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Systematic Theology
Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God
The Triune God , together with the forthcoming second volume, The Works of God , develops a compendious statement of Christian theology in the tradition of a medieval summa , or of such modern works as those of Schleiermacher and Barth. Theology, as it is understood here, is the Christian church's continuing discourse concerning her specific communal purpose; it is the hermeneutic and critical reflection internal to the church's task of speaking the gospel, to the world as message and to God in petition and praise. This volume and its successor are thus dedicated to the service of the one church of the creeds; it is for no particular denomination or confession.
256 pages, Paperback
First published July 8, 1997
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About the author
Robert W. Jenson
67 books39 followersRobert W. Jenson was a student of Barth's theology for many years, and his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg earned Barth’s approval as an interpretation of his writings. A native of Wisconsin, Dr. Jenson attended Luther College in Iowa and Luther Theological Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota, before studying at Heidelberg where he was awarded his Doctor of Theology, summa cum laude. After doing graduate work at the University of Basel he returned to the United States. He taught theology for many years at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg and St. Olaf College. Dr. Jenson also served as Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, NJ. He died in 2017.
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January 6, 2014
Robert W. Jenson’s systematic theology is refreshingly different from standard models. Loosely drawing upon older medieval and early Reformational loci, Jenson gives us a succinct yet profound model for presenting theology. True, Jenson does cover the standard loci (norms of authority, God, Christology, etc), but Jensons’s theology, either unlike others or more explicitly than others, operates from a common theme. Jensons’s theme is “the identity of God.” The way Jenson works this theme is similar to a musical fugue. As he introduces his theme, he allows it to take upon itself different connotations with each repetition, ending in a stunning climax.
Norms of Authority
Jenson’s approach here is very interesting. He doesn’t simply say, “The Baahhbul alone is our authority.” Perhaps we may fault him on that, but neither does he open himself up to immediate counters to that position. He recognizes the inevitability of tradition in the Church’s identity, but he raises a question from that that few do: it was tradition itself in the mid-2nd century that necessitated a formal canon. The implication: tradition, whatever its specific liturgical content may have been, was no longer adequate to the Church’s life by itself.
Jenson adds yet another key to this piece: the Spirit’s life in the church (26ff). Such a move sounds a lot like Eastern Orthodoxy, and it does incorporate a lot of Orthodoxy’s strengths on this point, but Jenson takes it to a different (and utterly more biblical) conclusion: the Spirit’s presence is the in-breaking of the Kingdom, which opens God’s future to God’s people. A Spirit-founded church is a future-moving church.
Jensons’s theme, accordingly,is “the identity of God.” The practice of theology, then, is “speaking this identity,” which is speaking the gospel. Jenson defines the gospel as “Jesus of Nazareth, the one who….is risen from the dead.”
What is God’s identity? Classical theology will say “3 Persons/1 Essence.” This is of course true, but the twilight of classical ontology and the current earthquakes from nihilism force clarification upon the theologian. This is the Church’s opportunity. Jenson identifies God as “The One who brought Israel out of Egypt” (44, quoting Exodus 20:2). The New Testament expands this identity as “The One who raised Jesus from the dead.” God is the one who rescued the Israelite from the dead. It is important to see that God is identified by his events (59). Jenson that follows with several profound meditations on the nature of idolatry.
The music is not yet finished. We have easily established the Father’s identity. We have hinted at (though not fully developed) a connection between the Father’s identity and that of his Son, the Resurrected Israelite. We must now see how these two “connect” in identity without losing their differences, and the role of the Spirit in that connection.
God’s identity is told by his story. In identifying God, we have a dramatis dei personae, “characters of the divine drama” (75). Exegetes have since come to the conclusion that “Son” is often a title for Israel. Yet Israel as a fallen nation cannot live up to that sonship. Another Israelite, God’s Son in a different sense, is with and by whom God is identified. “He is God himself as a participant in Israel’s story” (76). This leads naturally to an extended discussion of the Servant passages. Jenson, contrary to many evangelicals, does not say that the “Servant” is simply code for “Jesus.” He allows the Servant narratives to unfold and in the unfolding we see “Suddenly, the Servant is an individual within Israel” (80). Giving his prophetic speech, rising from the dead, and ushering in eschatological peace, the Church could not help but identify this servant with the Son of David from Nazareth. The next persona in the drama is the Spirit of the Lord. Jenson does not at this point explicate the Spirit’s role-identity.
How are they One Being?
Jenson notes that classical pagan ontology identified “god” by metaphysical predicates. Deity is a quality that can be participated in by degrees. To bridge any gap, pagan metaphysicians would invoke relatively divine-human figures to mediate that deity. From this standpoint, Jenson explains the work of the early Christian apologists until Origen and the role of Logos-theology.
Logos had a two-fold meaning: the sense the world makes and the expression of that sense (96). This allowed Justin Martyr to say that the Logos enthietos is eternal relative to God’s being (although there was some equivocation as to his timelessness) but the Logos prophorikos is temporal relative to God’s creating act (97). Besides obvious problems, Justin’s theology could not explain why there should only be one mediator between the divine realm and the temporal one, and not many like in Gnosticism and Paganism.
Origen sharpened this problematic. In Jenson’s beautiful description, Origen “conceived of the work of Father, Son, and Spirit as a sort of inverted stepped cone: the Father gives being to all creatures, the Son opens the knowledge of God to creatures capable of knowledge, and the Spirit performs the purification” (98). Origen perfected and avoided Justin’s starker problems by exploiting a favorite image of classical antiquity: the image. A statue of painting is not its archetype but neither is it not its archetype. “Being an image of something is a distinct mode of being” (98). This allowed antiquity (and early Christians) to posit a descending hierarchy of images.
