Robert Jenson and the God of the gospel
With the critical knife of a theology of the cross, Jens sought to cut through modern fogs of religiosity.
My life and work as a theologian was intertwined with Robert W. Jenson—“Jens,” as friends and colleagues addressed him. I discovered him in his book The Triune Identity when I was finishing my dissertation at Union Theological Seminary in 1983. Ideas that I had struggled to articulate suddenly became lucid in his striking and powerful formulations. The patristic doctrine of the tripersonal God whose being is in communion was not a misleading, intellectualizing speculation, Jens argued, but the surprising ontological description of “the God of the gospel.”
Why does this matter? We do not presume first to know who or what God is or must be, Karl Barth taught Jens. Rather, we discover what God is and hence can be from the disruptive evangelical narrative that tells who God is: the Father who generates His own Son, on whom He breathes His own Spirit, so that, gathered by the Spirit into union with the Son, we live to the glory of the self-surpassing Father of all grace and goodness. This description serves to identify God in the maelstrom of experience. This is the crying need of the community of faith if it is to remain faithful to its mission in a world surfeit with religious egoism and triumphalist ecclesiologies and with utopian political messianisms, which bathed the 20th century in rivers of blood.
Against those theologies of glory, Jens wrote, God’s self-identification with the Crucified frees us from the need to find God in the projection of our own ideals, perfections, or aspirations. With the critical knife of a theology of the cross, Jenson sought to cut through modern fogs of religiosity, even ones that take apparently secular form. Indeed, in his penetrating early study God after God, he saw such secular religiosity at work in liberal Protestant theology, especially in the United States, which was often barely conscious of the ways it was a projection of human ideals. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another inspiration alongside Barth, Jens considered contemporary American religiosity, whether fundamentalist or modernist, as “Protestantism without Reformation.”
