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Citation: Brain, Michael. “The Evangelization of Metaphysics: Robert W. Jenson 
and the Barthian Critique of Religion.” Paper presented at the Annual Wesley Studies 
Symposium, Tyndale University College & Seminary, Toronto, Ontario, April 25, 2018. 
(MPEG-3; 29:49 min.)

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Okay, so metaphysics metaphysics would be a term no?

So metaphysics is a term that's usually used to describe a higher order of discourse that explains the basic nature of reality.

Good. Thank you. So metaphysics answers questions like, what does it mean to exist? What does it mean to be? Why is there something rather than nothing?

It also explains what's the nature, the ultimate nature of the physical universe? What are kind of the building blocks of reality? And it also explains questions like what is time? Those questions that you stay up late at night in bed thinking about. So, in other words, metaphysics is a way of interpreting reality.

It is beyond what we can discern from the physical universe around us. It's a way of reading history. It's kind of like a lens through which we view every facet of our existence. Since Christianity has always claimed to hold the key to understanding history in the universe, its theology has often had to deal with such questions that fall under the category of metaphysics. Traditionally, the metaphysics of the Christian faith derived from Greek metaphysics, which were characterized by a struggle to apprehend being or substance as the basis of all reality.

According to the Greek philosophers, everything consists in being a timeless, unchanging, impersonal reality, functioning as the first principle of all things set into motion by a first cause. This would be Aristotle's unmoved mover. So Greek converts to Christianity. When the Gospel went into the Greek world, they were faced with the challenge of learning how to talk about the God of Scripture and often using their Greek categories of thinking. And so they used their culturally inherited beliefs in forming statements about God.

And as the Christian faith became established in the Greco Roman world, very soon these categories became entrenched in the way that we talk about God. But beginning in the Enlightenment, culminating in the 20th century, christian theologians began to question whether Greek metaphysics were useful for describing God. Increasingly, many found irregularities between the God that's depicted in the Bible and the God depicted by the Greek philosophers. This idea of a God as a timeless, non, historical, unchanging substance didn't really appear to be an accurate description of the God in Scripture who reveals Himself relationally with humanity through a particular group of people, through Israel, and then, most especially in a human life, in Jesus.

So with the traditional concept of God becoming less and less credible in the modern world, theologians start trying to come up with different metaphysics, different ways of viewing God, and they usually resort to philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wesleyans often were not exempt from this quest for a new God. Since the latter part of the last century, many scholars and theologians within the evangelical fold, often within Wesleyanism, have proposed so called openness theologies, also known as open theism free will, theism so. According to these theologies, god interacts with human beings on a personal level, allowing for a genuine relationship that's based on freedom of both parties. So for openness theologies, God and human beings must interact. And to interact freely, they have to be able to act freely as they choose.

So this means not only that God does not determine the future. We might be able to agree on that. But they go further as to say that God also does not know the future with certainty, because for openness theologies, absolute foreknowledge means for ordination. If God absolutely knows the future, then everything is already fixed and there is no freedom. So God, while knowing all possible scenarios, the ones most likely to occur in his wisdom, he does not know with certainty what will result from free human actions.

God allows for human freedom by surrendering absolute knowledge of the future, instead risking the accomplishment of his purposes in order to make room for human agency. One book on openness theology is called The God Who Risks. God is taking this risk in being in relationship with humanity. Not all Wesleyans have been convinced. I don't think that it's been a majority view, because I think for a lot of Wesleyans, the omnipotence and the omniscience of God really are too steep a price to pay to get this relational view of God.

But the question still remains what do we do with God? What do we do with this understanding of God that we've inherited? So with these questions in mind, my goal is for this study, is to recommend the theology of Robert Jensen, who's an American Lutheran theologian, and I want to recommend him as an alternative for us and as wesleans who struggle with the concept of God taken from the Greeks. So to demonstrate Jensen's usefulness for Wesleyan theology, this paper will examine Jensen's revisionary metaphysics. That's the term he used to describe his theology.

And we'll get into that. But I'll compare Jensen's metaphysics with Karl Bart's critique of religion. Who? Carl Bart was the primary influence over Jensen. So although Jensen didn't address Wesleyan theology specifically, he says at one point that it appeared far too little in his theology, and he said it was owing to his own ignorance of it.

I think we can forgive Jensen for that. But capturing his theological vision by comparing him to Bart, I think reveals certain things that we can learn as Wesleyans from Jensen. So we'll start first with Bart. So, ever since the 17th century, enlightenment's thinkers have been calling into question the traditions and beliefs of Christianity, replacing ecclesial theology, dogmatic theology with studies into natural religion. The Christian religion in its traditional form was considered for Enlightenment thinkers, untenable for modern people of reason and the coming of the scientific age.