Anticipating Hegel (!), Origen, using this imagic model, can say, “In that God knows himself, there subsists God as the object this knowledge; and in that this knowledge is expressed with divine perfection, God-as-his-own-object in an actual other than God himself” (99). Despite its beauty and profundity, Origen’s problematic was unstable. Beginning from the presuppositions of pagan metaphysics, Origen could not avoid the question “How divine was the Logos, on a spectrum of being of sheer divine and sheer temporality?” Any answer disrupts the inherent subordinationism. Scripture, however, asks different questions: Creator or creature? Origen really couldn’t answer this question, either. Not surprisingly, the Arian crisis soon exploded this problematic.
Discussions of Arianism, Nicea, and Athanasius are well-known, so this section of the essay will be brief. What is important to note is that key terms are beginning to be sharpened. Ousia in early Nicea is what a thing is; hypostasis is the differentiation of it.
Despite the Nicene-Constantinople victory, we must note what they did not accomplish. As Jenson notes, “The Cappadocians acknowledged only relations of origin as constitutive of the divine life. Thus, the eschatological character was suppressed” (108).
How does God’s reality present itself in history? Following Pannenberg (Systematiche Theologie, 3:333-347, quoted in Jenson 109n. 132) Jenson gives an interesting musing that “It is exactly in that Jesus or his Father or the Spirit refers absolutely from himself to one of the others as the One God that he is in a specific way a perfect correlate to that other, and so himself God within and of the history plotted by these referrals.” Jenson will later clinch this argument by sharpening Gregory of Nyssa’s: the term God for Gregory refers to the mutual action of the divine energies, to the perichoretic divine life” (214). This being of God is not a something (and thus we avoid Heidegger’s destruction of classical ontology), but a palable going-on...God is primally hypostatic: to be God the Father, or God the Son or God the Spirit, does not require that there antecedently be something one could call ‘God’” (214, 215; and thus we avoid Tillich’s critique of a quaternity).
Jenson’s discussion of Christology necessarily leads to a rather unique locus in his system: Patrology. This seems odd, since Patrology itself is not an ultimate norm for doing theology and authority. True, but Patrology does function as a grammar of how to do theology, illustrating key moves and problems. Those who ignore Patrology will find themselves unable to explain key problems in Christian theology.
Before we continue the discussion on Patrology, and in keeping with our musical theme, we should not Jenson’s masterful handling of the Holy Spirit and the Filioque debate. It must be admitted that conservative American evangelicals have failed miserably on this point. If I could think of harsher language, I would use it. Jenson begins by noting the problems in Augustine’s formulation: exactly how is one of the three specifically “spirit?” If hypostases are identified by relations of origin (Father-Son), we have a further problem, since no relation appears in the name “Holy Spirit” (147). Jenson then mentions Lossky’s poewrful argument against the West: by positing the Father and Son as a single cause of the Spirit, the West has muted the hypostatic characteristics of both Father and Son.
How can we respond? Before responding, we should briefly note the Eastern position. The Father is the sole monarchy of the Godhead, but this isn’t subordinationist because “terms such as procession and origine are but inappropriate expressions for a reality alien to all becoming, all process, all beginning” (Lossky, A l’image et a la ressemblance de Dieu, 78, quoted in Jenson, 152). Jenson remarks: “This is a vision of God as frozen as any we have encountered, and a new evacuation of Trinitarianism. The trinitarian propositions in their Eastern use fail to describe the Father’s subordinating of the Son and the Spirit, we discover, only because they do not describe any action at all (Jenson, 152).
Lossky’s problem points back to Gregory Palamas. Palamas employs the Cappadocians, but with a subtle difference. The Saints participate in the divine energies, which are the divine life, but not in the divine ousia, deity sheerly as such. The problem, though, is that the Cappadocians were a lot more flexible than Palamas. Their use of the term ousia (Basil probably excepted) does not suggest anything other than the divine life. Here is the problem for Palamas: “It is one thing to say that abstract deity is itself always the same quality, as the Cappadocians did; it is quite another to say that deity taken as God himself is a static essence. Ironically, Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his energies (153). Perhaps most disastrously, Orthodoxy has a tendency to “reify the energies, the moments of the divine life, and at least in the case of the Spirit, the energies replace the person in the historical actuality of salvation” (157).
So what is Jenson’s solution? By way of clarification, he explains Hegel’s famous “I-thou/Master-slave” analogy. If you and I are to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our discourse. If I am present, I am a subject whom you have as my object. But if I am not an object for you as subject, if I somehow evade that, I enslave you. I am not reciprocally available to you (155).
How then, can this mutual availability happen? How is an I-Thou relationship possible without becoming a struggle for power? (Jenson notes with humor that postmodernism carried out this program under a tutelage of horror!) Jenson, in perhaps an unacknowledged Augustinian strain,notes, “there is freely given love...a third party in the meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou. Thus, if you and I are to be free for one another, someone must be our liberator (okay, granted this isn’t the best term--JA)...If I am to be your object and you mine, so that we may be subjects for each other, there has to be one for whom we are both objects, and whose intention for us is our love for each other. The theological conclusion is obvious.
