The Trinitarian Theology of Stanley J. Grenz

Jason S. Sexton

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567662507
• eBook ISBN: 9780567045140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Exploring one of the most controversial figures in recent evangelical theology, this book thoroughly examines core features of Stanley J. Grenz's Trinitarian vision.

1

Evangelical Trinitarian Revisioning

Introduction

Stanley J. Grenz was one of the leading figures in evangelical theology at the turn of the century. He has been called “a preeminent evangelical theologian,” “one of the premier evangelical theologians in the world,” and “one of the most prolific evangelical theologians of our time.”¹ His work has received constant attention, from stern critics highly skeptical of his work to firm backers deeply sympathetic, and everything in between. His most mature work has been referred to by leading scholars as of a “more thorough and of an altogether higher order” than his earlier work,² which was displayed in the increasing quality of scholarship that his creative, constructive, and ambitious writing agenda left at the point of his tragic death on 12 March 2005,³ indicating how significant a loss Stanley Grenz was for evangelical theology.

Grenz’s project has been one of the most controversial in the recent history of evangelical theology.⁴ His work has received many labels, including “postconservative,”⁵ “meliorist,”⁶ “postmodern in approach and worldview,”⁷ and even postevangelical, this lattermost designation being less of a label and more of a description of his work.⁸ All of these descriptions eventually came to be viewed in a negative light, casting much doubt on Grenz’s work as not only a conservative theologian, but also a distinctly evangelical one.⁹ And yet not only did Grenz see himself as “hopelessly conservative,”¹⁰ but he also very shortly before his death declared, “I remain an evangelical through and through,” with the working desire “to spark a renewal in evangelical thought and piety for the sake of enhancing our gospel witness and our ministry to people in the contemporary context.”¹¹ Perhaps the most facetious assessment of the implications of his work was given in a paper titled, “How the Grenz Stole Christmas,” by R. Douglas Geivett. In this paper, Geivett affirmed that he was not suggesting that Grenz had “crossed the line” by denying any key doctrine from the classic orthodox creeds, or that he had “deliberately sabotaged the faith,” but that he had rather

paved the way, brick by brick, for others who come after him to upstage him, as it were, and carry the method to its natural, and I should think, unwelcome conclusion—that if Christianity is true, there is no way to know that it is true or even to be justified in believing that it is true, and indeed that Christianity is nothing more than a conceptual framework which as such bears no relation of correspondence to reality and so really is not true after all.¹²

Effectively, Grenz was consistently accused of the slippery-slope fallacy, which he explicitly and continually repudiated. Herein lies a significant problem. Who is the real Stanley J. Grenz? And what is the accurate description of his theology? Even some who once heartily endorsed his work have more recently had a shift in sympathies.¹³ But is this reading of Grenz’s work valid?

Challenges for the present study

Stanley Grenz’s work has continued to garner increasing interest, but less so from the monolithic, hegemonic approach that held sway for roughly the last eight years of his life and academic career, which has already been identified. From the turn of the century until his untimely death in 2005, a large number of Masters theses critical of his work were produced from evangelical academic institutions. His project had also come under considerable scrutiny in a number of PhD dissertations that maintained a similar emphasis.¹⁴ But since his death, a number of research projects have given much more serious, even-handed attention to his work.¹⁵ This does not mean that recent research has not been critical of his contributions, but it has increasingly critiqued his work in a manner much different from the earlier homogeneous reactionary approach. Each of these studies have their own agendas and reasons for engaging Grenz’s work and why it is a factor for their particular research aims. But fading and nearly gone is the mood that has treated his effort dismissively, under pejorative and misrepresentative labels such as postmodern, captive to culture, or something else.¹⁶ The academy is beginning to take his work seriously, and that, on the material’s own terms. These welcome contributions have paid attention to his work as a constructive theologian, and whereas I will take up particular issues with a number of the conclusions of these studies, they have nevertheless explored new avenues of research indicative of Grenz’s own particular research aims and the endeavors that his work sought to constructively contribute to.

