Category Archives: Robert Jenson

On taking sin seriously

Posted by on May 6, 2010 24 comments

In my recent, and utterly long sermon I quoted from Robert Jenson about the nature of the Gospel’s morality, a quote that I find vital and illuminating in many ways:

The gospel’s specific morality is a matter of opened opportunities, of what we may reasonably do because Jesus lives, that otherwise would have been foolish. The normal morality is a matter of imposed constraints, of what we must do, that otherwise we would have liked not to. [. . .] the gospel’s specific morality is a morality of freedom. Insofar as the gospel moves us, we do what we do because we may, not because we ought. And a good act is one which finds the way to love, to the affirmation of the brother’s freedom.

We hear the from the gospel what we may do, when the gospel affirmatively interprets the hopes and fears that move our lives. The gospel makes our hopes possibilities by making them hopes for the love that is indeed coming. When the gospel is spoken to a [person] or a community, it speaks to the particular inhibitions that keep that [person] or community from [. . .] their own humanity. The gospel dismisses those inhibitions. It’s pattern is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” [. . .]

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).

Obviously this approach to ethics is extremely liberating. The divine word does not impose constraints, make demands, and level requirements. Rather it simply frees. The Gospel forbids nothing, it merely liberates us for lives of true fullness.

Of course to many this will seem woefully inadequate. Is this not simply a cover for moral libertinism? Does not all this fanciful talk of “opened opportunities” merely mask a maneuver that seeks to use “freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence” (Gal 5:13)?

Actually, no not all. In fact this resurrection-centered understanding of the nature of the Gospel’s morality is the only way I can possibly imagine to take sin seriously. This notion insists that all sin is never a matter of some “thing” I can do that I ought not to do. Rather sin is always and everywhere a falling into slavery. The Gospel does not, therefore “forbid” us to sin — what real sense would it make to say that we are “forbidden” to enslave ourselves, mutilate ourselves, denigrate ourselves? — rather the Gospel frees us from sin.

The problem with the traditionally “serious” way of talking about sin and ethics is that it ends up simultaneously not taking sin seriously and making it far too interesting. If we view sin simply as bad, but nearly always seductive and at least fleetingly pleasurable things we ought not to do, we at once make sin interesting and rather unserious. If however we take the logic of the Gospel seriously we must understand sin always and only as slavery, as domination, denigration, and futility. We are not “forbidden” to be enslaved, we are freed from our slavery. We are not “commanded” to no longer dominate and denigrate ourselves and one another, we are freed from that infantile and dreadful compulsion.

This, it seems to me is the only way to really take sin seriously and to recognize how uninteresting it is. Sin is simply the slaveries we subject ourselves and one anther to. It is a world of striving, suffering, and death. God doesn’t come to us with commands not to do such things, God in Christ breaks the power of these forces and frees us from them. The Gospel closes down no true opportunity for anything interesting, rather it always on only opens opportunities and creates new possibilities. It is always and only a liberation. Nothing more, nothing less. Anything else simply doesn’t take sin seriously.

Throw Yourself Away in Love: An Easter Season Sermon

Posted by on May 3, 2010 7 comments

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:31-35)

“Love one another as I have loved you.” As far as I’m concerned this has to be what we would take as the “hardest” commandment ever given in the history of all of God’s dealings with Israel and the church. And it is, decidedly, a commandment. This is God in the flesh, laying down his law. Jesus, after washing the feet of his disciples, welcoming them into the Father’s household, tells them what they must do. Here comes the requirement: You must love one another just as I have loved you.

Now, the text is clear that what Jesus was talking about was something the disciples could not understand until later (John 13:7). “Love one another as I have loved you” is not something that they ever could have understood apart from the cross and the resurrection. Indeed, “Love one another as I have loved you” simply means, “Live my cross and resurrection toward each other.” To love one another as Jesus has loved us means to do the very thing that Jesus did: to abandon oneself wholly to the loving service and nourishing of others. And if we do this, Jesus claims that “though we die, we will live” (John 11:25).

But how? How can we even countenance loving one another as Jesus has loved us? That is a word too deep to bear – and I mean that literally. We, being who we are, as human beings bound in slavery quite simply cannot bear the word that Jesus lays on is. It is too much. It takes us beyond the bounds of what a people, born into slavery and deeply comfortable there, can stand. Like Israel, when we are called into the wilderness of loving one another just as Christ has loved us we find ourselves crying out for the fleshpots of Egypt:

“They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (Exodus 14:11-12)

And so also, when we hear Jesus’s new commandment, “Love one another just as I have loved you” we respond with cries of desperation and despair. This is just too much! This is a wilderness of death and toil! We cannot abide Jesus’s call to uncalculated, unconstrained, unhesitating love. We just can’t. After all, look at what Jesus’s loving looks like in this very passage. Jesus humiliates himself for those he loves, and those he loves aren’t exactly the easiest bunch to love. The feet Jesus washes are the feet of Judas the betrayer and Peter the denier.

This is a point that must not go unnoticed when we read the gospel and letters of John with their constant call to love “one another.” Don’t for a second think that this is somehow the easy version of “love your enemies.” The “one another” that Jesus loves is the company of betrayers and backstabbers, of cowards and utterly irritating simpletons who utterly and completely don’t get it.  It is a crowd of sleazy corrupt bureaucrats and guerrilla revolutionaries. This is the “one another” that Jesus loves and which he calls into sharing that same love, the love that washes feet, the goes to the cross and the grave.

