First Things RSS Feed - Robert W. Jenson

It's the Culture

Thu, 01 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400

What happens to a culture shaped by the Bible, if the culture ceases to believe that the Bible tells truth?” This was the question asked by my initiation paper for a liberal arts discussion group that met more than fifty years ago. In the meantime, we have been finding out the answer.

Continue Reading »

A Review of Ethics with Barth

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Ethics with Barth
by Matthew Rose
Ashgate, 226 pages, $89.95

Continue Reading »

How The World Lost Its Story

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

It is the whole mission of the church to speak the gospel. As to what sort of thing “the gospel” may be, too many years ago I tried to explain that in a book with the title Story and Promise , and I still regard these two concepts as the best analytical characterization of the church’s message. It is the church’s constitutive task to tell the biblical narrative to the world in proclamation and to God in worship, and to do so in a fashion appropriate to the content of that narrative, that is, as a promise claimed from God and proclaimed to the world. It is the church’s mission to tell all who will listen, God included, that the God of Israel has raised his servant Jesus from the dead, and to unpack the soteriological and doxological import of that fact.

Continue Reading »

Can We Have a Story?

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Some time ago I published in this journal an essay on “How the World Lost Its Story” (October 1993). Modernity’s project, I said with great unoriginality, was the attempt to maintain the Bible’s grasp of reality while dispensing with the Bible’s God. The long reading of Scripture in the West taught us”including those who did not notably obey Scripture”to perceive reality Scripture’s way, as a history that makes a whole because it has a conclusion and so a plot. The modern West tried to inhabit this world while believing no Teller of the story.

”Modernism” (if you are in the art“historical discourse) or “postmodernism” (if you are in the culture“diagnostic discourse) is merely the self“conscious collapse of modernity’s project. It is the despairing or gleeful recognition that you cannot very well have a drama without a dramatist. The recognition should not, of course, have been quite so long in coming, but humanity has a notable capacity for persistence in self“deception. If God is not, or is of deist persuasion and entertains no histories, that leaves only two possibilities: either we are to make up the world’s story, or the world just happens to have one. The latter possibility is remarkably implausible. As to the former, postmodernism proclaims the further unsurprising discovery that whatever universal stories we make up, whatever “metanarratives,” must be oppressive.

Then, more recently, I reviewed here T. J. Clark’s history of modernist painting (October 1999). Clark’s diagnosis is very much like mine. Clark construes modernist painting”not modern painting, which begins much earlier”as prophecy of a world freed from the bourgeois passion for comprehensible wholes, a world whose actual advent turns out, alas, to make no room for painting. The present moment is, he thinks, a “travesty” of the prophesied heaven, and hellish for art. Nevertheless, Clark wants to be hopeful: what we are in is not permanent hell but only “purgatory.” Unfortunately, Clark can give no account of this hope that is in him.

With this pair of First Things pieces behind me, I thought I might revisit the subject at the journal’s anniversary. So: can we have a story again?

It is not of course that there are no metanarratives still around. Modernity’s social“political story”running from initial situation through contract, fictive or actual, to the liberal society”retains its rule over our political self“understanding. And to very different effect, reality is forcing the hard sciences into story form. This would be a welcome development, if only popularizers did not make science’s story itself another metanarrative.

The framework of the biological sciences has been narrative at least since Darwin. The implications of this have been disguised by the ideological insistence that below the narrative there must be deterministic mechanism. This ideology has no evidential basis, but is nevertheless taught in seventh grade as “what science tells us.”

More remarkably, physics also assumes story form. The universe goes from big bang to big crunch/whimper; and at the other end of magnitude, we discover that an elementary particle just is its own history. Again ideologues among the scientists insist that a theory will yet be found that generates the cosmos and its story sheerly from timelessly underlying mathematics. Those not so desperate to avoid religion will be content to wait and see.

Moreover, postmodernist theories are themselves metanarratives. They are one and all stories about how it came to pass that we thought we had a story, and how we are now to be liberated from this delusion. (At an American Academy of Religion session a time or two ago, where the panelists were holding forth against oppressive hegemonic discourses, an elderly nonacademic finally interjected, “I wonder if you people know how you are oppressing me.”) The form of these narratives is quite directly dependent on Scripture; they are narratives of fall and redemption.

Scientists generally believe their own narratives. Postmodernists are supposed not to. No one but John Rawls any longer believes modernity’s social narrative, but we find none other to cling to. The joint effect is the problem. For the scientists’ narratives do not seem to be about us, the political narrative no longer suffices, and the postmodernist narratives, which are obsessively about us, finally conjure spiraling contradiction. At the turn of the millennium, what awaits appears indeed to be an eschaton, Nietzsche’s minus the superman”nihilism.

