Robert Jenson Systematic Theology
Systematic Theology, Volume I, The Triune God, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 and Volume II, The Words of God, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
I find it interesting that Robert Jensen identifies the church as the unique and unitary Church of the creeds. And he stresses that the denominational age has introduced a contradiction in the theological enterprise. Therefore, theology can only be in anticipation of the one church. He is impacted by the secularizing of the gospel I appreciate his reference to Nietzsche’s prophecy neutralism must be the fate of a once but no longer Christian culture. his insight that nihilism might itself only appear as a threat of its appearing is an interesting. It suggests that nihilism is not a sustainable position to hold but a moment that helps gain clarity. He admits that for the near future the threat of nihilism determines the culture religion and theology that the gospel must interpret. He admits that the innovations and the conservations of the following system respond to questions posed to the church in a world religiously determined by the awaited advent of nothingness.
His prolegomena has three sections to it. First what systematic theology is about. The gospel is the first order proclamation of the church. God is the object of theology only to the extent To which its central affirmation of the risen Lord is true. He classifies theology as speculative, practical, and hermeneutic. Hearing something as gospel leads us to ask how we can speak it in our time as gospel. Gospel is promise and this opens us to a history. Second is the norms of theological judgment. He considers these to be scripture both Jewish and Apostolic proclamation, liturgical institutions such as baptism, the Lord's supper, ordination, prayer to our Father, as well as the dogma in the creeds. He says that if the apostles did not get it right then no one ever did when we arrive at the apostles, we have no place else to go. He says that A3 article confession is directed to the father with the sun and in the spirit. I appreciate it his honesty that no one could know the whole tradition and that therefore the appearance of some theologians and the omission of others that makes it kind of biography of the author showing where he or she has been drawn into the long discussion and where her or his judgment is to be received with caution. Third he discusses the identification of God. Identity here means with the devil narrative such as the exodus event with the resurrection of Jesus. The God of the Bible is identical with these events. Thus, to the question who is God the only answer for one who gives priority to the word of God is that God is the one who liberated Israel from slavery and raised Jesus from the dead. I think he makes a particularly good point that If God is only projection, if good is only perception of an interest group, then no statement can be made in good faith.
Part 2 is a discussion of the triune identity. It covers chapters 4 through nine. I appreciate his emphasis on dramatic coherence in his reference to Aristotle on that point. His emphasis on II Isaiah is from my recent studies in the Old Testament very appropriate since he is the one who games clarity about there being one God for all humanity. He emphasizes that God is the opponent of death. God is eternally one with God's self as God anticipates in the end that God will be. This future that moves a story must be available within the story. In the gospel this occurs by God making promises. The promise begins with Abraham and the patriarchs this promise continues in the covenant on Mount Sinai and although there is a contrast with the covenant with David the moral content of the covenant remains the same. Palace and temple show God as invested in the reality of this world. The coming of exile made an eschatological transformation of the promises. Even the covenant with David is transformed into a royalty that embodies the people. He stresses that the mystery of suffering must be part of God's story. He then identifies the persons of God's identity in the Old Testament the notion of the son, the word, the servant, and the spirit of the Lord. What I appreciate here is that I have slowly been seeing that the story of Jesus as portrayed in the gospel narrative is a fulfillment of what Israel could have been and might have been had it been able to be faithful. His discussion of one being with the father seems mostly the contrast modalism and subordinationism. His statement that referring to the stages of God's work as creator Redeemer and sanctifier is modalistic. He is helpful I believe in showing that these statements are not identical or equivalent to notions of Father, Son and Spirit. Of course, I appreciated his references to both Justin Martyr and Origen. I also appreciated that post-apostolic authors were still wrestling with the relationship within divine life. I appreciated his discussion of Athanasius as well as the Cappadocians. The occurrence and plot of the life of God's people with God depends upon the occurrence and plot of the life of God with the people. It does so as this one life is in both aspects constituted in the father's originating, the spirits perfecting, and the Son’s mediating of the two, and as it is the whole reality of God on the one hand and of the creature on the other.
