Robert Jenson on Theology
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Robert Jenson, in his two-volume Systematic Theology, describes theology as the church's "continuing discourse about her individuating and carrying communal purpose."[1] "Church" is here defined as "the unique and unitary church of the creeds." Jenson writes this church is no longer "extant;" therefore theology in his sense might not be possible, until "by an act of God" the church be reunited (vii, viii).[2] This is the community gathered by God by the gospel to speak the gospel (5). Therefore, "theology is the thinking internal to the task of speaking the gospel, whether to humankind as message or to God in praise and petition" (ibid.). Theology thus is a critical "practical discipline" that asks (11): "Does this teaching or other practice further or hinder the saying of the gospel?" Theology, in other words, is not the same as proclamation or worship ("first-order discourse of faith") -- it is "'second-order' discourse" (18).
The gospel is here specifically the gospel of Christ's resurrection, "the origin and scopus of Christian theology" (4 n. 1). This gospel is more specifically defined as "witness to the Resurrection" and to the God who raised Jesus, respecitively (12).
Since, for Jenson, the gospel is not only spoken to men but also to God, specifically in worship, he can write, refering to the lex orandi lex credendi (the law of praying is the law of believing) rule (13):According to this principle, there are distinguishing regularities in the church's communal life of prayer, and these must govern the church's formulation of her belief.[3] Chief among such patterns of the church's prayer is its triune structure, and chief among historical instances of obediences to the catholic rule is the third- and fourth-century development of a conceptually elaborated doctrine of Trinity.
Yet he also takes up the "analogous" rule of the Reformation: lex proclamandi lex credendi (the law of proclaiming is the law of believing): "Theology is to take for its rule the specific character by which the gospel is the gospel and not some other sort of discourse; theology must be thinking that guards the proclamation in its authenticity" (13). What sets the gospel apart as gospel is its character as promise.[4]
Both formulae are needed, according to Jenson, lest theology lose sight of its assignment and its object, respectively (14).
Theology also is "hermeneutic," that is, interpretative in nature, located at the place "where past hearing turns to new speaking" (14). It is thus part of the process of tradition since "we do not have in any unmediated way the gospel we are to speak; we have it only as we receive it" (ibid.). This "historicality of the gospel" Jenson sees anchored in the gospel's promise-character, that is, in the fact that it "opens the future."[5] And since the gospel thus enables future from God, it must be historical (not timeless) in nature. The hermeneutic task exists also because the gospel is a missionary message; the Christian message concerning God, humanity, etc. "always emerges by the reinterpretation of some antecedent religious and theological understanding;" the church's "discourse simultaneously depends upon and collides with an antecedent discourse" (16).[6]
The result of this reinterpretation -- given what the church has heard (in church and other religions), the church now says the gospel is X -- Jenson calls "doctrine," which he distinguishes from dogma in that dogmas are more foundational, in fact, essential: Getting dogmas wrong means the end of a church as church, i.e., "the community of the gospel" (17).
As the church's "second-level discourse, [theology] is best described as a sort of grammar. The church, we may say, is the community that speaks Christianese, and theology formulates the syntax and semantics of this language" (18) in a prescritive not merely descriptive way which is possible because theology is in conversation with the God who speaks (20). At the same time, Christian language is regulated "by stating extralingual fact" (19). This means theology must be "metaphysical," that is, it must assume the existence of things beyond the empirical, physical realm, including God, "the one decisive fact about all things" (20). Due to its metaphysical knowledge, theology is "'universal' hermeneutics;" it interprets all things in light of God (20). Theology arrives at its metaphysical knowledge in discourse with philosophical metaphysics and hermeneutics, for which Jenson sees Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth as a prime examples.
The basic hermeneutical place of theology between the past and the future then also offers Jenson with a criterion to distinguish the theological subdisciplines, the most basic of which is that between "historical" and "normative" theology (21); "normative" theology is then subdivided in "systematic" and "pastoral" theology where the latter deals with the daily questions while the former looks at the big picture (22).
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), I:3. Page numbers refer to this volume.
- ↑ What church is Jenson really speaking about here? He rejects the notion that a single confessional or juridical body could be the church today. Yet it also cannot be the "invisible" church, the sum total of all believers, since, we hope, this still exisist. Is it the one undivided church of antiquity? Possibly, but then the reference to the "creeds" (plural!) seems inapproriate, since the East does not recognize the Anthanasian Creed and typically does not know the Apostles' Creed and does not agree with the West on the wording of the Nicene Creed (filioque, Jenson's solution: 149ff.).
- ↑ It is no surprise that Jenson knows of four theological norms (26): canonical Scripture as norma normans (norming norm); "the continuity of instituted liturgical action; the dogmatic tradition; and succession in ministerial office." Given what he says below about the reinterpretation of the gospel in the encounter with the religions of the world, one wonders whether those religions might not need to be added as a fifth norm.
- ↑ Jenson's way of coordinating the reformation's and the medieval church's doctrine of grace is interesting (13):
At least since the Council of Orange, it has not in the Western church been controversial that God's gifts are gratis, given only because God freely chooses to give them. Reformation theology merely pointed to one relatively neglected aspect of the agreed situation: since God's gifts are given in and through the person Jesus, the giving itself must be a personal act. Which is to say that God's grace occurs as word, as the address by which one person communicates him- or herself to others.
Reading Luther's Smalcald Articles, one certainly gets a different impression of what was controversial at the time and what was not. - ↑ Jenson also notes, drawing on "Bultmann and his followers," that in reality "all actual discourse in some way opens the future," the law being the kind of discourse where the hearer has to meet the conditions for this future, while in the case of the gospel the speaker meets these conditions (15 with n. 35).
- ↑ Emphasis added. Jenson quotes Ebeling who writes: "the circumstance that God ... is already spoken of, although it is sacra doctrina's hermeneutic condition, makes sacra doctrina simultaneously controverted." In other words, for Christian discourse about God to be understood, there has to be discourse about god. Ebeling, to be sure, makes this point drawing on Thomas Aquinas; but could he have not made it also, with a grain of salt, in reference to Schleiermacher? In other words, is not here also Christian discourse about God simply a "particular ... mode" of religious discourse in general? Jenson considers himself indebted to Schleiermacher's analysis of religion, but declares that he does not use it as Schleiermacher did, that is, in a foundational way (9). Is this convincing (cf. also Jenson 54ff., referencing Acts 17!)? -- Cf. O. Bayer, Theologie (Guetersloh: Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 1994), 470-474, where he contrasts Luther, on the one hand, with Schleiermacher and Ebeling, on the other hand: while the former understood false religions on the basis of the First Commandment (namely, as its perversions), the latter understood Christianity as a particular case of religion in general. According to Bayer, both Ebeling and Schleiermacher transform specific Christian notions into such common to humanity without making this explicit, while Luther set out with the concrete, specific First Commandment. Bayer's criticism of Schleiermacher and Ebeling evidently touches on the question of "natural theology," its essence and role in Christian theology which needs to be discussed seperately, especially in view of the fact pointed out by Jenson (8) that the Enlightenment made the natural theology of reason normative for all other theology.
