Autonomy and Determination

In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Jenson raises the question of God’s impassibility (how could he not!?).  Israel’s God is not impassible if that connotes, as it usually did for extra-biblical thought, timelessness.  Yet, Israel’s God is also not passible in a straightforward sense, since passibility connotes passivity.  ”Passion could be unambiguously good only in a person in whom free self-determination and determination by the other were one.”  That’s not true of us, but it is true of God because He is triune:

“the Father is nothing but the Father of the Son; his very being is constituted in his passion for the Son; and yet precisely therein he is perfectly autonomous, since the Son is the same God as he.  And the same may be said of the Son’s love for and identity with the Father, and indeed of the Spirit as himself the love between them.”  That is, the Father is Father because He begets the Son, but because the Son is not a lesser underling, but equal to the Father, the Father is also uniquely Father, “autonomously” Father, in the begetting of the Son.

There is a reflex of this autonomy-determination identity in human existence, in “our creation as male and female.”  Thus, “in sexual union, lover and beloved enter each other and are, as Genesis put it, ‘one flesh,’ that is, one creature.  Who then am I in this event?  I am in my very autonomy someone utterly seized by and invested in another.”  In sexual union, we are most free, and most determined.  And thus in sexual union we have (the possibility of) a created image of Triune life.