Evangelical attributes

Robert Jenson attempts to expound the attributes of God as explications of the statement "God raised Jesus from the dead by the Spirit." He objects to the traditional "bipartite classification" systems prevalent in Protestant dogmatics, citing John Gerhard's distinction between absolute and relative attributes and commending: "This division betrays all to clearly the definition of God himself by abstraction from his relations, against which we have been struggling. We therefore have proposed a different classification, to serve the legitimate part of the same purpose."

For instance, to say that God raised Jesus is to make a statement about God's eternity: "over against the question of whether Jesus, this figure of historic antiquity, can mean anything to us in our so very different world, we may reply that since he is risen, his life is not in fact distant in time but brackets our time, defining all our possibilities. As a slogan: 'God [always the triune God, of whom Jesus is the second identity] is eternal.'"

For another: "God is infinite. That is, God can be limited by no temporal conditions. Rules of the form 'If X happens/has happened, Y must/cannot therefore happen' do not apply to God. God can accept and approve not only the godly but also the ungodly. He can use in his final fulfillment not only the virtues and successes of history, but also its sins and disasters. God can give life not merely to the not-yet born but also to the already dead. He is not predictably by the probabilities. God transcends what has happened and now s, created what cannot but must yet be."

Or this: God transcends temporal limits not arbitrarily but in a specific way, in faithfulness to Jesus, which Jenson takes as an evangelical way of saying "changelessness": "God's continuity as an enduring entity is that of a successful personal life, the very truth of which is to unite unpredictability and reliability. Aristotle defined a successful drama as one in which each event is a surprise when it happens, but makes us afterward say it was just what had to happen." God's changelessness is not the static impersonal changelessness but the persistent faithfulness of an Infinite Person.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, October 20, 2007 at 12:26 PM

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