The first volume of Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology resolves two theological difficulties in the doctrine of God by innovatively binding together eschatology and pneumatology (advancing what I will refer to as Jenson’s “eschatological pneumatology”) in order to develop and sustain material proposals concerning God’s triune character. In terms of eschatology, Jenson’s project critically opposes theologies which are overdetermined by protological thinking, or God’s reality as source and origin, and also critically revises theologies which are unable to give content to God’s eschatological character. Rhetorically, Jenson’s revisions are framed by attention to the narrative identity of the biblical God. In terms of pneumatology, Jenson corrects
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This kind of theological thinking is noted by its adherence to an “adamant persistence.” Jenson’s most explicit concern with these kind of theologies emerge in his chapter on the ways of the triune God’s identity (1:63-74). For Jenson, because God speaks the gospel as promise, God’s self-identity is constituted through a logic of anticipation. God is God in the present precisely as God anticipates who God will be. Persistence, by contrast, constitutes divine identity according to a logic of origins and sources. The difference here hangs on a differential relation to the future. Jenson …show more content…
Bultmann is able to say “Resurrection happens” but has difficulty with the particularity of “Jesus is risen” (1:168). So Jenson claims: “[c]onfrontation with eschatological possibility must, according to Bultmann, deprive the previous course of events of determinative force. If, therefore, the meaning of a past event is that it poses eschatological possibility, then the temporal course of that event must be irrelevant to its meaning” (1:169). The problem, then, stated as succinctly as possible, is that Bultmann’s eschatology stands in a negative relation to narrative. If a historical event, like the resurrection, is understood as eschatological, it can only be valued eschatologically as a sheer historical moment, it cannot be narrated as a historical extension across
This kind of theological thinking is noted by its adherence to an “adamant persistence.” Jenson’s most explicit concern with these kind of theologies emerge in his chapter on the ways of the triune God’s identity (1:63-74). For Jenson, because God speaks the gospel as promise, God’s self-identity is constituted through a logic of anticipation. God is God in the present precisely as God anticipates who God will be. Persistence, by contrast, constitutes divine identity according to a logic of origins and sources. The difference here hangs on a differential relation to the future. Jenson …show more content…
Bultmann is able to say “Resurrection happens” but has difficulty with the particularity of “Jesus is risen” (1:168). So Jenson claims: “[c]onfrontation with eschatological possibility must, according to Bultmann, deprive the previous course of events of determinative force. If, therefore, the meaning of a past event is that it poses eschatological possibility, then the temporal course of that event must be irrelevant to its meaning” (1:169). The problem, then, stated as succinctly as possible, is that Bultmann’s eschatology stands in a negative relation to narrative. If a historical event, like the resurrection, is understood as eschatological, it can only be valued eschatologically as a sheer historical moment, it cannot be narrated as a historical extension across