Abstract
AbstractWhile Karl Barth balances the reliability of revelation with divine counterfactual freedom through the analogia temporalis, Robert Jenson rejects this form of analogy, arguing that it posits an unknowable reality of God behind revelation. He instead transposes metaphysics into narratological terms, arguing that this secures the reliability of revelation and divine freedom, since it means God is future to (and so undetermined by) events in time. This metric for divine freedom cannot, however, replace counterfactual possibility; hence, the analogia temporalis (presupposed in counterfactuals) re-emerges in Jenson's theology. This form of analogy is essential in balancing the reliability of revelation with divine freedom.
Highlights
The question of how to balance two fundamental tenets of the Christian faith – that revelation discloses God as he truly is, and that the divine acts that form the content of this revelation were undertaken freely – is a matter of fierce debate,1 which, as Robert Jenson puts it, ‘has recurred throughout history’
Karl Rahner’s famous identification of the immanent and economic Trinities has catalysed a new wave of this debate, with his critique of the ontological distinction between God’s eternal triune being and God’s triune history in time prompting concern that such an identification of God with history risks rendering God dependent on creation
Among the countless works written in an attempt resolve the stalemate in which the epistemology–freedom debate has found itself, Jenson’s own solution stands apart as one of the most daringly innovative of the twentieth century
Summary
Having described Jenson’s basic methodological principle, the article shall turn to illustrate how he understands God to be self-determined by the resurrection, such that this event does not merely reveal God’s identity, but determines it. For Jenson, God’s being is teleological, with God not fully actualised ‘apart from the telos of history’, meaning that God’s life is dictated by its outcome.32 This redefinition of identity in narrative terms provides the means to overcome the Deus absconditus remnant in Bruce McCormack’s actualistic interpretation of Barth’s doctrine of election, in the form of God’s undetermined and unknowable being logically prior to his decision to be God-for-us.. By replacing the protological determination that such a critique presupposes with teleological determination, Jenson argues that God can be exhaustively identified by the decision of election and as the God-for-us of revelation, since this is the divine identity at God’s telos by which that identity is constituted.34 This treatment of the divine hypostases in strictly narrative terms leads Jenson to define them as ‘relations subsisting in God’,35 and to argue that the three persons are their relations to one another.. Concludes that it is by just this temporal dynamic in the economy of salvation ‘that the three are God’.38
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