No matter what, whenever we read Jesus’s call to love one another just has he has loved us we all have a sense of its radical hardness. And even if we believe it is possible, we know its not very likely. However, if we avoid lifting these discourses of Jesus out of their narrative context, things get more interesting. They get interesting in that Jesus seemed to think the very opposite in regard to the message he was preaching: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

In Jesus’s view, the call to abandon ourselves in cruciform love that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind. Jesus seems to think that this self-abandoning is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30). In other words, Jesus viewed his call to love one another in a way that is exactly opposite from how we view it when we encounter it. What is to us an impossible demand that must have some other explanation is for Jesus liberation, resurrection, indeed the very life of God the Father. What we cannot bear is the depth to which this love will liberate us from the dominating forces of slavery and death.

Because after all, we are used to living in a world run by control and calculation. This is the logic of all existence under sin. This the logic that says “Hey, this guy is raising the dead. We gotta kill him” (cf. John 11:47ff). But most of the time the logic of control, calculation, and management doesn’t seem so insidious. We figure out what we can handle, what we need to limit, the boundaries we need to draw to do right by ourselves, or maybe our families, possibly even some friends. We learn how to be reasonable, to manage, to get by with what we have and acquire what we need. Is this so wrong?

Yes. A thousand times yes. Or rather, this is slavery. This is the life that accepts death and the final outcome of all things. Death is the limit, the boundary for all our doings. All the resources we have, all the things we can do, all the methods and calculations we can employ are ultimately a dance with the inevitable: death. Where death is the ultimate boundary there can finally be no truly new possibilities, no complete and utter transformation, and certainly no loving one another “just as I have loved you.” If death is the boundary that finally rules, then yeah, it sure would be better to be a slave in Egypt than to die in the wilderness!

And this is why the resurrection of the crucified is our only hope. Indeed only if Christ is raised is there any such thing as hope. If Christ has been raised, then death, which hovers at the boundary, defining our lives of calculation and control, has no power to shut things down anymore. If resurrection, new creation. If resurrection, new possibilities. If resurrection, love one another even as I have loved you.

The word of self-abandoning, cruciform love is indeed a word that we cannot bear. It is so unbearable that we must undergo a complete death to everything that we are. Our whole identity of possession and calculation and qualification must wither away and die on the cross with Christ so that we may be raised to new life with the Risen Jesus. We cannot bear to love one another, but the unbounded word of the gospel is that we have been born by Christ, by the one who lived his life wholly for others, giving himself away in love to the fullest, to the point of death. And this One, this man, who recklessly threw himself away in love, the gospel proclaims that he lives. And if this true, if he really does live, then everything is made new. Nothing whatsoever is the same anymore. The old world—the world run by death at the boundary—that world has been crucified with Christ! Your old life, the life ruled by calculation, by control, by management—that life has been crucified with Christ!

The word to abandon yourself in love for one another—and remember who the “one another” is—is simply the word of the resurrection written into our lives. It is a commandment that is a non-commandment, a law that is non-law. What we see here is not a demand for self-improvement, moral effort, or righteous action; those are the province of the old world, the world ruled by the law of death. No one I know of has said this better than Robert Jenson:

The gospel’s specific morality is a matter of opened opportunities, of what we may reasonably do because Jesus lives, that otherwise would have been foolish. The normal morality is a matter of imposed constraints, of what we must do, that otherwise we would have liked not to. [. . .] the gospel’s specific morality is a morality of freedom. Insofar as the gospel moves us, we do what we do because we may, not because we ought. And a good act is one which finds the way to love, to the affirmation of the brother’s freedom.

We hear the from the gospel what we may do, when the gospel affirmatively interprets the hopes and fears that move our lives. The gospel makes our hopes possibilities by making them hopes for the love that is indeed coming. When the gospel is spoken to a [person] or a community, it speaks to the particular inhibitions that keep that [person] or community from [. . .] their own humanity. The gospel dismisses those inhibitions. It’s pattern is: “You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen, there is no need to fear . . .” [. . .]

Thus the specific morality of the gospel is not a mater of “laws.” The gospel’s moral discourse does not say “Do this and do that because you ought/must/would be best advised/will be rewarded.” It does not have the “if . . . then . . .” form. It imposes no conditions whatever, on anything at all. It does not say “Do . . . , because otherwise you won’t get into heaven.” It does not say—with a bit more religious sophistication: “Do . . . , because, although of course God will accept you anyway, that is what good Christians do.” It does not even say: “Do . . . , because virtue is its own reward.” The moral discourse of the gospel says only: “You may do . . . , because Jesus lives” (Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81, 82).

The gospel’s commandment, to love one another just as Jesus has loved is precisely the proclamation of liberation, of freedom into God’s resurrecting life. You may love one another fully, to the end, without reserve, because Jesus lives and therefore there is no need to fear. The reason we need not fear is that Jesus, the man who existed wholly as love, as self-abandoning agape, is risen. Death has no dominion over him. And if death has no final dominion over love, then we can joyfully throw ourselves away into love. To again quote from Robert Jenson’s beautiful articulation of this truth:

[. . .] Jesus was a lover who went to death rather than qualify his self-giving to others; the love which was the plot of his life is an unconditional love. Of this person it is said that he nevertheless lives, that he is risen [. . .] for love means an unconditional self-giving and an acceptance of death, and a successful love would be an acceptance of death which nevertheless did not result in the lover’s absence from the beloved, but in his presence. Love must finally mean death and resurrection. For this particular man, resurrection, if it happened, was therefore but the proper outcome of his life.

