Scott Swain’s attention to Robert Jenson’s work in The God of the Gospel: Robert Jenson’s Trinitarian Theology 
Yet, I was frustrated with Swain’s presentation at various points. On some of these same points, I am frustrated with Jenson as well, since he hasn’t always been as clear with his clarifications as one would wish. But I wish that Swain would have pushed a few of these points further, both to clarify Jenson and to arrive at sound judgments concerning where Jenson is right and wrong.
Let me mention two of these points in particular: The first has to do with Jenson’s claim that God is not only identified by but identified with the events of redemption history, the Exodus and the resurrection of Jesus in particular. The second has to do with the meaning of “identity” in Jenson’s work.
Swain gives this initial summary of Jenson’s by/with point: “The identification of God by proper name (i.e., YHWH) and narrated action (i.e., the deliverance of Israel from Egypt) . . . represents what is perhaps the Old Testament’s most characteristic grammar for naming God. Taking this characteristic grammar as a reliable revelation of God’s identity entails a number of materially significant decisions for the Christian doctrine of God, preeminently in Jenson’s case: the identification of God both by and with the saving events of history. According to Jenson, if God is identified only by the events that name him and not with those events, then the doctrine of God’s connection to biblical revelation is severed. On such a scheme, the Bible’s narrative descriptions become mere clues to a God who actually remains unknown and unrevealed. On such a scheme, such clues can only serve as an occasion for projecting our own idolatrous conceptions upon God” (82).
Swain goes on to explain the consequences of this claim. One of them is to raise questions about Jenson’s commitment to the Creator-creature distinction: “Does allowing the exodus to function as the primary grammar for identifying God threaten to leave the Creator-creature distinction underdeveloped when discussing God’s mighty acts of salvation?” (83). Swain thinks the answer is Yes, as he explains in a passage reflecting on Jenson’s claim that God’s suggestion that “YHWH’s relationship to his son Israel is a relationship internal to his identity and therefore constitutive of his identity” (86). He adds, “What is so striking about this relationship . . . is that the second term of this father-son relationship is in this case a creature ” (86).
Swain is quite aware that Jenson affirms the Creator-creature distinction. In fact, he quotes Jenson claiming that the Creator-creature distinction is the “first axiom” of Christian theology (94). It’s certainly possible that a theologian will say things that violate a basic conviction; it’s possible that Jenson is simply incoherent. But if this is incoherence, it’s a surprisingly basic one: One of Jenson’s most critical constructive claims is at odds with something he considers an axiom of Christian faith. If Jenson didn’t recognize the incoherence, he hardly deserves the plaudits he’s received, from Swain among others. If he did recognize it, and glossed over, then matters may be worse.
It seems more plausible to give Jenson the benefit of the doubt: Let’s assume he really believes that the Creator-creature distinction is axiomatic, and that he doesn’t believe his understanding of God’s relation to Israel contradicts or threatens that distinction. Is there a way to understand his by/with claim in a way that avoids incoherence? A good start would be to ask further what he might mean by these prepositions. Identification by an event seems straightforward enough. Jenson uses homey examples like: “I saw John.” “Which John?” “The John who sold me my car.” That’s identification by John’s action.
Would we say that John is identified with that action? At one level, that makes no sense at all: We would not say that “John is the pattern of events and actions involved in selling me my car.” But at that level, it makes no sense when applied to God. Assuming Jenson believes what he says about the Creator-creature distinction, we can’t imagine that “identification with” means something like “God is the event-in-history-during-which-the-Red-Sea-parted-and-Israel-escaped-and-Pharaoh-was-destroyed.” That would indeed violate the Creator-creature distinction and move us toward a weird kind of biblical pantheism.
But if Jenson doesn’t mean that , what does he mean? Can “identification with” bear a sense compatible with the Creator-creature distinction? It obviously does in Jenson’s own mind, but can we make sense of it. I suspect that it means something like this: He uses the exodus to identify Himself (by) when He says that He is the God who delivered Israel from Egypt. But the Exodus is not merely a thing that God does. It expresses His commitment to redeem Israel, and gives us a pattern of action (a type) that He promises to enact again and again. God identified with Exodus because He is the God who did Exodus once, and the God who does it again and again, for Israel, for Jesus, for the church. And He is identified with Exodus because He has chosen (election is crucial to Jenson, as Swain notes) to identify Himself with His bride. Exodus is not like selling a car; Exodus is more like identifying John as “the John married Jill.”
Something like this sense is implied by a statement quoted by Swain (86): “The primary trinitarian sense of ‘the Son’ may be so stated: he is another by and whom whom God is identified, so that what he does for this other he does to and for himself . . . and so that he is related to himself as the one who is related to this other in this way” (86). Here, identification with the “son” (Israel) means that when Yahweh acts on Israel’s behalf, He is also acting on His own behalf, proving Himself the God that He is by keeping His commitments to Israel. Once God has chosen Abraham, then God cannot be the God that He is unless He acts for Abraham’s seed, His Son Israel. He is “related to himself” as the one related to Israel. This doesn’t mean that Israel somehow becomes a fourth person of the Trinity, or that there are infinite numbers of potential divine persons (Jenson deals with this explicitly, 94). Israel is “internal” to God’s identity because His story (once He creates and chooses) is a story with His creatures, and thus these creatures “cannot be merely extrinsic to him” (97; emphasis added).
Another way to work this out would be to focus on the second issue I raised above, namely, that of identity. Swain recognizes that Jenson sees the Trinity as a name that distinguishes the God of Israel and Jesus from the many other gods of the Greco-Roman world (67) and the various idols of our age. But having made that point, it seems that Swain forgets it, and quotes Jenson’s statements about God’s “identity” as if they were identical to statements about God’s being. It’s one thing to say that God’s identity is constituted by “blatantly historical events,” quite another to say that “These ‘blatantly historical events’ constitute God as Trinity” (68). The former means that God distinguishes Himself from the other gods by the things that He does; the latter implies that in the course of history God unravels Himself trinitarianly.
Again, assuming that Jenson believes in the Creator-creature distinction and believes with Barth that God is self-determining, as he says he believes, he presumably doesn’t mean that God becomes the God He is by virtue of the creation. Jenson certainly doesn’t want to set God’s name and identity at odds with His being; that would violate some of His most basic convictions. But some of his more shocking statements might be clarified if we remember that he is regularly concerned with the identity of the Triune God.
My purpose here is not to defend Jenson. He is notoriously difficult, and difficult on precisely these points. But Swain’s work would have been stronger if he had explored more deeply various possible interpretations of Jenson’s most controversial claims.
