Robert Jenson

The latest theologian I've come across in my search for the secrets of the universe is Robert Jenson. I have read some of his online writings ... I can't say I understood him well, but I really liked his Jesus/God, who he sees as very immediate. Having said that, I read an article on homosexuality by a group to which he belongs - The Ramsey Colloquium - with which I disagreed.

David B. Hart wrote that he's possibly America's most creative systematic theologian. Below is a bit from a First Things article by Hart, The Lively God of Robert Jenson in which he discusses Jenson's idea of the trinity. I've left out the part about the trinity :-) as it probably should be read in its entirety to do it justice, but I've left in Hart's opinion of Jenson ...

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A year ago, I was interviewed by a small theological journal concerning a book of mine that had appeared a few months earlier. Near the end of the conversation, my interlocutor (a young and obviously intelligent divinity student) asked me if there was any modern American theologian whose thinking I thought especially fascinating, to which I answered Robert Jenson; he then asked if there was any American theologian with whose thought I myself found it especially profitable to struggle, to which I again answered, without a moment’s hesitation, Robert Jenson ....

... Among those who do genuinely care about systematic theology in this country, his work is known and esteemed (indeed, by many, revered), and the appearance a few years ago of his Systematic Theology confirmed his stature not only as an exciting thinker—more theoretically audacious than almost all of his contemporaries—but one whose achievement is indisputably enormous ...

... His books are not buttressed (as we know such things should be) by long, ponderous, Teutonic prolegomena on method or on critical history or on the status quaestionis; his scholarly apparatus rarely exceed what is necessary to support his assertions and are almost ascetically devoid of needless displays of exhaustive erudition; his method and peculiar concerns are typically disclosed in the act of theology itself, on the wing, and he tends to say what he wishes to say once only, and as concisely as he can.

Of course, this last characteristic can occasionally prove daunting. At its most idiosyncratic, Jenson’s prose has about it at once a spare tautness and a condensed energy that are almost palpable; one sometimes has the premonition that if certain of his sentences are handled too casually they might detonate. Whether his style is the result of a conscious method, or merely of the legendarily laconic reserve of the Scandinavian upper Midwest translated through a rigorous speculative intelligence, it occasionally produces formulations of a positively oracular terseness ...

Perhaps the simplest thing one might say about Jenson’s theology is that it is a theology of the living God. To put the matter thus, however, scarcely conveys any inkling of the vibrancy of Jenson’s sense of God’s liveliness, or of the force with which that sense has impressed itself upon—and occupies every page of— Jenson’s theology: There is nothing in the triune God, one might better say, that is not an infinite act of life— and that life an act of boundless love. God is the movement of the Father’s love for the Son, and the Son’s love for the Father, and their inexhaustible life together in the endless love of the Spirit; and within that movement is contained all beauty, glory, splendor, joy, and future. As Jenson insists upon saying, God is an event—the event, to be precise, of Christ in its eternal fullness—and this event has a real and concrete history ...

(most of the article - trinity stuff - snipped)

... Jenson’s work: there (especially in his Systematic Theology) one will find an account of the triune God drawing near to us—and of us drawing near to Him—of extraordinary richness, one that is (depending on one’s temperament or intellectual affiliations) either seductive or scandalous, but one that is also impossible to dismiss or forget.

Again, I feel free to plead my own disinterest where Jenson is concerned. As it happens—to return to the anecdote with which I began—whatever elf or imp it is that arranges the little ironies of our lives had contrived that, on returning home from the interview with the young divinity school student that I mentioned above, I should find an e-mail waiting for me from a fairly authoritative interpreter of Jenson’s work, complaining that my critique of Jenson’s theology, in the very book concerning which I had just been interviewed, 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. Hence this article (though I cannot be sure I have not merely compounded my earlier malfeasance with an inadequate synopsis).

So, speaking for myself, I wish to say only that 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. No one of my theological persuasion, I think, who engages Jenson’s thought in earnest can doubt that it is indeed the living God with whom he has come to grips: not some fabulous metaphysical phantom conjured out of Jenson’s fixations or fantasies, but a genuine attempt to describe the God of Scripture in the fullness of His historical presence and eternal identity. Nor, I think, can such a theologian hope to retreat from that contest without a wound; but neither, for that matter, will he depart without a blessing.

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To read some of Jenson's work online, you can visit this page

Visit the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology here, which he co-founded

Read more about The Ramsey Colloquium of which Jenson is a member