And if this lover’s resurrection happened, then there also now lives an unconditional liver with death—the limit of love—behind him, so that his love must finally triumph altogether, must embrace all people and all circumstances of their lives. If he is risen, the human enterprise has a conclusion: a human communion constituted in its commonality by one man’s unconditional self-dedication to his fellows, and so embracing each individual and communal freedom established in the history so fulfilled.

Thus, if Jesus is risen his personal love will be the last Outcome of the human enterprise. If he died, his self-definition has been written to its end, as each of ours will be, but if he also nevertheless lives, [. . . then his life] is not thereby a dead item of the past but an item of living, surprising time, an item of the future and indeed, of the last future. (Robert Jenson, The Triune Identity, 22-23)

And this is precisely why Jesus’s call to us to love one anther as he has loved us, to throw ourselves away in love is paired this Sunday with the most holy vision of John the Revelator of the new heavens and new earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” (Revelation 21:1-6)

This vision simply expresses the truth of the gospel that the outcome of everything is the victory of Christ’s radical, self-abandoning love. Just as Christ threw himself away in becoming flesh, walking among us, healing us, feeding us, teaching us, weeping with us, dying for us, and rising for us, so also the fullness of God will finally throw itself away on us. The infinity of God’s unbounded radical love will descend and it will consummate and manifest what has already been achieved in Christ’s resurrection.

Because of this God, this self-abandoning God who throws himself away on us, we can love one another in the same way. Because this God’s self-abandoning life will be the outcome of all things—down to the most minute, petty, precious slaveries we still cling to—because of this we are freed into self-abandonment. We can throw ourselves away on each other without fear. For, as Paul proclaims, we “did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:14-17).

The word of the gospel is that we are freed into loving one another just as Christ has loved us, that we can do this without fear because God throws himself away on us, and that reckless act of self-giving is power that sustains all creation. We can love one another because Jesus is risen, because God is the God of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we see God as God truly is, as God will be in the outcome of all things. In Jesus’s abandonment of himself we get to see what true human life is, and we get invited into that life of joyful self-abandonment. Herbert McCabe speaks to this in a way worth recalling:

In Jesus [. . .] we can watch God understanding himself. God’s understanding of himself is that he throws himself away in love, that he keeps nothing back for himself. God’s understanding of God is that he is a love that unconditionally accepts, that always lets others be, even if what they want is to be his murderers. God’s understanding of God is that he is not a special person with a special kind of message, with a special way of living to which he wants people to conform. God’s understanding of God could not appear to us as someone who wants to found a new and better religion, or recommend a special new discipline or way of life—a religious code laid upon us for all time because it is from God. God’s understanding of God is that he just says: “Yes, be; be human, but be really human; be human if it kills you—and it will.” The Law of God is a non-law; it has no special regulation. The Word just says: “I accept you as human beings; what a pity you have such difficulty in doing this yourselves. What a pity you can only like yourselves if you pretend to be super-humans or gods.” God could never understand himself as one of the gods; only as one of the human race.

[. . .] To be able, through faith to share in Christ, in God’s understanding of himself, to be in Christ, is to be filled ourselves also with this joy, this Holy Spirit. It is a joy so vast that we can only faintly sometimes experience it as our elation and joy—just as our sharing in God’s self-understanding hardly at all seems to us an understanding, a being enlightened. We have a life in us, an understanding and a joy in us, that is too great for us to comprehend. Quite often it has to show itself as what seems its opposite, as darkness and suffering. The Word of God is Christ crucified. But it is God’s way and the truth of God and the life and joy of God. And this is in us because we have faith. We have been prepared to go into the dark with Christ, to die with Christ. And we know that this means that we live in Christ. And that life, the divine understanding and joy that is in us, will one day soon show itself in us for what it truly is. And we shall live with the Father, through the [. . .] the Word made flesh, in the joy which is the Holy Spirit for eternity. (Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, 104-6)

Life, resurrection life, is coming and is now here. When Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us he tells us to do nothing more than give ourselves over to his love, throwing the consequences to the wind. This is abject and utter foolishness. A stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. But Christ has been raised. And therefore this is the power and wisdom of God. This is God’s own self-understanding that will finally triumph over every authority and ruler and power.

The love that Jesus commands will ultimately have its way. It will be victorious. Our infantile dreams of calculation, control, and qualification are doomed, one way or the other. Lay them down. Give yourself over, in all the concreteness, contingency, and hardship of your life to the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. He has come that we may have life and have it abundantly. Everything else, every other word steals, kills, and destroys.

Because Christ is risen, you are free to love one another. You are free to throw yourselves away in love. You are free to waste yourself on the worthless, on the trivial, on the stuff that no reasonable person should put up with or care about. You are free. Death no longer has dominion over you. You are no longer enslaved to fear, to calculation, to qualification, to self-protection. You are free to just throw yourself away, to lavish yourself in all your imperfection on one another in love and on God in worship. And this is life. This is the life of the gospel. The life of the crucified and risen Lord. The life that death cannot touch. The life of the world to come. Amen.