What is to be done within church and synagogue seems relatively plain. God’s people must gather the courage to subordinate other narratives to their own, to proclaim and live within a metanarrative that is “meta” in superlative degree. If the story the Bible tells, running from creation to consummation and plotted by Exodus or Exodus“Resurrection, is true , it is not just our story but God’s. If it is God’s story, it is universal. And if it is the triune God’s story, it cannot be oppressive.

Astrophysical cosmology and evolutionary narrative do not tell the encompassing story within which all others must be construed. For all this story’s melo drama, it is an abstraction of reality, and believers must have the gall to say this, indeed to say that such abstraction touches reality only as it is construed within the story of God and His creation. Modernity’s political narrative is not the comprehensive story within which the Church must be assigned its place. On the contrary, Augustine was right: the polities of this world are feeble imitations, for emergency conditions, of the divine polity.

If the coming period is to be any special period in the history of God’s people, it will be the time when we are at once reduced to a sect and forced to claim universality with unprecedented boldness, when we must openly and intentionally be tellers of a particular story that is either a fairy tale or the comprehensive truth. If the turn of millennium indeed is anything special, it is the moment when God’s people will have no choice but to summon such chutzpah and live by it.

Will we do it? Yes, because Hell’s gates cannot prevail. Will any particular segment of God’s people do it? Not necessarily; there is no promise that, e.g., American Protestantism will not disappear or adopt for good and all the mask of Nietzsche’s “last man.”

Will the world itself have a story? God knows. Perhaps there is indeed to be a penultimate end of history, not an end of newspaper events but a global imposition of storyless procedural society, of Clark’s “purgatory.” In any case, church and synagogue, in charity for humankind, must pray against such a time of trial and meanwhile do what we can for our fellows.

We can but make the claim. We can note the postmodernist critique of metanarratives, and then offer a narrative that, because it is about God and us at once, is of a different species altogether. Will there be enough people in the world who entertain this obviously self“serving offer to make a difference? God knows. We can strengthen the voices of those in the scientific community who are considering the implications and possibilities of their disciplines’ transformation into narrative; and we can actually produce such accounts of God’s history with creation as show the truth and benefit of the sciences’ stories. Will this suffice for the culture to acquire a new version of “what science says,” a version that helps folk inhabit a coherent history rather than hinders it? God knows. We can not only expose the mythic character of modernity’s social narrative”this is anyway almost universally admitted”but as synagogue and church display how there can be a polity shaped not only by measures to alleviate the love of domination, but also by love for the good. Will enough of the world look and emulate to make a difference? God knows.

Robert W. Jenson is Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.

Continue Reading »

Contradictions of Modernism

Fri, 01 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism
By T. J. Clarke.
Yale University Press. 451 pp. $45.

Continue Reading »

“The American People”

Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

Sometimes the phrase became so intolerably ubiquitous that entire comedy routines were made around it. But neither political leaders nor the press nor furrowed-brow academics nor editors of prestigious journals nor indeed “the American people” have seemed able to desist. All parties to our recent disputes have incessantly claimed either to represent “the American people” or to be looking out for its better interests. Polls constantly measure its “will.” President Clinton has professed himself determined above all to get on with its “business.” And queried by roving reporters, presumable members of “the American people” regularly complain that government does not sufficiently heed it, or its will.

But what sort of thing is “the American people”? (I will from here on mostly refrain from the scare-quotes.) As soon as the question is posed, and a quick mental survey is made, the answer becomes obvious: the phrase as used must name a wholly fictitious entity. According to the grammar of current (attempted) references to the American people, the thing referred to exists strictly in the moment of reference. But human being, individual or collective, subsists only diachronically, occupying a stretch of time.

The will of the American people is, according to recent usage, ascertained by polling a present cross-section; it is a momentary phenomenon to be measured as we measure degrees Fahrenheit. Past persons do not belong to this American people. Thus, for a key example, the authors of the Constitution appear in debates and analyses only as authorities, perhaps supporting or perhaps challenging, but in any case other than the American people. (I owe this observation to a comment by William Bennett.) Future persons do not belong to it either: “our children” have figured prominently in the discourse, but only as those for whom the American people are concerned. But of course no person, to say nothing of a people, subsists in a momentary present tense.

