The Promise of Robert W. Jenson's Theology: Constructive Engagements

UK.

Introduction

Chris E. W. Green and Stephen John Wright

It is the fate of every theological system to be dismembered and have its fragments bandied about in an ongoing debate.

—Robert W. Jenson

This volume, like so many, emerged from idle conversation at an academic conference. The editors met for the first time at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Baltimore, drawn together by a common interest in Jenson’s theology, and quickly noted that while Jenson is widely read, he is rarely read as himself. Commonly, he appears within a theological narrative as the face of some negative modern theological trend: he might be the face of the alleged collapse of the immanent and the economic Trinity, or as foremost of the diabolical Hegelian Trinitarians, or a champion of metaphysics in a postmetaphysical age.[1] Jenson’s theology, we agreed, is far more interesting and promising than any alleged debt to Hegel or any of these caricatured reductions of his work.

Before the glasses were empty, we had conspired to arrange a meeting at the following year’s AAR, inviting scholars not so much to reflect on Jenson’s thought as to put it to use. This was, we decided, the most fitting way to pay tribute to Jenson’s theology. Undoubtedly, inviting scholars to appropriate Jenson into their own work, pursuing their own interests rather than Jenson’s, would lead to some dismantling and reconfiguration of Jenson’s theology. That is, it would lead to utterly Jensonian theology, rippling with critique and construction. We held a meeting at AAR in this format over two years, and then decided to invite others to join the fun and proposed a volume of such essays.

The theological landscape has altered since the publication of the festschrift edited by Colin Gunton, as have Jenson’s own theological emphases. When Gunton’s volume was published, Jenson’s Systematic Theology was still a toddler, and scholars were projecting their hopes and fears for it. Now, the work is in its late teens, and Jenson has had other literary children. A survey of his recent theological efforts would signal several shifts and clarifications. Most clearly seen is a new emphasis on hermeneutics and Scripture evidenced by two commentaries and two books on Scripture published in the last decade.[2] This shift, together with new clarifying statements on christology, the nature of the theological task, and the doctrine of creation all come through in the essays gathered in this collection.

The Promise of the Gospel

The organizing theme of this collection of essays is the promise of Robert Jenson’s theology. Theologians of all ages, in Jenson’s view, have a single common task to undertake: figuring out how to speak the gospel faithfully. In the 1960s, Robert Jenson defined our common task thus: Theology is the persistent and disciplined asking and answering of the question: Given that the Christian community has in the past said and done such-and-such, what should it say and do now?[3] More specifically, the task of theology is the communication of the gospel. What do we make of previous attempts to speak the gospel, and what should we be saying now to be speaking the gospel?

We do not naturally speak the gospel fully or even coherently. We stammer in our articulation of the good news, stumbling through our proclamations in the hope that our speaking will in some way be resonant with the whole work of God throughout history. Christianity is the lived-out telling and mistelling, believing and perverting, practice and malpractice, of the narrative of what is supposed to have happened and to be yet going to happen with Jesus-in-Israel, and of the promise made by that narrative.[4] For Jenson, this enable a certain imaginative boldness. Morwenna Ludlow notes that while some theologians might approach Gregory of Nyssa and other church fathers as authorities, Jenson gives one the impression that he and Gregory are engaged in the same theological task.[5] It not surprising, then, that Jenson opened his Systematic Theology with an admission that the endeavour was irremediably hubristic but still somehow necessary as it is surrendered to the church for dismemberment.[6]

Theology, Jenson once claimed, can only be attempted in reliance on forgiveness.[7] And yet, from Jenson, this can hardly be construed as an invitation to timid theological formulations. The singular defining characteristic of Jenson’s theology must be his willingness to attempt to follow through on the theological and metaphysical implications of the gospel.[8] In a memorable moment, Jenson asks theologians what it would mean if the gospel were simply true, in the dumb sense, the sense with which we all use the word when behaving normally.[9] If the gospel is true, then what must we believe is true about God’s being and nature, and the nature of creaturely reality? Few American theologians have shared Jenson’s capacity to think audaciously original thoughts about such things. His works convey a certain Germanic grandness hidden beneath his idiosyncratically compact grammar. He is remarkably willing to let the gospel as he hears and sees it lead him into radical revisioning of the received wisdom. And he does this revisioning both for the sake of and in the spirit of the church’s tradition.

