Daily Archives: June 29, 2007

The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: The Centrality of Divine Self-Determination

Posted by on June 29, 2007 5 comments

George Hunsinger, in a review article (Scottish Journal of Theology 55[2]: 161-200 [2002]) on Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology, offers three drastic critiques of Jenson’s contribution to Christian dogmatics.  He claims that Jenson’s view of the cross is Socinian, his view of the incarnation, Arian, and his view of the Trinity, Hegelian (all three of which are, apparently equally deplorable).  Hunsinger, is I think, wrong on all counts and terribly misunderstands Jenson precisely because he does not understand, as Jenson points out in his response, that what Jenson is undertaking is ”an effort of revisonary metaphysics” (230).  Hunsinger’s critique is unimaginative because he simply applies traditional metaphysical critiques to Jenson’s revised metaphysics, and thus (of course), finds Jenson to be woefully contradictory and nonsensical.

I want to engage one aspect of Hunsinger’s critique, not so much for the purpose of exonerating Jenson (though, if that happens, so be it), but rather for continuing to explore some aspects of what a revisonary and indeed a biblical metaphysics might look like.  What I want to explore is Hunsinger’s claim that Jenson is, if not Arian, then at least neo-Arian.  Hunsinger claims that Jenson so closely identifies (in good Lutheran fashion) the man Jesus with the divine Logos, that he collapses the distinction between Christ’s deity and humanity and ends up positing that the Son of God had no existence prior to the incarnation of Jesus.  Thus, Jenson tends toward Arianism in that he claims that the Son of God had a temporal beginning.  Hunsinger claims that for Jenson, “the Son enjoys no antecedent reality prior to his coming to be in history, the eternal trinity enjoys not antecedent reality, strictly speaking, prior to the creation of the world” (171).  Hunsinger claims that for Jenson, the existence of the Son prior to the incarnation is at best “merely embryonic and potential” (172).

If this is indeed the case, then Jenson does seem to be in serious trouble.  I do think that Jenson can answer this question himself, and indeed he does at numerous points in his two volumes.  Jenson clearly does not believe that “there was when he was not” or that the Son comes into being as a creative act of the Father.  “The Son’s origin is an event not of God’s contingently willed creative action, but an occurrence in the Father’s being as God” (I.102).  Jenson likewise states clearly that, while the Trinitarian Son is Jesus of Nazareth without remainder, he is so precisely within the eternal life of the immanent Trinity.  For Jenson, “it is the Incarnate Son who is himself his own presupposition in God’s eternity: the incarnation happens in eternity as the foundation of its happening in time, in eternity as the act of the decision that God is, and in time as the carrying-out of what God decides” (I.140).   Truth be told, this should not be new to Hunsinger, this is just Jenson reaffirming and nuancing Barth’s own claim that the Son is eternally incarnandus.  However, this is precisely where the metaphysical difference between Hunsinger and Jenson becomes clear.

For Hunsinger, the idea that the Son can have a temporal beginning and be eternal is contradictory because according to the traditional metaphysics eternity is the negation of time.  This is precisely what Jenson is calling into question.  Thus, for Hunsinger, if all that was eternally present in the immanent Trinity was God’s self-determination to be for us as Jesus of Nazareth, then the Son of God “enjoys no antecedent reality prior to his coming to be in history”.  However, Jenson’s more thoroughly biblical metaphysics insists that God is the event of his own self-determination.  Thus, the person of Jesus eternally belongs to the reality of the Triune life because God determines himself to be the one who is incarnate as Jesus. 

This point is made well in Neil MacDonald’s recent book Metaphysics and the God of Israel, where he articulates a radical biblical metaphysic on the basis of the Old and New Testaments narratives of divine action in creation and in Jesus.  What MacDonald shows is that God is identical with his own act of self-determination.  For God, his self-determination precedes and constitutes his carrying-out of what he has determined himself to be.

As MacDonald says with reference to the doctrine of creation, “God does not create the world in order for it to be the case that he determines himself as creator.  God determines himself as the creator of the world; therefore, he is the creator of the world” (29).  Now, of course Hunsinger would jump all over an analogy being drawn between God determining himself as creator and determining himself as Triune.  Such would indeed imply that “there was when he was not”, for creation is not eternal.  However, the point to be made on the ontological level is that God is who he is because he determines himself to be so.  That he determines himself to be the creator at a particular point in the life of God does not mitigate this point.  God is the event of his own self-determination.  It is not incoherent in the least to say that God determines himself as Creator at a point in his life before which he had not so determined himself, but eternally determines himself as Triune (which is to say that God determines himself to be the incarnate Jesus).  Thus, if God eternally determines himself as Jesus of Nazareth, the Jesus simply is eternally included in the identity of God.  And, as MacDonald further observes in discussing the atonement, “God cannot be the one who takes his own judgment on himself – in the form of Jesus of Nazareth – and it not be the case that the man Jesus of Nazareth – the Jew of Galilee – be part of who this God, the God of Israel, is eternally” (226).

Jenson shares precisely this actualistic ontology of divine freedom.  As he argues, “the one God is a decision” (I.222).  God’s act of self-determination as Jesus of Nazareth belongs eternally to the being of God.  We do not need, then to posit, as Hunsinger does, a “Logos” who is unincarnate and subsequently unites himself to human flesh in Jesus.  This is, in fact to project our humanity to crudely into the mode of divine action.  For us, we determine ourselves to be something by doing.  I determine to be a theologian by doing theology.  However, God does not determine himself by carrying out certain acts, as MacDonald shows.  Rather, God Rather, the Logos simply is Jesus because the act of God becoming incarnate belongs to God’s own eternal self-determination.  Thus, Jenson can indeed say with all consistency that “eternity is the inexhaustibility of the Son’s life” (II.219).