The author of this essay is just as much constituted by his former utterance of perhaps now embarrassing opinions as by the present act of writing. His will is not what he happens at the moment to want; his faith is not what a present inventory of his religious opinions might discover; his conviction is not the answers he might give even to an omnicompetent poll-taker; his love spans all the decades of the beloved’s life. Indeed, only the most superficial observer would attempt to describe him without reference to an indeterminate group of persons quite other than him, most of them past, as to Thomas Jenson, buried at Clifton, Texas, or to Lena Nerhaugen, buried in Mt. Olive Cemetery in Chicago. And any attempt on my part to act as if it were not so could only be a sort of attempted moral suicide.

All this is of course doubly true of a people. If we were to use the phrase “the American people” with meaning, it would refer to Thomas Jefferson and Benedict Arnold and my grandparents just named fully as much as to anyone now living. The will of the American people that actually exists is stated by the Plymouth Covenant and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and “I have a dream” and the contrarian judgment of Clinton maintained by a straight-backed widow in Peoria who is included in no surveyor’s sample or focus group. And it is wholly unavailable to polling. Does the American nation “support our troops”-wherever they currently are occupied? If it does, the support does not consist in a majority wishing them well at the moment, but in their being legally dispatched by a legally elected government, in the provision of weapons and food by taxes collected in common consent over the years, and above all in the coherence of their sending with the nation’s historically achieved common good. I could go on in this vein, but perhaps the point is made.

That “the American people” (sorry, it was necessary) as currently evoked cannot exist, does not mean it is harmless. Americans’ self-identification with a non-entity must be, if not actually a cause of our nihilism, at least a very clear symptom. Surely it offers partial explanation of a strange phenomenon: that the more Clinton has refused responsibility for his past, the more popular he has become. It is very hard not to love one’s own image; I suggest that the more blatantly Clinton refused to live a morally continuous life, the more Americans recognized their own isolation in the moment. Americans have notoriously been short on historical self-awareness, but determination to have no past or future seems at the moment to have reached the point of mania.

Perhaps we can explain also a second phenomenon of the recent unpleasantness: the agreement by all parties that sexual misconduct is a private matter. Some argued that because Clinton’s perjury was about sex he should not be impeached for it; others that perjury is perjury, though of course his sexual behavior is none of our business. Now, if ever a common opinion was manifestly absurd, it is the notion that sexual acts are not the community’s concern. Sexual attraction and union is-as every field anthropologist knows and as is in any case obvious-the very creation of community. Intercourse, or deliberated abstention from it, is the primal act by which in an absorbing present moment we reach out from ourselves to the future. It is the arrangement God has made for the continuation of community across time, and the enticement he provides for individuals’ interest in that continuity. Is not Americans’-hopeless-passion to privatize sex simply one part of our rebellion against diachronic humanity?

We have to get past Augustine in this matter. It has for some years been so fashionable to blame Augustine for Western troubles that a counter-fashion has arisen of debunking his debunkers. Nevertheless, Western Christendom’s great spiritual and intellectual founder did teach both church and civilization that the past exists only in the present moment of our remembering it and the future only in the present moment of our anticipating it, and he was utterly and disastrously wrong. For the past exists in God’s remembering it, and the future in His anticipating it; and what is remembered and anticipated in the life of God is not reduced to a present moment but rather spans and enables all moments. Our lives and our nation’s lives transcend the present moment, to make genuine stories plotted between future, past, and present, because there is the biblical God-which Augustine of all people should have known. His lamentable and perhaps only serious error seems to be the one thing the general culture still retains from him.

Robert W. Jenson is Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey.

Continue Reading »

Catholic and Evangelical?

Thu, 01 Oct 1998 00:00:00 -0400

Systematic Theology: Volume 3
By Wolfhart Pannenberg, Translated by Geoffrey Bromiley
Eerdmans. 713 pp. $49

Continue Reading »

The Ordinary Transformed

Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

The Ordinary Transformed:
An Inquiry into the Christian Vision of Transcendence
By R.R. Reno
Eerdmans, 222 pages, $19 paper

Continue Reading »

Parting Ways?

Mon, 01 May 1995 00:00:00 -0400

Systematic Theology: Volume 2 By Wolfhart Pannenberg, Translated by Geoffrey Bromiley
Eerdmans, 449 pages, $39.99

Continue Reading »

On Hegemonic Discourse

Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 -0400

It is currently a favorite complaint and/or explanation: a “hegemonic discourse” is repressing someone. Thus, for instance, it is said that “patriarchal” societies practice a hegemonic masculinist discourse, and that this is why when gender-feminists try to say their truth they are driven to such linguistic enormities. Or again, Christians who actually believe the gospel are said to bind the religious impulses of their fellow denominationalists with dogmatically grammared language, which is why when the latter try to express the depths within them these come out seeming so paltry. Et cetera.