Chapters 7-9 deal with problems related to the persons of the Trinity. First, he discusses the problem of the Father. He gets into the monarchy of the Father. To discuss the persons of the Trinity is to say that they can engage in conversation that they address others and that others can address them. In his terminology the persons of the Trinity have identity but the Trinity itself is not an identity. Here is where he finds some help from Jonathan Edwards. A person is one whom other persons may address in hopes of response. Christian speech to God is an address to the Father, with the Son, and in the Spirit. We stand before the Father, speaking in community with the Son, and are impelled by the Spirit. Second, he discusses the problem of Christology. He says Maximus the confessor may well be the last creative thinker of antiquity. I have not read very much of him. He gets into discussions of the Monophysites and those who believed in one nature in Christ. Much of these discussions revolve around whether the Son as deity suffered. He thinks we have gotten beyond this. He agrees with Karl Barth. Before the existence of the Incarnate there is the eternal triune life, in the actuality of which it is decided that there be a created history and a life of the Son in that history. If we then ask who the second identity of this eternal triune life is, in which the created life of the Son is decreed, we must answer that is it is the same Incarnate Son. He points out that an unfortunate legacy of the Logos theology regarding the pre-existence of Jesus is the ignoring of the Old Testament anticipations of the appearance of the Son. The third problem relates to pneumatology. With Augustine the Spirit is love that binds the Father and Son together. As a personal being the Spirit has only himself to give. In the biblical narrative the Spirit indeed comes to us not only from the Father but also from the Son. I appreciated his comment that Church Dogmatics is a parade of trinitarian solutions to questions that modern theology had answered in Unitarian fashion. Yet as significant as the doctrine of the Trinity was for him it often is a doctrine of bi-unity. This criticism while valid does not do justice to the incompletion of church dogmatics. I wonder if Karl Barth had not gotten so wordy in the church dogmatics and completed it if this criticism would still be appropriate. He points out that most of postmodern thought supposes that all personal converse is openly or hiddenly a struggle for domination. If there is to be love freely given there must be a third party in the meeting who becomes our Liberator. The Spirit is indeed the love between two personal lovers, the Father and the Son, but the Spirit can be this just in that the Spirit is also an identity. The Spirit is another who liberates Father and Son to love each other. The Father begets the Son, but the Spirit presents this Son to the Father as an object of the love that had begotten the Son and thus to be actively loved. The Son adores the Father while the Spirit is the one who shows the Father to the Son as the available and lovable Father. He admits that the tradition has not construed the divine life by the biblical narratives as eschatological character. The Spirit stands at the end of all of the ways of God because the Spirit is the end of all the ways of God. The Spirit is the liveliness of the divine life because the Spirit is the power of the divine future. The Spirit is the one who, when the Spirit in time gives a down payment on the rule of God, gives precisely the gift of the personal presence of the Spirit. The Spirit is the love into which all things will at the last be brought, who is thus the fulfillment not only of created life but the divine life. The divine goal at which relations of fulfillment focus should be acknowledged as the Spirit’s Archimedean standpoint. There is a problem with such thinking only if we focus on the origin of the Trinity and not its goal. I was surprised that he did not refer to Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 1980, which makes the same point: the goal of the divine activity is toward the presence and power of the Spirit. In this way, the presence and power of the Spirit, as transforming and life-giving, within finite and temporal life, means the Spirit the destiny of the Trinity and of the creative work of the Father and the reconciling work of the Son.
