Jesus in the Trinity

Lincoln Harvey

Description

A critical figure in understanding doctrinal debates, Robert Jenson's work is nonetheless incredibly hard to get a handle on. Jesus in the Trinity presents a much-needed primer on the theologian, demystifying his work and exploring the place his thinking has in the life of faith today.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334058830
• Langue: English

Extrait

© Lincoln Harvey 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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978-0-334-05881-6
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Typeset by Manila Typesetting Company
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd
For Tereza, Anna, Georgia, Rose and Rachel
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 A Not-So-Gentle Introduction to Jenson’s Theology
Part One | A Cluster of Jensonian Concepts
2 The Strange God of the Gospel
3 Time, Eternities and the Story of God
Part Two | Jenson and the Tradition
4 In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
5 We Believe in One Lord, Jesus Christ
Part Three | Jenson’s Doctrine of God
6 Adopting and Adapting Barth’s Doctrine of Election
7 One Dramatic Act, Two Terms
8 Easter First, Creation After
Part Four | And So
9 What on Earth Do We Do?
10 Concluding Postscript
Bibliography
Selected Works by Robert W. Jenson
Selected Secondary Literature
Index of Names and Subjects
How could I have agreed to work with them?
Who could possibly have thought that a majority would ever lead me to a course of action, in preference to following the divine Word?
Gregory Nazianzus
Acknowledgements
Like all the good things in my life, the opportunity to write this book has depended on the generosity of others. I am therefore grateful to the Board of Trustees at St Mellitus College for granting me a period of study leave over the summer term of 2018, and to my colleagues who cheerfully surrounded me with prayers despite picking up extra work in my absence; theology is certainly a collegial business. The old adage that teaching is the best way to learn also rings true, and I am especially indebted to all the postgraduate students who have enrolled on the Jenson module over the last four years, not least for their patience as I slowly worked out what I think about Jenson. I am also deeply grateful to Vastiana Belfon, Sam Durley, Chris E. W. Green, Douglas H. Knight, Donna Lazenby and Stephen J. Wright for reading drafts of the various chapters and for their constructive feedback on the project as a whole. They have helped me to revise both the form and content of the final manuscript, and I think it is a much better book due to their charitable labours. Of course, any deficiencies remain entirely my fault. David Shervington at SCM Press has been a great help in ensuring the project came to print, not least in accepting that this book isn’t the one he initially expected. However, I am most grateful to my beloved Tereza, not only for her encouragement during the process of writing, but for her extra patience during the frustratingly longer process of not- writing – that limbo state that plagues so many academics in this bureaucratic day and age. Admittedly, our wonderful children didn’t provide me with quite as much space as I originally envisaged, but I don’t think I could have written this book without their noisy innocence alerting me to the intrinsic goodness of family life. Finally, I must say this book has been an absolute joy to write. My hope is that the reader will delight in it also, and that it will help them bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, who – as I have learned from Robert W. Jenson – is one of the Trinity, without qualification.
1 A Not-So-Gentle Introduction to Jenson’s Theology
1.1 The remarkable nature of Jenson’s work
Robert W. Jenson thinks God is ‘one big excitement’. 1 And not just any old excitement. God is the ecstasy of his own choice to be a particular God. That is to say, God ‘behappens himself’ in such a spectacular way that ‘doer and act’ are precisely the same. 2 What is more, the personal act of God’s sheer decision centres on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a decisive event that is at one and the same time an eternal ‘implosion of freedom’ and a timely ‘explosion of love’. 3 In other words, what happens over that first Easter weekend is the event by which God renders himself always and forever God-with-us, and with God constituted by the eternal act of the Crucified bursting from the grave, everything that exists ‘spirals around’ the resurrected Jesus ‘like a helix’, with the entire creation springing into life as God envelops us from every conceivable direction to draw us into the endless harmony of his own infinite life. 4 In short, the living God ‘is a great fugue’, 5 and ‘the end is music’. 6 That is God’s glory, and we too should be excited. Or so says Robert W. Jenson. 7
Admittedly, I have launched us in at the deep end here, with the opening paragraph likely to have left the reader somewhat bewildered. In many respects, that is how we should feel when we read any theology book. Theology is a lot like baptism, in that the last thing you want to do is keep your head above water. We are attempting to speak about God, and so we will necessarily be out of our depth. Of course, secondary literature is often designed to keep the reader on dry land for as long as possible, in effect providing the gentlest of gradients into the depths of any theologian’s work. 8 But this book will be somewhat different. Though it will mimic standard approaches in many respects, I will not abstract every building block from Jenson’s constructive proposal, thereby breaking down the whole into more manageable parts before laying them out in isolated form in the hope that the bite-sized chunks enable the reader to digest Jenson’s proposal more readily. Instead, the book is designed to convey the startling nature of Jenson’s theology by keeping the prose flowing so that the barrage of ideas conveys the exciting liveliness of his systematic proposal, thereby stretching the reader right from the start as we trace the gospel-shaped reasoning that informs Jenson’s astonishing account of what makes God the God that he is. This approach means we will often race ahead into deep waters, before slowing down and returning to simpler matters, thus introducing themes ahead of time before circling back to earlier ideas with the expectation that the accumulation of repeating insights will work one upon the other in mutual development. My hope is that the paragraph with which we began will make sense by the end of the book. I think the tactic works, though appreciate that the reader will be best placed to judge if it has.
The adopted method means – as Jenson recognized when he engaged with the work of other theologians – that it is not always clear where my interpretation ventures beyond the substance of Jenson’s proposal. 9 This is especially true when I attempt to show how classical concepts like aseity – that is, God’s unique act of self-causing – can be reimagined in the context of Jenson’s account of Easter. My attempt to draw these technical ideas into positive conversation with Jenson’s theology inevitably places great strain on both his work and the classical concepts, and one to which Jenson never subjected them to the best of my knowledge. 10 Nonetheless, I hope to have remained faithful to Jenson’s register throughout, trusting that my unusual handling of his proposal evidences the way his theology is best worked with, rather than upon.
In fact, Jenson’s theology is little short of an extended invitation for others to join him in the theological task he undertakes, which he fears has been too often neglected. 11 As a result, there is more than enough room for the creativity of others alongside him, because Jenson was only ever offering an ‘experimental’ approach to the theological task. 12 Jenson therefore encourages his readers to replicate the risks he takes, and so that is what I will on occasion do. I want to see what we can learn from Jenson’s theology, and where we can push his proposal even further than he might have liked, thereby pursuing lines of thought that his own work only gestures towards. Of course, this approach is something of a gamble. Plenty of details will be overlooked and many stones left unturned as I focus on key areas, but I think I have still managed to capture Jenson’s signature moves in what follows, thereby demonstrating the way his understanding of the gospel enabled him to redefine the trinitarian concepts of person and nature in such a startling way that both God and creation – as distinct communal realities – can be set in mutual harmony within the pure contingency of the dynamic event in which the once dead Jesus is raised into the futurity that is God’s own unending life. In other words, this book is something of a Jensonian introduction to Jenson.
As this brief summary indicates, we will be venturing into the epicentre of Jenson’s proposal, with the hope that this guidebook thereby assists the reader in grappling with Jenson’s own written work, where he can be found wrestling with the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is one of the Trinity ‘without qualification or evasion’. 13 Overall, I want to encourage readers to study Jenson for themselves, because there can be no substitute for the primary texts. 14 And Jenson certainly wrote. He authored over a dozen monographs, co-authored many more – including one with his then eight-year-old granddaughter, Solveig 15 – penned countless essays and peer-reviewed articles, edited and introduced num