A hegemonic discourse, we are told, makes things that ought to be said unsayable; therefore those who nevertheless try to say them find themselves uttering nonsense though they know they have sense to say. The phrase “hegemonic discourse” is well established (in a hegemonic discourse?), and is equally beloved of charlatans and genuine thinkers; in view of the latter, there must be something to it.

But what is a hegemonic discourse? So soon as the question is allowed, its answer is-embarrassingly?-apparent: it is the way those talk who at any given time and place happen to be doing the talking. Perhaps they have come to be or remain in this position by shutting others up, by manipulating them, or by doing something else reprehensible. But it is not apparent that this must always be so. Maybe others just like to hear them.

There is of course the possibility that everyone could be doing the talking, that there would be no outsiders at all. The realization of this possibility is awaited by Jewish or Christian faith as the Kingdom of Heaven.

It is important to notice: nothing would necessarily be different about discourse in itself merely because it had no outsiders. It is just that nobody would complain of hegemony. Even in the Kingdom of Heaven there could still be governing linguistic rules of which someone could complain if, impossibly, there were anyone who wanted to.

If some of us at a time and place short of the Kingdom are not among those doing the talking and are unwillingly in that position, we have two recourses. We can join the going conversation, learning to talk its way. Or we can try to replace the way of the going conversation with the way we would talk if we were doing the talking; such an attempt is known as a revolution. By neither move can we create a discourse that is not hegemonic. Until the Kingdom comes, somebody will still be doing the talking and somebody else will still not be doing the talking. Unless, of course, nobody at all is talking anymore.

All discourse is enabled by grammar, by implicit rules that let us, e.g., put “horse” and “fast”/”slow” together but not “horse” and “vaporous”/”condensed.” Grammar is primarily learned and enforced not by direct study-recalling junior high, that would be a lost cause indeed- but by apprenticed practice. Some people know not to say “My horse is condensed,” and those who do not, learn it by trying to talk to them. Listen to a clever child with a new word try it out in endless combinations, alert to every response showing which work and which do not-and mourn the irremediable suffering of the child with no practiced talkers to talk to.

Thus a hegemonic discourse is finally just the way those talk from whom we learn to talk at all. Absent a hegemonic discourse and short of the Kingdom, there could only be silence. This could be the pre-linguistic silence of mystic experience. Or it could be the post-linguistic silence of fascist cacophony, in which speech has ceased to be discourse and has become simply one way in which we try to cause one another to behave as we want.

This does not mean that hegemonic discourses are not in fact oppressive, that we can never legitimately complain of a going hegemony and should attempt no revolutions. It is the human condition after the fall: what enables us is also what oppresses us. There are several such complaints I have been myself making for decades. To choose an example that is materially almost irrelevant to this article, I have urged the metaphysically revolutionary proposition, “God has plenty of time. It is we who want to be timeless.” And I am indeed oppressed by the fact that folk adamantly presume a semantic rule of the very discourse I am assaulting, that for them the word “God” is assumed beyond question to be equivalent to “timeless entity,” so that they “hear me saying” the nonsense, “The timeless one has plenty of time.”

So if I can cry, “Down with the hegemony of Hellenic theological discourse, which hinders my saying what must be said,” why should not others cry, “Down with the hegemony of patriarchal discourse”? Or “capitalist discourse.” Or whatever. And of course there is no reason why not. Those who disapprove of such revolutions can then oppose them.

There is, however, one current cry that transfers to another genus. “Down with the hegemony of hegemonic discourse” is on its face only an especially inept pleonasm. But its actual force is desperate: it must be a demand either for silence or for the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom not being in our achieving, and the silence of real mysticism being not commonly wanted, the demand works out as a plea for fascism’s substitution of causation for discourse, for the replacement of politics by verbal manipulation.

Two questions present themselves. In what discourse do we complain of or defend a hegemonic discourse? And what would a non-hegemonic discourse be like? I will take up the second first.