The issue is one of metaphysics, and centrally the role that the Bible takes in the formulation of metaphysics.  Jenson and MacDonald, in my view have helpfully questioned traditional metaphysics on the basis of a more radically Trinitarian and biblical theological orientation.  Hunsinger is unable to think “inside” of Jenson’s metaphysics, and as such finds his thought to be frustrating and untenable.  In this, Hunsinger is limited by a failure of imagination which keeps him from appropriating all the insights of Jenson’s contribution to dogmatic theology.  

Propositions On Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on June 29, 2007 16 comments

Since Radical Orthodoxy has recently come up in a few discussions, I thought I’d post a few of my own basic thoughts about what’s really wrong with this particular theological movement.

  1. Radical Orthodoxy purports to be a theological theology.  It begins with a perfect theological instinct and aim: to show that all thought is fundamentally theological.  The theological is ubiquitous and there is no non-theological frame of reference for interpreting the world.  The question is if Radical Orthodoxy is in fact theological enough.
  2. Radical Orthodoxy is a neoplatonic theology. This point is directly related to the previous one. While Radical Orthodoxy purports to be radically theologically, it is in fact radically bound to the philosohpy of antiquity. Specifically, it is premised upon the proposition that the neoplatonic ontology of participation (methexis) is the necessary presupposition for a Christian ontology of particiaption (koinonia).  In fact it claims that the two are the same thing.  Thus, neoplatonic metaphysics establishes the conditions necessary for the incarnation, and the doctrine of the Trinity rather than the incarnation and the Trinity issuing in a distinctly Christian metaphysic.
  3. Radical Orthodoxy is a nostalgic theology.  It’s fixation on “Christianity/Platonism” as the to-be repristinated answer to all of modernity’s woes marks Radical Orthodoxy as an extremely nostalgic enterprise.  It longs for the time (real or imagined) when their particular metaphysic of participation ruled the philosophical imagination and when all aspects of life in church, state, and market were under the integrating rule of “the sacred”.
  4. Radical Orthodoxy is a bourgeois theology.  Those who are actually movers and shakers in this “movement” are aristocratic, wealthy, and western.  Their thought is forged in the academy, not in any sort of concrete ecclesial or political praxis.  This is not do demean rigorous academic theology, quite the opposite in fact.  Radical Orthodoxy tends to overdose on abstraction and jargon, and who is being quoted is far more important to it that what is being said.  As such, this movement as no real interest in the actual life of the church(es) in the world.  It is theology by a new brand of Cambridge Platonists written for their own inner circle.  As Rodney Clapp has observed, “You can’t just tell people to go to church and be better neoplatonists.”
  5. Radical Orthodoxy is a militant theology.  The fundamental desire of Radical Orthodoxy is to win.  It claims that only the Christian narrative is capable of narrating a world in which difference can exist nonviolently.  All other narratives lead to violence are as such are nihilistic.  The Christian narrative alone can outnarrate all other narratives and bring about “The path of peaceful flight…” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 434)
  6. Ironically, Radical Orthodoxy is thus an inherently violent theology.  It does not claim that the Triune God is the answer to the threat of nihilism, but rather that the answer is found in trinitarian theology.  Specifically in their own brand of gingerly platonised trinitarianism, that has more to do with abstractions about “exchange” and “gift” than about the actual missions and relations of the Triune persons as revealed in the economy of salavation (See in contrast D.B. Hart’s treatment of “gift” in The Beauty of the Infinite, 236ff).  Radical Orthodoxy claims that it is our theological narration of the sacred which will save the world from secular nihilism, death, and non-being.  As such it is both violent and Pelagian.
  7. Radical Orthodoxy is a revisonary theology.  It is based on a grand appropriation and revisionist readings of key figures in Christian history, such as Augustine and Aquinas.  The readings offered by Radical Orthodoxy of these figures are idiosyncratic and generally wrong.  Even from within their own movement, their revisionist readings of the Medievals have been strongly challenged (see James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy).
  8. Radical Orthodoxy is an erotic theology.  Any perusal of the literature by the major authors in the Radical Orthodoxy series will show their fascination with speculative theologies of sexuality, gender, and the body.  This is yet another example of the theological faddishness of this movement.  The bodies that are the obsession of thinkers like Gerard Loughlin, Eugene Rogers, and John Milbank are always and inevitably coupling bodies, not emaciated, battered, or mutilated ones.  Radical Orthodoxy offers and unembodied theology of the body that seems to think that the height of bodiliness is orgasm.  As such, Radical Orthodoxy is really doing nothing more for a theology of the body and sexuality than reproducing the sex-obssessed zeitgeist of our age.
  9. Radical Orthodoxy is a varied theology.  A distinction must be made between European and American contributors to the Radical Orthodoxy series and other theologians commonly associated with the movement.  Thinkers like William T. Cavanaugh, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., D.B. Hart, J. Kameron Carter, and James K.A. Smith stand quite apart from folks like John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and Gerard Loughlin.  The orientation of nearly all American contributors to Radical Orthodoxy is based in praxis, is more strongly ecclesial, and more thoroughly pacifist.  As such the American contribution (by authors who are all associated with the Ekklesia Project) represents a far more valuable contribution to contemporary theology.

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