Still, it does not fully answer the Filioque debate, at least not here. Jenson tentatively works toward a Western answer. The debate over the Filioque is misplaced. If God is indeed the God of the future, and we see Cappadocian hints of an ever-forward moving futurity in God, then does it not make more sense to see the better question as “The Spirit is the End and Goal of all God’s ways”? East and West debate over the beginning Archimedean point when they should be discussing the divine goal as the Spirit’s Archimedean point” (157). Quoting Pannenberg again, “The fault of the Filioque is that the true Augustinian insight that the Spirit is the fellowship of the Son and Father ‘was formulated in terms of relations of origin’” (Pannenberg, I: 347, quoted in Jenson, 157 n. 67).
Jenson has an interesting, yet ultimately unsatisfying chapter on the atonement. He accepts many of the criticisms of Anselm: strictly speaking, on Anselm’s view there is no need for the Resurrection. Upon the death of Christ the transaction is complete. Theology, unfortunately, remains incomplete. Even more pointedly, “The New Testament speaks of God’s action to reconcile us to himself, and nowhere of God’s being reconciled to us” (186). The problem, however, with these subjective critiques of Anselm, and the theories they represent, fail to say how Jesus’s death accomplished anything specific.
After a brief and interesting discussion of the Christus Victor model, Jenson proposes a liturgical understanding of the atonement: the church’s primal way of understanding the atonement is that we live this narrative (189). “We rehearse the Word-event in our lives.” I am not exactly sure how he describes his proposal. He gives an interesting outline of public liturgies during Passion week and ends with an admittedly interesting suggestion: “If a theological proposition is one that says, ‘To be saying the gospel, let us say F rather than G,’ and if the gospel is spoken in language and by more embodied sorts of signs, by sacrament and sacrifice, then we must expect theology to take the form of ritual rubrics” (190). This isn’t wrong, per se, and I can attest to the power of liturgy in my own life, but one suspects that Jenson himself isn’t entirely free from the critique he offered of subjective models: precisely what happened on the cross? He answers it was Israel’s denouement of her Scriptures” (183). Very good and well said, but what does that have to do with me?
We must wait for the Resurrection for the answer to that question. He asserts that it accomplishes our reconciliation to God. With this we agree, but we suspect Scripture has said much more.
Jenson concludes his book with summary chapters on Spirit, Jesus, and the Being of the One God, incorporating much critical scholarship and noting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Conclusion:
Astute readers will notice some similarities between Jenson’s approach and that of David Bentley Hart. Both theologians write musically. There are some differences, to be sure. Hart, for the most part, accepts classical ontology; Jenson does not. Jenson, further, is sympathetic to those in the Reformed tradition (see his spirited defense of Jonathan Edwards). Hart’s vitriol towards Calvinism is well-known. Most importantly, perhaps, is that Jenson can write in a coherent and readable (if sometimes dense) manner. Hart cannot.
Appendix: God and the Future
Our God is different from the Pagan gods because he is not afraid of “time.” God’s acting in salvation for his people is an acting in time, “not defending against the future, but securing it” (67). Gregory of Nyssa was on the verge of completely dismantling classical metaphysics hold on God-doctrine. Identifying the divine ousia as infinity, Gregory took it a step forward and identified it as temporal infinity, a future-oriented infinity (infinity qua infinity would dissipate into nothingness, the temptation of absolute models of simplicity). According to Jenson, “The Arians err defining God as having no beginning, when they should define God as having no end” (216). In Jenson’s succint pjhrase, “The Father is the whence of the divine life; The Spirit is the whither, and the Son the specious present” (218-219). The way in which the whence and the whither are one, the way in which the Triune God is eternal, is by the events in Jesus’s death and resurrection” (219).
Norms of Authority
Jenson’s approach here is very interesting. He doesn’t simply say, “The Baahhbul alone is our authority.” Perhaps we may fault him on that, but neither does he open himself up to immediate counters to that position. He recognizes the inevitability of tradition in the Church’s identity, but he raises a question from that that few do: it was tradition itself in the mid-2nd century that necessitated a formal canon. The implication: tradition, whatever its specific liturgical content may have been, was no longer adequate to the Church’s life by itself.
Jenson adds yet another key to this piece: the Spirit’s life in the church (26ff). Such a move sounds a lot like Eastern Orthodoxy, and it does incorporate a lot of Orthodoxy’s strengths on this point, but Jenson takes it to a different (and utterly more biblical) conclusion: the Spirit’s presence is the in-breaking of the Kingdom, which opens God’s future to God’s people. A Spirit-founded church is a future-moving church.
Jensons’s theme, accordingly,is “the identity of God.” The practice of theology, then, is “speaking this identity,” which is speaking the gospel. Jenson defines the gospel as “Jesus of Nazareth, the one who….is risen from the dead.”
What is God’s identity? Classical theology will say “3 Persons/1 Essence.” This is of course true, but the twilight of classical ontology and the current earthquakes from nihilism force clarification upon the theologian. This is the Church’s opportunity. Jenson identifies God as “The One who brought Israel out of Egypt” (44, quoting Exodus 20:2). The New Testament expands this identity as “The One who raised Jesus from the dead.” God is the one who rescued the Israelite from the dead. It is important to see that God is identified by his events (59). Jenson that follows with several profound meditations on the nature of idolatry.
The music is not yet finished. We have easily established the Father’s identity. We have hinted at (though not fully developed) a connection between the Father’s identity and that of his Son, the Resurrected Israelite. We must now see how these two “connect” in identity without losing their differences, and the role of the Spirit in that connection.