Rendered superstitions of the past age of religion obsolete. Liberal or neoprotestant Christianity provided religion a brief recess from this relentless attack, maintaining that the message of Christianity could still be made palatable to modern people when it's rearticulated as a natural religion. That is, if we look at it on the basis of reason alone, then we can find some redeeming qualities that make Christianity still useful. So for the better part of the 19th century, though, these Enlightenment critiques continued, liberal Protestantism still gave Christianity a pride of place in the west. So in the late 19th century, though, this guy, Ludwig Feuerbach, his critique of religion marked a turning point in religion in the west, and it kind of ended this hopeful reign that liberal Christianity gave.

Feuerbach asserted that all religion, even the natural religion of liberal Christianity, was merely a reflection of human thoughts, feelings, rationality. According to Firebach, religion is the projection of the highest human attributes and values onto this objectivity, and we call this objectivity God. So we take our own thoughts and feelings and we impose it on God, and then we receive ourselves again by worshipping this God. But really, Firebach was an atheist. He was a materialist.

He wasn't averse to all religion. But he maintained that, I quote, consciousness of God is self consciousness. Knowledge of God is self knowledge. By his god. Thou knowest the man and the man by his God.

The two are identical. So religion for Firebach is nothing more than a human construct. It's something that we've made up ourselves. So religion doesn't involve any grand metaphysical claims about the world itself. It's just saying our own values.

It's only speaking what we think and our own attitudes. And this was a surprising development for many. Firebox critique of religion was picked up by the young Carl Bart. This is a young picture of Bart. Bart was utterly disillusioned by liberal Christianity, which he was very well schooled in.

But he was disillusioned because he found that it was useless for his task of preaching. He found he couldn't preach the Bible with liberal Christianity. So what made Bart's work most shocking was his use of Firebox Firebox ideas to launch an insider critique on religion. Liberal Christianity, according to Bart, was exactly as Firebox said it's, the projection of human values onto the divine. Modern theology, in other words, failed to say anything positive about God at all because it was simply a reflection of our own beliefs.

However, unlike Firebach, Bart was a Christian. Bart believed in God, and he maintained that the God of the Bible does in fact exist. And he stands above all human constructions, all human ideologies. He was a Christian with a concern to assert the reality of the one true God over all human religious constructions. So Bart initiated this critique in his commentary on Romans, and he calls religion, quote, the last and most inevitable human possibility.

He says it's the culmination of humanism. In contrast to religion, grace is the divine possibility. It originates from the free act of God over against humanity. So religion is the highest attempt for human beings to reach God on their own. But since it's a human act, it's rendered obsolete by grace.

Bert still said that. I quote him, the corrupt tree of sin must not be identified with the possibility of religion. Paul says in Romans Seven, what shall we say? Is the law sin? By no means.

So Bart, with Paul, says, religion is not sin because although it's a human possibility, even though these are human things that we're doing, it shows us that there's a divine reality that confronts the world. It's showing us that there is a reality called God. But the problem with liberal Christianity was that it substituted divine grace for human religion as the essence of the faith. So religion itself, rather than God, became the subject of theology. And so in this way, by doing this, religion could only be idolatrous.

And the critique of religion that Bart initiated, it made its way into his later theology. In the Church Dogmatics, Bart contrasts human religion with the revelation of God, which presents a curious dilemma. Revelation is grace, so that is it's something that comes to us from God, it's something that's coming from God's direction. But we also have to say that God's revealing of Himself takes place in the realm of human experience. In other words, God reveals Himself and that's his initiative, but we still experience it here.

So as such, we have to say that the revelation of God, Bart says, is hidden within human religion. But how are the two related religion and revelation? Liberal Christianity since the 19th century had been claiming that religion explains revelation. For Bart, however, revelation had to be identical with God himself to avoid placing something over and against God that's above him. So without denying that revelation takes place in our midst, bart maintained that revelation must explain religion and it has to be superior to all human religion.

Revelation. For Bart, we're not just given facts about God. Revelation isn't just us receiving little facts about God in revelation, it's actually God Himself giving his entire self to us. So it's not just mere facts, it's actually God Himself coming to us. So for this reason, religion can't explain revelation, since revelation is God Himself as he manifests Himself to us.

And so the solution for theology was to move beyond religion and to be able to reassert God's freedom and power over his revealing Himself to us and freeing those things from human ideas that we tend to make up ourselves and then we place them onto God. So Bart's critique of religion was immensely influential over 20th century Protestant theology. His rebuke of human attempts to access the divine reality drove this a strong reaction in 20th century to liberal Protestantism. And as a remedy to these failures as he saw them, bart sought to redefine Christian theology according to the history of Jesus Christ. How God has revealed himself through Jesus.

