Robert W. Jenson > Quotes

“The order of a good story is an ordering by the outcome of the narrated events; its animating spirit—precisely here the word is unavoidable—is the power of a self determinate future to liberate each specious present from mere predictabilities, from being the mere consequence of what has gone before, and open it to itself, to itself as what that present is precisely not yet. The great metaphysical question on the border between the gospel and our culture's antecedent theology is whether this ordering may be regarded as its own kind of causality...The immediate question is at once more specific and foundational: Is there such causation in God? Is his life ordered by an Outcome that is his outcome, and so in a freedom that is more than abstract aseity The theology of Mediterranean antiquity thought there could be nothing like that in God; the gospel supposes that there is.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“There is and can be no greater offense to the way all of us now manage our lives, than the forgiveness of sins. Also the Church has much difficulty with it. On the one hand, if we are all ok in any case, there is nothing to forgive; “acceptance” is not the same as “forgiveness.” “Accept yourself as you are” is not the same as “I forgive you,” and assuredly not as “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, I absolve you of your sin.” In the mainline churches, and it seems increasingly in the evangelical churches, forgiveness is taken for a matter of course; but then it is not forgiveness.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller. The experiment has failed.”
― Robert W. Jenson

“Since the biblical God can truly be identified by narrative, his hypostatic being, his self-identity, is constituted in dramatic coherence. The classic definition of this sort of coherence is provided by Aristotle, who noticed that a good story is one in which events occur “unexpectedly but on account of each other” [Poetics 1452a3], so that before each decisive event we cannot predict it, but afterwards see it was just what had to happen.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“Absent God and faith in God, the good, the beautiful, and the true become seemingly independent—and thereupon possibly competing notions.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“Those who reject the gospel now usually do so not because they find it necessary to disbelieve in God, but simply because the whole matter seems insignificant. Indeed, there is the suspicion that many who say they believe find this possible just because it makes so little difference anyway. The word “God” is empty for us, that is, it is dead.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“An ideology is—and this is its defining characteristic—a screen of words created to conceal the lack of a meaning in life.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“Any pattern of thought that in any way abstracts God ‘himself’ from this person [Jesus], from his death or his career or his birth or his family or his Jewishness or his maleness or his teaching or the particular intercession and rule he as risen now exercises, has, according to Nicaea, no place in the church.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian church’s answer to the question, How does truth hang together? And how may it be grasped as one?”
― Robert W. Jenson

“An ideology is an excuse to cling to the past, an excuse for not living. It is a screen thrown up to hide again that totally unpredictable future which the modern experience has unveiled.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“When the gods are gone we will create idols—and if metaphysics are unbelievable we will believe ideologies. We will cling to Nazism or religious fundamentalism or “liberalism.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“To the way in which the Western Church most often talks about God, the fact of the Incarnation has made far too little difference; most of what we say could equally well be said if God’s Logos were that immaterial mirror and Jesus simply a great prophet or rabbi—or beach-boy guru. And that God and that Jesus are indeed fundamentally uninteresting.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“The doctrine of Trinity is simply the insistence, against all objections from otherwise founded intuitions of deity, that God in himself is not other than he is in his history with us.”
― Robert W. Jenson

“Perhaps we may summarize relevant study by saying that a sacrifice is any prayer spoken not only with language but also with objects and gestures, so that these latter are like the verbal prayer 'offered.' The New Testament's particular use of sacrificial language to interpret the Crucifixion and the life of faith moreover obliterates a common distinction between the offerer and what is offered: a sacrifice as offered by Christ—or by his saint—is 'the giving-over of oneself out of love.. . ,”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“Perhaps we may summarize relevant study by saying that a sacrifice is any prayer spoken not only with language but also with objects and gestures, so that these latter are like the verbal prayer 'offered.' The New Testament's particular use of sacrificial language to interpret the Crucifixion and the life of faith moreover obliterates a common distinction between the offerer and what is offered: a
sacrifice as offered by Christ—or by his saints—is 'the giving-over of oneself out
of love.. . ,”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“The canon without the creed will not serve to protect the church against perversion of the Gospel, and neither will the creed without the canon.”
― Robert W. Jenson

“Indeed, fully reliable love can only he the resurrected life of one who has died for the beloved ones. Contemporary society speaks much of 'unconditional' love, and is always disappointed. If I commit myself in love, I may die of it. If I do not, my love remains uncertain; if I do, it is lost—unless I rise again. When the gospel proclaims actual unconditional love, it proclaims a specific, individual love, the love that is the actuality of the risen Jesus. No one else can love unconditionally as does the Lord; not even the church can so love her members or they one another.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“Death indeed will terminate my story, but it will not conclude it; for it will make all my hopes into might-have-beens and my fears into never-minds, and so make absurd the anticipatory coherences by which I have lived. if I am to have a conclusion, it will have to be a resurection.”
― Robert W. Jenson

“Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?”
― Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God

“Once the devil is identified, he is too laughable to be taken seriously, but we have to know in what direction to throw the inkwell.”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation

“Therefore to fully understand we must expand it: “God is not—but ought to be.” “God is not—yet.” Is this not the true content of our bereavement?”
― Robert W. Jenson, Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation