Robert Jenson Lectures

It may be silly of me to assume that this is of interest to those out in the blog-o-sphere, especially since I didn't get any comments on particular questions to ask Jenson, but on the off chance that it might be interesting or beneficial to someone out there, I've decided to post my notes on Jenson's Grider-Winget Lectures in Theology given at NTS this week. Unfortunately, audio files are not available to the general public since he already has a deal with a publisher to put these lectures in a book format. Otherwise, I would have linked the lectures to this blog.

Two preliminary words. First, these are my notes, which means they are my interpretation of what Jenson said, not necessarily a verbatim dictation. There is a good chance I could have misunderstood him at various points. Secondly, again these are simply notes so they are somewhat cryptic in nature and lack the sense of coherence and clarity that one might get from listening to the entire lectures, or from reading them in the book format, I would assume. Yet, for whatever they are worth...here they are.

Notes: Robert Jenson’s Grider-Winget Lectures in Theology
October 9 – 11
Topic: The Inspiration of Scripture

October 9th: If we are to think of our current theological house, we have some inappropriate presuppositions banging around in our basement. He focused his assessment of these inadequate presuppositions on our understanding of inspiration and relation to Scripture.

1.) We’ve gone about the matter backwards. We tend to bring our needs to the text in search of an answer. This is ultimately an anthropocentric move, which lends itself to human-centered readings of the text. Thus it ceases to function as Scripture for us. Instead we must begin with a doctrine of the Spirit – his entire lectures tended toward a pronounced pneumatology that brings coherence to this particular theological framework. We must find our base and foundation for the interpretation of Scripture in the doctrine of the Trinity.

2.) In Western Trinitarian theology we’ve taken a wrong turn with respect to our pneumatological language. The problem was set out in Peter Lombard’s Sentences when he asked, “Is the gift of the Spirit the Spirit’s own self or something other than Himself?” Standard Western theology chose the second path. That is to say, we’ve understood the gift of the Spirit as something other than the Spirit Himself – typically understood in terms of virtues or power or life. However, we must begin to think more in terms of the first way. That is to say, if the Spirit gives us the virtue of love that is because the Spirit is love or joy because the Spirit is joy, etc. The Spirit does not have an extrinsic relationship with us, but the Spirit gives Himself internally.

3.) We have tended to draw to divisive a line between the Spirit’s inspiration of Scripture and the Spirits inspiration of the community.

4.) We have supposed that the notions of both “inspiration” and of “Scripture” are univocal notions. That is we have supposed that they always mean the same thing. This supposition can hardly be right. Even early Lutheran theologians understood at least two notions of inspiration – The Spoken or Living Word and The Written Word. We should not flatten out the robust meanings of these words.

The Church depends on the existence of Scripture in different ways – the two testaments are different. The Church’s dependence on the OT is absolute, but the NT is God’s gift to the Church in a special historical circumstance. The NT is an emergency substitute for the living voice of the Gospel through the Apostles.

October 10th: Jenson through his theological articulation has continued to demonstrate what Rahner proclaimed: “The eternal mission of God cannot be disconnected from the incarnate mission.”

The paradigmatic image for Biblical inspiration is that of the OT Prophets. The NT writers understood this. Thus the OT is interpreted at narrative – that is in line with something of a ‘Salvation History’ understanding of Scripture.

First Century Judaism was much like protestant denominationalism today. However, the only groups that survived after the destruction of the Temple were those groups who could get along without the Temple, which were Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Rabbinic Judaism – as descended from the Pharisaical sect – was based primarily on the text and not the temple. They added the Mishnah to the TANAK and understood the text primarily in terms of Torah.

Christians, on the other hand, had a portable temple in the Risen Christ. They added the NT narrative to the TANAK and therefore understood the text primarily in terms of narrative – the Prophetic narrative to be more precise. We must understand this development as the work of the Spirit in the Church. This narrative or historical reading of the text puts the prophets at the forefront, since they point toward the culmination of the story. Therefore, prophecy became a paradigm for Israel’s Scripture – all Scripture is given by Prophets and Apostles in a Christian understanding of the text. Thus, the OT prefigures Christ, the Church and the Kingdom.

We might use the analogy of reading a mystery novel to describe early Christian interpretations of the OT. If you are like me, you’ll peak ahead to the end of the story to find out what’s going on. In light of the end all of the other pieces of the story make sense. Christians believed that through the Resurrection of Christ they had been given a glimpse of the End, thus the rest of the story had to make sense in light of that reality.

The other genres of the OT text had to fit into this paradigm. Thus the prayers of the Psalms become the prayers of Christ and as the Body of Christ sings the Psalms we join in with the songs of Christ and thus become in Augustine’s words the totus Christus.

Christ is present in the OT as a dramatis personae. The Word who speaks in the OT is Jesus Christ. One cannot refer to the Word of the Lord without referring to Jesus or vise versa.

If the OT Prophet is our paradigm for the inspiration of Scripture, then we must ask, how does the OT describe the Spirit’s inspiration of the Prophet?

What the Spirit does with the prophets is to make them prophets. That is to say, the Spirit opens one up to God in such a way that they might say, “Thus says the LORD!” The second person of the Trinity is the Logos; the Spirit then is the Freedom for the Word to be the Word of the Father. In other words, Jesus is, ontologically speaking, the Son and the Word, but the Spirit enables Jesus to remain the Son and the Word of the Father. In turn the Risen Jesus gives the Spirit to others. OT prophecy is a joint work of both the Spirit and the Word.

