Thursday, October 28, 2010

This is why I read Robert Jenson

"The question has to be 'following what critical theory, and penetrating to whose agenda, should the church read its Scripture?' My answer is implicit in all the foregoing chapters. [Chapters in his sparkling new book Canon and Creed]

The community positioned to perceive what a scriptural text is truly up to is the church, and the creed is the set of instructions for discerning this agenda. The needed suspicious eye is the eye trained in the church to distrust all human religiosity, also as it may appear in Scripture...

And it is the triune God who is up to something with these texts, whose agenda is to be discovered, to be affirmed by the church and denounced by others." (81)

Read that a few times. Something in it will surprise you each time. Other parts will say succinctly what you've already known for a while but never expressed so clearly.

If you read no other work of theology in 2010, read this one. It's short, just over 100 pages, but like most of Jenson, says a lot in a compact style that is worth internalizing.

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