in this bloodthirsty fashion and whom you cannot help with your ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ With the modesty indicated, be there for these people instead of against them in this most unprofitable style and effort. In this way, and in this way alone, will you thank God for your healing. In this way, and in this way alone, can you help to prevent new depression overtaking you tomorrow or the day after. 

            This is what I want to say to you as your old teacher, who also has real knowledge of the ups and downs in the outer and inner life of man even to this very day, but who knows how to greet in friendly fashion the remedy which there is for them.

            With sincere greetings, which I ask you to convey also to your wife and sister-in-law,

                                                                                                Yours,

                                                                                                KARL BARTH.”[2]

This last one in particular struck me, as it sounds like something a former version of myself would have done well to listen to.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, “19: To a Prisoner in Germany,” in Karl Barth Letters: 1961-1968, ed. by Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, ed. and trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981), 27-28.

[2] Karl Barth, “237: To a Pastor in Germany,” in Karl Barth Letters: 1961-1968, ed. by Jürgen Fangmeier and Hinrich Stoevesandt, ed. and trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981), 229-231.

Quotation

Robert Jenson on Protology and the Futility of Free-Floating Interpretation

Alex Renner

–

–

Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology Vol. I is a treasure trove of beautiful doctrinal insights. Near the end of his first section, he comments on what is needed to engage with the theological tradition in an honest way. Just like Webster argues in his magisterial Holy Scripture, Jenson posits that the only way a coherent doctrine of Scripture can be formulated and maintained is one grounded in the self-presentation of the God who is Trinity; i.e., the one who Jesus reveals in the Spirit by calling Him Father.

Here are two block quotes from Jenson sure to bless your soul and mind.

First, on Scripture:

“Whenever someone has tried to construe the unity of Scripture otherwise than by the identity of this God the book has fragmented, first into Hebrew Scripture and New Testament and thereupon into traditions and genres and redactions within each. And when communities other than the church – in modernity, the communities of various ideologies and particularly the surreptitious such community of supposedly autonomous scholars – try to appropriate the Bible for their own purposes, the book falls into mere shards – to which, of course, anyone is welcome… The modern attempt to interpret scripture ‘historically’ has been intrinsically self-defeating and has now defeated itself, since it has curiously supposed that to interpret the Bible historically we must abstract from the history for whose attestation the church assembled this collection in the first place, the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ.”[1]

The free-floating scholars out there, who claim to represent the rational person’s engagement with the biblical material, fall into meaninglessness. This is rooted in the Modernist’s blindness to his own placement in a history and a community; it would be better, I suspect Jenson would say, if the independent scholar would fly the banner of Atheistic Fragmentation as the community from which he wrestles with the material instead of the banner of View from Nowhere. Then, the presuppositional commitments the interpreter truly does hold would come to conscious explication, and wouldn’t be hidden beneath the false belief in one’s own prescient objectivity over and above the text.

Then, protology. Here is where Jenson sets forth his (self-avowed) revisionist theological agenda, one in the vein of Barth’s methodology but one that also decisively breaks with Barth at important points. He writes:

“God is not only identified by Exodus and Resurrection; he is identified with them. Thus we may state the point of this chapter yet one more time: the God to be interpreted in this work is the triune God. For the doctrine of the 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. The primal systematic function of trinitarian teaching is to identify the theos in ‘theology’… 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 discouse, 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; the temptations posed by this ordering have recently been much discussed. The extent to which any particular theologian may actually have fallen to these temptations is doubtless often arguable. The present work seeks to avoid the temptation altogether, by breaking with this aspect of the tradition.”[2]

This point is one famously highlighted by Barth about the way in which to approach the theological task. Jenson and Barth argue that, instead of tripping up himself at the beginning of the race by forcibly inserting the God of ancient Hellenism into his doctrinal engagement with the Word of God, the theologian should instead consciously set out to exegete the Scriptures in a Christian way (i.e., in a Trinitarian way). The God of “general” Theism has no place here.

I am not finished with Jenson’s ST just yet. As I plow through it, however, I am struck by the way in which Jenson’s philosophical commitments alter his approach, sometimes in very strange color schemes. Nonetheless, his dependence on Barth shines through in some of the best possible ways… not least in his emphasis on the centrality of God as Trinity.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.

[2] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. I: The Triune God (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.

Quotation

“To Be Wholly Embraced”: θεωσιS in Maximus the Confessor’s Ambiguum 7

Alex Renner

–

–

Maximus the Confessor, in Ambiguum 7, writes:

“If it perceives, it certainly loves what it perceives. If it loves, it certainly experiences ecstasy [εκστασιs] over what is loved. If it experiences ecstasy, it presses on eagerly, and if it presses on eagerly it intensifies its motion; if its motion is intensified, it does not come to rest until it is embraced wholly by the object of its desire. It no longer wants anything from itself, for it knows itself to be wholly embraced, and intentionally and by choice it wholly receives the life-giving delimitation. When it is wholly embraced it no longer wishes to be embraced at all by itself but is suffused by that which embraces it. In the same way air is illuminated by light and iron is wholly inflamed by fire, as is the case with other things of this sort.”[1]

I have commented on passages of this sort by Maximus before. I will just let it sit here as a reminder of the nature of your salvation in Christ: to receive the full-embrace, the full “delimitation” of being united to the Trinity in the humanity of Christ the Son.

Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 51.