God’s identity is told by his story. In identifying God, we have a dramatis dei personae, “characters of the divine drama” (75). Exegetes have since come to the conclusion that “Son” is often a title for Israel. Yet Israel as a fallen nation cannot live up to that sonship. Another Israelite, God’s Son in a different sense, is with and by whom God is identified. “He is God himself as a participant in Israel’s story” (76). This leads naturally to an extended discussion of the Servant passages. Jenson, contrary to many evangelicals, does not say that the “Servant” is simply code for “Jesus.” He allows the Servant narratives to unfold and in the unfolding we see “Suddenly, the Servant is an individual within Israel” (80). Giving his prophetic speech, rising from the dead, and ushering in eschatological peace, the Church could not help but identify this servant with the Son of David from Nazareth. The next persona in the drama is the Spirit of the Lord. Jenson does not at this point explicate the Spirit’s role-identity.
How are they One Being?
Jenson notes that classical pagan ontology identified “god” by metaphysical predicates. Deity is a quality that can be participated in by degrees. To bridge any gap, pagan metaphysicians would invoke relatively divine-human figures to mediate that deity. From this standpoint, Jenson explains the work of the early Christian apologists until Origen and the role of Logos-theology.
Logos had a two-fold meaning: the sense the world makes and the expression of that sense (96). This allowed Justin Martyr to say that the Logos enthietos is eternal relative to God’s being (although there was some equivocation as to his timelessness) but the Logos prophorikos is temporal relative to God’s creating act (97). Besides obvious problems, Justin’s theology could not explain why there should only be one mediator between the divine realm and the temporal one, and not many like in Gnosticism and Paganism.
Origen sharpened this problematic. In Jenson’s beautiful description, Origen “conceived of the work of Father, Son, and Spirit as a sort of inverted stepped cone: the Father gives being to all creatures, the Son opens the knowledge of God to creatures capable of knowledge, and the Spirit performs the purification” (98). Origen perfected and avoided Justin’s starker problems by exploiting a favorite image of classical antiquity: the image. A statue of painting is not its archetype but neither is it not its archetype. “Being an image of something is a distinct mode of being” (98). This allowed antiquity (and early Christians) to posit a descending hierarchy of images.
Anticipating Hegel (!), Origen, using this imagic model, can say, “In that God knows himself, there subsists God as the object this knowledge; and in that this knowledge is expressed with divine perfection, God-as-his-own-object in an actual other than God himself” (99). Despite its beauty and profundity, Origen’s problematic was unstable. Beginning from the presuppositions of pagan metaphysics, Origen could not avoid the question “How divine was the Logos, on a spectrum of being of sheer divine and sheer temporality?” Any answer disrupts the inherent subordinationism. Scripture, however, asks different questions: Creator or creature? Origen really couldn’t answer this question, either. Not surprisingly, the Arian crisis soon exploded this problematic.
Discussions of Arianism, Nicea, and Athanasius are well-known, so this section of the essay will be brief. What is important to note is that key terms are beginning to be sharpened. Ousia in early Nicea is what a thing is; hypostasis is the differentiation of it.
Despite the Nicene-Constantinople victory, we must note what they did not accomplish. As Jenson notes, “The Cappadocians acknowledged only relations of origin as constitutive of the divine life. Thus, the eschatological character was suppressed” (108).
How does God’s reality present itself in history? Following Pannenberg (Systematiche Theologie, 3:333-347, quoted in Jenson 109n. 132) Jenson gives an interesting musing that “It is exactly in that Jesus or his Father or the Spirit refers absolutely from himself to one of the others as the One God that he is in a specific way a perfect correlate to that other, and so himself God within and of the history plotted by these referrals.” Jenson will later clinch this argument by sharpening Gregory of Nyssa’s: the term God for Gregory refers to the mutual action of the divine energies, to the perichoretic divine life” (214). This being of God is not a something (and thus we avoid Heidegger’s destruction of classical ontology), but a palable going-on...God is primally hypostatic: to be God the Father, or God the Son or God the Spirit, does not require that there antecedently be something one could call ‘God’” (214, 215; and thus we avoid Tillich’s critique of a quaternity).
Jenson’s discussion of Christology necessarily leads to a rather unique locus in his system: Patrology. This seems odd, since Patrology itself is not an ultimate norm for doing theology and authority. True, but Patrology does function as a grammar of how to do theology, illustrating key moves and problems. Those who ignore Patrology will find themselves unable to explain key problems in Christian theology.
Before we continue the discussion on Patrology, and in keeping with our musical theme, we should not Jenson’s masterful handling of the Holy Spirit and the Filioque debate. It must be admitted that conservative American evangelicals have failed miserably on this point. If I could think of harsher language, I would use it. Jenson begins by noting the problems in Augustine’s formulation: exactly how is one of the three specifically “spirit?” If hypostases are identified by relations of origin (Father-Son), we have a further problem, since no relation appears in the name “Holy Spirit” (147). Jenson then mentions Lossky’s poewrful argument against the West: by positing the Father and Son as a single cause of the Spirit, the West has muted the hypostatic characteristics of both Father and Son.
How can we respond? Before responding, we should briefly note the Eastern position. The Father is the sole monarchy of the Godhead, but this isn’t subordinationist because “terms such as procession and origine are but inappropriate expressions for a reality alien to all becoming, all process, all beginning” (Lossky, A l’image et a la ressemblance de Dieu, 78, quoted in Jenson, 152). Jenson remarks: “This is a vision of God as frozen as any we have encountered, and a new evacuation of Trinitarianism. The trinitarian propositions in their Eastern use fail to describe the Father’s subordinating of the Son and the Spirit, we discover, only because they do not describe any action at all (Jenson, 152).
