Robert Jenson’s Catholic Lutheranism
by John Hoyum
from LF Spring 2022
Evangelical catholicism in American Lutheranism appears to be in decline. In a recent Lutheran Forum editorial, R. David Nelson admits he was tempted to profile the movement by invoking the image of an autopsy. He chose instead to offer an account of a “pathology.” Whatever image one might summon, there is no question that it’s a movement in crisis. There is an institutional explanation for the malaise of evangelical catholic identity: Lutheran unity in the United States appears to be an impossible dream. But there are also underlying theological reasons for the crisis. To trace these reasons, I’ll take Robert Jenson, his catholic Lutheranism, and its reception as a case study. Jenson is undoubtedly the most sophisticated representative of evangelical catholic Lutheranism. He surpasses all others in his intellectual creativity; the volume of his output; and his influence on many pastors and other theologians. But in spite of the fact that in Jenson, Lutheranism gave to America perhaps its greatest theologian since Jonathan Edwards, Jenson’s program has failed to catch on. I’d like to sketch Jenson’s vision of evangelical catholicism and then suggest some reasons why Lutherans have refused this vision––and how they might take it up once again.
Jenson’s Evangelical Catholicism
Jenson’s reception is split between the two groups he influenced most deeply: academic theologians and parish pastors. On the one hand, his academic interpreters have focused intensely on his revision of metaphysics according to the gospel. These readers tend not to be Lutherans, but nevertheless appreciate Jenson’s fidelity to the gospel as a rule for the theological task. On the other hand, Jenson’s teaching as a seminary professor shaped many pastors through his liturgical, ecclesiological, and ecumenical work. Metaphysically, Jenson offers a Lutheran reading of Karl Barth’s proposal that God’s being is located in His eternal decision to save in Christ. No God hides behind Jesus, and Jenson’s theology is an adventure in integrating this insight into Lutheran theology. But at the end of his career, Barth took his doctrine of election in an antisacramental direction––especially by rejecting infant baptism. Here, Barth’s christocentrism takes a different path from Lutheran christocentrism.
What Jenson does with Barth’s doctrine of election is to recast it to cohere with the Lutheran contention that God is graspable in word and sacrament. In preaching, baptism, and the eucharist, we do not have human acts that merely correspond to God’s activity, but truly divine works performed in and through created means. The difference is christological. To Barth’s emphasis on God as subject and object of election, Jenson adds the Byzantine christology he finds in Luther and Johannes Brenz. A key feature of Jenson’s ontology is a subtle modification of Aquinas’s definition of the divine being as pure act (actus purus). According to Aquinas, there is no potentiality within God; God is thus identical to His own sheer actuality. In connection to Barth, Jenson notices that Aquinas is not wrong here but insufficiently specific. The necessary specificity is God’s self-revelation in Christ: God is pure act as the particular event of Jesus’s life (actus purus particularis).
The story of Jesus’s life narrated by the gospels is the story of God’s life in connection with us. The man Jesus is without qualification the second person of the Trinity. But where Jenson exploits the speculative possibilities of this christology as mediated by Barth and Luther is in the doctrine of the church. It’s at this point that Jenson’s catholic Lutheranism comes into view; it’s also the point at which many of Jenson’s academic interpreters leave. What Jenson does, particularly in the Systematic Theology (1997–1999), is build an account of the church from Christ’s personal “availability,” as Jenson calls it. The resurrection and ascension present a problem, however: how can the risen Jesus be available to us today? In the background here is the skeptical milieu of modern historical critical study of the New Testament and the existentialist solution offered by Rudolf Bultmann. Where Bultmann contends that it is only the proclamation of Christ as risen that makes Him presently accessible to us, Jenson shifts focus to the church. Christ is risen “into the church and her sacraments.”
Here Jenson takes up the old Lutheran contention that the ascended Christ is omnipresent according to His humanity. He is not trapped at the right hand of the Father in heaven, but has risen to “fill all things” (Ephesians 4:10 NRSV). As Jenson has it, Jesus is available to the world as the church and the sacraments. Christ is identified with and identifiable as the churchly gathering enacted through the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. The eucharist—not baptism—is the paradigmatic sacrament of the church. Jenson extends Paul’s image of the church as the body of Christ, since a body is simply one’s presence to others. This is why Paul chastises Christians for mistreating their own bodies through sexual immorality: to join oneself to a prostitute is not meaningless, but through sexual vulnerability, purchased access to another’s body actually unites one person to another. And by extension, for a Christian to be united with a prostitute is to unite Christ to her as well (I Cor. 6:15). The same logic is true of the eucharist: Christ is not simply imparting a gift to the world, but is incorporating believers into Himself through the church’s fellowship (I Cor. 10:16).