Summarizing Jenson on God and Time

Posted by on November 16, 2009 1 comment

Peter Leithart has perhaps the best post-length summary of Robert Jenson’s controversial and oft-misunderstood theology of God and time:

Is God eternally and infinitely the eternal and infinite God that He is? Of course. He’s God.

Is God dependent on creation for His fulfillment? Of course not. He’s God.

The biblical God uniquely does not try to escape time. All other gods do; that’s what makes them gods.

The world is what it is. History is what it is. No use worrying what might have been.

God promises to show mercy, and give Himself to His people. These promises are given to a real people, in real time.

Those promises come true, or they don’t.

If they don’t, then God is not in fact the God who shows mercy.

If they do, then God is in fact the God who shows mercy. He could not be the God who shows mercy if He failed show mercy. By definition.

Given the kind of world that is, this mercy must involve the Cross and Resurrection. God could not be in fact the God who whose mercy without crucifixion and resurrection.

Think of the contrary: God could be a God bursting with mercy and grace, but refuse to make or keep promises. But then He wouldn’t be the God of mercy and grace.

Or, what amounts to the same thing: God could be a God of mercy and grace “in Himself,” without reference to the creation. But then God would no longer be the biblical God, but an idol who does what all gods do – provide security against time.

The Morality of Freedom

Posted by on April 29, 2009 1 comment

“The gospel’s specific morality is a matter of opened opportunities, of what we may reasonably do that otherwise would have been foolish. The normal morality is a matter of imposed constraints, of what we must do, that otherwise we would have liked to not do. Given Christianity’s record of legalisms, it is hard to credit but is true nevertheless: the gospel’s specific morality is a morality of freedom. Insofar as the gospel moves us, we do what we do because we may, not because we ought. And a good act is one which finds the way to love, to the affirmation of the brother’s freedom. . . . It’s pattern is: ‘You may . . . because, if Jesus is risen there is no need to fear. . . .”

~ Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 81.

Unconditional Promise

Posted by on April 12, 2009 Comments Off

“In Jesus’ resurrection, the identity of the God of promise became clear. The news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is a claim on behalf of a God unequivocally identified as a God of unconditional promise: of life precisely in spite of, indeed using and transforming, death; of fulfillment in spite of, indeed including alienation. “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead” is both past tense and future tense; for it can also be stated this way: “Jesus’ life, as defined by his death, will triumph – and that triumph will be the reality of God.”

~ Robert Jenson, Story and Promise, 60.

An Interview with Robert Jenson

Posted by on April 6, 2009 8 comments

Pretty interesting interview with Robert Jenson that was originally published in the Christian Century in 2007. It’s been made available for free here. A few of the questions and responses are particularly interesting, regarding ecumenism, the church of the global south, theology and politics, and the question of Christ and culture:

What do you hope for and what do you foresee regarding the ecumenical movement?

I foresee continued stagnation — abstracting of course from an uncovenanted intervention of the Spirit. The ecumenical movement is not very interesting if it is simply an apparatus for practical comity and joint political agitation; its heart must be concern for what ecumenists have called “faith and order,” that is, for the theological and structural divisions that prevent fellowship at the Lord’s table, and for the possibilities of overcoming them.

Of that concern there are now few stirrings outside professional ranks; indeed, people find it hard to imagine what enthusiasm there once was in congregations and educational institutions.

That Faith and Order ecumenism is dead in the water has for some time been widely recognized. Out of that recognition, scores of American church leaders five years ago endorsed an initiative to hold a “second Oberlin.” The Faith and Order movement in North America had been kindled by a 1957 conference at Oberlin College, mostly of mainline Protestants; the hope was that a similar but more broadly based conference might rekindle the movement. An independent foundation was created to carry the effort, since it was apparent that for many reasons the National Council of Churches could not. In January of this year, the foundation’s incorporating directors formally terminated the venture. It was undone by mainline Protestantism’s present indifference to and distraction from the whole matter, by evangelicalism’s unconcern about separation at the Lord’s table, and by deliberate obstruction from within the established ecumenical apparatus.

To be sure, this pessimistic assessment indeed abstracts from the unpredictable work of the Spirit. When Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said on several much-quoted occasions that further major ecumenical progress depended on a new “depth of faith” worked by a new initiative of the Spirit. That can happen at any time and is what we should pray for — and prayer is the most optimistic act a creature can perform.

What do you think will be the theological impact of global Christianity’s geographic shift away from Europe and North America and to the Southern Hemisphere and Asia? And of the rising influence of Pentecostal churches and the relative waning of churches in the historic confessional traditions?

I think that is unpredictable. As an intrinsically missionary faith, Christianity repeatedly invades geographically or historically new turf — and it never finds that turf religiously unoccupied. In the ensuing conversation and argument, Christianity will discover both agreements with the antecedent religion and necessary disagreements. As the missionary partner, Christianity will change in some ways, whether the other does or not: it will have to address new questions and configurations of thought, and weigh liturgical and cultural practices to be adopted, adapted or rejected. A form of the church will emerge which may look and sound very different from previous forms — as different, say, as a late-fourth-century Eucharist in Alexandria from a first-century breaking of bread in Jerusalem.

Some have thought they could so securely identify a general and repeated pattern of religious history as to predict the outcome of a particular contestation of this sort. I am tempted to such hubris but try to resist it. It is in any case too soon, in my view, to know in what ways the churches of Africa or India or China will be specifically African or Indian or Chinese a century or so from now.

