E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 1

Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: The Works of God. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 1

For Jenson, systematic theology is a cognitive practice of thinking undertaken by the church that is

internal to the task of speaking the gospel. Theological thinking is “speculative,” “practical,” and

“hermeneutical.” Theology is a practical discipline as a critical and self­critical guide to the practice of speaking

the gospel, which is the mission of the church. It is also a “cognitive enterprise so captivated by a determinate

object that it is its own reward” (p. 11). It is speculative with regard to the determinate object which the gospel

witnesses to, namely, the Resurrection. “To attend to the resurrection is to attend to God self­identified as ‘the

one who raised the Lord Jesus.’ Whoever ­ and, indeed, whatever, ­ did that, the church says, is the reality we

mean by ‘God.’ To attend to the Resurrection and to attend to this particular putative God, to take either as the

object of our reflection, are the same” (p. 12). As reflection internal to the practice of speaking the gospel,

theology is also “hermeneutical” reflection as interpretation internal to the act of tradition “that begins with a

received word and issues in a new word essentially related to the old word” (p. 14). The history of the gospel and

its practice is, hence, necessarily a history of interpretative thought on the part of the church that involves historic

choices. These historic choices are dogmatically evidenced in the logical form marked by irreversibility

characteristic of theological propositions: “ ‘To be speaking the gospel, let us henceforward say ‘F’ rather than

that other possibility ‘G.’ A dogmatic choice is one by which the church so decisively determines her own future

that if the choice is wrongly made, the community determined by that choice is no longer in fact the community of

the gospel; thus no church thereafter exists to reverse the decision’ ” (p. 17). Christian theology, for Jenson, is a

hermeneutical, second­order discourse explicating the prescriptive grammar of the first­order discourse of the

church's practice of speaking the gospel.

As the ongoing ecclesial practice of thinking for the sake of its mission and practice of the speaking of

the gospel, systematic theology will always be related to dogma as the irreversible decisions of the community of

1 I am grateful to the editor of Homiletic for permission to incorporate my review of the first volume for this expanded review.

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 2

faith so far taken in that effort. “Therefore all theology is subject to the authority of dogma and may in turn

contribute to dogma yet to be formulated. The theologian who understands his or her work knows that to proceed

in contradiction or indifference to dogma is to turn from theology to another practice” (p. 22). For Jenson,

systematic theology is only relatively distinguished from dogmatic theology in that, whereas dogmatic theology is

principally concerned with explicating the dogmas of the church, systematics “is more freely concerned with the

truth of the gospel, whether dogmatically defined or not” (p. 22).

The plan of Jenson's systematics is configured in light of Catholic and Protestant outlines of theology,

two construals of systematics that have typically predominated in the Western theological tradition. In Scholastic

and Tridentine Roman Catholic theology, the subject matter is, first and foremost, God and then all other things

as “ordered to God as to their … source and final goal” [Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, i.1.8]. For

Protestant theology “in its seventeenth­century maturity” (p. x), theology was construed as a practical discipline

that is a guide to a practice or practices, namely, true faith in God, through various means. While informed by

and incorporating features of both, Jenson's project departs from them by including “christology and

pneumatology, together with discussions of the historical Jesus, of the doctrines of the atonement, and of the

resurrection, back into the doctrine of God” (p. x). Jenson's aim is to present a radically trinitarian theology in

which the immanent trinity is the economic trinity. For Jenson, Christian systematic theology can only be a

trinitarian theology with its “conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and

with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ” (p. 60). The

inclusion of christology, pneumatology, and the aforementioned doctrines functions not only to safeguard against

the possibility of the temptation of a nontrinitarian identification of God, but rather to enable them to identify God

“as narrative of the history with us with which and by which he [God] identifies himself” (p. 60).

For Jenson, since the biblical God is identified by narrative, God's self­identity or hypostatic being is

constituted by dramatic coherence. As constituted through dramatic coherence of the biblical narrative, divine

self­identity is established “not from the beginning but from the end, not at the birth but at the death, not in

persistence, but in anticipation. The biblical God is not eternally himself in that he persistently instantiates a

beginning in which he already is all he ever will be; he is eternally himself in that he unrestrictedly anticipates an

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 3

end in which he will be all he could ever be. It holds also ­ or, rather, primarily ­ with God: a story is constituted

by the outcome of the narrated events” (p. 66). But, since the biblical narrative has more than one agent, the

identity of the God of Exodus and Resurrection is determined in his relations with others who are not extrinsic,

such that theology “must reckon with and seek to identify a plurality of what can only be called dramatis dei

personae, ‘characters of the drama of God’ ” (p. 75). For Jenson, the event of the resurrection of Jesus provides

the central dramatic coherence for the self­identification of God as triune.

