On Robert Jenson's Trinitarian Thought

This paper addresses Robert Jenson's critique of impassibility along with his Trinitarian formulations. Jenson's decision to eschew a doctrine of divine impassibility leads him to adopt a Kantian conception of subjectivity in order to explicate the traditional concept of hypostasis. In turn, Jenson advocates a Hegelian notion of determinate negation to relate to a concept of being dependent upon a German Idealist figuration of temporality. The final section of the paper contrasts Jenson's modernist immanentism with the positive perichoretic movement of Jonathan Edwards' trinitarian thought. For Edwards, the Trinity cannot be known as a repeatable object of knowledge reflected within human consciousness, but as a non-identical repletion of eternal love to which univocal categories do not apply.