One God

Of the atonement, Robert Jenson writes: “We do not want to share the Son’s relation to the Father, we do not want there to be a Father; and that is why the one who said, ‘When you pray, say ‘Our Father,’ had to die.  The Father sends servant after servant and finally the Son.  The vineyard-keepers kill each in turn; given the project that defines their lives, to have no one over them, they could not do otherwise.”

Again: “The eternal inner-triune decision made at the Crucifixion and Resurrection was between the parable as told, with a dead son and slaughter of the vineyard-keepers, and raising a Son who insists rather on forgiving them.  The Father can have his Son and us with him into the bargain, or he can abolish us and have no Son, for there is no Son but the one who said, ‘Father, forgive them.’”

Does this mean that there was a separation of Father and Son that has to be repaired in the resurrection?  Jenson says No.  The Spirit was the once and future bond of union between Father and Son.  Why then the confusing flirtation with the impossible possibility of a separation of Father and Son?

The answer to that, I think, goes to the heart of Jenson’s project, which is to insist that what we know and say of God is what we have learned from the gospel, the specific Scriptural narrative about Jesus.  Historically, “unity” has been seen as an obvious attribute of God, a by-definition description of divine nature.  Tertullian, for instance, argues that it’s incoherent to argue that there is more than one God, or that God is divided.

Jenson might perhaps see some value in such arguments in some contexts, but that’s not the foundational support for our understanding of divine unity.  Rather the gospel is.  How do we know God is one?  Not because of a prior, generic metaphysical commitment to divine unity.  Instead, we know God is one because the Son endured death on the cross, cried with the cry of dereliction, died and was buried, and raised again.  We know that God is one because even death could not tear the Triune God into three equal shares.