Part Three deals with the Triune Character. Chapter 10 deals with Jesus. Since the gospel says of Jesus that he is risen from the dead the name Jesus must denote an accomplished human life. The Jesus of history is risen to be the word, so the Jesus of history must somehow be what God says by raising him. Rudolph Bultmann has contributed to the recovery of the biblical notion of the word. He refers to this as the word event being an understanding existence and meeting what one has and what one counts for are intrinsically mutual is therefore also what one is at one word and what one is not yet the past and the future what is real is what has a future. He held to a strict correlation between faith in the actual proclamation of the gospel. Faith is the eschatological mode of existence. God is the coming one whose deity is a constant reference to the future. We cannot free ourselves by an act of the will but only as they proclaimed the word it comes from outside of us word that challenges us to live from God's future rather rather than The possibilities of this life. This opens and eschatological life for us. The question Bultmann Never successfully addressed was why the proclamation of the historical event of Jesus is the eschatological event as over against any other historical event. Eternity becomes the timelessness of the moment of decision. For him myth is any sequential narrative pretending to be about deity. Another problem with his position is that the Old Testament serves only as an antithetical background for the eschatological proclamation in the New Testament. The position of Jensen in this book is that the eschatological proclamation needs the narrative of Jesus to identify the eschaton that in fact is proclaimed. To believe to exist authentically is to be unconditionally open to the future but what future the future being fully open to the future as determined by fellowship with Jesus. Jesus the Christ and his full historical reality of birth life death and resurrection is the word of God in that he is the identity of the future opened by the word of God. He is the word of God in that he is the narrative content of the proclamation that because it poses eschatological possibility is the word of God. He is the word of God because he is the narrative content of the word event that is the word of God. Jesus the Christ is the word of God and so is word as he is the content of the proclamation whose power is the spirit and whose source is the father. Jesus would not be the word without the resurrection. If he is risen we may trust him to accomplish a sufficient and sufficiently coherent self-identification even by means of lapses and biases of the tradition about him. This trust must guide scholarship within the church. If the history of Jesus does not include his resurrection the word that grounds faith does not include his risen. It would be mistaken to view the phrase Jesus is risen simply as a confession of faith. It is the ground for faith. Chapter 11 deals with the crucifixion. The crucifixion is God's salvific action just in that God overcomes it by the resurrection. This is the event in God that settles what sort of God he is over against following creation. The crucifixion given the resurrection settles also our situation as creatures. The resurrection was the father's yes. The resurrection settled that the crucifixion sort of God is indeed the one God the crucifixion settled what sort of God it is who establishes deity by the resurrection. The crucifixion settled who and what God is. The resurrection settled that this God is. The crucifixion settled also who and what we are. Why did Jesus have to die? Christ suffering is the anguish God undergoes to be merciful within history it is the pain of truly loving us. How was this death a sacrifice? The new testaments particular use of sacrificial language to interpret the crucifixion and the life of faith obliterates the common distinction between the offerer and what is offered. How was jesus's death a victory over the powers and principalities? We answer this first by saying that Jesus defeated the high priest and the Roman governor the powers and principalities of a political empire and religious self assertion. Chapter 12 deals with the resurrection Jesus is risen into the future that God has for his creatures which certain persons saw after his death was a reality of that future. Love perfected at the cross is now active to surprise us. The risen one is Jesus in the identity of his person. He lives in the glory of God. Jesus's resurrection has confessed by the church as a bodily resurrection with or without and emptying of the tomb. Somehow there now exists a body that is the living Jesus 's human body. The only body of Christ to which Paul ever actually refers is not an entity in this heaven but the eucharists loaf and cup and the church assembled around him. But what can Paul mean speaking of Christ body? Neither the bread and cup Northern faithful gander gathered around them look and react like a human body. Chapter 13 deals with the being of the one God. In Greek philosophy being satisfied the longing of the mind for absolute assurance for transcendence over times surprises. Christian theology must devise A trinitarian concept of being and Gregory of Nyssa is a good mentor here. The difference between essence and being or essence and existence and their identity and God is one of intellectual history's most powerful and tantalizing ideas. Refers to the mutual action of the identities divine energies to the periodic triune life. And since all divine action is the singular mutual work of father son and spirit there's only one such life and therefore only one subject of the predicate God. The divine nature or osia is infinite. Such an infinite being cannot be something other than its own Infinity. Deity that is Infinity and nothing else can only be Infinity as such. This can only be what God picks out as the mutual action of father son and spirit. What father son and spirit have from each other to be 3 identities of God and what characterizes their mutual act as God his limitlessness. What happens among them accepts no boundaries. God is infinite because no temporal activity can keep up with the activity that he is the transcendent and blessed life as neither interior nor exterior measure and no temporal process can keep pace with it. The being of God it keeps things moving. To be God is always to be open to and always to open a future transgressing all past imposed conditions. The temporal Infinity that opens before us and so embraces us as the triune God's eternity is the inexhaustible ability of one event. At that event is the appropriation of all other events by the love in the fullness of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. There's one God is an event a person it's a decision and a conversation. Chapter 14 deals with our place in God. Whatever is must be true in good and beautiful. God is being and therefore God is truth goodness and beauty. God is this because of the knowledge love and enjoyment first in the triune life. God is this because God is roomy including other persons in that divine life. To know God is to know God's moral will that God honors and benefits us is there any buying goodness to us. This is the gift of the commandments. This is the gift of the tradition of wisdom. And this is also the source of the lovability of God which allows people to delight in God.