Accounts of theological and political disputes in this country often pit the religious right against mainline or liberal Protestantism. How would you describe the main features of the American religious landscape and where would you locate yourself?

Contrasting liberal or left with conservative or right yields, in my view, a map of very limited utility. For my own part, I have been labeled both ways, depending on who was disapproving of me.

At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or “theory” is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use “justification by faith” — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the “law and gospel” distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.

Churches on the left and right often see themselves in opposition to the dominant culture — whether they are opposing abortion rights on one side or opposing U.S. foreign policy on the other. Is Richard Niebuhr’s description of “Christ against culture” still a helpful way to speak about the church’s political stance with regard to the world?

I have long thought that Niebuhr’s book, for all its individual insights, was based on a false setting of the question. Whatever preposition you put between Christ and culture, its mere presence there marks and enforces the supposition that Christ and culture are entities different in kind. But it is of course only the risen Christ who can now have a relation to a culture, and this living Christ’s body is the church. And the church — with its scriptures, odd rituals and peculiar forms of government — is plainly itself a culture.

Therefore the real question is always about the relation of the church culture to some other culture with which the church’s mission involves it at a time and place. And I do not think the relation can be the same in every case. During the time of “Christendom,” the culture of the church and the culture of the West were barely distinguishable. I do not think this “Constantinian settlement” was avoidable. When the empire said, “Come over and help us hold civilization together,” should the bishops have just refused?

As to Christendom’s consequences for faith, some were beneficial and some were malign, as is usual with great historical configurations. During the present collapse of Christendom and its replacement by an antinomian and would-be pagan culture, confrontation must of course be more the style.

Free Lectures by Robert Jenson: The Regula Fidei and Scripture

Posted by on April 3, 2009 10 comments

Jason has recently finished posting notes on Robert Jenson’s 2009 Burn Lectures delivered at the University of Otago on the theme, ‘The Regula Fidei and Scripture’:

These lectures are fantastic examples of why Jenson is such a great theologian, and, equally importantly they point out the importance and vitality of the task of theological engagement with Scripture.

Even more exciting is the fact that Jason also has now helpfully pointed us to video podcasts of those lectures which are now available for download as MP4s:

  • Lecture 1: Creed, Scripture, and their Modern Alienation
  • Lecture 2: The Tanakh as Christian Scripture
  • Lecture 3: The New Testament and the Regula Fidei
  • Lecture 4: The Apostles’ Creed
  • Lecture 5: The Creed as Critical Theory of Scripture
  • Lecture 6: Genesis 1:1 and Luke 1:26-38

Thanks to Jason for this wonderful service. For Robert Jenson fanatics like myself, this is wonderful news.

The Meaning of Life is…Jazz?

Posted by on September 5, 2008 2 comments

Philosophers today are, by and large, not too bold. The same is only more true for theologians, that’s why when quite literally any sort of theological writing that is bold comes across the radar everybody is all in a tizzy. Terry Eagleton is fairly bold as philosophers go. This is seen in his willingness to write a book detailing what he thinks is the meaning of life. His conclusion however, is not that original. Rather it is simply good Christian theological thinking that he likely learned from Herbert McCabe. Ultimately the meaning of life is love, defined in a very particular, very Christian way.

“Take, as an image of the good life, a jazz group. A jazz group which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performaces of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting asthe basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights.  There is no conflict here betwee freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realization, but only through a loss of self in the music as a whole. There is achievement, but it is not a question of self-aggrandizing success. Instead, the acheivement–the music itself–acts as a medium of relationship among the performers. There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry, and–since there is a free fulfillment or realization of powers–there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because this flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak, remotely and analogically, of a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life–both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and –more contoversially–in the sense that when we act in this way, we realize our natures at their finest.” (p. 172-73)

A bit whimsical perhaps, but quite insightful. What Eagleton sees is that the meaning of life must, in some sense come from outside of life. Music, as in this example always exists in some sense over-against us even as we participate in it. It is, in some sense greater than we who, empirically seem to bring it into existence. And so it is for the Christian experience of life’s meaningfulness, as Eagleton also hints at:

“Is jazz, then, the meaning of life? Not exactly. The goal would be to construct this kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal. What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid-back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living in this way can human being be said to share in his life.” (p. 174)

Whether or not this is truly the fullest expression of the meaning of human life, it certainly gets at something quite important. It also strikes a chord quite similar to the thought of Robert Jenson, particularly in this quote, which R.O. Flyer recently posted from Story and Promise which perhaps makes the Christian articulation of the meaning of life most explicit:

“Play is meaningful action that does not need to seek its meaning in some achievement exterior to itself. It is what we do because we do not have to. It is action to which the future opens as gift rather than as burden. The life of the Trinity is sheer play. As play with the Trinity, liturgy is anticipation of life in the Fulfillment–-the closest we get to freedom. It must be admitted that liturgy-as-play is a rather rare occurrence in America’s recognized churches.” (p. 184)

Rethinking Protology and Eschatology

Posted by on August 14, 2008 17 comments

I’ve commented before on the issue of protology and eschatology, arguing along with Robert Jenson for understanding the future, rather than the past as ontologically primary. The future, rather than the past is determinative for the ultimate shape of our being. However, in line with Jenson’s own thinking, any conception of eternity is some sort of union of the past and the future, it is some form of temporal transcendence which encapsulates the present by bracketing the past and the future thus rendering all three tenses of time somehow meaningful and coherent. As such our notion of eternity, and the ontological priority of the future cannot simply play protology and eschatology off against one another as if there were no reality whatsoever to the Alpha, leaving the Omega alone with ontological status. Whatever else eternity is, it must include the reconciliation of past, present, and future in such a way that all temporal realities find their redemption and transfiguration, not their abrogation.