The Word is a person. This personal Word comes to someone who is so opened to the Word by the Spirit that He may speak to and through the prophet. The Spirit thus opens a person or frees a person to receive the Word.

Scripture is the written version of the Prophets and Apostles verbal teaching – so that it is materially the same. As Christians we read the OT from the NT or we wouldn’t be able to read the OT as Scripture at all. The distinction that we all tend to make, when it is proposed that an OT text has a Christological or ecclesial sense, is to then bring up the ‘original’ or ‘historical’ sense that we fear may be forgotten in light of this ‘other’ meaning. (This is akin to Krister Stendahl’s proposed dichotomy between what a text “meant” and what it “means” – following the logical conclusion of Gadamer’s work, among others. It seems to me that Barth has clearly dealt with this false dichotomy in his preface to the second and following editions of Der Römerbrief.) When this type of distinction or dichotomy happens, a Christian reading of the text seems imposed from the outside.

A proper understanding of the Spirits role in the text and community – that is the Spirits role in interpretation rebuffs this sort of distinction. Ecclesial unity in Christ unifies us in the interpretation of the OT as Scripture – thus we cannot make a sharp distinction between the ‘original’ community and our current community.

October 11th: He proposed two assignments with this final lecture. 1) To determine the particular relation of the Spirit to particular creatures who are to speak God’s word. 2) To then get into our understanding of the NT.

If we were to disassociate the Father from the other persons of the Trinity, which is obviously an impossible proposal, but one he wanted to explore nonetheless, then we end up with something like a modern philosophical or Platonic image of “God”. However, the Father with the Spirit is the Living God – the Triune God is living and moving…not the static arche of ancient philosophy or Aristotle’s unmoved mover, etc. Thus, where the Spirit is among us there is freedom, possibility, future.

Our fallen condition is precisely the lack of that future – we are closed to it. The Spirit acts as our liberator to the lack of possibility or the lack of hope. The Spirit brings us freedom because the Spirit is freedom.

The Spirit is also the bond of love (in Augustinian language). This sometimes sounds impersonal to us, but that is not the case with the Spirit. He is the active personal love, who gives himself to the Father and to the Son. As Hegel seemed to indicate that genuine loving relations require a third party, otherwise they may denigrate into a will to power relationship. (I’m not quite sure of this proposal, but in the life of the Trinity it seems to be the case, and if we are to use the Trinity as are paradigm of loving relations then I suppose the analogy fits.) The Spirit is freedom and love, thus if the Spirit comes to creatures we in turn love God and one another.

On to the analogy of the Body – because that it what the community that has received the Spirit that they might love God and others is referred to. How are we to understand the body? We tend to initially think of our physical bodies, but it seems that Paul had a broader understanding of that term – especially if we think of his proposal that we might one day have “spiritual bodies”, though whatever he meant by that is unclear. It seems that a person’s body is the person himself or herself as he or she is available to other persons. So body and in some way personhood is defined by our availability to other persons (definitely a relational concept of the body). Thus, the Body of Christ is only the Body of Christ if Christ is available to ‘others’…to the world.

Again the Spirit gives the Gift of Himself – and does not externally give us virtues, but instead takes up residence within us and makes us part of the Triune life.

Therefore, the Spirit makes a prophet by so opening a person to the Word and by so binding the two in love that the prophet and the Eternal Word of God can speak for each other. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t false prophets, but it does describe true prophets. The analogy of marriage may be somewhat helpful in this case. It doesn’t always happen this way, but there are times in marriage that one spouse may speak for the other. That spouse doesn’t have to ask the other what he or she might say, but they are so united in the bond of love, in a relationship over time that they might speak for one another. In this way, Jenson’s wife, Blanche, should be understood as a co-author of all his work…not that she told him what to write, but that their covenant relationship freed him to think and write as he has.

Because the Spirit gives Himself in person, when the Spirit binds the prophet and the Word together He does this within the prophet himself. Thus, they are distinct but bound together so that the Word speaks from within the prophet. This internal union is again kin to the albeit imperfect analogy of the marriage covenant. This describes the OT paradigm for the inspiration of Scripture in the Prophets.

Something is different with the NT. First, the NT is not essential to the existence of the Church, since we know that the Church got along for some time without the existence of the NT…so the relation to the NT is not timeless for the Church. The NT is a historical phenomenon of the Church. That is to say, that it’s relationship is mediated through history. (My only question is – does this not propose the distinction that we just denied between the original community and us?) In the NT Christ is something like a prophet, but He is a peculiar one – since He is the Son and the Word. In a sense we might say that He is the Prophet, but He is distinct from the other prophets. More so in the NT Mary is the epitome of the prophet – the Spirit works in her to bear the Word to the world.

Ecclesially speaking, Christ gathered with the Church, His Body, is the Prophet (totus christus). The Church is the Spirit’s work to make the final prophet. One might then ask, well can the Church be wrong? That depends on what you mean by the Church. When the Church speaks out of her reality as the One Body of Christ (catholic and apostolic) in conjunction with her Head, then we must say, “No, she cannot be wrong.” Speaking out of her brokenness, she may and does obviously speak wrongly. Therefore, we must work toward ecumenism – this is not an option, it is a command of the Lord.

The Apostles are analogous to the prophets, but in a limited way…there is also a historical difference between the Apostles and us – since none of us are eyewitnesses of the resurrection. It is not nearness to the historical event itself, but nearness to the Spirit’s inspiration of the whole prophetic event.

This entire paradigm for the inspiration of Scripture might align more with our Wesleyan tradition than his own Lutheran tradition. He’s not asking that we give it immediate acceptance as the right doctrine of inspiration, but only that we think about it.