Part II [“The Triune Identity” (pp. 63­161)] presents a reinterpretation of the christological and

trinitarian doctrines through a closer recognition and adherence to the biblical God's hypostatic being as

determined by the coordinates of the triune name in light of the dramatis dei personae ­ Father, Son, and Spirit.

This section can most fruitfully be understood as a systematic theological rethinking of dogmatic theology in light

of the scriptural narrative, preparatory work for the culmination of the volume in Part III [“The Triune

Character” pp. 165­236)] and its presentation of the definitive self­identification of God in terms of the event of

the resurrection of Jesus attested to in the good news that “Jesus is risen from the dead”. Jenson's reinterpretation,

as the rethinking of dogma in light of the biblical narrative, seeks to address the patrological, christological, and

pneumatological problems in the classical dogmatic formulations. Specifically, he seeks to accomplish “what

Nicea and Constantinople and the theologians who enabled them did not accomplish” in light of their assumption

of the equivalence between deity and impassability, their failure to recover “a biblical understanding of the Logos

as God's speech”, and their protological interest in relations of origin as constitutive for the divine life of the

triune God, thereby suppressing “the eschatological character of God's scriptural history” (p. 108).

Part III is the systematic theological conclusion, presenting the trinitarian concept of the Being of

God [Chapter 13 ­ "The Being of God" (pp. 207­223)] by reinterpreting being ‘to accommodate the gospel,

and just by so doing say what it is for God to be ‘ (p. 212) in virtue of Jenson's conceptual move ‘from the

biblical God's self­identification by events in time to his identification with those events ‘ (p. 58). Jenson's

argument can be seen as a radicalization of the seventeenth­century Swabian Lutheran christological

proposal regarding the personal unity of Jesus of Nazareth (as scripturally presented) as the basis for the

understanding of the divinity and humanity of Christ, rather than interpreting, in abstraction from the

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 4

Scriptural narrative, the person in light of an understanding of the divine and human natures derived from a

metaphysics of substance. Jenson systematically proposes to revision the doctrine of God in terms of the

gospel news that “Jesus is risen from the dead” by incorporating christology, pneumatology, the historical

Jesus, the atonement, and resurrection within the doctrine of God, though, with an eschatological emphasis

upon the resurrection. This is the reason why the trinitarian interpretation of the being of God is preceded

by the interrelated discussions of Jesus [Chapter 10 (pp. 165­178)], the crucifixion [Chapter 11 (pp. 179­

193)], and the resurrection [Chapter 12 (pp. 194­206)]. The centrality of the resurrection as historical

event is underscored by being already included, contra Bultmann, as a specification of Jesus' historical

reality, together with his birth, life, and death, in Chapter 10. Chapter 12 [“the Resurrection”] is concerned

principally with the question of the “bodily” character of the resurrection.

Jenson notes that his repeated emphasis upon the centrality of the resurrection “does, however,

remove the Crucifixion from a kind of centrality it has sometimes occupied in theology” and that “[w]hat

the church in her self­identification has denoted by ‘the gospel’ is the message of the crucified one's

resurrection” (p. 179). His emphasis invites the counterquestion as to whether his position is a theologia

gloriae rather than theologia crucifixi. Despite his affirmations of the unity of crucifixion and resurrection

as events within God's triune life, an ambiguity is present in his various formulations. On the one hand, his

language can imply that the crucifixion is the negative presupposition for the positive event of the

resurrection: “The Crucifixion is God's salvific action just in that God overcomes it by the Resurrection”

(p. 182). On the other hand, in another place, his language can imply that the crucifixion of Jesus is the

positive condition of the possibility for the resurrection in that God's self­identity is decisively established in

the crucifixion: “The Crucifixion put it up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son? To this

candidate to be his own self­identifying Word? … The Resurrection was the Father's Yes. We may say:

the Resurrection settled that the Crucifixion's sort of God is indeed the one God; the Crucifixion settled

what sort of God it is who establishes his deity by the Resurrection. Or: the Crucifixion settled who and

what God is; the Resurrection settled that this God is" (p. 189). A clarification of the issue for the reader

would have been possible if Jenson had explicitly engaged in dialogue with those contemporary post­

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Bultmannian positions (e.g., Eberhard Jüngel, Ingolf Ulrich Dalferth, and Ebeling) emphasizing the

centrality of the crucifixion, that argue for the latter claim, namely, the triune self­identification of God in

the history of Jesus' birth, life, and death disclosed in the resurrection without requiring the affirmation of

the resurrection as historical event in space and time. This is especially important in light of the many

theological concerns shared in common by both Jenson and such figures.

