The Braaten-Jenson Duo: From Radical to Conservative?

Can we talk about what appears to me to be a rather distinct and unfortunate political shift in the Jenson-Braaten duo? Is it just me, or does this totally suck? The two founders of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and the journal Pro Ecclesia have co-edited something like 15 volumes on various theological topics in the past thirty some years or so. Many are familiar with Braaten primarily through the work of Jenson, who is considered by some to be the best living American theologian. Have you ever read Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson’s early theology? Braaten’s Christ and Counter-Christ is really a wonderful example of a politically radical ‘apocalyptic’ theology. I mean this Braaten loves Karl Marx. Similarly, Jenson’s Story and Promise is ultra critical of Americanism and capitalism. And both speak quite seriously about political revolution.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Braaten and Jenson are now right-wing ideologues–but we have to be honest about a real shift in the political tenor of their theology. I love Jenson’s more recent Systematic Theology, but I found much of the cultural critique in it to be quite disappointing. Some of the volumes that they’ve co-edited have also been quite disappointing and strangely conservative in tone–for instance, Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism.

C’mon, let’s talk about this–what went wrong here? Please, someone, tell me I’m mistaken.

Theologian of Christian Witness

Speaking of helpful secondary literature, Joseph Mangina has written a fine introduction to Karl Barth. The book is called Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness. This, however, is not just one more introduction to Barth, it also brings his thought into dialogue with other (mostly) contemporary theologians, namely George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, Henri de Lubac, Stanley Hauerwas, and Michael Wyschogrod.

Jesus and the Trinity

The appearance of Jesus requires that a specifically Christian construal of God be Trinitarian. In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the triune persons are revealed. Further, the nature and character of the eternal relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit is actualized in the concrete (i.e. historical) ‘appearance,’ that is to say, the incarnation of Jesus in history. At the same time, we must also emphasize that the person and work of Jesus stands in essential continuity with God’s work with and in Israel. Hence, as the New Testament writers tirelessly insist, Jesus is the fulfillment of the scriptures, the hopes, and dreams of Israel.

A clarification is, perhaps, in order: the significance of the historical appearance of Jesus for the Christian construal of God as triune, importantly, resists all abstraction. The incarnation radically calls into question all efforts to reach for a God behind God’s self-revelation in Jesus, for the historical relationship between Jesus and the Father is nothing other than the eternal relationship between the Son and the Father. Likewise, the historical outpouring of the Spirit in the story of Jesus is the eternal outpouring of the Spirit between the Father and the Son. In the words of Hebert McCabe, “the story of Jesus is nothing other than the triune life of God projected onto our history” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).  Hence, as Robert Jenson puts it, “‘God’ is whoever raised Jesus from the dead.” The reason why this story appears to us as fundamentally gruesome—a story about rejection, murder, and even state torture—is precisely because this is God’s life “projected on, lived out on, our rubbish tip” (McCabe, God Matters, 48).

Liturgy as play

Play is meaningful action that does not need to seek its meaning in some achievement exterior to itself. It is what we do because we do not have to. It is action to which the future opens as gift rather than as burden. The life of the Trinity is sheer play. As play with the Trinity, liturgy is anticipation of life in the Fulfillment–the closest we get to freedom. It must be admitted that liturgy-as-play is a rather rare occurrence in America’s recognized churches.

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 184.

Eschatological Politics

The only one who could make a revolution would be one who lived freedom from the established structures to its fulfilled end, without giving up on the historical human reality mediated in those structures. That is, only he could make a revolution who had freely abandoned his life, who had freely died and who had died of his total acceptance of his fellows in all their hate and alienation. There will only be a revolution if it is made by a loving one who has died. Those of us who say Jesus of Nazareth is risen say there is such a man, and await the revolution from him.

Therefore, also, we can invest revolutionary passion in utopias known to be utopias, without despair or fanaticism; he will make the revolution and not we. Just so, therefore, we are free from ourselves to attack each new status quo with abandon, in the name of that future that is the meaning of all presents.

Robert Jenson, “Eschatological Politics and Political Eschatology,” in Essays in Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 25.

Questing after God?

Christian spirituality is often understood in terms of a quest. We think of God as some thing out there after whom (or from whom!) we diligently search or quest. And so we seek God under, beneath, behind, above, or beyond temporality. God is some thing who is outside of it all. Temporal reality, that is ordinary life, thereby becomes something that must be penetrated or even overcome. Of course, we are always in this stage of seeking, for to claim to have “found” God would appear to be utterly presumptuous, would it not? And what would we do then, after we found God? The practice of questing for God is not limited to the “mystics” in our midst. Christians “seek” God in any number of ways, whether it be in social action or contemplation, rocking out to U2 or worshiping in a more traditional way.

According to Robert Jenson, however, the gospel is “an attack on this religious way of dealing with time,” for the gospel “denies the eternity of timelessness” (110). This questing for God is “regularly launched by some event in the world, that makes us see the peril of our temporality and suggests a refuge” (110). Instead, “the true eternity is temporal liberty, from exactly such fixity” (110). Jenson goes so far as to say the gospel unmasks this God of timeless eternity as Satan. This pseudo-God is bent on destroying us with the guilt of our own past and deludes us in a false sense of security in who what we are. In other words, the God of the gospel, the Father of Jesus, is not someone or something to whom we flee. We do not need to fear, flee, or defend ourselves from the future precisely because “Jesus’ triumph is our future” (110).

Christian spirituality is, therefore, not about questing for God, for the gospel reveals that “God” is not some distant thing above, beneath, within, or behind it all in some other realm of being. God is not out there to be reached for. The gospel identifies the eternity of God with radical temporality, for gospel reveals “God” as Jesus in death and resurrection. This is the crucial point. Jesus is not the revelation of some distant and hidden God. In other words, God does not lie “behind” the man Jesus. Rather, God is identified with the very person, the historical man, Jesus. Thus, in Jenson’s own words, God is “not transcendent by his distance, to be quested after; he is transcendent in that he is coming” (111). The Christian spiritual life is perhaps better described as discipleship or pilgrimage, for we follow a person on a journey toward a goal. And this goal is Jesus himself, a man who is “framed by the same time and space as we; we are not called to seek him, but to follow him” (112).

The Social Function of the Church

“It is the social function of the church to intrude an ultimate vision into the comfortable arrangements and watered-down values of political and economic everyday, to be the unauthorized upsetter of the achieved world.”

Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973) 85.