4 - The Post-Barthian Temptation

Summary

The first two theologians treated in this chapter – Robert Jenson and Eberhard Jüngel – were conditioned by both a deep-lying attraction to revisionary metaphysics and by eschatology in their reception of Barth’s theology. This helped to uncover aspects of Barth’s dogmatics that had previously gone unnoticed. Ultimately, however, the temptation for both Jenson and Jüngel was to treat the immanent Trinity as something that is “complete” only in the eschaton. For divine kenosis, this meant that it was not an ontological precondition to incarnation but something that takes place in Jesus’ way to the cross. The third theologian treated in this chapter is Piet Schoonenberg. He shares a starting point with Jenson and Jüngel in the narrated history of Jesus of Nazareth attested in the New Testament, yet the “principles” he employs in his constructive Christology could just as easily be taken in a direction in which the second person of the Trinity is not collapsed into a human being. This chapter’s historical analysis finally raises the questions: why resist a collapse of the eternal Son into Jesus of Nazareth? Why engage in any sort of return to the received Christological dogma, however modified we might make it to be?