Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that he became “reluctant to mention God by name to religious people – because that name seems to me here not to ring true.”[1] He describes something like a feeling of disgust at religious jargon (he says “I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable”).[2] When I see billboards or bumper stickers advertising “Jesus is the Answer” or “Jesus is the Reason for the Season” I get a similar feeling. I am suspicious of the question Jesus might be thought to answer, or the “reason” behind such sloganeering. The language is largely unintelligible. As Robert Jenson has noted, this is true not simply of slogans but “That Christianity’s language about God has become unintelligible to its hearers is finally apparent also to us who speak it – in that we find it increasingly unintelligible to ourselves.”[3] The sloganeering like much of popular religion, seems to be on the order of “Coke is It” – spoken with enough force by enough smiling people the product is consumed for an unspecified “it” factor. To ask after the meaning is already to have missed the point. The implication is Coke/Jesus will bring on a certain toothy happiness, devoid of specifics and requiring a hollow intensity of “faith.” This Jesus answers nothing and does nothing, and yet rather than assume this name is a cipher, preachers and believers blindly committed to the faith, increase the intensity of the sloganeering. It cannot be admitted the meaning is uncertain, as this implies it may have no meaning.
The problem is not that too much is made of Christ. As Jenson has noted, much of Christian thought is falsely construed as part of a “possessed rationality” in which an idea, an image, or a mental picture serves in place of the person of the Logos and this results in human striving toward God, rather than a reception of the Word. From his Lutheran context, this is “works righteousness” – with focus on ascent to God, rather than on a relinquishing of human logic. The Logos is not received on the basis of an already possessed logic, as if the Word is one word among many. This Word which establishes all of creation and which is its fulfillment, is an order of reality which exceeds human speaking and thinking, as it is the summation and creation of reality. As Michael Brain has written of Jenson, “All of the disparate words of creation coalesce into one: the Word of God, whom Jenson identifies exactly with the person of Jesus Christ.”[4] This is not a Word subject to verification by other means, or testable according to scientific positivism, but is a Word that surpasses this sort of reason.
On the other hand, this Word is not an abstraction, an analogy or an image, but a person. Brain maintains, “Jenson emphatically taught the unqualified and exhaustive identity of the Word with this person, for the Word that establishes creation in the beginning is the exact history of Jesus in our midst and the Kingdom he enacts. Creation has its being from the historical life of Jesus Christ, from 1 to 30 A.D., so that statements of reality are true insofar as they narrate the story of Jesus as both the story of God and the story of creation.”[5] Of course, this makes no sense according to a reason built on the logic of cause and effect, in which the life of Christ is subsequent to the eternal life of God, but neither does a suffering God, a God that is human and is born, a God that experiences time and history, or a God who in Christ grows in wisdom and stature.
In Jenson’s reading and expansion upon Maximus, he maintains the Logos is “a triune identity” (tropos hyparxeos): “he is a subsisting relation to the Father, the subsisting relation of being begotten.”[6] Jenson recognizes that to follow Maximus, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[7] If God the Son suffered, then one of the Trinity suffered, and if one of the Trinity suffered, then God suffered. “We may still apprehend paradox in his position, but the paradox is now not that the presumed impassible Logos suffers, but that the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[8] As Maximus states it, he is “Suffering God.”[9]
Jenson, following Maximus and Origen and deploying a metaphor of Augustine, asserts a peculiar first century understanding, that the Trinitarian God is accomplishing his identity in Christ. Deploying Augustine’s psychological analogy, God the Father is like “consciousness” or the locus of awareness, while God the Son is as God’s “ego,” the “diachronically identifiable individual” while the Holy Spirit is God’s freedom. God in Christ is not a disembodied logos asarkos, but the historical person Jesus.[10] “The second identity of God is directly the human person of the gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[11] Jesus find his “I” “in the same way that other human beings do – or, rather, that other humans find their ‘I’ and are free” as he is and does.[12] “This human personality is then an identity of God in that before the Father in the Spirit he lives the mutual life that God is. . .”[13]
According to David Bruner, “A Father without a Son – that is, without an incarnate son of the kind Jenson specifies – would be the same as an apparatus of mental perception without any lived history.”[14] God would have no lived content or actuality and Trinity and theology are rendered abstract and unintelligible. For Jenson, apart from the historical Jesus, God would not be who he is, Trinity would not be a fact about God, and the love of God or the very definition of God would not be the case. This is a paradoxical logic which accounts for the synthesis found in Christ between God and human, between Creator and creation, which is definitive of the personhood and love of God. This paradoxical, cosmic, synthesizing, love of God found in Christ, is directly accessible and intelligible.
(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967), 141–42. The title of this blog was inspired by Jordan Wood’s lecture 8 on Maximus at PBI, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/maximus-and-the-love-of-god-in-synthesis-personhood-and-humility/
[2] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.
[3] Robert Jenson, The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) 3.
[4] Michael Raymond Brain, The Metaphysics of the Gospel: Christ, Reality, and Ecumenism in the Theology of Robert W. Jenson (Toronto: Wycliffe College Dissertation, 2023) 70.
[5] Brain, 70.
[6] Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 136
[7] Ibid, 137.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Maximus, Ambigua, 91:1037B, quoted in Jenson, Ibid.
[10] David Bruner, “Jenson, Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition,” International Journal of Systematic Theology (Volume 21 Number 3 July 2019) 317.
[11] Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 137, Cited in Bruner, Ibid.
[12] Jenson, Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Bruner, Ibid, 317.
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