Lossky’s problem points back to Gregory Palamas. Palamas employs the Cappadocians, but with a subtle difference. The Saints participate in the divine energies, which are the divine life, but not in the divine ousia, deity sheerly as such. The problem, though, is that the Cappadocians were a lot more flexible than Palamas. Their use of the term ousia (Basil probably excepted) does not suggest anything other than the divine life. Here is the problem for Palamas: “It is one thing to say that abstract deity is itself always the same quality, as the Cappadocians did; it is quite another to say that deity taken as God himself is a static essence. Ironically, Orthodoxy is here driven to a bluntly modalist doctrine: God himself is above the biblical narrative, which applies only to his energies (153). Perhaps most disastrously, Orthodoxy has a tendency to “reify the energies, the moments of the divine life, and at least in the case of the Spirit, the energies replace the person in the historical actuality of salvation” (157).
So what is Jenson’s solution? By way of clarification, he explains Hegel’s famous “I-thou/Master-slave” analogy. If you and I are to be free for one another, each of us must be both subject and object in our discourse. If I am present, I am a subject whom you have as my object. But if I am not an object for you as subject, if I somehow evade that, I enslave you. I am not reciprocally available to you (155).
How then, can this mutual availability happen? How is an I-Thou relationship possible without becoming a struggle for power? (Jenson notes with humor that postmodernism carried out this program under a tutelage of horror!) Jenson, in perhaps an unacknowledged Augustinian strain,notes, “there is freely given love...a third party in the meeting of ‘I’ and ‘Thou. Thus, if you and I are to be free for one another, someone must be our liberator (okay, granted this isn’t the best term--JA)...If I am to be your object and you mine, so that we may be subjects for each other, there has to be one for whom we are both objects, and whose intention for us is our love for each other. The theological conclusion is obvious.
Still, it does not fully answer the Filioque debate, at least not here. Jenson tentatively works toward a Western answer. The debate over the Filioque is misplaced. If God is indeed the God of the future, and we see Cappadocian hints of an ever-forward moving futurity in God, then does it not make more sense to see the better question as “The Spirit is the End and Goal of all God’s ways”? East and West debate over the beginning Archimedean point when they should be discussing the divine goal as the Spirit’s Archimedean point” (157). Quoting Pannenberg again, “The fault of the Filioque is that the true Augustinian insight that the Spirit is the fellowship of the Son and Father ‘was formulated in terms of relations of origin’” (Pannenberg, I: 347, quoted in Jenson, 157 n. 67).
Jenson has an interesting, yet ultimately unsatisfying chapter on the atonement. He accepts many of the criticisms of Anselm: strictly speaking, on Anselm’s view there is no need for the Resurrection. Upon the death of Christ the transaction is complete. Theology, unfortunately, remains incomplete. Even more pointedly, “The New Testament speaks of God’s action to reconcile us to himself, and nowhere of God’s being reconciled to us” (186). The problem, however, with these subjective critiques of Anselm, and the theories they represent, fail to say how Jesus’s death accomplished anything specific.
After a brief and interesting discussion of the Christus Victor model, Jenson proposes a liturgical understanding of the atonement: the church’s primal way of understanding the atonement is that we live this narrative (189). “We rehearse the Word-event in our lives.” I am not exactly sure how he describes his proposal. He gives an interesting outline of public liturgies during Passion week and ends with an admittedly interesting suggestion: “If a theological proposition is one that says, ‘To be saying the gospel, let us say F rather than G,’ and if the gospel is spoken in language and by more embodied sorts of signs, by sacrament and sacrifice, then we must expect theology to take the form of ritual rubrics” (190). This isn’t wrong, per se, and I can attest to the power of liturgy in my own life, but one suspects that Jenson himself isn’t entirely free from the critique he offered of subjective models: precisely what happened on the cross? He answers it was Israel’s denouement of her Scriptures” (183). Very good and well said, but what does that have to do with me?
We must wait for the Resurrection for the answer to that question. He asserts that it accomplishes our reconciliation to God. With this we agree, but we suspect Scripture has said much more.
Jenson concludes his book with summary chapters on Spirit, Jesus, and the Being of the One God, incorporating much critical scholarship and noting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.
Conclusion:
Astute readers will notice some similarities between Jenson’s approach and that of David Bentley Hart. Both theologians write musically. There are some differences, to be sure. Hart, for the most part, accepts classical ontology; Jenson does not. Jenson, further, is sympathetic to those in the Reformed tradition (see his spirited defense of Jonathan Edwards). Hart’s vitriol towards Calvinism is well-known. Most importantly, perhaps, is that Jenson can write in a coherent and readable (if sometimes dense) manner. Hart cannot.
Appendix: God and the Future
Our God is different from the Pagan gods because he is not afraid of “time.” God’s acting in salvation for his people is an acting in time, “not defending against the future, but securing it” (67). Gregory of Nyssa was on the verge of completely dismantling classical metaphysics hold on God-doctrine. Identifying the divine ousia as infinity, Gregory took it a step forward and identified it as temporal infinity, a future-oriented infinity (infinity qua infinity would dissipate into nothingness, the temptation of absolute models of simplicity). According to Jenson, “The Arians err defining God as having no beginning, when they should define God as having no end” (216). In Jenson’s succint pjhrase, “The Father is the whence of the divine life; The Spirit is the whither, and the Son the specious present” (218-219). The way in which the whence and the whither are one, the way in which the Triune God is eternal, is by the events in Jesus’s death and resurrection” (219).
