Robert Jenson - Early Career

Early Career

Jenson's doctoral dissertation (revised and published in 1963 as Alpha and Omega) was completed in Basel, with Barth's approval, and so Jenson returned to Luther College, where he continued to study Barth while also developing an increasing interest in the philosophy of Hegel. The faculty of the religion department was uncomfortable with Jenson's theological liberalism, and his openness to biblical criticism and evolutionary biology was strongly condemned. When the college failed to force Jenson's retirement, several professors from the religion and biology departments resigned in protest. From 1960 to 1966, Jenson was thus left with the task of helping to rebuild an entire religion department, and he became especially involved in the development of a new philosophy department. During these years, he also wrote A Religion against Itself (1967), which sharply critiqued the American religious culture of the 1960s.

Jenson finally left Luther College to spend three years as Dean and Tutor of Lutheran Studies at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Here he was able to focus for the first time on teaching theology, and he was deeply influenced by his encounters with Anglicanism and with ecumenical worship. The three years at Oxford marked a creative and productive period in Jenson's career. In The Knowledge of Things Hoped For (1969), he sought to integrate the traditions of European hermeneutics and English analytical philosophy, while also drawing on patristic and medieval theologians such as Origen and Thomas Aquinas. And in God after God (1969), he sought to go beyond the "death of God" theology by emphasizing the actualism and futurity of God's being. The proposal advanced in God after God was in many respects parallel to the new "theology of hope" that was being developed at the time in Germany by young scholars like Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg. At Oxford, Jenson also supervised the doctoral work of Colin Gunton, who went on to become one of Great Britain's most distinguished and influential systematic theologians.

From Oxford, Jenson returned to America in 1968 and took up a position at the Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg. His work here focused in part on distinctively Lutheran themes, especially in the books Lutheranism (1976) and Visible Words (1978). He also began to engage deeply with patristic thought (especially with Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor), which led him to develop a creative new proposal for trinitarian theology in The Triune Identity (1982).

Further, as a result of his encounter with Anglicanism at Oxford, Jenson was appointed to the first round of Lutheran-Episcopal ecumenical dialogue in 1968. This was the beginning of his long involvement with the ecumenical movement, which would deeply shape his later theology. With George Lindbeck, he became involved in the Roman Catholic-Lutheran dialogue; and in 1988, he spent time at the Institute for Ecumenical Research at Strasbourg. Throughout his career, Jenson's theology continued to move in an increasingly Catholic, conservative and ecumenical direction. He interacted extensively with the work of Catholic theologians like Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and with Eastern Orthodox theologians like Maximus the Confessor, John Zizioulas and Vladimir Lossky.