JESUS IN THE TRINITY Robert W. Jenson
I There could There could hardly be a more direct and basic confession of Christian hardly be a more faith than "Jesus is Lord." Nevertheless, the history of theology is in direct and basic considerable part shaped by sustained reluctance to admit immediate confession of religious and conceptual consequences of that confession. There has Christianfaith than been a recurrent rear-guard action against them, only broken through "Jesus is Lord. " by interventions of the Spirit. When some — usually in itself perfectly obvious — new consequence of the proposition "Jesus is Lord" has been glimpsed, a usual first reaction has been "Oh, No! That can't be right;" and an ecclesial majority has devoted great energy and ingenuity to fending it off. The weapons of the Spirit have been initially beleaguered minorities or even individuals, and the teaching authorities who have eventually justified them. The first great such struggle I will adduce lasted some two hundred years, from around 150 until the confession of Nicea and Con stantinople. In the Bible, there is and can be only one Lord. So if Jesus is Lord, what then? It looks like Bible-readers are committed to say that he is that Lord, that he is somehow or other to be identified with the God of Israel, with the very one he called Father and taught us to call so. But surely, said most of the church's intellectuals from the first "apolo gists" to Athanasius' majority opponents, that cannot be. For Jesus Robert W. Jenson, Center for Theological Inquiry, 50 Stockton Street, Princeton, Ν J 08540
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Robert W. Jenson