Seeing What Is from What Will Be

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Here is the recording from the Mockingbird Book Club conversation I led on Robert Jenson’s little book, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live?

The book itself are the transcriptions from a rare undergraduate course Jenson taught on Christian theology at Princeton University the decade before his death. I began the book club by trying to offer an orientation on Jenson and his work, using Jens’s essay, A Theological Autobiography, to Date.

You can find that essay HERE.

Finally, here is the book’s closing paragraph which I read at the top of the conversation:

In my judgment, theology responds best by trusting in the gospel’s own interior rationality, and then building its own metaphysics, its own vision of reality. This endeavor has been going on for some time actually. One point guard in the endeavor might be Wolfhart Pannenberg, who has elaborated an entire system of metaphysics (and indeed an entire philosophy of science to go with it) on the principle that traditional metaphysics draws its vision of what is from what has been, whereas a distinctively Christian metaphysics must draw its vision from what will be. Indeed, that is what we have been doing all along here in these lectures. We have taken the claims of Christian doctrine with absolute seriousness: that the creator of all things is triune, so that his life has a specific structure from which the structure of everything else follows, and that one of the Trinity, one of the three, is the resurrected Jewish Messiah, Jesus.

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