This project inspired a lot of 20th century figures, actually. But Jensen in particular is the one that we'll look at today, jensen took up this task of critiquing religion. To Jensen took this up as inspiration for his theology. So we'll get into Jensen alpha and Omega was Jensen's first book. This was developed from his doctoral dissertation.

And the problem that he discusses in his dissertation was the problem of time and eternity in modern theology. So in the modern period, human beings became increasingly aware of the fact that each human being inhabits a very specific social, historical and geographical location. And as we just heard from Tim's presentation, the problem was this matter of truth, that truth tends to develop over time. This is this idea known as historical consciousness, this fact that we're located in a really particular place. So with the rise of historical consciousness, people began to find a disconnect between the truths of history and the universal truths of reason and religion.

So in short, the problem for many modern thinkers and I think for a lot of people today in our culture is that one can't move from the fact of certain historical claims that happened to someone in the first century Jesus, however historically accurate those events might be. We can't move from that to then come up with this grand overarching scheme of what the entire universe is like, who God is. We can't logically make that step. We can't find the link between these two. And so for modern thinkers, this isn't obvious.

It isn't obvious that when we look at this human life of Jesus, that we actually see God.

Historical occurrences for modern people cannot indicate universally binding ideas about what the world is like. So the central question for theology is how the historical events of Jesus can have importance for all people, which is what we are claiming when we preach the gospel. We're claiming that Jesus has significance for all of us. So with this background in mind, Jensen's basic question is to ask how does God rule and involve himself in history, in our history? In what sense does God himself have a history?

So to find these answers, Jensen plunged into Karl Bart's theology. Jensen concluded from his study that because of Jesus Christ's nature as both God and a human being and because of his preexistence with God before creation, that God himself in his eternal transcendent being, he must be linked to history in some way. That if God became a human being, that somehow God's eternity must find its way into history. So that when one looks at this historical life of Jesus and we see Jesus life, that one's not just looking at one human life, but we're actually viewing the eternal God himself. So this claim blows this entire modern dichotomy out of the water that historical truths can't say anything about eternal truths.

The central claim of the gospel is that the union of God and humanity in Jesus Christ bridges the gap between our world and the being of God. God can be known to the human race because Jesus Christ, God himself, embraces history, embraces time. So this means for Jensen that Christianity offers a radically different approach to the world. He insists that we have to develop a Christ centered metaphysics, quote, a vision of our lives and the world we live it in. Which will be an explication of the Gospel's concrete meaning for the understanding of existence.

Since Jesus Christ is both divine and human, history itself as a whole and our own lives in the world around us take on a whole new shape. Our lives today are impacted by the entrance of God in the world.

And so Jensen's subsequent work tends to go on the same line of trying to overcome human ideas about God. He links this back to Bart's critique that we can't impose human systems onto God. That to see what God is like, we have to look only to Jesus. And so Jensen, throughout the rest of his theology is seeking to conform all talk about God to the reality of the Gospel as revealed in Jesus. I skipped over that part for our time.

So in his systematic theology we see some of the mature reflections that Jensen has on these things. Jensen claims that the whole of my systematics is in one aspect and effort of revisionary metaphysics aimed at allowing one to say things about God that Scripture seems to require but that inherited metaphysics inhibit.

And so Jensen cites Bart as one of his main sources. But what were Jensen's revisionary metaphysics, as he calls them? So I'll offer a brief outline. So the first is that all Christian talk about God must take into consideration the specific reality of the Gospel. For Jensen, God is identified as, quote the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

This is who God is. So like Bart, Jensen sought to conform all theological discourse to the life history of Jesus his death, his resurrection and his coming glory. However, since the life history of Jesus is a temporal life lived in human history, then the Gospel raises metaphysical questions about the nature of God and his relation to time. If God is Jesus Christ, then our metaphysics must allow for a God who can be identified by events in time. So there's a series of implications.

The first is that the God of the Gospel must be triune. Jensen actually says that father, Son and Holy Spirit is the proper name of God. That this is how God's identified it's. Like our name, my name is Michael. That's how you identify me in the world.

Well, you identify God because he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Secondly, if God is triune and he's revealed in Jesus temporal life then God can't be defined as immune to time which was characteristic of Greek metaphysics, which Christian theology has had has tended to continue to repeat. Because time is the place of change and along with it suffering and pain. And anxiety for the Greeks. God has to be removed from those things.

