Earlier this summer, with my friend Joel, I visited the Robert Jenson Collection at the Center for Barth Studies in Princeton. Among the many letters and papers, the collection also includes cassette recordings of Jenson’s chapel sermons from various points in his vocation. Like his lifelong friend Gerhard Forde, Jenson believed that theology is for proclamation. The proof of theology is therefore in the preaching. Just so, it is no surprise to discover the themes and convictions that recur throughout Jenson’s theological corpus also appear reliably— doggedly— in his public proclamation.
Here is a sermon for the First Sunday of Advent at St. Olaf College in 1983 on Isaiah 64.1-19. Unlike many preachers handling the word of truth from the prophet Isaiah, Jenson refuses to allow his hearers to domesticate God before the sermon even begins. Here is, as David Bentley Hart remarked of him, Robert Jenson’s lively God.
Jens opens his homily by first naming the trap. Advent, we think, ends with Christmas and its creche. The Nativity, we erroneously believe, gives us to expect a manageable God at Mary’s breast. But the actual scripture set for the beginning of Advent, Isaiah’s cry that the heavens would tear open, refuses to abide by our domesticated expectations. Isaiah prophesies a LORD who comes down in order to make mountains quake and empire dissolve. He is not safe. He is not, in Jenson’s playful polemic, “the servant of our plans.”
God’s identity is not bound by what we bring to the scriptures based on our prior notions of deity. God just is who and what the scriptures of Israel discloses him to be; God is none other than the history he makes with us, and the scriptures are the revelation of that story-making. Jenson will not let “God” function as a stable metaphysical placeholder that Advent or Christmas then merely illustrate.
“God” is a category that must be broken open by the story itself.
Another key feature of Jenson’s theology— that the Triune God’s identity is bound up with and determined by the history he makes with his people— shows up in this sermon in his alignment of the Cold War with the empires of Israel’s day. For Jenson, it is not possible to make a “religious” claim about God that is also not a claim about our time and events. God’s “unpredictably” is neither a spiritual abstraction nor a narrative feature of the scriptures. It is how God acts— or does not act— in actual history, amidst the rise and collapse of regimes.
Such a God is indeed “lively.” In this case, Jenson does not soften Isaiah’s terror so as to make room for the incarnation of the human God. Jenson instead, counterintuitively, escalates the unease. Knocking down a mountain? Jenson insists that any god can do that. What no one could have anticipated, though, is God knocking down the wall between eternity and us from the inside, joining our life rather than simply overruling it. Again, this is the thesis that runs throughout Jenson’s mature work. God is who he is by the history he makes with us. Jesus is not an exception to the God of Israel’s scriptures. He is the defining instance of Israel’s God.
This brings Jenson to a fresh and surprising, albeit straightforwardly biblical, claim in his sermon. The arrival of God as an infant is not a gentler advent than Isaiah’s apocalyptic one. It is the same terrible advent, only more so.
This culminates with the payoff line: God is no longer just the potter but one of the pots too. Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim is simultaneously Creator and creature. This is his doctrine of theosis stated almost offhandedly— that in Christ God has put himself on both sides of the Creator/creature line, and by that same act put us on both sides of it as well, taking us up into “that terrible energy that shatters nations and galaxies.” In pointing to that Future, Jenson reveals another of his consistent convictions; namely, the Last Future— and nothing else before then— which the church anticipates in word and sacrament, will retroactively tell us what God’s action has meant all along. Thus Jenson ends his sermon with appropriate plainness, “It will not be less glorious, and not less mighty.”
Here is the sermon:
I have this text because it is the reading for the first week in the church’s season of Advent. As the name stipulates, Advent is a time of waiting for someone to arrive — indeed, for God to arrive. Perhaps none of us is very clear about what that might mean, that God should be arriving.
But since the Advent season ends with Christmas, we mostly think of the coming of the child — of the Advent of God as gentle Jesus in the Madonna’s lap. At St. Olaf, as elsewhere, what we call the Christmas concert in fact falls in Advent, and it is indeed the child and his sweetness that we sing.
It is therefore disconcerting that the Bible readings for Advent are what they are. For the church, in its Bible readings for Advent, seems to have in mind a very different sort of God, and a different sort of arrival, from the God of our Christmas dreams. Indeed, the present lesson — the Hebrew scripture for the first Sunday of Advent — speaks of an expectation of God so different from, and so much deeper than, what we normally associate with Christmas, and indeed from what is generally standard among us, that it is almost incomprehensible to us.