In this way, Jenson transcends the classically Protestant doctrine of the church as the “creature of the word.” He moves past the fundamental Lutheran conviction that God acts sacramentally in created things by emphasizing ontological union with Christ. Jenson’s catholic ecclesiology therefore turns on reciprocity between God and creatures due to their participation in the divine life. This is the logic of Jenson’s evangelical catholicity. At its core, Jenson rejects the pure passivity of justified sinners as Luther has it, and his later work steers away from the kind of narrow confessionalism that takes forensic justification as the crucial difference between Rome and Augsburg. Revisionist readers of Luther, like Tuomo Mannermaa and the Finnish school, must be recruited to rescue the Reformer from the misinterpretations introduced by Philip Melanchthon and the Formula of Concord, which take Luther’s doctrine of justification as a bare declaration of righteousness. Justification is not less than a declaration, but it’s also more—it must also mean the gradual moral transformation of sinners. Justifying faith is participation, and so eternal salvation is deification. To be human, in the last analysis, is to be God.
Jenson’s later work indicates something of his rather unreliable Lutheranism. He was involved early on in Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogues, but was asked to leave, he admits, because he sided too often with the opposition. Jenson’s earlier writings indicate a conventionally Lutheran understanding of justification by faith as a hermeneutical shorthand for the distinction between law and gospel. To properly articulate the gospel, the demands of the law must be distinguished from the good things promised by the gospel. Moreover, this distinction is not just one doctrine among many but is the hermeneutical key to all of theology. Jenson eventually came to situate the Reformation teaching on justification within a different ontological paradigm—one of ascent into the divine life rather than descent into the human neighbor through love. The proper distinction of law and gospel is no longer a fundamental structuring “horizon” for theology, but is situated within the architecture of participation. In this way, Jenson’s catholic Lutheranism is not a matter of romantic liturgical taste or an antiquarian sensibility. Nor does Jenson mount a defense of the true catholicity of original Lutheranism. Evangelical catholicism, in Jenson’s mature expression, relativizes Lutheran claims by the ruling principle of catholic metaphysics.
Jenson’s Mixed Reception
Jenson claims that his revisionist metaphysics is designed to renovate the inheritance of classical metaphysics and its influence upon Christian theology. The fact that he embraces the very metaphysical framework he claims to reject under the rubric of ecclesiology is a question for another occasion. But leaving aside this apparent discontinuity, Jenson’s vision of evangelical catholic Lutheranism—with robust ecumenism, strong eucharistic piety, the restoration of the threefold ordering of ministry, and an evangelical papacy—has yet to actually catch on with American Lutherans.
A simple survey of the major Lutheran bodies in the United States is illustrative. The ELCA has been riven by internal debates from the beginning, and a position like Jenson’s was simply one among many contested visions for what the ELCA could be. Not only was there a lively debate about the ECLA’s ecumenical initiatives, the threefold ordering of ministry, and the historic episcopate; human sexuality was up for discussion from the start. The Call to Faithfulness conferences in the early 1990s signaled that this was a church with crippling internal disagreements. Conservatives were split during this time over ecumenism: should the ELCA pursue full communion with Reformed churches? What about the Episcopalians? In 2000, the ELCA achieved the latter with Called to Common Mission. The formation of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) in 2001 was a first visible crack in the negotiated merger. The 2009 decision on homosexuality completed the rupture, leading to the formation of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) in 2010.
