Robert William Jenson (August 2, 1930 – September 5, 2017) was a leading American Lutheran and ecumenical theologian. Prior to his retirement in 2007, he spent seven years as the director of the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was the co-founder of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and is known for his two-volume Systematic Theology published between 1997 and 1999.
Student years
Jenson was born on August 2, 1930, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He studied classics and philosophy at Luther College in the late 1940s, before beginning theological studies at Luther Seminary in 1951. Due to a car accident he missed most of his first-year seminary studies, and during that year he immersed himself in the works of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard. Jenson began reading historical-critical scholars like Hermann Gunkel and Sigmund Mowinckel, and as a result he became deeply interested in the biblical texts and in the theological significance of the Old Testament.
At Luther Seminary, Jenson was assistant to the renowned orthodox Lutheran theologian, Herman Preus. Preus infused Jenson with an admiration for the theology of post-Reformation Lutheran scholasticism, and with a strong belief in the orthodox Lutheran understanding of predestination. Against the majority of the staff at Luther Seminary at that time, who believed that God elected individuals to salvation on the basis of "foreseen faith", Preus held that God had decreed the salvation of a definite number of the elect, without a decree of reprobation. Other influences at Luther Seminary included Edmund Smits, who introduced Jenson to the work of Augustine of Hippo, and fellow student Gerhard Forde, who introduced him to the work of Rudolf Bultmann. While studying at seminary, Jenson also met and married Blanche Rockne, who became one of the major stimuli for his theological work (one of his later books includes a dedication to Blanche, "the mother of all my theology").
After seminary, Jenson taught in the department of religion and philosophy at Luther College from 1955 to 1957, before moving to Heidelberg for doctoral studies in 1957–1958. Though he had planned to write his dissertation on Bultmann, his supervisor, , advised him to work on Karl Barth's doctrine of election. Thus Jenson worked on Barth's theology at Heidelberg, and he also studied nineteenth-century German theology and philosophy, partly with the help of the new Heidelberg lecturer, Wolfhart Pannenberg. He also attended a seminar there with Martin Heidegger (and, during a later visit to Heidelberg, with Hans-Georg Gadamer). Even more significantly, at Heidelberg he became friends with another young Lutheran scholar, Carl Braaten, who would later become his "chief theological companion" and his most important theological collaborator.
Early career
Jenson's doctoral dissertation (revised and published in 1963 as Alpha and Omega) was completed in Basel, with Barth's approval, and so Jenson returned to Luther College, where he continued to study Barth while also developing an increasing interest in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. The faculty of the religion department was uncomfortable with Jenson's theological liberalism, and his openness to biblical criticism and evolutionary biology was strongly condemned. When the college failed to force Jenson's retirement, several professors from the religion and biology departments resigned in protest. From 1960 to 1966, Jenson was thus left with the task of helping to rebuild an entire religion department, and he became especially involved in the development of a new philosophy department. During these years, he also wrote A Religion Against Itself (1967), which sharply critiqued the American religious culture of the 1960s.