Thus, it seems possible to hold that we can indeed posit something like John Milbank and David Bentley Hart argue for in their narration of an ontology of original peace. What we cannot do is allow ourselves be sucked into the sort of timeless, cyclical ontology of emanation and return (as I fear Milbank sometimes comes close to). However, avoiding this problem should not necessarily deter us from openness to a notion of primordiality or original harmony. This original harmony must, if it is to be a fruitful concept be understood in an Irenaean manner in which the original harmony of creation is retroactively determined by and towards its eschatological end in Christ. We cannot dispense with the Alpha, but we must insist that the glory of the Omega, while in total continuity with the Alpha, is in some sense more glorious, just as the New Jerusalem is more glorious than the Edenic Garden. The end is greater than the beginning, and precisely in so being, infuses the beginning with meaning and beauty.

Hart and Jenson: Locating the Disagreement

Posted by on July 23, 2008 25 comments

I’m currently re-reading David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite and am loving going back through this text again. This is truly a magnificent work of Christian theology that deserves extensive thoughtful engagement. After my initial reading of Hart’s book, I found myself giving a profoundly negative assessment thereto; however after letting the book sit and digest over the last year or so and now reading it again, I am finding it more and more joyous an experience.

Ultimately, I think that my own differences with Hart occur at the same theological locale that defines Hart’s argument with Robert Jenson. In the actual discussion of Jenson’s theology and Hart’s argument with him, the disagreement seems to be based on — as Hart says in the preface to the book — a different understanding of the economic and immanent trinities. Particularly there seems to a wide divergence over the issue of what Hart perceives as Jenson’s historicization of God’s being. For Hart it is essential to assert that creation is not necessary to God, that it adds nothing to God’s being, being a purely gratuitous gift of God which neither adds nor detracts from God’s plenitude. For Jenson, however, the revelation of God in Israel and Jesus requires us to identify God’s own self-definition by and as particular historical events, supremely the event of the resurrection which defines and indeed, constitutes God’s own eternal life. For Jenson, “If Jesus is not risen, this God simply is not.”

However, in the course of Hart’s book he makes claims that sound utterly Jensonian, from his musical ontology through which he describes the beatific vision to his Trinitarian theology of divine beauty, Hart and Jenson sound much more alike than unlike one another. The real locus of their disagreement, I suggest is located at the level of their respective theologies of time. Hart’s whole project, including his geneological assault on continental philosophy, is predicated on the positing of a primordial, protological harmony, an original peace that is definitive of creation. This original peace forms the ontological ground of Hart’s entire project. Violence is privatio boni, a secondary intrusion of negation into an ocean of beatific plenitude that the world, as creatio ex nihilo is imbued with. For Hart, it is all about origin. The key to his understanding of the Christian gospel, as a rhetoric of peace is grounded in the positing of an original ontological harmony, a protological ontology of serendipity.

For Jenson, by contrast, the Christian evangel is not primarily constituted by its appeal to an original created harmony, but rather by its proclamation of an irreducible future of eschatological abundance which is the outcome of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. For Jenson, the ontological ground of the Christian gospel does not reside in the past, as a primordial harmony to which we hope to be restored, but rather in the future which is an eschatological superabundance of resurrection life, overturning the world of sin and death in a dynamic confrontation between the powers of death and the life of the Triune God.

Hart’s magnificent Trinitarian aesthetics is grounded protologically; Jenson’s is grounded eschatologically. Herein, I think lies the true difference between the two thinkers. This is seen even in terms of how much attention they respectively give to the doctrines of creation and eschatology respectively. Jenson does not even begin to treat the doctrine of creation until the second volume of his Systematic Theology, only beginning to discuss it after establishing a doctrine of God that is radically determined by the resurrection and eschatology. Hart, by contrast, devotes over a hundred and fifty pages to establishing the doctrines of the analogia entis, divine apatheia, and a doctrine of creation and only then turns to salvation and eschatology, only devoting a mere 18 pages or so to eschatology when he does get there. And even in his discussion of eschatology, the first words thereof are that Christian eschatology affirms the goodness of created difference, again taking recourse back to Hart’s grounding principle of protological harmony.

My point in all this is not to attempt to adjudicate the disagreement between Hart and Jenson. On the whole I find Jenson’s theology to better conform to the ratio of the Christian gospel, which begins with the eschatological proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection then proceeds to retroactively read that overriding reality back into our understandings of God as Trinity and God’s creation. Hart seems to invert this scheme, moving instead from an original metaphysical vision of God and creation to an evaluation and incorporation of the significance of the resurrected Messiah. Ultimately, the difference really lies in the area of ontology: does the being of creation (and God?) take its form and ratio from an original protological harmony, or an irreducible future of superabundance? Or is some sort of third way possible as Jenson seems to hint in his review of Hart in Pro Ecclesia? How one answers that question will probably determine whether one finds Hart or Jenson more persuasive to one’s theological sensibilities.

