Jenson makes the remarkable claim that God is Himself culture (in a contribution to God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas
“What it is to be God is given in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and enlivening through the Spirit, in the Spirit’s eternal liberating of the Father and the Son for one another, in the Son’s eternal self-giving to the Father in the Spirit. Thus the triune God is nothing but culture, and just so is infinite culture, culture setting nature and transforming it and just so setting nature and so on in an eternal act.”
We don’t, in short, encounter God in His “bare” divine nature. We know Him only in the “social” interactions of Father, Son, and Spirit, which are “cultural” interactions of ritualized self-gift.
And this cultured God makes Himself available in a culture: “If the church is the body of Christ, that is, if the church is the availability of Christ in and for the world, and if this body of Christ, the church, is a culture, it follows then that Christ is a culture. And the sense of the ‘is’ in ‘Christ is a culture’ will be the sense in which each of us must say that he or she ‘is’ his or her body” (“Christ as Culture,” IJST 5 [2003] 325).
To confess the Trinity then is to also confess the church. And perhaps there is an implicit Trinitarian heresy in theologies that deny the necessary mediation of the structured Eucharistic community.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
