Jenson on metaphor and theological language

Across the two volumes of his systematic theology, Robert Jenson makes a number of comments about the nature of metaphor in theological speech. I tracked down one of these the other day, only to stumble across others. I thought I’d share them here. Some are in the body of the text, some are footnotes; I’ll signal when which is which.

At the first mention, Jenson has just spent some paragraphs discussing the Old Testament’s description of the relationship between God and Israel, as well as between God and individual Israelites, “as a relation of father to son” (I:77). He then writes, “Given that such language is indeed used, we should not too quickly interpret it as a trope.” To which is appended the footnote (n.20):

That is, “. . . is a Son of God” is used in these passages as a proper concept. If someone has a theory of “metaphor” such that the use can be both concept and metaphor, well and good.

Clearly, Jenson has certain theories of metaphor in mind. We see in the next chapter whose these are. As he writes (I:104):

When the bishops and other teachers left Nicea and realized that, along with condemning Arius, they had renounced the established subordinationist consensus, many began to backtrack. Indeed, refusal to face Nicea has remained a permanent feature of Christianity’s history. If modalism has been the perennial theology of the pious but unthinking, Arianism has continually reappeared in the opposite role, as the theology of those controlled more by culture’s intellectual fashion than by the gospel.

He then adds in a footnote (n.99):

Most blatantly in recent memory, the “theology of metaphor,” paradigmatically represented by Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

The culprit at last! Nor is she, or theories like hers, far from Jenson’s mind in the next volume. Three chapters in, he is writing of “the sheer musicality” of “the divine conversation”; he argues that “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music” (II:39). Immediately he anticipates an objection:

The previous paragraph is likely to be read as metaphor, and indeed as metaphor run wild. It is not so intended, or not in any sense of “metaphor” that is alternative to “concept.” Such words as “harmony” are here conscripted to be metaphysically descriptive language more malleable to the gospel’s grasp of reality than is, for central contrary example, the language of “substance” in its native Aristotelian or Cartesian or Lockean senses. That we are used to the metaphysical concepts of Mediterranean pagan antiquity and its Enlightenment recrudescence does not mean they are the only ones possible; there is no a priori reason why, for example, “substance”—which after all simply meant “what holds something up”—should be apt for conscription into metaphysical service and, for example, “tune” should not.

On the second sentence he hangs a footnote (n.41):

This may be the place to insist on a vital point against most recent “metaphor” theology. Its practitioners want to have it both ways. Sometimes it is important for them to note that metaphor is a universal function in all language. This of course is a truism, and when we think of “metaphor” in this way, there is no opposition between “metaphor” and “concept.” But then the key step in their theological arguments is that they pit metaphor against concept: we have, they say, “only” metaphors for God. It is perhaps safe to say that what most theologians now have in mind when they speak of metaphor is trope that is not concept; it is for this reason that I am so leary of “metaphor.”

Later in the same volume the subject reappears one last time, in the opening to the chapter on the church’s polity (II:189-190):

In ecumenical ecclesiology it has become customary to discuss the church’s reality under three headings drawn from the New Testament: the church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the Body of Christ. The trinitarian echoes of the pattern are obvious, as must be its attractiveness to this enterprise.

But much twentieth-century theology has succumbed here also to an endemic strategy of evasion: “people,” “temple,” and “body” have been treated as unconnected “images” or “metaphors” of the church, which at most need to be balanced or variously emphasized, that is, which need not be taken seriously as concepts. But although “temple” may be a simile when applied to the church, which to be sure is not literally a building or place, “people” clearly is neither metaphor nor simile; and if one pauses to examine Paul’s actual use of the phrase “body of Christ,” it becomes obvious that neither is it.

If we are to follow this scheme, then it must be the task of systematic theology to take “The church is the people of God, the temple of the Spirit, and the body of Christ” with epistemic seriousness by displaying the conceptual links between these phrases.

In the second paragraph, after the word “emphasized,” Jenson attaches the following footnote (n.2):

It perhaps needs to be repeated in this volume: I am well aware of the sense in which all language may be said to be metaphorical in its origins. But this trivial obsession has recently been widely used to escape the necessary distinction in actual usage between concepts and tropes. Both concepts and tropes are “functions,” sentences with holes in them. A concept is a function that, if the hole is filled in, yields a sentence that can be a premise in valid argument. Thus “The church is the temple of the Spirit” is a properly metaphorical proposition precisely because it will not, together with “All temples are containers for a god or gods,” yield “The church is the container of a god.”

Jenson was always attentive to the nature of language and, in particular, to the linguistic turn in philosophy and theology. See his long footnote back in the first volume, incidentally in a chapter dedicated to God the Father, here following discussion of Jonathan Edwards and Immanuel Kant (I:120n.21):

The most notorious line of this line of work [that is, the postmodern deconstruction of the “Western notion and experience of the self”] begins, significantly, with a theory of language, the “structuralist” theory founded by Ferdinand de Saussure . . . . A “language,” in structuralist theory, is a system of signs, whether of words, gestures, or other cultural artifacts. Each such system functions as possible discourse merely by the internal relations of its constituent signs, independently of any relation to a world outside the system. A language system as such can therefore have no history. It simply perseveres for its time and then is replaced by another, built perhaps from its fragment-signs; a favorite term in this connection is bricolage, the assembling of a new structure from fragments of former structures.

“Poststructuralism” combines structuralist understanding of language with an ontological position widely held in late-modern Continental thought: the personal self is said to be constituted in and by language, to subsist only as the act of self-interpretation. The emblematic figure in this movement has been Jacques Derrida . . . . The combination undoes the self, for the human self, inescapably, does have history. If then the self is linguistic, constituted in self-interpretation, and if language’s history is discontinuous, then so is the self’s history; then the self is constituted only as an endless bricolage of succeeding self-interpretations. A human life can have no status as a whole; that is, there is no self.

There’s much more where that came from. For essays along this line, there are some great ones available online. For a whole book on the matter, consult The Knowledge of Things Hoped For: The Sense of Theological Discourse.