Today, the ELCA is more unified than ever before—at least on the level of clergy and administration. But losing so many conservative congregations and pastors has also made it one of the most liberal denominations in the country. Consequently, the traditionalism of a figure like Jenson eliminates him from serious consideration. His promotion of the historic liturgy surely has an indirect impact because of his work on the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship and its byproduct, the Lutheran Book of Worship. But aside from an aesthetic appreciation of the harvest of the modern liturgical movement, it’s hard to see where Jenson’s catholic Lutheranism is thriving in the ELCA. Some conservative holdouts remain, to be sure, especially among loyalist members of the Society of the Holy Trinity (STS). But in its march leftward, the ELCA has embraced an emancipatory politics against oppression—even where church tradition has perpetrated such oppression. Jenson’s early work has an emancipatory dimension, but he doesn’t oppose radical politics to creedal catholic teaching. Rather, authentic political liberation is derived from the basic conviction of catholic Christianity that Jesus is risen and that in Him, the triune God has acted to rescue creation from sin. One can only hope the ELCA’s politically conscious members would pay attention to Jenson’s plea for orthodoxy.
The other major Lutheran body in the United States is the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS). Known for its conservatism and its commitment to unconditional confessional subscription, Jenson’s evangelical catholicism doesn’t seem to have caught on there either. Granted, the LCMS has a reactionary contingent that has responded to the so-called worship wars of the 1990s by embracing the high ceremonial piety of historic Lutheranism. But liturgical renewal in the LCMS has its own lineage, traceable back to twentieth-century figures like Berthold von Schenk (1895–1974) and Arthur Carl Piepkorn (1907–1973). Arguably, a certain version of evangelical catholicism thrives in the LCMS more than anywhere else—it’s just not Jenson’s version. A key distinction concerns the ecumenical imperative. Evangelical catholicism in the LCMS approaches ecumenism rather differently. Jenson’s case for Lutheran catholicity doesn’t take the form of defensive apologetics for Lutheranism’s catholic claim. Instead he presumes that the Lutheran tradition itself is a fitting object of criticism for its failures to embody the catholicity its Confessions call for.
This conservative brand of evangelical catholicism is not interested in the ecumenical movement, insisting rather on Lutheranism’s exclusive claim to catholicity. Jenson (and Gritsch) suggest that Lutheranism is a confessional movement within the church catholic with justification as its proposal of dogma. But traditionalist elements among conservative Lutherans are preoccupied with demonstrating that the Church of the Augsburg Confession is the true heir of Western Christendom. Because of this stance, Lutheran scholasticism is seeing a bit of a revival because of its robust moral and metaphysical continuity with the pre-Reformation tradition. A potent reactionary impulse informs this reconstruction of the Lutheran heritage as a bulwark of truth and moral integrity against modernity’s secularity and antinomianism. By conscripting Lutheranism for the culture war on the opposite side of the ELCA, the tradition appears less as a herald of the gospel than as a witness to the moral and metaphysical stability of classical culture.
But at bottom, this issue is more than just a question of what it means to be a confessional Lutheran, but whether confessionalism is a good thing at all. Is Lutheranism simply the deposit of catholic doctrine codified in the Book of Concord? Or is it a movement with a vocation in the wider church to bear witness to the gospel? According to the former position, the unstated contention is that the Lutheran church is the visible church, to which all believers will eventually be reconciled (in this life or the next). According to the latter, the Lutheran tradition is a fraught and contested one: each generation must reinterpret what it means to be Lutheran as context requires. Jenson’s evangelical catholicism is one recipe for Lutheran identity shaped by its time. But perhaps Lutheran identity in the coming years requires something different.
The place where it would seem that Jenson might get his best hearing is the NALC. Conservatives from the ELCA founded the NALC following the 2009 decision, and many of them have been shaped by Jenson’s liturgical and ecumenical outlook. But like the ELCA in its early years, the NALC’s identity remains contested. At least three different factions compete for influence over the church’s future. Those with heritage in the American Lutheran Church (TALC) tend toward lower liturgical ceremony; greater skepticism of ecumenism; and a more conservative concept of Lutheran identity. Theologians like Gerhard Forde and the legacy of institutions like Luther Seminary (St. Paul, Minnesota) loom large for this contingent. This faction is centered in the Midwest and tends to be of Scandinavian heritage. To these Lutherans, Jenson’s evangelical catholicism appears both too posh and too compromising on core Lutheran convictions. On the other hand, the NALC also nurtures a church growth faction that isn’t so concerned about Lutheran identity. As convenience demands, the liturgy can be adjusted or eliminated in imitation of evangelical style, but with the hope that Lutheran substance still shines through.