This theological issue is also related to an important hermeneutical issue vis­à­vis the theological

interpretation of Scripture. Could one not possibly affirm the triune self­identification of God in light of

the narrative/story of Jesus' history (birth, life, and death) and resurrection rather than, as Jenson does, in

light of the history of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection, thereby conflating narrative/story and

history? For Jenson, the test for a system of theology in relation to Scripture is in terms of “its success or

failure as a hermeneutical principle for Scripture taken as a whole, as one great text with a very complex

internal structure…. Internal biblical proof of the system that follows can therefore only be the system

itself as it presents itself in the role of a general hermeneutical principle for Scripture taken as a single

complex text, that is, as it marshals the structured whole of the Bible to its own systematic and

argumentative purposes and just thereby displays or fails to display the coherent sense that the Bible itself

is antecedently presumed to make” (p. 33). But is it necessary hermeneutically to read the Bible as one

single narrative in order to affirm theologically the triune self­identification of God? Many post­

Bultmannian theological positions, such as those mentioned above, would affirm that the affirmation of the

triune self­identification of God does not necessarily require such a hermeneutical claim.

Jenson himself does in fact raise the question “Is there in fact ‘the’ biblical narrative, running

through all the Scriptures' historical discontinuities and non­narrative genres?” (p. 58). His response to the

question is a dogmatic stipulation because finally “one cannot interpret the Bible independently of the

church and its dogma is that without these there is no such book. The modern attempt to interpret

Scripture ‘historically’ has been intrinsically self­defeating and has now defeated itself, since it has

curiously supposed that to interpret the Bible historically we must abstract from the history for whose

attestation the church assembled this collection in the first place, the Incarnation and the Resurrection of

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Christ” (p. 59). Jenson does not totally discredit historical criticism, however, even though he terms it

“self­defeating” and “defeated”: “In the church, we will credit reconstructions of ‘the historical Jesus’ that

are compatible with the canonical narrative before we credit alternative hypotheses that are not” (p. 174).

But does this mean that the interpretation of the biblical texts is captive to its churchly interpreters

who claim proprietary possession of the texts? Jenson contends that “[I]f now we ask who is to defend a

biblical text against its churchly interpreters ­ perhaps by pointing out facts about it [emphasis added]­ the

final answer is that the Spirit must do so. But at the lower level maintained in these prolegomena, the

needed insight is that there is no one to defend the text against the association of its interpreters except the

community of those same interpreters, that is, the church as church over against the church as a certain

number of conjoined persons. All texts finally need an interpreter that is no particular interpreter or even

all particular interpreters added or averaged together, that is to say, all texts need a true community as

interpreter; in the church, Scripture has just such a defender” (p. 40). Could one not say theologically,

however, that the Spirit of truth is free to elect as defenders historical­critical interpreters of the biblical

texts both within the church and outside of the church (in a Cyrus­like capacity)? It is questionable

whether Jenson's antithetical portrayal of the relation between the historical­critical method and the

theological interpretation of Scripture is adequate in light of those systematic positions that articulate

hermeneutical mediations between them. It would have again been helpful for the reader if Jenson had

seriously engaged other contemporary theological positions, which articulate sophisticated discussions of

the hermeneutical issues between the historical­critical method and the theological interpretation of

Scripture, in order to substantiate his, often acerbic, contentions. It has often been remarked that the

greatest strength of seventeenth­century Lutheran christological proposals, its dogmatic attentiveness to the

Scriptural narratives, was perhaps also its greatest weakness. Perhaps the strength of Jenson's dogmatic

attentiveness to the biblical texts, underlying the strengths of his systematic theological proposals, is also

the greatest weakness of his systematic theology.

