Abstract
This article explored the relation between creation and salvation as acts of God in the theology of Robert Jenson, an American Lutheran theologian. This is important due to Jenson’s growing importance as theologian and because of the current importance of ecotheology (and related themes that were implicated by the relation between creation and salvation). Jenson’s theology is an effort to tell God’s particular story and it can be described as a Trinitarian, narrative and eschatological theology. His starting point is that God’s eternity must not be understood as timeless (this is unbiblical and incompatible with the story of creation and redemption) and that creation (space and time) takes place somehow within the being of God. Jenson qualified this ‘withinness’, but also emphasised that creation is an intelligible whole, a history with an intended end. It is important for him that God’s story – a story of dramatic coherence – is not separated from our own and creation’s story. Within this understanding of God’s story (as dramatic coherence), creation found its own dramatic teleology because salvation also includes creation. Creation is therefore not subjected to pointlessness any longer, but will find its final place within God. The implication of this is that we must value creation much more and act with more responsibility towards it. According to Jenson we must enjoy creation in an aesthetic fashion and delight in creation as a whole because of its dramatic teleology.
Highlights
To investigate the relation between creation and salvation as acts of God in the theology of Robert Jenson is a complex and challenging task
Jenson does give ample attention to these themes in his theology and because of Jenson’s growing importance as theologian on the one hand, and the current importance of ecotheology on the other, it is worth the effort to reconstruct his position on these themes and to identify their implications
Jenson was born on 02 August 1930 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in the United States of America. He studied and worked in Germany, the United Kingdom and in the United States and before his retirement in 2005, from 1998 he was a senior scholar for research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey
Summary
To investigate the relation between creation and salvation as acts of God in the theology of Robert Jenson is a complex and challenging task. This view of Jenson leads to a very specific understanding about the relationship between God and time in which Jenson regards the definition of God’s eternity as timeless as unbiblical and incompatible with the story of creation and redemption.
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