November 14, 2025
I am not sure what to say. Let me attempt something:
I cried finishing this book. Cried.
God is what happens with Jesus. He is an event, a person, a decision, and a conversation. He is Father, Son, and Spirit- the one who raised Jesus from the dead and brought Israel out of Egypt. God is the bread and wine, and the church itself. He is dynamic and inexhaustible, within history and himself infinite history, and one with his dramatic coherence. The God of Israel is an actual capacious person that has made himself available to us and pulls us out of our nihilistic tendencies through the futurity- that he inhabits- opened in the Jesus event. Who is the Son of God, the Logos? It is Jesus Christ, Mary’s child, the hanged man of Golgotha.
In the end, all is music. God is pure music- he is indeed the great fugue.
I cried finishing this book. Cried.
God is what happens with Jesus. He is an event, a person, a decision, and a conversation. He is Father, Son, and Spirit- the one who raised Jesus from the dead and brought Israel out of Egypt. God is the bread and wine, and the church itself. He is dynamic and inexhaustible, within history and himself infinite history, and one with his dramatic coherence. The God of Israel is an actual capacious person that has made himself available to us and pulls us out of our nihilistic tendencies through the futurity- that he inhabits- opened in the Jesus event. Who is the Son of God, the Logos? It is Jesus Christ, Mary’s child, the hanged man of Golgotha.
In the end, all is music. God is pure music- he is indeed the great fugue.
May 11, 2020
A masterpiece.
December 3, 2022
Finished this book, Dec 2022. Really helpful in a lot of ways. Great resource to understanding the Trinity and trinitarian discussions. A few hints of some liberalism but on the whole really biblical. He regularly quotes scripture even as he quotes church fathers and theologians. This is high octane theology that leads to deep Christian devotion.
March 24, 2021
I had heard lots of great things about Jenson’s theology so I finally dove in. The first thing to say is I was pleasantly surprised this book was only 235 pages long! Based on it being volume 1 of a systematic theology, I expected something much longer (not to mention the hefty price tag).
There is deep value in a systematic theology that is concise. I have gotten into a great rhythm in my reading (surely helped by my kids growing out of the toddler stage and developing their own rhythm in sleeping!). Each morning after some scripture and prayer, I spend time reading theology. This year it has been Sarah Coakley, Sergius Bulgakov, John Behr and now Jenson. Of course, I may read bits and pieces at other times, but feeding my mind in this way is like breakfast prior to breakfast!
Jenson’s book lends itself to this time of reading as the chapters are all about 10-15 pages long. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a “devotional” systematic theology. But Jenson intentionally seems to have written it for the church and pastor types could do a lot worse than read a chapter of Jenson a day.
On top of all that, I love how Jenson’s theology flows out of scripture. There sometimes seems a divide between Bible/biblical studies and theology. Rather than beginning with scripture, theology sometimes begins by reasoning about God in ways we might imagine as philosophy. Of course, Jenson engages with these philosophical ideas. But for him, when we ask who God is, we answer by saying God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that Jenson overcomes any sort of divide between systematic and practical theology. Again, there sometimes seems to be a divide between the God we worship on Sundays and the God we ponder in a philosophy classroom (or theology book). Jenson, and others, would remind us that the Christian view of God in the early church developed not in an ivory tower but in liturgy. Jenson reminds us God is always God as Trinity. Even if we engage Greek philosophy or other ideas, God is always Trinity and we cannot reason about God apart from this.
Overall, this is a brilliant book. I hate to say something is life-changing and this book alone is not. But reading the theology of folks like Jenson, Bulgakov, Behr, Coakley as well as DB Hart and others in the last few years has been paradigm shifting. In my 20s I was obsessed with apologetics and proving God’s existence, in my 40s I’m reading theology that is driving me to pray and worship...
There is deep value in a systematic theology that is concise. I have gotten into a great rhythm in my reading (surely helped by my kids growing out of the toddler stage and developing their own rhythm in sleeping!). Each morning after some scripture and prayer, I spend time reading theology. This year it has been Sarah Coakley, Sergius Bulgakov, John Behr and now Jenson. Of course, I may read bits and pieces at other times, but feeding my mind in this way is like breakfast prior to breakfast!
Jenson’s book lends itself to this time of reading as the chapters are all about 10-15 pages long. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a “devotional” systematic theology. But Jenson intentionally seems to have written it for the church and pastor types could do a lot worse than read a chapter of Jenson a day.
On top of all that, I love how Jenson’s theology flows out of scripture. There sometimes seems a divide between Bible/biblical studies and theology. Rather than beginning with scripture, theology sometimes begins by reasoning about God in ways we might imagine as philosophy. Of course, Jenson engages with these philosophical ideas. But for him, when we ask who God is, we answer by saying God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead.
Perhaps another way of putting it is that Jenson overcomes any sort of divide between systematic and practical theology. Again, there sometimes seems to be a divide between the God we worship on Sundays and the God we ponder in a philosophy classroom (or theology book). Jenson, and others, would remind us that the Christian view of God in the early church developed not in an ivory tower but in liturgy. Jenson reminds us God is always God as Trinity. Even if we engage Greek philosophy or other ideas, God is always Trinity and we cannot reason about God apart from this.
Overall, this is a brilliant book. I hate to say something is life-changing and this book alone is not. But reading the theology of folks like Jenson, Bulgakov, Behr, Coakley as well as DB Hart and others in the last few years has been paradigm shifting. In my 20s I was obsessed with apologetics and proving God’s existence, in my 40s I’m reading theology that is driving me to pray and worship...
