Right now I’m reading a wonderful old book by Robert Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus. This short systematic theology, originally written in 1972 is a superb gem. In it Jenson structures a dogmatica minora around the theme of “promise.” All of biblical faith, according to Jenson is built on the reality of the God who promises, Jesus who is fulfilment of the promise and the Spirit who is renders that promise the as the world’s future.

At the center of Jenson’s brief dogmatics is, of course the resurrection of Jesus. It is in this event that God is identified and revealed. And it is this event of resurrection that guarantees the possibility of living and believing in a promisory faith. Under the reality of sin, all of our communications have the character of demands. “If you do such-and-such I will do such-and-such…” The “if-then” clause is at the center of all our communication. However, the logic of promise is quite different. In promising, one says “Because I will do such-and-such, therefore you may await such-and-such.” In the former case, that of demand, the future is made dependent on the happenings of the present for its potential to become an actuality. “If you love me, I will care for you. Your future is contingent upon you meeting my demands in the present.” The logic of promise, however, as Jenson says, “makes the past dependent on the future, for it grants a future free from the past, and so allows us to appropriate also the past in a new way. This is the point of all the biblical and churchly talk about “forgiveness;” we are accepted in spite of what we have been, we are permitted to appropriate what we have been afresh, as the occasion and object of that acceptance.” Thus, promise inverts the reality of demand and exchange by opening up a future that is not contingent upon the fixity of the past. It opens up a transcendent horizon of hope that promises liberation and wholeness beyond the confines of the closed past. In effect, promise declares that the past does not determine the future, but rather, the future as promised renarrates and heals the past which was once thought to be intractable.

The problem with this logic of promise, of course is that in all of our promises there are “hidden conditions.” When people marry, they may vow “for better or worse, for richer or poorer,” but they cannot truly guarantee that no act of their spouse could end up breaking their commitment to one another. Our promises are by definition fragile, and knowingly, or unknowingly they have secret demands attached to them. Rarely do we say “I love you” without the implicit demand that the one loved love us in return. Our promises are fragile. They are broken. And, as Jenson points out, “the fundamental condition in all our promises is death: I cannot be held to a promise if keeping it will kill me.”

Thus, the question is raised, can a pure promise be made? Given human frailty and sin, can there ever be a truly pure promise? Can there ever be a truly unconditional promise? The answer, as Jenson puts his finger on is that “only a promise which had death behind it could be unconditional. Only a promise made about and by one who had already died for the sake of his promise, could be irreversibly a promise. The narrative content of such a promise would be death and resurrection.” If someone who made such a promise and lived totally for others in fulfillment of that promise, to the point of giving himself away in death, and then lived again, such an event would mean that a promise could truly be made, that a gift could truly be given. That the last word in the human story would now be caught up in in his promise-keeping that has died and yet lives. Because death no longer has a hold over that one, his promise, his life will be the last word. And thus, the reality of true promise being possible “poses a future in a very particular way: as gift.”

And thus, as Jenson says, the gospel message is primarily this, “There has lived a man wholly for others, all the way to death; and he has risen so that his self-giving will finally triumph.” And the claim of the church is that this story, the story of this man, Jesus who died and then lived “is the encompassing plot of all men’s stories; it promises the outcome of the entire human enterprise and of each man’s involvement in it.” Because the God who promises has died and been raised to life in Christ, there is nothing that can stand in the way of the fulfillment of his promise. All of creation is caught up into the drama of death and resurrection through which the promise of God’s redemption superabundantly exceeds and outstrips sin and death. And thus, the end of all things is the fulfillment of promise, the coming of shalom, the actualization of hope. On the other side of death, the resurrection of Jesus proves that the love of the God of Promise is stronger than death precisely in its very yielding, self-giving, and weakness. The gospel of Jesus is ultimately this, that the promise of God is stronger than death and therefore we have every reason to hope and the freedom to give our own selves away to the point of death, for yawning maw of death is always already overshadowed and overcome by the resurrecting love of the One how is at once the Promiser, the Promise, and the Fulfillment of the Promise. It is this One whom death cannot hold. And thus, even in the darkness, those who have been seized by the gospel have the freedom to hope, and peaceably wait for the Light.