This generation’s greatest baroque theological stylist, David Bentley Hart, once lauded Jenson’s ability to produce formulations of a positively oracular terseness, even if this tone contrasts with Hart’s own taste for the sesquipedalian and pointlessly elaborate.[10] Such rhetorical reserve may appear casual—and frequently masks both the imaginatively spectacular and fervently orthodox character of Jenson’s theology—but it is in fact the sign of a strictly disciplined theologian.

In all of his writing, Jenson asks us to evaluate how we undertake the theological task. Take a basic Christian claim: Jesus is Lord. Theology done in the usual way will consider this to be a densely-packed idea needing to be unfurled into elaborate theological rhetoric. Jenson’s theology, on the other hand, treats Jesus is Lord as a large billowing idea that needs to be compressed into theological claims to be shared. It is this compressive character of Jenson’s theology that leads Hart to write that a single phrase of Jenson’s might detonate if mishandled. Rather than expending his energy by expressing simple ideas through grand flourishes, Jenson saves the grandness and the energy for the ideas themselves.

This is what we learn from Jenson as a theologian. The basic stuff of Christian faith is conceptually grand: Christ is risen, this is my body, your sins are forgiven, and so on. Moreover, they are grand in a metaphysical sense, where metaphysics is not to be contrasted with existence: When we begin doing metaphysics—that is, when we begin asking questions like what is it ‘to be?’—we are not just playing empty word games. The questions we ask and the answers we give both express and shape the way we perceive and act in the world.[11] Our metaphysical construal of such claims is the manner by which we decide how we will live. As Jenson treats the gospel, any word spoken about Jesus is simultaneously a telling of our own stories. A grand story, Jenson suggests, is one that makes room for all of us.[12] Any construction of talk about Jesus can be gospel only if it opens up new possibilities for living. That is, the gospel is told when the story about Jesus is spoken as a promise: as sheer gift.

Such reconstruction of the theological tradition necessarily occurs as the church undertakes its missionary task in attempting to speak the gospel. The demise of the centrality of the church and the Christian faith in the modern West has created a missional dilemma for Christianity, and this, as much as anything else, occasioned Jenson’s robustly Trinitarian provocations. Christianity’s present missionary imperative, Jenson has maintained, is to identify the God of whom the Scriptures speak to a society that once was Christian, but now no longer is. This task renews Christianity, as it requires a perpetual baptism of concepts, raising them into a new life of possibility. Therefore, to speak of the promise of his theology is to see how his theology might be reconfigured to respond to the crises of contemporary life.

As radically and daringly revisionist as Jenson’s theology is, his aim is tightly focused: to find the best ways possible here and now to make the gospel sayable. And his hubristic readiness to engage Gregory and others as contemporaries is matched by his willingness for his work to be engaged by others. We believe these essays belong to the conversation that Jenson describes as the heart of the theological life, and that just so they are a tribute to his work even where they depart from it or call it into question. Our thanks to the contributors for their endeavours in this common task, and to Jens and Blanche, for provoking us to respond to the God of Scripture with a word of promise.

We will not name names, but such question-begging critiques are not difficult to find when one starts digging into the secondary literature. These generalised categories bear revisiting, as do the figures trotted out as supposed instantiations of them. Just as recent cautious patristic scholarship has corrected common misapprehensions about the theology of the past, we should consider doing the same service to the theologians of the present. We are in the curious position of needing to rehabilitate our contemporaries. ↵

Song of Songs, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005); Ezekiel (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009); Canon and Creed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010); On the Inspiration of Scripture (Delhi, NY: ALPB Books, 2012). ↵

Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), vii. ↵

Ibid., 1. ↵

Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49. ↵

Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997–99), 1:vii. ↵

Robert W. Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 240. ↵

A willingness that some critics have found to be simultaneously alluring and distressing. For example, David Bentley Hart states, I find it impossible to have done with Jenson’s work, or to cease returning to it as a challenge to refine and clarify my understanding of the gospel. David Bentley Hart, The Lively God of Robert Jenson, First Things (October 2005), 28–34. ↵

Jenson, here, wryly contrasts behaving normally with attempts at academic discourse. Robert W. Jenson, What if It Were True?, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 43:1 (2001), 3. ↵

David Bentley Hart, Angel at the Ford of Jabbok, in In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 158. Jenson returns the compliment by observing that Hart never uses one clause where twenty will do. . . . But whether you otherwise like your books lean or stuffed, linear or opportunist, put aside the time to read this one. Robert W. Jenson, "Review Essay: David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth," Pro Ecclesia 14:2 (2005), 235. ↵

Robert W. Jenson, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 108. ↵

See Robert W. Jenson, On Hegemonic Discourse, First Things 45 (August–September 1994): 13–15. ↵

I

Theology and Scripture

1

A Precise Mystery

Stephen John Wright

"Si comprehendis non est deus." —Augustine of Hippo

Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words / And nothing’s true that figures in words only. —Les Murray

Robert Jenson has a habit of taking a known concept and turning it ever so slightly to one side so that new edges are revealed. His project is revisionary metaphysics to the extent that he wanders through the halls of Christian thought and turns all the objects he finds to face the risen Christ. Many concepts derided as hopelessly troublesome find utility in Jenson’s theology. As if to prove his delight with difficult ideas, Jenson concludes the first volume of his Systematic Theology by rearranging the transcendentals. A considerable number of modern scholars are uncertain whether they believe in being let alone the putatively violent transcendental traits of truth, goodness, and beauty. But even more startling is the way that Jenson handles them. In Jenson’s revision, the transcendentals are not rigid, essential categories to which all being must conform but rather name the openings in the divine life in which creatures can participate. God’s beauty means that God is enjoyable.[1] Worshipers might witness this beauty in their incorporation into the divine life through prayer and song. Music, after all, is the core of Jenson’s doctrine of theosis.[2] But most audacious of these ploys is Jenson’s decision to open his musings on the transcendentals by claiming that God is intrinsically knowable.[3]

Many works of Anglophone theology of recent years have veered away from this claim, tending toward the spacious fields of apophatic predication.[4] God’s knowability is in open dispute.[5] Jenson’s theology bucks the trend with its open discussion of God’s availability to human knowledge—as one might expect from any thinker seriously impacted by the study of Barth. And yet, certainly, Augustine is right. We cannot simply claim to comprehend God. Has Jenson eradicated the mystery of God? In this essay, I wish to examine how the claim to knowledge of God squares with the idea of God-as-mystery in Jenson’s theology. Jenson avoids the language of mystery wherever possible, conjuring up the concept mostly through his discussions of divine hiddenness. In what follows, I will show that Jenson does not deny divine mystery but that he evokes mystery with Christ in mind. Mystery, for Jenson, is not the absence of knowledge about God but the presence of the saving God in Christ. Christian theology produces mystery rather than succumbing to it.[6] I will conclude with a brief reflection on Jenson’s approach to the mystery of theodicy as a mystery arising from faith.

Saying God

R. S. Thomas writes that God is that great absence in our lives who keeps the interstices in our knowledge.[7] In an early framing of the matter, Jenson would also agree that the word God is a mere lack on our lips.[8] This word signals not a peacefully dark gap in our knowledge but a deeply troubling absence. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, Jenson suggests in his early theology, was simply naming modernity’s covert natural theology. The evangelistic task is no longer to show how a vague apprehension of transcendence can be explained by Christian concepts but to speak about Jesus as alive and present to a society committed to the maxim: there’s probably no God.