What has been said so far has mainly been meant to highlight the difficult challenges that have surrounded Grenz’s controversial project. The contested nature of his work has created significant challenges that have made it difficult to both access and assess Grenz’s writings and agenda. This is not in any way to suggest that either Evangelicalism as a tradition, or evangelical theology as a subject, is not a “contested” phenomenon.¹⁷ In many ways the phenomenon identifiable as Evangelicalism and evangelical theology are most adequately understood as “an ongoing conversation” constantly returning to particular themes while holding out Jesus Christ as the hope of the world.¹⁸ The curious case of Stanley Grenz displays the contestedness of the evangelical tradition and its theology, and acknowledging the controversy surrounding his work provides both a catalyst and an incentive for approaching his actual work directly in order to determine what he was saying amidst the unfortunately loose and somewhat careless descriptions of his work given by well-known evangelical figureheads who either sought to defend or dismiss his program, which has been subsequently mimicked by later theologians.

But aside from the controversy swirling around his writings, prompting responses from numerous voices, his work is also difficult to assess due to its sheer volume. In twenty-three years, Grenz authored, co-authored, or edited twenty-eight books, and over one hundred articles, essays, and reviews covering a wide-range of theological subjects. Beyond the sizeable body of material he left, his writings skillfully treaded the worlds of both the academic and the popular, which often made it difficult to see the coherence of his work, and whether or not he had an explicitly identifiable agenda. Grenz also had the keen ability to cover a large swath of material in his assessment of issues related to his constructs, especially concerning findings from other disciplines outside of theology and in the contemporary culture. While these features were often surveyed in order to establish the contexts in which he was working and the questions being asked therein, providing invaluable material for his construction and raising issues that facilitated important interdisciplinary conversations and contextually-appropriate articulations of the gospel, so many commentators on Grenz’s work mistakenly cite his descriptions of other positions (which he was a master at describing) as his own.

Additional difficulties arising from assessing Grenz’s work can be seen in the continual effort he set forth while isolating individual issues throughout the writing process that might have lacked clarity and which were nevertheless intended to be further developed and illumined throughout the constructive and creative writing process, as many scholars do as a matter of practice. Writing was his creative process. He unfortunately left behind an uncompleted project at the time when his scholarly ambitions and academic capabilities were at their peak. He was an evangelical theologian who actually took the work of constructive theology very seriously, seeking to present ideas to be tested by the church and the academy with a view toward further revision of that theology in service to the church and world.

As a result of these difficulties, in order to provide a substantial assessment of Grenz’s programmatic corpus, the entire body of his work must be brought into consideration. His work must be assessed on its own terms, according to his explicit agenda, and on the grounds of his own explicit aims and relative accomplishment of those aims. The present book is therefore the first work seeking to provide an exhaustive treatment of Grenz’s writings, having set out to explore the entirety of his available written material, and thereby aiming to provide an accurate, thorough, and exhaustive account of the primary feature running conspicuously throughout his work. It grants primary consideration to the articulation of his own self-understood aims, along with his self-conscious methodology. Therefore this book begins where Grenz began, by sketching the explicit methodology he deemed adequate to carry his project through, which he identified as the sources and motifs inherent to distinctly evangelical theology.

Grenz’s methodology

As his writing ministry began to blossom into its second decade (1990s), Grenz had already written a number of works devoted directly to serving the church.¹⁹ He had already established himself as a highly capable theologian, being one of the earliest interpreters of Pannenberg’s systematic program at its pinnacle.²⁰ Engagement with contemporary theology was also on his radar, about which he made a number of formative conclusions concerning its shape and state nearing the end of the twentieth century.²¹ It was out of this trajectory that his single-volume Theology for the Community of God (1994) was birthed, and yet not without a preliminary, “more programmatic book” that he was encouraged to generate prior to the wake of the single-volume systematic theology.²² This methodological work became Revisioning Eva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• eCopyright
• Dedication
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Evangelical Trinitarian Revisioning
• 2 Pannenberg and Grenz (1): The Origin of Stanley J. Grenz’s Trinitarian Methodology
• 3 Pannenberg and Grenz (2): The Origin of Stanley J. Grenz’s Trinitarian Theology
• 4 Discovering the Divine Community: The Early Developing Shape of Stanley J. Grenz’s Doctrine of the Trinity
• 5 Rediscovering the Triune God: The Latter Shape of Stanley J. Grenz’s Doctrine of the Trinity
• 6 Grenz and the Imago Dei: The Trinitarian Shape of Stanley J. Grenz’s Theology
• 7 Grenz and Comprehensive Love: The Trinitarian Shape of Stanley J. Grenz’s Ethic/s
• 8 Conclusion: Evangelical Theology’s Reception of Grenz’s Trinitarian Project
• Bibliography