Narrative and the Triune Reality

Examining Robert W. Jenson's Doctrine of the Trinity with Reference to Eberhard Jüngel

Wai Luen Kwok

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781725252578, 9781725252585
• eBook ISBN: 9781725252592
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Robert Jenson is commended as one of the greatest American theologians in the twentieth century. This book proposes a critique of Jenson's narrative Trinitarianism by comparing it with Eberhard Jungel's theology. It argues for the importance of the double dimensions of event and communicative-linguistics of the Divine narrative.

Chapter 1

Jenson on Narrative and the Trinity

Biblical Narrative as Triune Story of Promise

This chapter examines the relation of triune reality and biblical narrative in Jenson’s trinitarian theology. I will argue that Jenson understands biblical narrative as the story of God’s promise. This story is the drama of the triune God. It really depicts, and it really is, the triune reality as God is identified by and with it.

1. Proper Names, Biblical Narrative, and the Trinity

Jenson believes that trinitarian discourse represents the determination of the Christian church to identify the God who has claimed her.225 We must trace the beginning of this identification back to Israel’s identification of God, because “It is the God of Israel whom Jesus called Father and to whom the disciples wanted to pray.”226 It should be noted that both Israel and Christianity identify their God through proper names and descriptive narratives.

The basis of Israel’s identification of God is the experience of deliverance from Egypt and migration to Canaan. Jenson contends that Israel’s confession in Deuteronomy 26:5–9227 provides the proper name (JHWH) and identifying description of God (the narrative of the Exodus events) that are determinative of Israel’s religious life.228 This proper name and narrative description come together to make this identification.229 We should notice that this double identification does not come from Israel’s projection of God. It is the self-introduction of the God who permits Israel to call on him by the name he gives.230 Jenson believes that the biblical God can be identified by this narrative, and at the same time, identifies himself with this narrative. The narrative and revelatory events are not clues about God or our own projection of God. The narrative that comes with this proper name is God’s personal self-introduction—God identifies himself with this narrative.231

According to Jenson, the New Testament provides a new identifying description for this same God. The Apostles identify the God of Israel as he who raised Jesus our Lord from the Dead.232 Thus, the identification by the death and resurrection neither replaces nor is a simple addition to the identification by Exodus—the God who raised Jesus is the same God who freed Israel from Egypt. The resurrection is verification of that earlier liberation.233 The exile is catastrophe or national death for Israel. Hope in the God of Israel is a hope of a victory over this death.234 The resurrection of Jesus verifies the hope of Israel in its God, and without it this hope cannot be sustained.

This new description enables the emergence of new kinds of naming.235 “Jesus” is the first kind of naming that the apostolic church uses to speak of God. In Jenson’s opinion, “Jesus” was the way that the various groups of primal church invoked God.236

The triune name “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is another kind of naming which appears in the New Testament. Jenson suggests that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” occupies the place in the church occupied by JHWH in Israel.237 Why does the triune name become the church’s name for God? Jenson believes that this is because the triune name contains the content and logic of this God’s identifying descriptions that embody the church’s primal experience of God in a single phrase.238 Though Jenson admits that the earliest formulating process and history of this naming are obscure, he thinks its logic is clear. He expounds the logic of triune name:

In it [the triune name] “Son” is a title for Jesus, who “made himself the Son of God” simply by addressing God as “my Father.” Conversely, God is here called “Father” not generally, bu...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jenson on Narrative and the Trinity
• Chapter 2: How Does Jenson Advance Barth’s Doctrine of the Trinity?
• Chapter 3: Jenson’s Theology of Language and Narrative Trinitarianism
• Chapter 4: Divine Temporal Infinity, Triune Persons, and the Problem of One and Three in Jenson’s Trinitarianism
• Chapter 5: God’s Being Is in His Becoming
• Chapter 6: Theology of Possibility and Theology of Actuality
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography