In what follows, I wish simply to state Robert Jenson’s position on the preexistence of the Son. His views on the matter have been attacked–and often misconstrued–by the likes of George Hunsinger and Oliver Crisp. Sang Hoon Lee’s book, Trinitarian Ontology and Israel in Robert W. Jenson’s Theology, has been enormously helpful on this subject. (It should be noted, in passing, that–per Jenson himself–Lee’s book “succeeds handsomely” in defending Jenson’s own position!)

In his Systematic Theology 1, Jenson writes:

In John’s prologue we read that ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ and that the Word then “became flesh.” However, in that same Gospel, we find this Word himself testifying to the mode of his preexistence: “Before Abraham was, I am.” It is precisely the aggressively incarnate protagonist of this Gospel’s narrative who says this of himself, and he puts his antecedence to Abraham in the present tense.” (ST 1, 139)

Thus, Jenson argues, the Word is always “aggressively incarnate.” As Sang Hoon Lee puts it, “There was no time when the Word was not the man Jesus.”

For example, we see the man Jesus appearing to several people in the Old Testament. He engages with Israel in a fleshly manner: he can “indulge in a little wrestling match with Jacob, or sit down to Abraham and Sarah’s cooking, or converse with humans as his own ‘angel;’ … [and] establish an earthly address at Number One Temple Avenue” (Jenson, “Toward a Christian Doctrine of Israel”). In these encounters, Israel received the Word and uttered the words of prophecies in the Spirit. As Lee says, “The Word that came to the prophets was the retroactive existence of the risen one, from the heaven/future by the Spirit” (Lee, 63).

The same Word appears in the New Testament after his death and resurrection. “After the resurrection, the presence of Jesus is not restricted by space and time as we are in this age” (Lee). As Jenson puts it, Jesus “did not simply return to inhabit the witnesses’ time and space,” but he “appeared when and as he would and then ‘vanished from their sight.'” As the Gospel of John tells us, “Although the doors were shut,” Jesus yet “came and stood among them.” So, Jenson writes, “If we ask where Jesus was–so to speak–resident during the days of the appearances, the immediately available answer is that he was in the heaven of the apocalypses, that is, in God’s final future, from which he showed himself–or the Spirit showed him–to the chosen” (ST 1, 139).

Lee summarizes Jenson’s view brilliantly:

For Jenson, the event of the resurrection that occurred in the middle of history determines the content of the future, and it recursively breaks into any or some points of time of history, as the futural and liberating power.

This occasional “breaking into history” is an eschatological revelation:

The risen one appears in apocalyptic fashion: “Paul calls what he saw a ‘revelation’ (apokalypsis).” Jenson states, “What certain persons saw after his death was a reality of that future.” So Jesus is “risen into the future that God has for his creatures.” Now he is in the Eschaton, and he is the Eschatos. He is coming to us by the rushing power of the Spirit. He comes by the Spirit as he comes from the future. (Lee, 162)

So, then, Jenson’s claim seems to be that the preexistent Word (the Son) in the beginning of creation is not the Logos asarkos, but the fully divine and fully human Jesus of Nazareth, who inhabits God’s final future (the Eschaton). This view requires a revisionary conception of time. As Jenson puts it: “Time is more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ.”