Trinity and Temporality

Posted by on June 16, 2008 8 comments

One of the most provocative claims made by Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian theology is that temporality has its source in the eternal life of the Trinity. In his view God is temporality itself, containing the reality of history within God’s own life.  This is important to understand in light of God’s claim that the event of Jesus’ resurrection constituted the identity of God.  The reason that this does not endanger the freedom of God is because the whole reality of history is itself incorporate into the eternal life of temporal infinity which is the event of God’s being God.

This is important to understand in light of criticisms that Jenson subordinates the doctrine of God to eschatology.  What Jenson in fact does is seek to think temporality in light of the gospel of the resurrection.  Thus for Jenson past, present, and future find their reconciliation in the life of the Trinity.  Protology and Eschatology are united in God’s temporal infinity of love; it is the event of Jesus’ resurrection that is their tabernacle.  In him past and future are reconciled in the present.  “In the gospel’s usage, ‘God is’ means: ‘Origin and Fulfillment rhyme in the Event of Jesus death and resurrection, without there needing to be a higher timeless reality in which they are encompassed and relativized” (Story and Promise, 117).

Thus Jenson goes on to say: “We can sketch the plot that God is: he is Fulfiller, Creator and the Reconciler of both; he is Goal and Origin enacted together in the history of Jesus; he is God-Future, God-Past, and God-Present; to use the biblical names, he is Spirit, Father and Son.  In time, God-Future and God-Past confront each other in Jesus resurrection; and just this Confrontation is God” (Story and Promise, 117-118).

Thus for Jenson the doctrine of the Trinity “states the plot of the temporal event which is the reality of God.”  He claims that the gospel “uses the word ‘God’ for the event that what happened with Jesus gives our lives plot by reconciling past and future in the present” (Story and Promise, 117).  What is particularly interesting about this is the way in which Jenson unapologetically links the three persons of the Trinity with the temporal realities of past, present, and future. 

What are we to make of this?  Does such a scheme ultimately work or is it but a suggestive yet incoherent attempt to penetrate the mystery of God?  Ultimately I think that it does work though it may need to be described in different language than Jenson’s, particularly with reference to the issue of the personal reality of the three Trinitarian hypostases.  Understanding the temporal infinity of the Trinitarian God should never lead us to reduce the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit merely to poles within the structure of temporality.  Of course that is not Jenson’s intention, rather he draws attention to the fact that God is event as well as person.  What is crucial is that we be careful not to lose the coterminous reality of the personhood of the hypostases in our attempt to describe the actualism of their event of being the infinitely temporal God of Jesus’ cross and resurrection.

What is Freedom?

Posted by on June 7, 2008 3 comments

In my recent posts on Robert Jenson’s theology one of the recurring themes is that of freedom.  One of the revolutionary elements of Jenson’s theology is his radical challenge to conventional understandings of what freedom means in Western culture.  One of the recurring critiques of Jenson’s work is precisely that he compromises God’s freedom (see Molnar’s Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Imannent Trinity for example).  However, such an accusation ignores the fundamental logic of Jenson’s work, which is to challenge the protological understanding of freedom which obtains in the inherited metaphysics of the West. 

Normally, we think of freedom, both for God and for ourselves as the freedom of unconstrained and undetermined ability to carry out what we desire.  Freedom, in nearly all of our contemporary idiom is understood as being autonomous, undetermined, and unaffected by anything outside ourselves.  This whole understanding is, of course where the whole alleged problem of divine sovereignty and human freedom comes from.  It seems pretty obvious that there can never be two completelyunconstrained and undetermined persons in existence.  Eventually one will somehow impinge on the other’s freedom.  And of course since, in standard theistic thinking God is understood (inadvertently or not) as a really, really big sort of top person, clearly our freedom is called into question by his far greater power.  (If you really want to see this problem utterly dismantled, see Herbert McCabe, God Matters, pp. 10-24.)

Jenson’s theology is radical because it argues that freedom is not being unconstrained and undetermined, but rather that freedom is what occurs in being determined by the trinitarian logic of Christ’s death and resurrection.  Freedom is not being undetermined, it is being determined by the one whose life is love.  And moreover, this is freedom, not only for us but for God himself.  Death and resurrection is the freedom of God and the liberation of humanity.

So, I pose the question in light of this: What do you say freedom means?  What does it mean for God and what does mean for us?

Robert Jenson: A Reader’s Guide

Posted by on June 6, 2008 18 comments

Lately I’ve been re-reading the works of Robert Jenson, as you all may have guessed from the overabundance of Jenson quotes that have appeared on this site lately.  Jenson remains, in my opinion the most important American theologian alive today, and perhaps the most important American theologian of the last century.  However, he is woefully under-read.  So, here is my advice on reading Jenson for those who are inclined to do so.

First,  the place to begin is with a small, older book of Jenson’s entitled Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus.  This book is less than 200 small pages, but every sentence is packed with dynamic theological insight.  All of the themes that will emerge in Jenson’s later work are here in nascent form (the temporal infinite of the Triune God, the centrality of the resurrection, the body of the ascended Jesus as embodied in the Eucharistic church, etc.).  The book is a bit hard to get these days, but if you can get it, do so.  And hopefully I’ll be able to get us at Wipf & Stock the chance to reprint it soon!