For the NALC’s true evangelical catholic contingent, many are involved in the STS and are intensely focused on maintaining the Lutheran liturgical and sacramental heritage. But these Lutherans have imbibed only part of Jenson’s vision: for many, his theology is largely a matter of liturgical and aesthetic taste. They may also pay homage to his ecumenical sensibility. But at the moment, the ELCA remains the primary dialogue partner for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The prospects of ecumenical work with Rome appear to have cooled significantly because of internal Lutheran disputes about sexuality. Some in this segment of the NALC have also taken ritualism paired with social conservatism to an extreme in which church doctrine is subordinated to the cultivation of a properly ecclesial culture—brought forth through the right kind of liturgical, sacramental, and moral orientation. Some of Jenson’s recent critics—particularly those with a post-Barthian apocalyptic outlook—have criticized his fixation on the church and its culture as an alternative polis to the modern liberal state. A reduction of ecclesial sociology to liturgical antiquarianism surely only strengthens the cogency of this critique. I suspect that evangelical catholics in the NALC will need to turn elsewhere to renew their commitment to a Jensonian catholic Lutheranism.
Conclusion: Renewing Jenson’s Reception
This sketch might look like a bleak picture. To begin with Jenson’s academic readers, they are preoccupied with how Jenson’s revisionary metaphysics can help them answer the questions posed by modernity. Some find him too revisionist, too willing to sacrifice the stability of received metaphysical doctrine. Others find in Jenson a refreshing emphasis on the gospel promise as the anchor of all Christian theology. Jenson’s academic readers, however, don’t frequently extend their discussions into his ecclesiological and ecumenical work. In scholarly reception, Jenson is a metaphysician with an evolving series of conversation partners: first it’s Barth, then it’s radical theology, then it’s Yale School postliberalism, and finally it’s Judaism. But Jenson as a Lutheran theologian (even if an unreliable one) doesn’t receive so much attention despite the importance of his church context.
Jenson’s churchly audience on the other hand is the beneficiary of his ecclesial work. But evangelical catholicism of Jenson’s brand is in decline. A militant traditionalism on the right stands in opposition to whatever weak tea the mainline left has on offer at the moment. Jenson’s evangelical catholicism could have thrived in the ELCA if that body hadn’t turned out to be so fractious. The NALC is too small an institution for his more ambitious proposals for a reunited church. As the NALC continues to shape its identity, the trajectory it charts will probably lead further out of the mainline orbit and into closer proximity to various confessional Lutheran synods like the LCMS.
My contention is that this likely future needn’t spell the end Jenson’s evangelical catholicism, but invites its recalibration. Now is the occasion to reckon with the fact that the ecumenical movement has failed to realize the reunification of Christendom—if it ever intended that to begin with. Its model was fundamentally flawed because of the notion that intellectuals in dialogue could negotiate viable agreements between traditions. Bluntly, this approach hasn’t worked out. The mainline is exhausted, anemic, and homogeneous. Confessionalism now appears as the more energetic and durable alternative for Lutheran identity. Perhaps it’s time to embrace it. But that would also require some reconsiderations. Was full communion really prudent as a model for interconfessional ecumenism? Did the “urge to merge” make Lutherans more conflicted than they otherwise would have been? There are other matters that need to be addressed. Documents like the Joint Declaration have failed to smooth over the structural differences of Lutheran and Catholic theology that manifest themselves in mutually exclusive teachings on justification. For Lutherans to nourish evangelical catholic identity in the future, they must come to terms with the fact that we no longer live in a world of postwar economic prosperity, inflated institutional trust, and unprecedented openness to liturgical reform and Americanization.
Reclaiming an evangelical catholicism like Jenson’s will require some honesty in this respect. It’s from this standpoint that evangelical catholics can regroup and reclaim what it means for Lutheranism to be a confessional movement in the church catholic whose vocation is to bear witness to the centrality of justification by faith. This, along with its christological and sacramental entailments, lies at the heart of Lutheran identity. All this is inscribed into its inheritance of liturgy and preaching as well. And it’s from this standpoint that Lutherans can strengthen their proclamation of the gospel. Where the chaos of modernity tempts the church to prescribe moralism as the cure, who better than evangelical catholics to deliver the only promise that can open the future and impart hope to its hearers?
John W. Hoyum is a Ph.D. student in systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen and the pastor of Denny Park Lutheran Church in Seattle, Washington.
NOTE
[1] For a full list of citations and notes please see the Spring 2022 issue or contact us directly.
