The Being of God

Jenson’s discussion of the “Being of the One God” at the end of the first volume of his Systematic theology is intriguing both as historical and as systematic theology.

He summarizes the Greek answer to the question “What is Being” in three steps. Being is “immunity to time”; it is “what does not come or go, and therefore divinely is and therefore truly is, is ‘form’” and “what satisfies the mind’s longing for absolute assurance, for transcendence over time’s surprises”; it is, finally, the “shape that the mind’s eye sees.”

What can Christians do with this pre-Christian concept of being? How ought it be applied to God? Some theologians – Jenson mentions John of Damascus – accept this concept of being, apply it to God, but then limit the ways in which the concept does apply. When “being” menaces God’s freedom, it is said that God is “‘above; the level at which such dangers menace.” Alternatively, some theologians, especially those influenced by Heidegger, accept the concept but deny its applicability to God. God is therefore “above being” or even “non-being.” This is dangerous, Jenson thinks, because in modern thought “nonbeing is evoked as mere negativity, that is, as violence upon what is; Heidegger’s fascism was no accident or coincidence.” The other option, which Jenson somewhat surprisingly attributes to Aquinas, is to reject the concept as formulated and “reinterpret it to accommodate the gospel, and just by so doing say what it is for God to be.”

How does Aquinas do this? First, against Aristotle’s claim that forms that are not instantiated in matter are divine, Thomas “teaches that a form’s lack of need for matter cannot in itself guarantee that it is not instantiated, and so does not qualify it as divine.” Angels are forms without matter, but are still creatures. Second, Aquinas “trumped” Aristotle with a second composition added to form/matter. Form and the need for instantiation in matter is “essence,” but this is distinct from being or existence, even in cases of separated forms like angels. There is a “being” or “existence” which is not itself form; Being is “the actuality of essence, its step beyond potentiality.” What something is is not what it is is but only what it may be. When we have determined the essence of a thing, we don’t yet know whether it exists.

This is not Aristotle’s view. For Aristotle “what a separated entity is implies that it is.” Things are “truly and unqualifiedly are contain within themselves the guarantee of their own actuality.” Thomas cannot accept this; it violates the doctrine of creation, which says that the existence of creatures is not rooted in anything in them but in the Creator.

In God, though, there is a perfect coincidence of essence and existence. “What God is, if he is, itself guarantees that he in fact is.” What interests Jenson is the possibility that this convertibility of essence and existence can also work the other direction: Essence is existence, but does “his existence sheerly as such constitute his essence? Is an otherwise unqualified act of existing the essence of God?” Jenson thinks that this is what Aquinas is after. God doesn’t have a form, but what occupies the place that a form would occupy is the actual divine existence, the action and life of the Trinity.

Turning from Aquinas to Gregory of Nyssa, Jenson argues that “God” is not the name of any particular person nor of the ousia. Rather, “‘God,’ according to Gregory, refers to the mutual action of the identities divine ‘energies,’ to the perichoretic triune life.” God or “the one God” or “the being of God” is “not a something, however rarefied or immaterial, but a going-on, a sequentially palpable event, like a kiss or a train wreck. The being of God, said Thomas, is not something actualized but the event of actualization.” This is the background for Jenson’s endorsement of Barth’s idea that God’s deity is an event.

This is also the background to Jenson’s argument concerning God’s infinity. Greek thought resists infinity, since without boundaries there is no form and a formless thing is simply nothing. Infinity can only be non-being, the threatening violence set against being. For Nyssa, Jenson argues, God’s infinity is not a matter of boundlessness but a matter of His power to overcome all boundaries. It is a temporal infinity, and it is fundamentally the eternity of God’s faithfulness – God’s power to knit together events, God’s ability and determination to overcome all obstacles, most especially death (time’s final boundary) to fulfill His promise. Jenson writes, “God is not eternal in what he adamantly remains as he began, but in that he always creatively opens to what he will be; not in that he hangs on, but in that he gives and receives; not in that he perfectly persists, but in that he perfectly anticipates.”

This faithfulness has a Trinitarian structure, a “whence” (Father) and a “whither” (Spirit) and an instantiated present (Son). Jenson is even willing to entertain the notion that God has his own time: “The life of God is constituted in a structure of relations, whose own referents are narrative. This narrative structure is constrained by a difference between whence and whither that one cannot finally refrain from calling ‘past’ and ‘future,’ and that is congruent with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit. This difference is not relative and therefore not measurable; nothing in God recedes into the past or approaches from the future. But the difference is also absolute: the arrow of God’s eternity, like the arrow of causal time, does not reverse itself. Whence and whither are not like right and left or up and down on a map but are like before and after in a narrative.”

All this leads to the somewhat strange formulation: “God’s being is a particular event, the active relation of the triune persons, the event in which we are involved in that the crucifixion and resurrection occur among us.” Events happen to something, so Jenson says that “the event of God happens to . . . the divine persons. The fundamental statement of God’s being is therefore: God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit.” But he also says that “God is what happens to Jesus and the world . . . . God is the event of the world’s transformation by Jesus’ love, the same love to which the world owes its existence.”

To un

pack this, we have to recall that “God” is not the name of the ousia of God, or of any of the persons. God is the name of the “perichoretic triune life.” God is the word that we use to name what in God would be form if God had form. Since He doesn’t, and since his essence is existence/being, God is the name of His existence, His being, His life.