Jenson on Apocalytic

Wow. Robert Jenson knows how to write a review. In the latest Pro Ecclesia , he presents his “three complaints” against Nathan Kerr’s Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Theopolitical Visions) , which he describes as “important,” “rich” and “profound.” His first complaint is stylistic: “If there is a way to lay out a sentence so as to hide its import, [Kerr] often finds it.” Ouch, and wow again.

Kerr’s book takes aim at historicism, not only because it cannot account for itself (any teleology that gives meaning to history as a whole “has to be imported . . . from some ahistorical grasp of truth or purpose,” as Jenson puts it) but also because it robs Christ’s advent of its “sheer eruptive contingency” that “without mediation crosses the run of events and reconfigures history just thereby” (Jenson’s summary again).

Kerr tests Barth, Hauerwas, and Yoder, and finds all insufficiently apocalyptic. Jenson again: “To satisfy Kerr, the ‘singular’ event of the life of Jesus must be able to reconfigure history independently also of any fixed set of churchly practices.” It’s not enough to make the story of Jesus and the church the master story, as Hauerwas does; Jesus destabilizes and interrupted all fixity even in the church’s history. Kerr’s church “exists only as ‘mission,’ that is, as sheer encounter between the powers that now rule ‘real history’ and Christians’ destabilizing ‘doxology’ of Christ’s ever-intrusive advent.”

Which brings up Jenson’s other two complaints.

First, “Where does the regularly and normatively invoked notion of ‘real history’ . . . come from? Surely not from one of those historicist alien sources?” More fundamentally, “Kerr ends up with a remarkable disembodied Christ.” In the New Testament, the church is Christ’s body “and it can be someone’s body precisely in that it is now an actual gathering, always identifiable by specific mandated practices.” But Kerr concludes that “the apocalyptically historical Christ acts independently of all that.”

What Jenson does not shrink form calling Kerr’s “docetism” shows up in his avoidance of baptism and the Supper in his discussion of liturgy and mission (Jenson says, “a remarkable feat for one who has presumably read the New Testament”!) and in the absence of “Israel and her Scripture” in Kerr’s apocalyptic gospel.

Jenson concludes that the book represents “the perfection of what Barth might have come to think if he had not been so concerned for Scripture.”