The Promise of Robert W. Jenson’s Theology

Constructive Engagements

Stephen John Wright, Chris E. W. Green, Stephen John Wright, Chris E. W. Green

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506432663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506408378
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

North America has rarely produced a theologian as creative and productive as Robert W. Jenson. A truly ecumenical thinker, Jenson consistently demonstrates the way that the church's confession of the triune God of scripture restructures Christian thinking. Jenson's work on the nature of theology has focused on the category of "promise": a way with language that opens up new possibilities. At the heart of Jenson's theology of the gospel is the conviction that, in Christ, God discloses a word of pure promise to us, enabling new patterns of life. Just as the gospel opens up new ways of living, good theology unfolds into new interpretations and articulations. Engaging Jenson's work across vital areas, this volume lays out the contours and key contributions of Jenson's thought for modern Christology, theological interpretation of Scripture, the doctrine of the Trinity in light of the recent Trinitarian revival, and ecumenical theological relations. This volume gathers together essays by some of contemporary theology's most capable thinkers, such as Oliver Crisp, Stephen Holmes, Joseph Mangina, Peter Leithart, Telford Work, Eugene Rogers, R. Kendall Soulen, and Peter Ochs, to examine the ways in which Jenson's own theology functions as "promise," enabling further theological visions and articulations.

II

Creation and Christ

6

Creation as Perichoretic Trinitarian Conversation

Reflections on World-Making with Robert W. Jenson

Daniela C. Augustine

In his two-volume Systematic Theology, Robert W. Jenson offers us the gift of a breathtaking vision of the Trinity as a tri-directional discourse of harmonious, perichoretic beauty that sings forth the cosmos into existence within its own communal reality. In this theological unveiling inspired by Jonathan Edwards, God is goodness and truth, righteousness and love,^[1] precisely because he is beauty—the beauty that spell-binds all of existence into the rhythms of the Spirit and hollows the cosmos by rapturing it into the triune singing—the beauty that (in the words of Dostoyevsky) “will save the world” and saturate it with his glory. In the sheer musicality of the divine perichoresis, “God is a great fugue”—a capacious, luminous melody that opens itself for others, inviting them to harmonize in a creative ascent from glory to glory.^[2] In the pure joy of this communal music, creation crescendos as a tri-unal love song, for indeed, what moves forth this inspired composition is not an internal need, deficit, or necessity “but love alone.”^[3] Therefore, “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music.”^[4] Yet, this music is a communion and communication, a divine discourse in which creation comes forth, spoken by the Logos, vocalizing the will of the Father in the perfecting energies of the Spirit. Therefore, to be a creature is “to be mentioned in the triune moral conversation as something other than those who conduct it”;^[5] it is to be “spoken of” and “to be heard of”^[6]—to be a legomena in the communal perichoretic conversation that is the Trinity. To be a creature is to be a “created word.”^[7] Further, the act of creation is “God taking time in his time for us,” and thus to be a creature is to inhabit the accommodation in God that is created time.^[8] Yet, in the time-space continuum of embodied words spoken by the eternal Word, creation takes place as an act of God’s self-re-spacing, of opening room within himself for the creature.^[9] Moved by Jenson’s captivating vision of the Trinity, the present chapter will offer a reflection on the event of creation as both an act of God’s unconditional hospitality for the absolute other as well as a divine liturgy performed by the Creator in which humanity is spoken forth as the special creature made to hear the Word and respond to it in prayer, thus becoming a partaker within the triune communal liturgy.

Creation as Divine Hospitality

The poetry of the fourth Gospel’s prologue fuses together the visions of the divine creative act as both unconditional hospitality for and a loving communal discourse with the other. It depicts the act of cosmic creation as proceeding from the Word that speaks it forth while being turned toward God (pros ton theon, John 1:1).^[10] The orientation of the creative speech is not directed outside the divine reality but rather remains in the inner communion of the Trinity itself. Thus, creation takes place within the perichoretic intimacy of the Trinitarian life as a trialogue of loving interface with the other.