Jenson's second volume, devoted to the works of God ad extra in relation to the doctrines of

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 7

creation, the church, and the final Kingdom, is predicated upon the dogmatic claim of the dramatic

coherence of the Scriptural narrative. The dramatic coherence of the Scriptural narrative is the

presentation of “initial creation and redemption and fulfillment” as "dramatically united moments of God's

one creative work, shaped and moved by his one intent to save,” “a total dramatically unified divine action”

(Vol. 2:14). His affirmation of the dramatic coherence of the Scriptural narrative is significant in terms of

his departure from associating it with the Catholic tradition's framework of nature and grace (cf. 2:66­68)

and its declared reclamation of futurist eschatology and the describability of its content over against the

"eschatological ascesis" of dialectical, Neo­Protestant, and postmodern theologies (cf. 2:309­310, 321).

For Jenson, the critical questions and suspicions directed towards the dogmatic claim of the coherent unity

of the biblical narrative in light of the work of the historical­critical method in modernity are finally

irrelevant, even though he claims "[s]uch historical consciousness and the routines of reading that have

developed within it ­ … ­ are in themselves imperative for the church's interpretation of Scripture" (2:278).

Citing Ebeling, Jenson claims that “at least where Christianity and modernity or postmodernity overlap,”

the historical­critical reading of Scripture is ‘the necessary self­criticism by the interpreter with respect to

… the possibilities of self­deception about what the … text intends’” (vol. 2:278).

Even though “the church is able to live neither with nor without ‘historical­critical exegesis’” (vol.

2:279), the resolution to the crisis of interpretation in modernity lies in the nature of the church. For

Jenson, the "one simple insight" requisite for the resolution of the hermeneutical crisis is that, "[w]hatever

hermeneutical gaps may need to be dealt with in the course of the church's biblical exegesis, there is one

that must not be posited or attempted to be dealt with: there is no historical distance between the

community in which the Bible appeared and the church that now seeks to understand the Bible, because

these are the same community.” For Jenson, “[t]he error of almost all modern biblical exegesis” lies in its

“subliminal assumption that the church in and for which Matthew and Paul wrote, or in which Irenaeus

shaped the canon, and the church in which we now read what they produced are historically distant from

each other, the subliminal assumption that there is no one diachronically identical universal church: nearly

all modern biblical exegesis in fact presupposes a sectarian ecclesiology” (vol. 2:279­280).

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 8

Jenson notes and emphasizes a necessary hermeneutical corollary to this dogmatic denial of

historical distance, namely, that “historical honesty requires the church to interpret Scripture in the light of

her dogmas” (vol. 2:281). Hence, if there is the church, then the dogma of the church “is in the direct

continuity of Scripture and is a necessary principle for interpreting Scripture, and vice versa” (vol. 2:281).

Hence, Jenson contends that the dogmatic claim of the church concerning the entitative identity of “the

Word that came to the prophets and the Word incarnate by Mary” entails that the interpretation of the

Servant Songs through the christology of the ecumenical councils “is not the imposition of an extrinsic rule

but is rather vital elucidation of what the text historically says” (vol. 2:281). The hermeneutical necessity

of interpretation of the biblical texts in light of dogma, however, neither means that “every biblical passage

must be made to agree with dogma” nor that “the Bible is theologically homogeneous even with itself”

(2:281). It also does not, Jenson claims, mean that “historical study may not find that particular apparently

dogmatic decisions of the church are unsupported by Scripture” (2:281).

The categorical denial of historical distance with regards to the church is seen by Jenson as not

being the critical disarming or neutralization of “historical­critical study's ability to confront readers of

Scripture with the otherness of the texts” (2:281). “The historical distances that historical­critical reading

of Scripture can and must keep open are historical distances within the story of Scripture's community;

they make the historical compass of the one community whose book this is. The historical distances with

which interpretation must indeed reckon and of which historical­critical labors must maintain the awareness

are the distances between Moses and the later prophets, or between the prophets and Jesus, or between

Jesus and Paul and Paul and us, but never between the story as a whole and us, never between the biblical

community as a whole and the present church” (2:281). These historical differences are precisely those

which it is the task of historical criticism “to mark … ever more sharply” (2:282). It is precisely the task

of historical criticism to function correctively in order to prevent the “perversion of ‘spiritual’ exegesis by

attending to historical locations and the respective historical differences between those locations. Churchly

exegesis as "spiritual," safeguarded from perversion through historical criticism, “that should now be

possible would be devoted as any medieval homilist to finding a christological and eschatological and moral

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sense in every last event or testimony of Scripture but would be constrained by historical consciousness

from finding them by ahistorical associations” (2:284). Jenson offers his own pages of scriptural

interpretation in his systematics as illustrative examples of such a possible exegesis (which then could be

legitimately examined as to whether or not it is sufficiently safeguarded from “ahistorical associations”).

