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David Bentley Hart writes,

“I find it impossible to have done with Jenson’s work, or to cease returning to it as a challenge to refine and clarify my own understanding of the gospel. And whenever I make that return, I cannot help but feel that, in a small way, the experience is rather like that of Jacob wrestling with God in His angel at the ford of Jabbok.”

The debate between these two theological giants is about their definitions of God–the very nature of God. My intention in what follows is not to resolve the debate between Hart and Jenson (which would be laughably grandiose on my part), but simply to lay the debate before you.

Let us see, then, what this wrestling match entails. I assure you that the questions which emerge out of the Jenson-Hart encounter will stretch your mind, regardless of your theological persuasion.

Jenson: “God is an event”

Robert Jenson (following Barth), affirms that “God is an event; history occurs not only in him but as his being” (Systematic Theology vol. 1). How so? Jenson quotes his mentor, Peter Brunner: “From eternity the Father sees us in the Son as determined for fellowship with him…God in the totality of his being thus enters the covenant of relation he has willed,” and so saving history is made possible for us as real history.

This is the event which constitutes God’s being, and in which we are involved. Jenson is quick to clarify, though, that to say that “God is an event” is not to say that God’s being is mere “eventhood or eventfulness or any such abstraction; it is a particular event, the active relation of the triune persons, the event in which we are involved in that the crucifixion and resurrection occur among us” (ST 1).

“Events, he writes, “happen to something. What the event of God happens to is, first, the triune persons. The fundamental statement of God’s being is therefore: God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit.” The event also happens to us (“That an event happens to something does not entail that this something must be metaphysically or temporally prior to it”): “God is the event of the world’s transformation by Jesus’s love, the same love to which the world owes its existence.”

This deviates drastically from antiquity’s notion of the atemporal, unmoved mover; and that’s to be expected, Jenson writes, considering that “Parmenides and Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics did not know the Incarnation or the biblical distinction of creature from Creator. For them, the great distinction was between the temporal world and the atemporal realm of deity, the latter conceived as an abstract sheer other.” (Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics, 94)

We must abandon this picture of God, according to Jenson. Again, quoting Peter Brunner: “In view of God’s self-determination to us, we must abandon all pictures of God that by antiquity’s modes of thought read into God a fixed perfection, so that talk of new judgements, new reactions, new deeds and new words in God appears naive and anthropomorphic.”

Hard questions from Hart

Hart has some challenging questions for Jenson:

If nothing else, in reading Jenson a theologian committed to traditional Catholic metaphysics will almost inevitably find himself raising certain very classical objections to what he is reading: Does it make sense, ultimately, to speak of God both as the source of all being and yet as becoming the God He is? Can temporality be intelligibly ascribed to God without one’s theology lapsing into contradiction or myth? What of the moral nature of God, if He must elect sin, death, and evil as the context of His self-determination in time? If it is true that, in order for God to transcend death, He must triumph over it in time, is death then an independent reality over against God? Perhaps most crucially, what could it mean to speak of God determining Himself, of God choosing to be the God He is? Could He choose otherwise? Is there–as classical Christian thought has always denied–“possibility” in God, potential that must be realized? How then could He be the infinite source of all actuality, from which everything draws its being?

The question, Could God choose otherwise, is perhaps the most pertinent here. As Jenson has acknowledged in recent years, it is the question that has pressured him to further his metaphysical reflections.

In challenging Jenson, though, Hart restrains himself:

And yet precisely here one encounters perhaps the best example of Jenson’s power to shake even the firmest traditionalist certitudes. No one else’s theology that I know of has the biblical depth to make theologians of my persuasion so poignantly conscious of the metaphoric limitations that encumber all the words we attempt to use of God, and of how quickly our terms can disintegrate into incoherence when we attempt to press them past a very rudimentary level of signification. When Jenson speaks of divine temporality, he surely does not mean to suggest that God experiences time as we do: as loss, as the possibility of things that may never come, as always fragmentary and haunted by disappointments and vain longings, as a future never yet possessed and only dimly imagined…. Nor certainly, I am sure, does he speak of God’s decision to be this God intending us to understand that decision in a human way. For us, after all, decision is always preceded by some kind of indecision, and no decision can be reached that is not in some sense the arbitrary selection of possibilities confronting us from outside ourselves.

“One may find the language of ‘choice’ unsatisfactory,” Hart writes, but then again, we must confront this challenge: that “in saying that God’s nature suffers no constraints, one should want also to urge that God is not passively or indifferently the God He is, and that His will abides in perfect freedom. And to speak of this mystery, no language really suffices.” (Hart)

Above all, however, Hart’s main reason for thinking Jenson’s work “so enormously important for serious theologians,” has to do with “the single great Christian mystery from which all theology arises: the mystery of the Person of Christ.” He explains:

For numerous reasons (which cannot be enumerated here, alas), it is an absolutely essential theological principle that there is nothing arbitrary or accidental in the relation of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth to that of the eternal Logos…. When God becomes man, this is the man He becomes–and there can be no other…. Jesus is not just one manifestation of the Son, but the Son in His only true human form.

Jenson Rejoinders

Jenson, then, comes back with a series of questions for Hart:

According to Hart, both are true: that in Israel and Jesus, God goes personally forth into the far country, takes the form of the slave, is crucified, and rises; and that these happenings do not affect God. Both can be true because the departure of the Incarnation, and the sacrifice of the cross, and the overcoming love of the Resurrection are already accounted for in God’s eternal inner-triune distancing and return, in his eternal inner-triune self-giving and return, and in the “always already” triumphant triune love. Perhaps one should so far agree, but there are still choices to make. Does Hart mean that the history of salvation is already somehow actual in triune eternity? If he does, he only needs to resolve that “somehow” as decision, to emerge as Barth redivivus. Or in several other ways to emerge as a standard Neo-Platonist after all. I doubt Hart wants either. But then? Toward the end of the book, Hart renews his insistence on divine apatheia and concludes the passage, “The act by which the form of God appears in the form of a slave is … not a change, but a manifestation of who God is [italics added]” (p. 357). Looking back, one sees that indeed these are the only possibilities Hart reckons with: that either God changes when Christ dies, or that the death manifests what God “always already” is. Let us join in denying that God changes, or anyway that he changes in “who” he is. But what does “always already” mean? So to the question with which I leave the reader. Hart envisions a God whose serenity simply is what it is, and who manifests his glory in the death and Resurrection of Christ but does not constitute it in them. Is this the way Scripture in fact tells its story of God? Another form of the question: Does Hart relate time and eternity in a way that can accommodate a history that is actually saving? And yet another form of the question: Is the alternative noted above in fact exclusive? If God’s history with us does not change him, is the only alternative that it manifests him? I wanted to write that last clause so: “…that it merely manifests him?” But that would have been the question in my mind, not the question I must pose. And let none who read reviews instead of the book undertake to answer it. –Robert Jenson, Review of The Beauty of the Infinite

Hart relates that, after the publication of The Beauty of the Infinite, he received an e-mail “from a fairly authoritative interpreter of Jenson’s work, complaining that my critique of Jenson’s theology, in [The Beauty of the Infinite], had been written in such a way as to appear merely as an exemplary episode within my own narrative of modern philosophy, and thus had all but entirely failed to provide a balanced account of Jenson’s theological intentions, or of the greater scope of his thought, or of the biblical concerns animating it. And after some hours of indignation, I came to the conclusion that this was quite probably true.”