It is not surprising that the creation of the world ex nihilo, an act of divine love, is expressed as a radical self-re-spacing of the Trinitarian proto-communal life, welcoming and hosting the existence and conversational inclusion of the other. Indeed, this is what love is and does as the ultimate act of freedom.^[11] Love has the extraordinary creative capacity (to use the words of Hannah Arendt) to “insert a new world into the existing world”^[12] between two persons. Love, as the most generous and spacious relationship to the different-than-oneself, is a hospitable sanctuary for the presence and flourishing of others, for it knows not the distorting/destructive oppression of fear, jealousy, envy, suspicion, competition, or rage (1 John 4:18, 1 Corinthians 13). Love (and therefore creation itself) is inclusion and empowerment.^[13] Love makes family out of strangers, creates space for them at the table, and empowers the voice of the other and secures their access to life, justice, and flourishing. Therefore, the bringing forth of creation can be understood as the movement of love in an internal act of praktike—of the Trinity’s loving askēsis and kenōsis. On the one hand, in an ascetic expression of love as self-giving, God “fasts” from himself in order to create within his eternal omnipresence time and (therefore) space for the existence of the other.^[14] In a gift of unconditional hospitality, the proto-communal Trinity becomes the immediate dwelling place of others as the very environment in which they live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28). On the other hand, God (being love) pours himself forward toward the existence of the other through the kenōsis of the Word and the Spirit so that the creatures may come to be (as materialized logoi spoken by the Logos and animated by the Spirit who circumscribes them in the self-giving, life-sustaining generosity of love). Thus in the act of creation we see the Trinity as an ascetic community of self-sharing with the other. This is the materialization of God as love—a communal life of radical hospitality (philoxenia) marked by unconditional, loving welcome for the other, the different, and the absolute stranger, all the while sustaining their uncompromised otherness.

Yet creation, as inclusion and empowerment of others, also summons them to the responsibility to do likewise—to love in the likeness of the Creator. Therefore, as the very fruit and cosmic expression of the divine reality of love, humanity is created to be an icon of the Trinity on earth and to exhibit the same communal life marked by askēsis (self-fasting) and kenōsis (self-sharing) in relation to the fellow human and the rest of creation. Humanity is placed amid the cosmos as a priestly, eucharistic, communal reality in order to serve as an agent/mediator of the world’s transfiguration into the likeness of God’s communal life until the divine community becomes all in all.

Since humanity is created in the image and likeness of God,^[15] from the beginning the spirit of askēsis is to be cultivated in the human being through abstaining from some of the fruit of the world (Gen 3:2–3) for the sake of communion with God and nature. The priestly vocation of humanity involves the eucharistic discernment of the world as a divine gift of substance and beauty for the sake of cultivating a community of shared life with the other—with God and neighbor (both anthropic and non-anthropic). This discernment necessitates growing in love (in the divine likeness) through unceasing covenantal commitment to differentiating between one’s needs and desires, and sanctifying the latter through the theocentric, deifying movement of worship as theoformation (or rather Christoformation) in and through the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, humanity is created as a worshiping creature that is to carry in and with itself the entire cosmos before God in a teleological, liturgical movement toward theōsis. Humanity’s theōsis is manifested in Christlikeness (the likeness of God in human flesh), and since Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1:15) in the material cosmos, to be truly human is to be Christ-like.^[16] Yet, theōsis is experienced as ontological renewal and healing that engulfs not only humanity but all of creation in life-giving union with the Creator. This all-permeating cosmic healing involves free-willed, Christoformed, Spirit-empowered human agency. Therefore, humanity’s ontology (coinciding with its vocation), embodied in the first Adam before the fall, is that of a community of priests in the cathedral of the cosmos, bearing the image and growing into the likeness of the communal Trinity amid the material world. As a priest before God, Adam stands as the embodiment of the cosmic communion of matter and Spirit, representing in his very being a sacrament in which the icon of the cosmos and the icon of God are united together as an evocation of the destiny of the world where God is to be all in all (Eph 1:21). Human ontology is to be the materialization of the sacred story of the world, joining together the primordial memory of its beginning with the anticipation of its eschatological unfolding as an embodied, in-Spirit-ed movement toward creation’s pneumatisation in theōsis. In the words of St. Gregory the Theologian,

The Word of God wanted to reveal that humanity participates in both worlds, namely in invisible as well as in visible nature. . . . Therefore, Adam was placed on this earth as a second world, a large world within a small world, like an angel that worships God while participating in the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Theology and Scripture
• Creation and Christ
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index