February 26, 2022
While reading Jenson qualifies as rigorous mental workout requiring focused concentration, I enjoyed the way he takes us through the history of theological engagement with who God is, critiquing the ways theology has been dictated or subsumed by Greek concerns (particularly with divine impassivity) and rooting who God is exclusively as he reveals himself to be as Triune through the narrative of Israel and Jesus. Jenson helpfully overturns a number of assumptions which have tripped us up theologically, while remaining adamant about locating all our theology in the biblical narrative. I particularly enjoyed his short piece on atonement theories. Refreshing and insightful. On to Volume 2 soon.
July 18, 2019
Stunning. Absolutely stunning.
June 12, 2025
This is a brilliant work of academic theology rather than an introduction to systematic theology. This is clear first of all by footnotes in untranslated Latin, Greek, and German. He is probably the most important American systematic theologian of the last 50+ years.
He interacts most of all with Barth, Aquinas, and Augustine, but also with Pannenberg, Luther and some of the patristic, in particular the Cappadocians and John of Damascus’ systematic work, ‘Orthodoxy Faith.’ He mines the ancients for insight which he polishes and sets out brilliantly.
One could call his approach to theology playful. This is particularly true in his introductory work, ‘A Theology in Outline’, but also evident here in his academic work. He is a bit of a theological leprechaun, a trickster. Reveling in the impish unmasking of pretension. Although not disrespectful to other theologians, he is willing to pull threads others have left hanging loose.
He pulls on all the loose threads on theology. He unwinds, untangles and unravels much theology. With the ball of string he has left, he knits a net of truth. It tends to reduce the overreach of much theology and attempts a rebuilding of a secure network of truth. His net may not hold everything, it lets a lot pass through, but what it does hold, it hold more securely.
The work makes a compelling case for the centrality of the Trinity in understanding anything about God and His work. Everything is Trinity, all acts are Trinitarian. The way he embeds the Trinity in the narrative of God’s acts is startling, but also insightful. He makes a persuasive case for his perspective.
His unique insights in atonement are worth the read. He is somewhat critical of traditional atonement theory. One thing that becomes clear in this section is how much his whole constructive theological enterprise is coherent and consistent. He goes to great pains to work out the logical and narrative logic of his whole system. There are no disconnected doctrines. This is one coherent, self reinforcing, carefully thought out system.
His sheer brilliance is on display. He loves a clever but convoluted sentence a little too much. When unpacked one can see the brilliance of the construction, but too clever by half to be considered good communication. Overly clever sentences are the bane of the good writer. So, so difficult to let them go, even though, deference to the reader demands it.
A brilliant but difficult work.
He interacts most of all with Barth, Aquinas, and Augustine, but also with Pannenberg, Luther and some of the patristic, in particular the Cappadocians and John of Damascus’ systematic work, ‘Orthodoxy Faith.’ He mines the ancients for insight which he polishes and sets out brilliantly.
One could call his approach to theology playful. This is particularly true in his introductory work, ‘A Theology in Outline’, but also evident here in his academic work. He is a bit of a theological leprechaun, a trickster. Reveling in the impish unmasking of pretension. Although not disrespectful to other theologians, he is willing to pull threads others have left hanging loose.
He pulls on all the loose threads on theology. He unwinds, untangles and unravels much theology. With the ball of string he has left, he knits a net of truth. It tends to reduce the overreach of much theology and attempts a rebuilding of a secure network of truth. His net may not hold everything, it lets a lot pass through, but what it does hold, it hold more securely.
The work makes a compelling case for the centrality of the Trinity in understanding anything about God and His work. Everything is Trinity, all acts are Trinitarian. The way he embeds the Trinity in the narrative of God’s acts is startling, but also insightful. He makes a persuasive case for his perspective.
His unique insights in atonement are worth the read. He is somewhat critical of traditional atonement theory. One thing that becomes clear in this section is how much his whole constructive theological enterprise is coherent and consistent. He goes to great pains to work out the logical and narrative logic of his whole system. There are no disconnected doctrines. This is one coherent, self reinforcing, carefully thought out system.
His sheer brilliance is on display. He loves a clever but convoluted sentence a little too much. When unpacked one can see the brilliance of the construction, but too clever by half to be considered good communication. Overly clever sentences are the bane of the good writer. So, so difficult to let them go, even though, deference to the reader demands it.
A brilliant but difficult work.
May 11, 2018
There is a reason why Jenson is considered one of the most important theologians of our generation. He writes with a poetic clarity (with poetic modifying clarity), a deep knowledge of historical theology, and a decidedly Barthian flavor (though he is not afraid to move beyond Barth). Though not everything is equally clear and persuasive in vol 1 of his ST, he is a theologian that needs to be considered by anyone serious about understanding and interacting with modern theology. 4.5 stars.
July 6, 2021
A beautiful systematic theology that does not try to speak apart from those who have spoken. No unnecessary words in this slim volume.
Recently I looked through Jenson's section on the Filioque. It is a masterful consideration of the historical-theological development, but also a constructive presentation of the Holy Spirit's relation to the Father and the Son not strictly on the basis of origins but of eschaton. Brilliant.
Recently I looked through Jenson's section on the Filioque. It is a masterful consideration of the historical-theological development, but also a constructive presentation of the Holy Spirit's relation to the Father and the Son not strictly on the basis of origins but of eschaton. Brilliant.