“O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down…”
When the God of whom the Bible speaks comes down, it is, says Isaiah, not comfortable. It is to do “terrible things,” to use his word. When the God of whom the Bible speaks arrives, we should not be so sure that we will like what he does, or even be able to approve of it. The real God of whom the Bible speaks is not manageable by our instructions or judgments or dreams of divine blessings — but may do things before which we can only stand in awe, things beyond our approving or denying. When he arrives, says Isaiah, the powers of history — the nations — tremble. All the calculations of wealth and piety and armies and diplomacy fail. When he arrives, the heavens open and the mountains quake — that is, the very order of nature is revealed as the mere momentary display of his incessant energy. What the real God of the Bible comes to do, moreover, is unpredictable by us. As Isaiah says, he does things which we look not for.
So here I am — now let me ease off the rhetoric for just a moment. Here I am, you see: this Luther College graduate and former teacher at that other place, who once left the Midwest, as he thought, for good. So I finish out my life in Minnesota at St. Olaf, of all places, singing the Um ja ja song. Or maybe, on the other hand, I won’t stay here — who knows? It is in just such surprises that we have to recognize the providence of God.
And so now I’ll heat up the rhetoric again. For all the politically active life of anyone in this room, two great empires impoverished themselves — arming and plotting and maneuvering at the line drawn across Europe. And then one day, which we looked not for, the battle line of the Cold War was gone, and the weapons arrayed on it useless. The one empire was suddenly and unbelievably revealed as an empty shell. And who knows what will tomorrow be the fate of the other, in which we happen to live.
The God of our dreams is the servant of our plans — what we think would be good and fair and nice — which is perhaps why we like Christmas so much. At least at first glance, the baby seems manageable, even harmless. But the real God, the God we await in Advent, has his own purposes, which may or may not include ours, and which are in any case beyond our prediction. We think we must be the lords of our own lives, if anyone is. But of course, if there is a real God, then he is Lord, and not we. Then the meaning and value of our lives, and of the history of the nations, and the history of the universe, rests on his purposes.
Indeed, Isaiah goes so far with this as to teach that even the self-inflicted disasters from which God must ever and again rescue us belong to the mystery of God’s own incomprehensible will: “O Lord, why dost thou make us err from thy ways, and harden our hearts?” So it all comes down to this, at the end of Isaiah’s prayer: “Yet, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art the potter; we are all the work of thy hand.” At the end, it all comes down to our place as preachers, allowed to call on our Father — to our place as works of God’s hands, permitted to hope that he will make good use of us.
Which brings us back to Christmas. For in fact, of course, the event at Bethlehem is not sweet and harmless and manageable. It is, in Isaiah’s sense, terrible — beyond anything Isaiah could imagine. So strange and unpredictable is the real God, and his Advent, and his works, that even this has happened: God in a womb and in a cradle. You see — knocking down a mountain or two, or overthrowing a nation or two — any God can do that. But knocking down the barriers between eternity and us, conquering our human life from inside by joining up with us — that is indeed what no one could have looked for.
We understand Christmas when we understand that the arrival of God as the baby Jesus is not less mighty and weird and incomprehensible and fearsome than what Isaiah could imagine, but infinitely more so. So mighty and incomprehensible has God’s arrival among us proved to be, that he who once ruled the universe from a throne has come to rule it from a cradle. One has come to be at once our brother and God the Son, so that God is truly our Father — so that Isaiah’s metaphor is transformed into literal fact, so that we are members of the divine family, so that all the dreams and ignorance and false independence that we try to put between ourselves and God are shattered.
So mighty, and so strange, and so unpredictable has God’s arrival proved to be, that he is not just the potter anymore, but one of the pots — on both sides of the line, to be creator and creature, and so to be indeed all in all — and just so to put us on both sides of the line too: to take us, individually, you and me, and as a family, into that terrible energy that shatters nations and galaxies.
Now, we still, of course, await the last end of God’s Advent — when all this wonder will be no longer the object of faith, no longer what preachers talk about, but a matter of immediate experience, when God will have come among us for good and all. What that will be like we again can speak of only in the way Isaiah did — in fragments of poetry and metaphor — how God will then reshape our clay, and make us, openly and in everyday experience, daughters and sons of the divine family. We can only anticipate it in a sort of happy terror. But we can be sure of one thing: it will be not less glorious, and not less mighty.
Amen.
