I had a pingback message this morning in my email that placed the name of your article into my website. It may have merely appeared automatically because of my using XIV, but in any case I’m glad I could read your article.

It was very helpful and, in the sense of Hegel, I believe it “brought some issues to concept,”as he would say, e.g., incurvature, as well as objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated positions.

I believe that there is gain and loss in this process of conceptualization. The gained abstraction comes at the expense of existential concretion, a metaphor for which could be what is observed walking vs. driving in a car vs. flying in an airplane or looking over terrain from the summit of a mountain. Ideas lose sight of affect and embodiment. Ideas can race far ahead of affects and existential realities. I guess that’s really Kierkegaard criticizing Hegel.

Why should no increase in righteousness be possible, according to Luther? Kierkegaard has the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages that are experiences in the course of life. What about the existential rapture that I find in his “Freedom of a Christian”? I have presented it several times, specifically in my Luther Lecture this year at the Gettysburg Seminary on Luther’s providing a basis for theological therapy. (I summarize it in my last sermon at Bethlehem Lutheran on Dec. 21, 2008. See my website!)

If we grant an incapacity of mere ideas to entail all the realities of the affective states and bodily existence, then greater levels of maturity could be possible. Paul Lehmann argues that morality is a by-product of maturity, and thus I can argue that greater levels of morality translate into increases in righteousness. “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees….” Perhaps Luther means that you are either righteous or not? I subscribe to Tillich’s point about the ambiguity of all things, however. The choice between good and evil can never be left behind and the greater the level of maturity, the greater the capacity for evil is there as well. I believe that does not mean greater approximations of righteousness are impossible.

Thank you for your profound and helpful study.
peter krey

Thanks for that. You wouldn’t happen to know whether Jenson interacts with Harriet Harris’s article from the Scotish Journal of Theology–I think it is titled, ‘Should we think of persons as relational?’ After some fairly persuasive arguing, she concludes that there are very bad moral implications if we say that X is a person because X is related to Y. For example, suppose there is a guy called Sam, but Sam has never made any friends and in fact is lost in a big city. Does Sam count as a person? Does Sam gain personhood only when he has a relationship with somebody? Or again, suppose Sarah is being physically abused by her boyfriend, does this relationship constitute her personhood? The upshot of Harris’s argument is that we should define persons in terms of having the capacity to have relationships, rather than just having relationships as such; by doing this, we can attribute some integrity and value to e.g., Sarah even if she has a bad relationship.

In any case, when people talk about ‘relational ontology’ I often wonder what they actually mean.

He certainly does make ontological claims. He prefers a relational anthropology and therefore a relational ontology that sees people’s being constituted in relation to each other.

He certainly doesn’t reduce ontology to grammar, but he does think that theology should provide people with words (i.e., a grammar) to describe their lives and their experiences. BUT, and this is a big “but,” the grammar shouldn’t ‘arise’ from experience as much as flow from the Revelation of God in Christ.
-Jason