God’s Unity with Himself was at Stake in the Cross

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Hi Friends,

We will gather tonight at 7:00 EST to continue our study of Bonhoeffer’s “Lectures on Christology.” Josh cannot make it so my friend Dennis will join us.

Here is the link to join us.

Here are the pages we will cover:

Bonhoeffer Reading 42.46MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

Robert Jenson concludes his book on the basic flaw in ecumenical theology, Unbaptized God, by pointing to the eschatological nature of the church. He praises Anglican-Orthodox dialogue its willingness to say out loud what the church has too often and too long left as an item in footnotes. Namely, the church is not only the deposit of the fathers, the church is the foretaste of the future— the Last Future; that is, the church is not just an echo of the past, she is an anticipation of the End. The Father gives the Son “for the life of the world,” the Spirit sets up camp in the world incarnation prepared for it, and the church thus draws her life not from sentimentality but off of that divine movement. We literally feed on this sustaining love by faith, from Sunday to the next.

This means the church itself lives “for the life of the world.”

If this is true, Jenson writes, then the church’s very tradition—its prayers, sacraments, preaching, polity, even our persistent arguments with one another—is not primarily about preserving the riches of the past nor is about holding the line against creeping cultural decay.

The tradition is alive, a force in motion.

When the Holy Spirit shows up, it is the presence of the Risen Jesus— as he lives now in the Last Future. Thus the Holy Spirit always breaks into our now as the presence and power of God’s not-yet. Which is to say, the presence of Christ’s Spirit is always eschatological. The Holy Spirit’s presence just is the Future breaking and entering our present. This means the church is not primarily a museum curated for the movement begun by the dead Jesus.

The church is anticipation. We are who we are not because we cling to what was, but because we live toward what shall be.

The Spirit, Jenson says, is the one who keeps the church the church, who makes us both dynamic and yet still ourselves, who renders our identity across time something more than nostalgia. The whole eucharistic, liturgical, institutional life of the church—warts, cringe, and all—is where that continuity happens, because the Spirit keeps making it happen.

Now if Christ is present to us eschatologically by the Spirit, then the church does not merely remember the incarnation as a founding event of the past. The church, as the Anglican-Orthodox dialogues dared to say, is equally founded on what has not yet happened, on the promised future.

Just so—

Continuity is not about clinging to the past. Continuity is about the church making the Future intelligible.

The church is identical with herself through time precisely because in every “now” she is anticipating the one End.

If the dialogue between East and West managed to make this claim clear, it’s because both need to learn it, Jenson argues. All other ecumenical disputes do not much matter if the church misses this central point. Once again, Jenson lays the blame on the church’s half-baptized Hellenistic philosophy, which prevented her from ridding herself of her most stubborn idolatries.

The religion of Plato, Jenson writes, told us that eternity meant timelessness and being meant persistence. God was the one immune to the threats and opportunities of time. This picture of deity despite the church’s gospeling. Christianity half-exorcised it, but not fully. The result, Jenson judges, is a Christology that limps and an ecclesiology that knows not how to conceive of history.

Instead, if we actually trust that the Holy Spirit is fully God with the Father, then we would repent of imagining eternity as a static, unchanging plateau. We would start to see eternity as the dramatic mutuality of Father and Spirit, the origin and the goal. God’s being would no longer be persistence; it would be anticipation.

If we understood God’s being as anticipation, then, as Jenson posits, the church would see her foundational identity not in resisting change but in faithful change, in living open to what must come. This signals a seismic shift in the church’s self-understanding. However, if the gospel is true, Jenson argues, it is the only choice available to Christ’s bride.

The church’s foundational identity is not in resisting change but in faithful change, in living open to what must come.

This is the radical move Jenson presses:

It is not enough to say the Spirit has initiative in God’s saving work. God’s very being is this initiative.

Too often we treat the Holy Spirit as the caboose on the triune train. By contrast, Jenson insists the Spirit is the goal, the liberator, the one who makes Father and Son not static “hypostases” but living persons. Tradition extols the Father as the fountainhead of the Trinity, yet if the tradition remains there we end up with Plato’s unbaptized God— celebrating beginnings, persistence, security. Jenson asserts that we have to add: the Holy Spirit is the unsurpassed one, the liberator.

In other words, according to Jenson:

The Father is not really Father unless the Spirit frees him from being just Cause. The Son isn’t really Son unless the Spirit makes him more than just Begotten.

This means the church’s liturgy, her preaching, her whole practical church life has to stop treating Pentecost as a postscript. The Spirit is not merely “also God.” The Holy Spirit is God’s own Future. And until we see this, we’ll keep organizing our theology like a flowchart that only runs one way—from Father to Son to Spirit, all active voice on one side, all passive voice on the other.

Until we see that the Spirit is God’s own Future, we’ll keep organizing our theology like a flowchart that only runs one way—from Father to Son to Spirit, all active voice on one side, all passive voice on the other.

Jenson warns that this “flowchart of deity”may be the single greatest shaper of how we actually live as church. And, unfortunately, it’s pagan. Because it imagines eternity as safety rather than freedom.

What happens, Jenson wonders, if we actually believe what we preach?

What happens if we dare to trust that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, that God is in himself as he revealed himself to be in the scriptures and vice versa?

Jenson does not shirk.

He insists we have to venture a claim as bracing as this:

God’s unity with himself was at stake in the cross. The Father’s world, the Spirit’s Future, collided in Jesus’ fate. The unity of God is not—was not— a timeless given. It was executed in the resurrection.

What if Pharaoh had won?

What if Jesus had succumbed to the Tempter’s lure?

What if Pilate’s stone had remained fixed in the mouth of the tomb?

If we say those outcomes were metaphysically impossible, then we have simply gutted the gospel.

God’s identity, Jenson insists, is at risk in the story he tells with us, in the history he is making with us. That’s how seriously God takes time. Which means, the Son is not just the middleman between the Father’s Beginning and the Spirit’s End. The Son’s death and resurrection are the actual turning point where Beginning and End become one. Of course, this is the straightforward announcement of the scriptures.

The Logos is a Story.

God’s unity isn’t a principle.

It is a narrative word, told in flesh and blood, in crucifixion and resurrection.

The resurrection, like Aristotle’s definition of a true story, is the unpredictable that afterward proves inevitable.

It turns out God is the only one who has ever really told such a story.

This is why Jenson refuses to leave the Eucharist as just another sacrament on the list. The Eucharist is the church’s participation in the Son as the reconciliation of Beginning and End. It is the sacrament of the one good story, the story that is God’s life and therefore our own. In the Eucharist, the church is at the center of history and the end of history, both at once. We remember precisely the Future. We taste the kingdom not as a far-off hope but as bread and wine today.

The Eucharist is the sacrament of God’s narrative identity.

And the church is the community that lives by telling and retelling that story.

Just so, Jenson ventures that our true ecumenical difficult is not in settling technical theological disputes but rather whether our liturgies, our calendars, our preaching actually honor Pentecost as much as Easter, the Spirit as much as the Father, anticipation as much as memory.

Jenson’s wager is that the church’s divisions and immobility all stem from how we’ve clung to an unbaptized picture of God. We imagine him as persistence instead of promise, as immunity to time instead of faithfulness in time.

Until this changes, our divine flowchart will keep shaping us more than gospel.

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