Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 65:2 (Fall 2003)
Article: Response To Mark Seifrid, Paul Metzger, And Carl Trueman On Finnish Luther Research
Author: Robert W. Jenson

WTJ 65:2 (Fall 2003) p. 245

Response To Mark Seifrid, Paul Metzger, And Carl Trueman On Finnish Luther Research

Robert W. Jenson

[Prof. Jenson is the Associate Director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and Senior Scholar for Research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, N.J.]

I have one session to respond to three papers. You will understand that I am thus obligated to devote my time mostly to what I presume I was invited to do: defend the Finnish project. Let me therefore say once for all how impressed I am by the quality of scholarship and reflection found in all three presentations.

Let me grant at the beginning that proponents of a new insight generally tend to push it a bit hard, and that is true also of the Finns and of their advocates like myself. A couple of points can fall under this rubric.

I see no reason why the Finns—or certainly I—should disagree with Prof. Seifrid’s insistence that it is Christ in—or indeed as—his work, and not as a sort of embodiment of essences, that comes to and dwells with and in the believer. Indeed, for myself, anyone familiar with my systematics will know I am regularly denounced for having too drastically relational an ontology, and I can testify that, when the Finns are asked what is the ontology they find in Luther, that is, what is the content of such words as “participation” as they use them in characterizing Luther’s grasp of reality, they tend to move in the same direction. One must remember the polemical context in Europe: the Finns’ German interlocutors are folk for whom the mere word “ontology” signifies a sort of original theological sin.1 No doubt this does lead them to spend too little energy on the gospel-narrative itself and on the apocalyptic narrative in which—at least for Paul—it is embedded. One research project cannot do everything, though doubtless Mannermaa and his students have been more than usually concentrated on a single theme.

One should not, I think, overplay the continuing influence on the Finnish research of the relation to Orthodoxy. The project did indeed begin when the Finnish church asked the then young Tuomo Mannermaa to assemble a team for dialogue with the Orthodox, and they went looking—as such teams are supposed to do—for some wiggle-room in the traditional positions of their own party. But this event is long in the past of the research program that developed.

WTJ 65:2 (Fall 2003) p. 246

I do not think that a hankering for the East has now much to do either with the program or with its reception.

There are of course two big questions. Is the Finnish Luther the r...