If and when a non-hegemonic discourse comes to pass, perhaps it will prove different simply as discourse, in ways now unspecifiable. Perhaps it will have an altogether new kind of grammar. But this need not happen for there to be a non-hegemonic discourse. The necessary and sufficient condition is simply that those doing the talking do not merely by so doing come to fill the role we now call hegemonic. That is, a non- hegemonic discourse will come to pass when nobody any longer must be taught to talk. In other words, it will come to pass when history is no longer constituted by a succession of generations. A non-hegemonic discourse could therefore only be the discourse of the biblical Eschaton. Karl Marx noted this point, and repackaged it as the doctrine of ideology.

Marx’s hypothesis that the biblical expectation of the Kingdom could be separated from biblical faith in God has-lamentably-been tested in a massive historical experiment and has been falsified. We may therefore assert with fully public confidence: there will be a non-hegemonic discourse only if there is the Bible’s God and only if and when he achieves his final Kingdom and its discourse. This is of course a bitter pill for most who now complain of hegemonic discourse: there can be non- hegemonic discourse only if there is what they most dread, a real Hegemon. Those who first marshalled the noun on which the adjective depends were fathers of the Church, who used it for God, or an apostle or angel as a guide to God, or the deepest part of the soul as the place where God rules.

Discourse that was not oppressive would be a discourse with two characteristics. It would be the way people talked who were all those who wanted to talk. And all its actual sentences would be true, so that it repelled no other truth there was to say. As St. Thomas observed, such a doctrine could only be that of God and his perfected saints. Do we in this world want to cultivate a less oppressive-though still, of course, hegemonic-discourse? Then we must work at approximating the discourse of the saints in heaven. According to the Bible there is a way to do that: belong to one community with the saints and talk with them, join the people of the Lord (which is En glish for Adonai which is Hebrew for Hegemon).

And now we can turn also to the first question. How can it be that a hegemonic discourse only hinders what cannot be said within it? How can it be that, in however strangulated a fashion, we do sometimes manage to say what cannot be said in the going conversation? In what discourse do we protest a hegemonic discourse? Or oppose such a protest?

Evidently there must be a meta-hegemonic discourse (take that, fellow neologists!), a discourse that enables both any given ruling discourse and language beyond the latter’s sway. If there is God, and if he talks to us and lets us answer, there is just such a discourse. Indeed, vice versa: if there is a transcending discourse, the one sustaining it must simply thereby be God. Precisely the possibility of protesting a human linguistic hegemony, whether wisely or foolishly, is an evidence of God. Those who want no Hegemon must, and regularly do, finally deny the possibility of transcending the going human conversation and despairingly acquiesce in its hegemony.

The reason we are not fully enslaved to the fellow humans from whom we learn to talk is that finally it is not they but God who so talks as to enable talking. There can be rebellion against, or defense of, any given discourse if and only if there is a Word before all human conversation that is the latter’s possibility and beginning.

According to the heart of Christian interpretation-the doctrine that God is triune-there is indeed a meta-hegemonic discourse, a Conversation in progress before all created conversations. (This heart of Christian doctrine, one should note, is not so foreign to Judaism as might be supposed.) According to Genesis, in and as the beginning, God says, “Let there be” and whatever is, is. According to John’s version of Genesis, in the beginning God’s Word is with God so utterly as to be God, and all things come to be by being mentioned in this Word. God speaks his Word, which so completely is his truth as to be like him a person, who then must respond. This conversation, prototypically for any good conversation, has a Spirit that is of one being with the conversants. Thus God is a Conversation.

It is by being called into this Discourse that all who ever talk learn to talk. Creatures talk because God has decided to make room in himself for others to join in the Conversation he himself is. God creates all things by calling them in the third person: “Let there be.” But some he not only speaks about but speaks to and asks for response. Just thereby, those creatures themselves come to speak, and so are human.

The one meta-hegemonic Discourse is thus not itself a monologue; no one lays down the first and last grammar, since God himself is not merely one. The meta-hegemonic Discourse is antecedently in itself a true conversation. And moreover it is, in the contingency of the divine choice, a conversation that includes us. Therefore we live, move, and have our being in and over against a discourse that is liberating rather than oppressive. There will be a great discourse-indeed, a la the Book of Revelation, a great liturgy-in which all join with perfect freedom. And insofar as we can hope already to speak freely, it is by anticipatory joining in that liturgy.

Therefore the penultimate enterprise of seeking less oppressive linguistic polities is not hopeless. We must only be aware of what a tremendous thing we are then attempting, and of the true possibilities and limits of human enterprise on such lines. My suspicion is that if we achieve such awareness, we will stop worrying about “hegemonic discourse.”

Robert W. Jenson teaches in the Department of Religion at St. Olaf College.

Continue Reading »