Part IV deals with creation. Chapter 15 deals with the act of creation. Chapter 16 deals with the character of creation. Chapter 17 deals with time, created being, and space. He does not seem to appreciate reflections on time.
Part V deals with the creature. Chapter 19 deals with the image of God. An interesting possibility here is exploring the image of God in Genesis from the perspective that God addresses creation in a personal way and engages humanity in a conversation, which is the basis for the notion of personhood. We can speak in ways other than language. God is making room for reality other than God, thereby creating spatio-temporal reality together.[1] The address of God toward us is the Word, who is the human person of Jesus of Nazareth. To receive a word from God is to be also directed toward a fellow human being. The humanity of individuals consists in their being with their fellow human being. [2] Chapter 20 deals with politics and sex. Sensuality and the dual reproductive apparatus provides for new human beings in succession. Inescapably, the vagina and the penis are made for each other. Sexuality is this coincidence of sensuality and male-female differentiation. The union occurs is not an impersonal event, but an event in which we captivate each other and become bodily present to the other. Sexuality rescues the human communal character from being a mere ideal. We have no choice but to be fellow-human, and this receives emphasis in that we cannot say “human” without saying man and woman. The woman is for this man, and the man is for this woman, which is the eminent and decisive fellow-human moment. This difference is the only structural difference between human beings, for all other distinctions are human creations. One may hate the shape of one’s body, but maleness or femaleness are not the product of malleable or contingent psychology or social construction. Such givenness of our maleness or femaleness does not allow us to shirk the responsibility of embracing the task and opportunity of being the man or woman whom God has called us to be.[3] A consequence of this sexual reality is that the family is the essential institution of any community. The laws that regulate sexuality, that stipulate what constitutes a family and enforce its integrity, are a condition of all other law-making. Laws regarding sexuality are the reality test of law, for the future of society is at stake. Sexual anarchy will lead to rule by arbitrary force, for it brings with it the weakening of the home. A second consequence of sexuality is its humanizing rule. Intercourse is a gesture toward another, a promise of shared life, as one body engulfs another and that body enters another, abolishing the distance between the two. We can agree that intercourse is something less than this type of communication. A final consequence of this view of sexuality is that a society will do all it can to encourage heterosexual monogamy. A form of serial polygamy occurs as divorce legislation liberalizes. [4] Chapter 21 deals with other creatures. I know that a chapter on angels and devils is part of theological texts. I must confess that my view of the Trinity would make me focus on the personal relationship within divine life in such a way that makes a discussion of angels unnecessary. I am also not interested in a discussion of Satan and demons, although a discussion evil in its personal and corporate nature. Chapter 22 deals with sin. I appreciated the notion of original sin as beginning with our manipulation and lying of others and our suspicion that others are manipulating and lying to us. Chapter 23 deals with God’s speech in creation. I appreciated the application of the word-event to how God speaks through creation.