If the natural theology of our world is the denial of God, how shall we invoke the word God? Jenson plays with the concept of mystery here. When speaking of God, we plainly do not know what we are talking about. The word God—dutifully enclosed in scare quotes—names our desire to overcome our uncertainties. Here we find Jenson’s unabashed extension of Bonhoeffer and Barth’s aversion to religion. For Jenson, life’s coherence derives from its concluding act. We become ourselves in death. Not until I die can I know what my life is about, what its plot is, what or who I am. But then it is too late.[9] We deny this state of affairs in our religiosity: living in the hope that perhaps the last act [of our lives] is not missing after all.[10] We look to the absence in our lives, the lack of a concluding future, Jenson argues, and name it God. In describing this God as timeless we allow our futures to be settled and already realized (though kept hidden from us); thus God so understood endows us with the comprehensive identities that we otherwise lack. The reconciliation that occurs for humans in this scheme is reflexive (we are reconciled to ourselves) and primarily metaphysical rather than centered on Christ’s life and work. Since the word God merely fills an anxious space, this God must be pure mystery. Here stands the God of religion—the God we believe ought to exist. As pure mystery, this God is one that we can wield to our own ends—a plastic deity that we can shape as we see fit. Such a God supplies us with a given future, an identity, shores up our activities, and is, in the final accounting, the God of Feuerbach.

Thirty years later, Jenson presents a similar—though perhaps slightly more optimistic—construal of natural theology. Across both volumes of his Systematic Theology, Jenson argues that natural experience is of the absence of God—or at best of a God who hides. This experience develops into a positive natural theology only when it weighs the evidence against the reality of God and then says, Nevertheless, I believe.[11] Natural theology, again, finds itself in the limitations of the human capacity to know God. What is natural, then, is our alienation from God—our utter failure at conjuring up an adequate image of the divine. At both stages of Jenson’s theological development, the encounter with God in Christ overcomes our natural conceptions of God.

Jenson gives full assent to Thomas’s maxim that God’s essence transcends human knowledge.[12] Creation at its most lucid simply cannot bear us across the ontological crevasse to perfect knowledge of God. As we gaze upon the world, the word God arises to summarize our perplexity at our situation. Such is the standard account of divine mystery.[13] The question for theology is what we will do with this intuition of perplexing-absence-as-God. Such a God of mystery wears our nominations loosely, finally shaking them all off in total freedom from conceptual content. Could it be that all our knowledge of God is merely a mask worn by a totally ineffable Mystery?

Jenson inverts this standard theistic account of mystery. God does not hide behind Jesus but has only seemed absent, an effect of Christ’s proximity to our condition and our lives. Jesus is the one who has hidden behind the mask of the absent ‘God.’[14] Christian discourse uses God to clarify what faith requires us to say about Jesus of Nazareth. The earlier emptiness of the word is overcome by the fullness of meaning that it finds in relation to the life of Christ. The lack of a natural sense of identity named as God turns out to be an empty place for Christ to fill.[15] Christ is not the eradication of divine mystery but its Christian form.

The modern pressure to repristinate the solution of late pagan antiquity, to deny that the concept of specific identity can apply to God serves only to render God mysterious by appeal to distance.[16] When the claim that God sits at an absolute remove from human language is not met with a doctrine of revelation, all religious language becomes a poetic exercise as we attempt to erect linguistic scaffolding to reach the heavens. The religions, then, arise from this attempt to present avatars of identity-free Deity-as-such.[17]

Jenson correctly notes that this is not what Thomas’s doctrine of analogy intends, as Thomas seeks to give faith its language not through the cultivation of a special religious language but by showing how ordinary human language can be transparent to divinity.[18] Any attempt to identify a common deity behind multiple forms of religious worship, Jenson argues, must occur through a full account of the distinct characteristics of divinity presented by each religious group rather than by overlooking these distinctive claims.[19] Commonality could only be established through these unique identifications and not in spite of them.

