Jenson's article "What is the Point of Trinitarian Theology?" in Chrisoph Schwobel's Trinitarian Theology Today offers one of the most succinct statements of Jenson's theology.
He begin with the observation that "theology" and particularly "Trinitarian theology" is not second-order discourse at base, but first-order discourse, reflected in addresses, prayers, and worship. From this perspective, "Trinitarian theology does not have a point, it is the point." The liturgy of worship of the triune God is an anticipation of the end, and the end is to glorify this God, to speak for and to this God: "I must first evoke the life of the church as address to God; and this life and address simply is an anticipation of the End, in which Trinitarian discourse is the point and does not merely have one."
From there, he makes "two somewhat more prosaic points . . . about Trinitarian speech to God." First, he claims that Trinitarian statements first take the form of doxology. "The Son is begotten by the Father" arises from "O, Christ our Lord, only Begotten of the Father." This observation is often accompanied by the claim that Trinitarian discourse, being doxological, is not cognitive, and is more aesthetic than rational, and as such subjective. On the contrary, Jenson says, if the reality of the God addressed is beauty, then that is an argument wholly in favor of the objectivity of statements about God, because, Jenson argues following Jonathan Edwards, beauty is precisely the place where subjectivity is overcome. He affirms "the perhaps mostly implicit correlation of the Spirit, as the glorifier of the Father and Son, with beauty," and then goes on to note that God is Spirit. In God's life and ours, "the Spirit illumines, and thus founds, what [Edwards] calls the 'sense of the heart.' This 'sense' is the apprehension of beauty and therefore is the transcendental unity of the person."
Second, defending his intuition that "Father, Son, and Spirit" is an unrevisable proper name, Jenson compares the Triune name for the sacraments. We could no more revise the Triune name than we can decide on another rite than baptism for initiation into the church. We can't do either because in neither case do we "know the rules by which they were instituted." Citing Thomas's view that the scientia of theology is the scientia of God and of the blessed, he says that we can know God's name only by overhearing the conversation in heaven.
Turning to the function of Trinitarian theology more directly, he notes that the triune name is "simply the biblical account in drastic summary, construed as an account of God's own reality," that is, the biblical account of God's actions in history. In contrast to all Hellenistic religion ("and irreligion," Jenson nicely adds), Christians say that the story of the Bible is really true of God Himself, that He is not motionlessly impassible. Theology does not move from the story to some un-narrated ontological depth. God identifies Himself with and by His story.
If this is so, "then God's eternity cannot be the simple absence of time. Then God's eternity must be for him something like what time is for us." Religion, he suggests, is "the cultivation of eternity," eternity understood here as whatever it is that joins the poles of time "to knit future and past into a coherent fabric." Eternity is inherent in every human action; with ever action we are attempting to bracket moments to "rhyme remembrance and anticipation into lived present meaning." The question for a religion, though, is how God is eternal. Eternity need not simply be the negation of time; even tribes that look to ancestors don't believe that eternity is simply the evacuation of time. He summarizes this point by saying that the Bible tells a story about God, tells it in a way that we can't transcend the story and attempt to get at a "real" God without saying that the story is false, presents a story with three agents, and tells the story in which each agent is identified by self-distinction from the others.
This leads him to this formulation: "Christ refers all homage from himself to the one who 'sent' him, to his 'Father,' just so accomplishing our salvation and appearing as the Son. This God is the Father only as the one so addressed by the Son; and he then appears in the story centrally as he turns over divine rule to the Son and indeed at the cross 'abandons' his role as God, leaving the Son to suffer the consequences of godhead by himself. And the Spirit glorifies as God and testifies to as God the Father or the Son, exactly so enabling the proposition 'God is Spirit.'"
Jenson also relates the persons to tenses. The Father is the "whence" of every divine event, the Spirit is the "whither," the "divine self-transcendence, insofar as God does not depend upon what is not God to be the referent or energy of this coming to himself. The 'whither' of divine events is not their passive aiming point, but their agent in this mode." He suggests that in addition to processions the church must also talk about the "liberations" of Father and Son as "constitutive of the identity and reality of God."
He ends this discussion with this formulation: "The life of God is thus constituted in a structure of relations, whose contents are narrative. This structure is constrained by a difference between whence and whither, that one cannot finally refrain from calling 'past' and 'future' and that is identical with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit. Thus this difference is not measurable; nothing in God recedes into the past or approaches from the future." Citing Barth's claim that evil is ontologically what is "left behind," he concludes that "the difference [of whence and whither] is also absolute; there is no perspective from which to see evil as future or the Kingdom as past." We live and move and have our being in God, and thus time is not "extrinsic to God," but rather the "accommodation God makes in his living and moving eternity, for others than himself."
Jenson concludes this brief essay with a discussion of the narrative priority of the future. Stories are ordered by outcomes, and the story is "a power of the future to liberate each successive specious present from mere predictabilities, from being the mere consequences of what has gone before." He asks, "Is there such causation in God? Is his life in straightforward fact ordered by an Outcome which is his outcome, and so in a freedom that is more than abstract aseity? The theology of Mediterranean antiquity thought there could be no such causality in God; the gospel much teach us that there is." Jenson says that the Spirit is the specific locus of this liberation: "The Spirit is God as the Power of his own and our future; and it is that the Spirit is God as the Power of his own future, as the Power of a future that is truly 'unexpected' and yet connected, also for him, that the Spirit is a distinct identity of and in God." This is one way that Trinitarian theology "says how God has time, and how God's life is like a good play according to Aristotle."
[posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 06, 2007 at 04:14 PM]
No comments:
Post a Comment