Yet Jenson stipulates a limit to how sharply such historical distances can be drawn. In the church

he contends that ever more sharply delineated historical­critical readings cannot call into question the

dramatic coherence of the church's telling of the narrative. “But in the church this must be done only to

profile the individual moments of one dramatically coherent history and its telling. With any particular

biblical event or passage, this preliminary step is necessary; but actual interpretation is then the art of

displaying the thus profiled event or teaching or prophecy or prayer in its place within the one story of God

with his people” (2:282). For Jenson, the historical­critical method is permissible and necessary as an

ancillary moment and a corrective to abuses of “spiritual” exegesis, situated within dogmatic limits.

Though disputing the First Vatican Council's teaching concerning the supposition of a knowledge of God

“by natural human reason” (2:162­163), Jenson appears to concur with the First Vatican Council's

“Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith” and its explanation of the Tridentine decree on the

interpretation of Scripture: “that in matter of faith and morals, belonging as they do to the establishing of

christian doctrine, that meaning of holy scripture must be held to be the true one, which holy mother church

held and holds, since it is her right to judge of the true meaning and interpretation of holy scripture. In

consequence, it is not permissible for anyone to interpret holy scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed

against the unanimous consent of the fathers” (in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 2: Trent to

Vatican II, ed. by Norman P. Tanner, S. J. [Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990]).

Jenson's position can also be understood as a re­affirmation (with modifications) of what Ernst

Troeltsch described as the “dogmatic method” in his classic 1898 article “Historical and Dogmatic Method

in Theology” (available in English translation in Ernst Troeltsch, Religion in History, essays trans. by

James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense [Minneapolis: Fortress Press [ Fortress Texts in Modern

Theology], 1991). At issue is whether or not the historical­critical method as method can be limited such

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 10

that one cannot even rationally consider and seriously entertain the possibility of suspicions it might raise

that dogmatic construals of the dramatic coherence of salvation­historical model could rest upon a

hermeneutical self­deception in relation to the biblical texts. For Troeltsch, “[w]hoever lends it [the

historical­critical method] a finger must give it a hand” such that “[o]nce the historical method is applied to

biblical science and church history, it is a leaven that alters everything and, finally, bursts apart the entire

structure of theological methods employed until the present” (English translation modified). Does not the

use of the historical­critical method as a self­critical method require seriously entertaining such a possibility

in order to be prepared to follow rationality's imperative of epistemic openness?

Jenson himself defines rationality as “epistemic openness to God's future,” “obedience to the

command, ‘Be prepared to change your mind. Test your opinions, by whatever are in any instance the

appropriate warrants’ ”(2:146­147). Irrationality is precisely disobedience of this command and as such “

‘is indeed a crime’ ”(2:147). In language remarkably akin to Immanuel Kant's essay “What is

Enlightenment?” Jenson states categorically that “[w]hen I maintain my opinions merely because I already

hold them, I shut myself against the future and so against the new possibilities others represent to me. And

so I violate community. I violate community even or especially when I hold my opinions simply because

my community itself already maintains them” (2:147). Could not the affirmation of a dogmatic limitation

to the possible radicality of questions that might be (and have been) raised for certain theological construals

in relation to the interpretation of Scripture, such as a salvation­historical one of the total dramatic

coherence of the biblical texts, be such a violation “even or especially when” a community itself already

dogmatically maintains them? And, where Christianity and modernity (and post­modernity perhaps)

overlap, this is a question that theology has often been tempted to avoid, but finally in self­honesty cannot

be avoided.

As noted earlier, for Jenson, systematic theology is only relatively distinguished from dogmatic theology

in that, whereas dogmatic theology is principally concerned with explicating the dogmas of the church,

systematics “is more freely concerned with the truth of the gospel, whether dogmatically defined or not”(1: 22).

Perhaps a more apt general title for Jenson's systematics would be “dogmatic theology” rather than systematic

E. Crump/ Jenson Review/ 11

theology.

Eric H. Crump

Assoc. Prof. of Systematic Theology Lutheran Theological Seminary ­ Gettysburg