Christians have often been wary of attempts to make divinity a distant blur, which we grant form through the augmenting lenses of our words. As the late John Webster observed, Holy reason is not a poetic but a receptive enterprise.[20] There has always been some degree of knowledge of God within Christian thought. God, therefore, cannot be sheer mystery, no matter how greatly God transcends our concepts. Utter mystery would render only equivocal language. There must be a knowledge of God that reveals our lack of knowledge of God.

Certain recent approaches to apophatic theology have attempted to make this qualification explicit. Sarah Coakley, for example, writes, Apophatic theology, in its proper sense then, can never be mere verbal play, deferral of meaning, or the simple addition of negatives to positive (‘cataphatic’) claims. Nor on the other hand, can it be satisfied with the dogmatic ‘liberal’ denial that God in Godself can be known at all: it is not ‘mysterious’ in this sense.[21] Mystery, in the apophatic tradition, is not the negation of knowledge but a specific form of knowledge. We might say that apophatic knowledge arises from an awareness of creatureliness: it is the knowledge of limitations.[22] But an emphasis on knowledge would be a misrepresentation of the apophatic tradition, which aims to transcend concepts only as they inhibit encounter with God: negative theology is thus a ways towards mystical union with God, whose nature remains incomprehensible to us.[23] A familiar reader of Jenson will note some (perhaps surprising) similarities between his theological project and these articulations of apophaticism: a mystery brimming with content, a knowledge of God short of total comprehension, the need for theology to be directed by first- and second-person discourse about faith, and so on.

Jenson’s theology suggests material agreement with apophaticism’s affirmation of God’s essential incomprehensibility, and yet he has remained reluctant to affirm the via negativa.[24] His approach differs not in the degree of divine mystery but in the systematic location of divine mystery.

Locating God

One of Jenson’s great preoccupations when reading the theology of the patristic eras is the location of God. Athanasius made plain in a way that few had before him a rigidly twofold ontology. The Son, he would argue, is not merely greater than other creatures but altogether different from them.[25] Athanasius articulates a vision of being in which creatures and God do not share a common being. Human experience of being occurs from the creaturely side, and we are left to muse at what life would be like on the other side of the great ontological divide. Or this is the way that some have understood it.

Dionysius took such an ontology and developed it into an epistemology. The difference between God and creatures names a disjunction between creaturely conception and divine reality. The ill-fitting nominations of our religious discourse serve a spiritual purpose: flight to the mysterious God whom such words attempt to signify.[26] In this spirituality, we must abstract from the particulars of the world—from what sees and is seen—to the heights of the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing.[27] God is named by a distance from our conceptions, establishing Dionysius’s understanding of divine mystery.

One might hear resonances with Gregory of Nyssa’s mystical theology. Moses, in Gregory’s account, sees and knows God in the darkness.[28] The darkness, Gregory reasons, signifies the unknown.[29] This is not the pagan darkness contrary to religion which is fled for the light of Christ. Rather, this is the darkness that comes after one contemplates the light of God: the Christian now sees more clearly what of the divine nature is uncontemplated.[30] Gregory’s vision of divine mystery prefigures Dionysius’s in its affirmation of God’s transcendence of concepts, since every concept which comes from some comprehensible image . . . and by guessing at the divine nature constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God.[31] Jenson finds here what he takes to be a crucial difference between the two mystical accounts: their geometry of transcendence. Dionysius’s God reposes afar, whereas Gregory’s God comes mysteriously close.

Jenson maintains here a distinction between Dionysian and Cappadocian spirituality: for Dionysius we must rise up to God through the mind, but the Cappadocians hold that God has come down to us in the body.[32] The presentations of God as a kind of boundless and limitless sea of being, surpassing all thought and time and nature are coupled with affirmations of God’s drawing of us into the divine life, for what is completely ungraspable is unhoped for and unsought.[33] God’s transcendence is not measured by ontological distance in the Cappadocians, Jenson avers, but by presence. And there does seem to be some merit to the