Much of 2 Corinthians is Paul’s defense of his apostolic ministry, which is also a defense of the reliability of the gospel he preached at Corinth. One of the things that led some people to doubt Paul’s status as an apostle was his life of suffering. How can God be with Paul, so full of the Spirit, an apostle of the exalted Jesus, when he spends his life under duress? Shouldn’t an apostle be a success in ministry? Instead of... Read more
Jane Austen’s Emma is centrally concerned with character formation and guidance. Rich, beautiful, independent, Emma Woodhouse has no one to shepherd her. Her father is too frail, and everyone else in Hughbury too intimidated. She doesn’t think she needs to be shepherded, and instead spends her time meddling with other peoples’ lives. What needs guidance in Emma’s case is particularly her imagination, and in depicting a character who needs her imagination educated, guided, shaped, and disciplined, Austen enters into an... Read more
In the second volume of his Systematic Theology, Jenson raises pointed, Edwardsean questions about free will theodicies. Such devices suppose “that God once created and then somehow retreated, so that at least some things that happen within creation, those dependent on creatures’ ‘free will,’ he merely, as it were, observes” (22). That cannot be right because “in no present instant does anything happen outside the deliberate act of God.” But if that is right, then what becomes of our freedom, and... Read more
Robert Jenson argues in Unbaptized God that debates about justification regularly fail to notice the multivocal character of the word. Everyone knows that we have different views of justification, but we all believe that they are different “forms of teaching within the same locus of theology, that is, they are different answers or different ways of answering the same question” (22). This, he argues, is a confusion and a source of further confusions. What are the loci of “justification”? Jenson enumerates... Read more
Jenson observes that “Israel knew itself as created by God’s word, in the exact sense in which we until recently spoke of ‘a gentleman’s word.’ Yahweh made a promise and kept it, and just so Israel came to be.” Other nations could boast of “a visible and tangible presence of God in holy images and places,” but Israel boasted only in “God’s utterance.” Israel knew “a time when Israel had been Israel only by this word, without security, when her... Read more
In a 2002 essay on “The Bible and the Trinity, Jenson reflected on the Trinitarian features of Genesis 22, the Aqedah. Some are obvious and traditional – the relationship between the Angel of Yahweh and Yahweh. Some not so much. Jenson stresses that the issue at stake in Yahweh’s test of Abraham was not whether Abraham feared, but about the sort of fear He had and the sort of God He features: “The question, I suggest, was not whether Abraham... Read more
“God speaks in Jesus in and through the texts of the Old and New Testament,” writes Francis Watson in an appreciative critique of Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology. “These texts do not merely report divine speaking, they enact it; and that they do so is the distinctive work of the Holy Spirit.” Scripture thus is the word of the Triune God (217-8). As such, Scripture is the means for our participation in the Triune conversation: “According to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the... Read more
Robert Jenson admits in a 2004 essay that in most of his theological writing he tried to do without the claim that Scripture is inspired. Historically, inspiration has been used to justify the authority of Scripture, but Jenson doesn’t believe that use of inspiration is necessary. It’s simply obvious that Scripture is authoritative in the church, and “if the existence of the church is willed by God then so is the Bible’s authority within it” (393). The article, though, is... Read more
Robert Jenson begins his classic The Triune Identity with a succinct analysis of the religious import of human action. “Every human action moves from what was to what is to be: It is carried and filled by tradition but intends new creation” (1). Every action proposes and is something new; every action has an eschatological ambition. Because of this, Jenson argues, “our acts hang between past and future, to be in fact temporal, to be the self-transcendence, the inherent and inevitable... Read more
Here’s an effort to summarize Robert Jenson’s take on God-and-time, written with faux-Jensonesque pithiness. Is God eternally and infinitely the eternal and infinite God that He is? Of course. He’s God. Is God dependent on creation for His fulfillment? Of course not. He’s God. The biblical God uniquely does not try to escape time. All other gods do; that’s what makes them gods. The world is what it is. History is what it is. No use worrying what might have... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In