Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic | Carl E. Braaten | First Things:
"Robert Jenson was my closest friend and collaborator for sixty years. We first met when we were both students at Luther Seminary in St. Paul in the early 1950s, though we did not become friends until we were both graduate students at Heidelberg University in 1957. We met virtually every week during that one year, with our spouses, Blanche and LaVonne, eating and drinking together, while coming to terms with the great theological minds and issues of that era: Bultmann’s demythologizing, Barth’s dogmatics, Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, Tillich’s systematics, Ebeling’s hermeneutics, Rahner’s neo-Thomism, the Lundensian theology of Aulén and Nygren, and the revival of confessional Lutheran theology undertaken by Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink at Heidelberg University. That year we also met Wolfhart Pannenberg, who at that time was head of a circle conceiving a new theology of “revelation as history,” beyond Barth and Bultmann.
[GJ - Luther, Luther? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?]
After receiving his doctorate from Heidelberg with a dissertation on Karl Barth’s theology of election (with Peter Brunner serving as his doctor-father), Robert Jenson returned to the United States to join the faculty of religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. There he began his career as a professor of Christian theology and a prolific author of theological books (around thirty) and hundreds of articles and editorials in various journals and magazines. He taught for the next 38 years in Lutheran institutions: at Luther College; as dean and tutor of Lutheran students at Mansfield College in Oxford; at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg; and at St. Olaf College. While at Oxford, Jenson encountered the strengths of Anglicanism, which, unlike most other Protestant denominations, had retained theological and liturgical elements of the great catholic tradition of western Christianity. This encounter prepared Jenson to play a prominent role as a Lutheran representative in ecumenical dialogues with Anglicans and Roman Catholics."
'via Blog this'