Part VI, Chapters 24-30, deals with the church. God institutes the church by not letting the resurrection of Jesus be the end of world history as we know it, thereby immediately bringing the world into the rule of God of which Jesus preached. Jesus anticipated the formation of this community in the formation of a community with the Twelve, in the prayer Jesus taught the disciples to pray in anticipation of the rule of God, and in the meals he shared with the disciples and the marginalized of that society, a meal-fellowship broken by crucifixion and restored by the risen Lord. The baptism of Jesus by John makes of baptism as practiced by the church a mark of its missionary nature. Baptism is sign of justification and sanctification because it anticipates the righteousness and holiness of the rule of God. Baptism is an initiatory anointing of a community of priests and prophets. Baptism unites those who receive it into the fate of Jesus and this forms the body of Christ, making Christ available to the world. Baptism is a mark of the saving, liberating, and healing work of the Spirit in dealing with the weakness and rebellion that is part of the human condition. The delay of the rule of God gave to the disciples a mission, vocation, and task to form a community that would anticipate in its life and its proclamation the coming rule of God. Thus, it is true that while Jesus preached the soon arrival of the rule of God, what came was the good news, the kerygma, through which God through the agency of the Holy Spirit called a community into existence. The gospel or kerygma defines what the church is to prophecy. The community faithful to Scripture is one that most often and thoughtfully read and hear it, in light of its creeds, liturgies, and statements of faith. This word is a lively word present in the church and shapes its life, giving it a privileged status within the living discourse of the church. Luke has dramatically pictured the process of creating this community in having the disciples asking when the restoration of the kingdom to Israel would occur, and the risen Lord avoids answering the question and instead promises the gift of the Father, the Holy Spirit, who will empower them to witness in word and deed. The church becomes the detour toward the God of Israel fulfilling the promises to Israel. The Lord is patient for the sake of fulfilling the mission of Israel. The people of God anticipate the coming rule of God, doing so as the body of Christ and as the Temple of the foretaste or down payment it receives in the outpouring of the Spirit. Thus, we could imagine a different scenario in which the Father determined that the saints of canonical Israel would rise together with Jesus, so that the resurrection of Jesus would be the end, brought about the arrival of the rule of God Jesus preached through the power of the Holy Spirit. There would have been no church. Pentecost is the contribution the Spirit makes to the delay of the rule of God preached by Jesus, opening the time for the church. The Spirit frees a human community for union with the Son and to be in its life, as defined by its embodiment of the Lord’s Prayer, its genuine hearing and doing of the Ten Commandments, and its adherence to the Love of God and neighbor, and in its proclamation, as defined by the gospel or kerygma, an anticipation of the fulfillment of creation as it moves toward its transformation into the rule of God. A proper understanding of the Christian life occurs within the context of an understanding of the doctrine of the church. Once the delay of the rule of God became reality, so did the need for offices within the church become necessary to continue the church beyond the apostolic generation. History shows that the basic cannons, liturgies, and creeds of the church arose within a church also united by an episcopal form of governance. However, a coherent narrative of the church hangs together not by its beginning but by its anticipation of its end, a notion that must not be used to set aside the past but be used to open the future to the transformation necessary for life in the rule of God. The nature of the Infinite and Eternal God means that creation in every time and place is just one place for God. The difference between the consummation of the ages in the coming of Christ in the future and presence of God now is one of style, for God is not coming from one place where God is to a place where God is not now. The rule of God comes where the rule of God already is.[5]
Part VI deals with the fulfillment. Chapter 31 deals with the promise, which provided some insights based upon Isaiah 11:1-10, which I have incorporated into my reflections on the text, where I especially appreciated his approach to the fears and hopes we might find in every culture. I also offer my reflections on eschatology, in which I incorporate my reflections on the Book of Revelation. Moving Christian reflection on the end away from the expectation of direct divine intervention is not an easy task, but one I find necessary.
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