May 27, 2020
Robert Jenson undoubtedly demonstrates his intellectual prowess (nearing on genius) in this magisterial volume. Unfortunately, this book is written by an academic for academics. Everything from his striking devotion to Hegel to his eventual subjugation of the being of the Triune God to time itself demonstrates the primarily philosophical lens of his theology. While this book will certainly pique the interests of academic theologians and encourage graduate divinity students, I'm afraid its impact is limited to these cerebral contexts. The academic success and ecclesial failure of this impressive book demonstrates the ever widening gap between Christians in the pews and Christians in the classroom.
November 14, 2017
It's not all right by any means, and at times its tendencious but it's the modern systematic theology I wish I could write: wry, warm, discursive and disciplined, creative and confessional. Much to learn from. But don't read it if you're looking for a introductory guide to evangelical dogmatics.
October 31, 2025
A lot to think about here! I appreciate that Jenson just says what he thinks boldly, but I wish he built up the background to his claims a little more. I'm still tripping over the metaphysics but I think I like where they take me in the end.
February 9, 2021
Absolutely stunning. A very precise and technical work and demands much of its reader. It rewards its attention in full.
August 2, 2024
Excellent. Refreshing. Innovative.
August 17, 2024
Short but dense, and excellent. On the nature and person of God, Jenson dialogues with ancients and moderns, and has no qualms pushing back against either as needed.
November 9, 2012
Jenson is not easy reading, but he is worth the effort. This (along with the second volume) is tremendously stimulating and edifying. He is, hands down, one of the English speaking world's, most important thinkers... Not just for protestantism or the West either. His contribution is catholic in the best sense of the word. Fair warning, he is "liberal", and I do not much care for liberal theology... but yet he does remain a faithfully committed disciple of Christ, and this oozes out in what he writes. His writing is dense... it took me several goes to get through this set, but in the end, I am better for it. I don't know, it seems (yes, subjectively to me) that he speaks from actually encountering God and his grace... not as someone who is approaching theology in a sterile, scientific or personally un-engaged manner. Even when I disagree with him, which I do, he has helped me mature in my understanding of the Trinity, the sacraments, the body of Christ, in what it means to actually live a Christian life and for that I am truly in his debt.
October 29, 2013
This book is amazingly dense and only for the theological specialists or for those willing to read very, very, very slowly and break apart what Jenson says.
The content is beyond glorious. Jenson has quite the imagination, his main contribution to theology being a radical rethinking of eternity. The short story is "Eternity is time on steroids." God is an event, not a catnap, God is a person, not a form, God is a decision, not a state, and most movingly God is a capacious fugue. (Look that word up!)
Jenson mixes his discussions of conversation with God, His extreme openness to the future and the one whose glorious eternality breaks boundaries instead of transcending them with some pyrotechnics and a dry sense of humor and consistent belittlement of a ton of thinkers and theologians. Terrific fun, but sometimes confusing and not as careful as, say, John Frame or Herman Bavinck, although he does maintain a creator/creature distinction. In fact, the book ends pretty much on the tension between this and the opposite pole of deification.
The content is beyond glorious. Jenson has quite the imagination, his main contribution to theology being a radical rethinking of eternity. The short story is "Eternity is time on steroids." God is an event, not a catnap, God is a person, not a form, God is a decision, not a state, and most movingly God is a capacious fugue. (Look that word up!)
Jenson mixes his discussions of conversation with God, His extreme openness to the future and the one whose glorious eternality breaks boundaries instead of transcending them with some pyrotechnics and a dry sense of humor and consistent belittlement of a ton of thinkers and theologians. Terrific fun, but sometimes confusing and not as careful as, say, John Frame or Herman Bavinck, although he does maintain a creator/creature distinction. In fact, the book ends pretty much on the tension between this and the opposite pole of deification.
December 7, 2015
Claiming Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, and the whole of Scriptures on his side, Jenson drops the bomb that is his catastrophic assertion that God is not timeless, but is timed. In other words, Jenson takes Barth's notable quote, "Atonement is history," to its noetic heights: the Triune God is history. As a rambunctious theologian, Jenson masterfully swings philosophical and theological acrobatics with rigor and vigor--the Jenson-train cannot be stopped. The temptation to dismiss "an old man and his rants" is enticing, yet this is one man and one rant that demand critical and appreciative analysis.
cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com
cf. www.sooholee.wordpress.com
March 5, 2015
One of the most amazing books I have ever read! I was supposed to read this for a class my last semester of college. I distinctly remember sitting, looking at the pages, completely unable to figure out what he was saying. This try, I read the entire book out loud; it was worth it.
I used to think the trinity was a rather dry concept. Jenson shows the beauty and wonder of the Trinity while also showing how the Trinity practically affects our lives.
I used to think the trinity was a rather dry concept. Jenson shows the beauty and wonder of the Trinity while also showing how the Trinity practically affects our lives.
June 9, 2012
Thoughtful and provocative, with perceptive insights into the history of doctrine and the Biblical data. Weaknesses include a failure to concisely define terms in places that would help both the reader and the argument as whole and an overreaching evaluation of the early Church Father's reliance upon Greek Philosophy.
October 20, 2021
Once you get past the first 40 pages of going around the term "theology" in circles, this book can be pretty interesting. It seems to get pretty far with basically just concept analysis. Every now and then everything seems just a bit too spelled out and repetitive but overall it's a good package.
March 14, 2012
Read these two volumes!
April 9, 2013
"God is a great fugue. There is nothing so capacious as a fugue."
May 19, 2020
Excellent! Very creative work.
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