The next place to go is to Jenson’s superb book on the Trinity, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel.  This book pulls together Jenson’s key thoughts on the doctrine of God, including his revisionary metaphysics which he roots in the gospel of Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  This book is incredibly energetic and provocative.  There are few books on the Trinity that have totally shaken up my views on God as much as this one.

After reading these two books, anyone can probably read anything else in Jenson’s corpus they want and not feel too lost.  However, it would probably be good to tackle the first volume of Jenson’s Systematic Theology next.  This book fully articulates all of the themes of Jenson’s doctrine of God explicitly and masterfully.  I have never read another volume of systematic theology that I found so energizing, except perhaps from some sections of Barth and Balthasar’s works.  After volume one, you are more than ready to head into the second volume of Jenson’s systematic theology.  Here you will receive a thorough exposure to other aspects of Jesons’s thought, including his radical ecclesiology.

For more study on Jenson’s ecclesiology and sacramentology, his earlier book Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments is very helpful and thorough.  Finally, after having read all of the above, I would advise that then and only then one move on to Jenson’s small book, On Thinking the Human.  This little volume is anything but light reading.  In it Jenson tackles some of the essential philosophical questions about human personhood from a theological perspective.  The results are fascinating and extremely provocative.

If at his point you still haven’t had enough, you can always start accumulating the dozens of books that Jenson has edited with Carl Braaten, or read his delightful book, coauthored with his young granddaughter, Conversations with Poppi About God.  And if you just haven’t had enough of Jenson’s systematic theology you can also read his extensive chapters in Christian Dogmatics, a collaborative work which Jenson and Braaten edited.  One of the notable parts of this collection is Jenson’s extensive treatment of the Holy Spirit, which is not equaled in his own systematics.

All in all, I think anyone interested in Christian theology will find reading Jenson a very rewarding experience.  I have been energized, provoked, and stimulated by him more than by any other living theologian.  Jenson ignites a fire in the theological imagination that is rapturous, deep, and ultimately fun.  Perhaps what I find most compelling about his work is the way in which it constantly seeks to be radically attuned to the gospel of the resurrection, allowing that gospel to shape the whole of theological inquiry.  Jenson has much to teach all of us who seek to do theology in the service of the gospel.

The Eternal Embrace of Time

Posted by on June 6, 2008 1 comment

In The Triune Identity, Robert Jenson opens his book with the following claim:  “Human life is possible — or in recent jargon ‘meaningful’ — only if past and future are somehow bracketed, only if their disconnection is somehow transcended, only if our lives somehow cohere to make a story.  Life in time is possible only, that is, if there is ‘eternity,’ if no-more, still, and not-yet do not exhaust the structure of reality.  Thus, in all we do we seek eternity.”

According to Jenson, our temporal lives are only livable, only meaningful in that the goneness of the past and the not-hereness of the future are somehow embraced or given coherence within a story that transcends the disconnection between the three arrows of time without eviscerating their difference.  In light of the fact that the possibility of a meaningful life is predicated on some sort of eternity, it becomes of primary importance to emphasize what sort of eternity is offered by the God of the gospel.  An eternity is always some sort of a reconciliation of the past and the future.  As such, it is vital for us to articulate the Christian hope for eternity in a way that makes specific just what sort of hope we have within us. 

As Jenson puts is, “In that an eternity is always some union of past and future, every possible eternity will be one of two broad kinds: a Persistence of the Beginning, or an Anticipation of the End.”  So, the question for Christian theology is which of these two eternities best articulates the logic of the gospel.  Jenson rightly proposes that it is the latter rather than the former that comports with the gospel of Christ: “It is because we face a future that we experience ourselves as temporal beings; if there were only the past, which remains forever as it is, we would be timeless.  The eternity in which all persists as it was is therefore the cancellation of time; the eternity in which all is open to transformation is the success of time itself.”

Thus, as Jenson points out, Christian theology must go one of two ways when considering eternity and the Christian hope.  It will either be a “refuge from time or confidence in it.  God may be God because in him all that will be is already realized, so that the novelties of the future are only apparent and its threats therefore not overwhelming.  Or God may be God because in him all that has been is opened to transformation, so that the guilts of the past and immobilities of the present are rightly to be interpreted as opportunities of creation.  God may be our defence against time’s uncertainties, or he may be himself the ‘Insecurity of the future.’”

Here is the fundamental divide between Christianity and all other world religions according to Jenson.  The gospel’s God does not give us the hope of the persisting past being eternalized in the present, but rather of a future open to inexhaustible transformation through death and resurrection.  As Jenson argues, “Brahman-Atman, by any of his names may be God, in which case all time is an illusion, circling around a blissful utter Sameness.  Or Yahweh may be God, in which case all sameness will be overcome by the God who makes all things new, whose very righteousness is his love of sinners, of those who are lost if the past determines.”

Christ or Nothing

Posted by on June 5, 2008 Comments Off

“If infinity is not the infinity of God, it must be the infinity of the world, that is, of nothingness.  The one who hears the call of infinity must believe either in Christ or in nothing.  Insofar as the call of infinity has been an actual historical phenomenon in the West, and insofar as we have various heard it, radical faith and nihilism have repeatedly and with increasing urgency posited themselves as our only choices; we need affirm the systems of neither Søren Kierkegaard nor Jean-Paul Sartre to see that each of us must in a deep sense be the one or the other.”

–Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2002), 169.

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