Defined by a cross

Jenseon writes: “The Crucifixion puts it up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son?  To this candidate to be his own self-identifying Word?  Would he be a God who, for example, hosts publicans and sinners, who justifies the ungodly?  The Resurrection was the Father’s Yes.  We may say: the Resurrection settled that the Crucifixion’s sort of God is indeed the one God; the Crucifixion settled what sort of God it is who establishes his deity by the Resurrection.  Or: the Crucifixion settled who and what God is; the Resurrection settled that this God is.  And just so the Crucifixion settled also who and what we are, if we are anything determinate.”

Behind this is an account of death as the defining end of human life in this world, of God’s identity with His people, of God’s promise as the opening of a future.

The crucifixion is the “crisis of the total biblical narrative.”  On the cross, the Father gives the Son over to “oppositional and deadly creatures.”  There are two possibilities here: Either Father, Son and Spirit have devolved into “a mutually betraying pantheon” or Father, Son and Spirit remains one God in spite of this apparent interior betrayal.  But if the latter is the case, then the Triune God’s “identity must be constituted precisely in the integration of this abandonment.  The God of crucifixion and resurrection is one with himself in a moment of supreme dramatic self-transcendence or not at all.”

Add to this the fact that human life is life lived toward death: “until I die, it remains uncertain who I shall have turned out to be.”  Since God’s story with creation is a story with creatures, then he must accept that framework for identifying Himself.  That is, He too “can have no identity except as he meets the temporal end toward which creatures live.”  To be identified as God, as God with His people in this particular world (Jenson famously dismisses as speculative the question of how God would have been Himself had He created a different world), He must face death.  Death must be definitive of His identity.

Throughout Israel’s history, Yahweh has been acclaimed as the opponent of death, but given the “radical historicity” of Israel this opposition cannot take the form of avoidance or bypassing death.  Since Israel’s faith was a faith in a God who promises and performed in time, her faith had to be a faith in the triumph of Yahweh over death, a hope for a time when “death would be no more.”  Israel could achieve “closure” only in that ending, and Yahweh could establish His claim to be the One God “only in meeting that ending.”  Jenson says, “The problematic of Ezekiel is interior to the identity of Israel’s God, and drives necessarily forward to some resolution or dissolution.”

God stakes His identity as God on His promises to Israel.  Should He fail, He is proven to be no God.  When He keeps His promise, it proves not only that Yahweh is God, but (in Isaiah’s words) it proves the “sheer statement of the Lord’s self-identity”: I am Yahweh.  The promise on which He stakes His identity as God is the promise to overcome death, and so in overcoming death, He is proven to be Yahweh.