But if Jesus human life, including his death, is included in the eternal being of God, then God can't be immune to time. Rather, God must possess a time of his own, what Jensen calls divine temporal infinity. There's a word to put in your sermon for Sunday. I'll quote him here any eternity is some transcendence of temporal limits. But the biblical God's eternity is not the simple contradiction of time.

But what he transcends is not. But what he transcends is having any personal limitation in having time. What he transcends is any limit imposed on what he can be by what he has been except the limit of his personal self identity that is, his being Trinity. So the true God is not eternal because he lacks time, but because he takes time. So for Jensen, God's being is not separate from our world, but he takes on time through his incarnation in Jesus Christ.

So this leads us to the relation of human time in God's eternity. And I tried to come up with a chart. This isn't Jensen approved. So this is kind of how I've seen how it works out. Divine temporal infinity provides us with two senses that we can understand time.

There's two different types of time. So first there's our time. There's this everyday progression of historical events. It's this progression from past, present, future. It's this cause and effect sequence.

It's how we experience time. But the gospel teaches that God himself has time and that God's time is actually what creates ours. So Jensen calls this triune time or God's time. Created time is real and fully possesses its own nature, but it's enveloped and constituted by God's time. So created time is linear.

There's a movement from past to future, right? This is our time here, right? So it begins at creation. We're going through and we have new creation. There's a definite end.

There's this linear sequence. But time isn't just that. The real meaning of time is the fact that the Father stands at the beginning, the Spirit stands at the end. And the Son exists as the present of God. And so because the Son is also Jesus Christ, he's a human being, what the Son does is he gathers all of our time.

He gathers everything that we are, everything that the world's ever going to be. And he takes it up into the life of God, takes it up into the triune God. And so this is what theologians will call participation in God. And this is how Jensen sees this as happening. And it's interesting, he actually throws a footnote in at his systematic theology at this point.

He says that when he speaks about this transformation that we have, when we're finally brought up into God's life, which occurs at the end of our history once everything is concluded, he actually says, Wesleyans can take over from here. Because he says that he's not well versed in Wesleyan theology. But he says that they've been talking about this for a while. They can probably offer some insights. So this is just a rough sketch of his metaphysics.

So I'll end with just some lessons that we can learn from it. First, metaphysics is unavoidable. That is, the reality of the gospel calls us to make definite statements about God and what the world is actually like. And so he recognized that if the Christian faith tells a story about who God is and what the world is, and if this applies to every single person that we encounter, then we have to be engaging in an interpretation of all reality. We must be doing a metaphysics, although nothing we ultimately say is going to match up to God and the full truth of who he is.

Yet we're called to make this because we are making these claims about God. Second, Jensen says that it's not about finding the right type of metaphysics. And sometimes Christian theologians have tended to do this. We say, okay, we need this, so let's go to this philosopher or this idea and then let's use that as the thing that is organizing how we read Scripture. And on this point, I think Jensen has a lot to teach us with openness theology sometimes.

There are a lot of good points that openness theologies have brought up. That open theism has brought up. But I think what we learn from Jensen is that they falter in that we tend to project our notions of time onto God and to assume that if we experience time as the fact that we can't know the future and that we're going along with time and experiencing time. If we're experiencing the future as something unknown to us, we know the possibilities, but we don't know it fully. They tend to presume that time entails the same thing for God's being.

But my question is, has this open theism tended to start from a concept of human freedom or a concept of what time is and then imposed it onto God? Or does God have a time of his own? Does he experience time different than we do? And should we actually be looking to God to see the meaning of time and then we apply it to ourselves? So we ask God first what it is.

But finally, Jensen's argument is that the Christian faith itself is a metaphysics and our goal is to interpret life through the gospel. And so, yeah, relevancy. I guess this brings up for me the question of relevancy of the gospel. And I think sometimes we take relevancy to mean we need to take the gospel and make it fit the world around us. But our goal, I think, as ministers of the gospel is not to take the gospel, make the gospel relevant by altering it according to the world around us and then imposing that on the gospel.

But rather to take our own ideas, to take our own philosophies, to take our own understandings of life, and to see them in the Gospel, to see them in the biblical story. How do we view ourselves in Jesus history, and how do we help people to see all things in the light of the Gospel? How do we help everyone to see what life in the world is truly like by looking to Jesus? So in some, our goal is not to make Jesus fit our stories, but to locate ourselves in his story.

So, yeah, just to conclude, one of Jensen's central claims for his theology is that it would be a theology for the ecumenical church. He wants it to apply to all Christians. He wants to speak to that. And so as Jensen works continue to kind of make waves and start to be examined, I think Wesleyans will be impoverished if we neglect some of the insights that he offers. And so his theology is written for the church universal, and I think that Wesleyans could really find a way of appreciating his work.

So thank you.


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