Biblical Trinitarian

One of the great virtues of Scott Swain’s The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology is his insight into the biblical foundations of Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian theology. He points out that Jenson “argues that the doctrine of the Trinity’s primary function in Christian theology is to identify who God is, that is, to distinguish the personal identity of the Christian God from that of other putative gods,” and he adds that “such an approach requires that we take the particular way that Scripture identifies God with utter seriousness.” As a result, “Jenson’s constructive theological work consists largely in a theological interpretation of biblical narrative, an attempt to follow Scripture’s narrative portrayal of who God is in order to understand what God is like” (67-68).

Jenson’s biblical Trinitarianism is a Trinitarianism of both testaments: “According to Jenson, the New Testament’s way of naming God as triune must be understood as a new way of naming the God already identified in the Old Testament as the God of the exodus, because the gospel fulfills the Scriptures of Israel . . . . trinitarian theology must never be merely a matter of New Testament exegesis. Trinitarian theology is an exercise in ecclesial exegesis of a two-testament Bible, a point the church must always acknowledge if it is to avoid the ‘perennial temptation’ toward Marcionism” (80).

It is this biblical orientation that explains Jenson’s large project of constructing a “revisonary metaphysics.” The gospel asserts certain things about God and God’s relation to the world. Jenson’s aim is to ask “what ‘everything’ must be like to have Jesus Christ at its center” (122, Jenson’s words). His criticisms of the Christian tradition are all founded on his conviction that the church hasn’t finished its work of re-envisioning everything as cohering in Jesus.