Veli-Matti Karkkainen offers a good summary of Jenson’s Trinitarian theology. He begins with seven propositions that describe Jenson’s particular contribution to Trinitarian studies. First, the Trinity is about the identity of Israel’s and the church’s God among the gods of the nations. Second, this God is identified by and with a narrative, the narrative of Israel and Jesus. Third, given the first two points, the Triune God, in contrast to all the gods of Hellenism, cannot be understood apart from time and history. Jenson focuses a great deal of attention on what it means for gods to be “eternal,” and on the specific and novel view of eternity that is embodied in Christian doctrine.

Fourth, history is “the locus for identifying God.” Israel’s God is the God who brought Israel from Egypt, identified in the New Testament as the God who raised Jesus from the dead. God is not to be defined in terms of substance, but in terms of events. Fifth, Jenson, like Moltmann and Pannenberg, emphasizes the union of immanent and economic Trinity by emphasizing the eschatological trajectory of the economy. Sixth, “Father, Son, and Spirit” is not so much a description as a proper name, the names of the “dramatis dei personae” of the drama of history. Seventh, “Father, Son, and Spirit,” being a proper name, cannot be replaced by faddish feminist alternatives.

Jenson begins many of his writings on the Trinity by critiquing traditional Trinitarian theology, which he finds has been insufficiently evangelized. Karkkainen focuses on two main issues, first the knot of issues surrounding time and eternity, the exclusion of history from God’s life, and the simplicity of God. Second, Jenson resists the “substance ontology” that has often guided Trinitarian thinking in favor of an ontology of event or becoming. On the issue of time and eternity, Jenson describes modalism not only as the denial of distinctions within the Godhead, but also as an effort to locate “God above time.” Religions are about eternity and time, about “bracketing” moments of time in order to unify the distinct moments, and there are essentially only two types of religion, those in which religion is a “refuge from time” or biblical faith that stresses “confidence” in time. The eternity of the biblical God is not an escape from or elevation above time, but faithfulness in time. Alongside his polemic against the notion that God is timeless, Jenson faults the Western tradition for replacing “relationality with the simplicity of God, an idea based on a substance ontology that does not allow for real distinctions.” He finds in the Cappadocians a solution in which “the hypostasis of each Trinitarian member [is based] on their mutual relations.” The Triune identities “are relations.”

For Jenson, the doctrine of the Trinity is a set of ways of identifying God, over against other competitors for worship. Before we can say what God is like, we have to define what God we’re talking about. As noted above, “Father, Son, and Spirit” is for Jenson a proper name, and this proper name receives further identification in His acts of deliverance – bringing Israel from Egypt or raising Jesus from the dead. Instead of hypostasis, Jenson proposes that the three also be described as “identities,” so that there are three “identities” in the Godhead, three “characters of the drama of God.”

These can be defined more specifically. The Son appears first, and this shows that time and history are included in divine life, because the Son appears in history. He has a relation to one He calls Father, and so the Father is identified in the history of the Son. The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, Jenson says, and is “the whirlwind of his liveliness that agitates whatever he turns toward.” In the New Testament, this Spirit is described specifically as the Spirit of Jesus, and also as the Spirit of a people that binds together and gathers from the nations. This amounts to an affirmation that “everything we know of God from the biblical narrative can be trusted. There is no abstract metaphysical God ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the events narrated.”

From Jenson’s narrative perspective, the identities of God are not to be understood in terms of substance, but in terms of dramatic coherence. Each works consistently, but the work of each is also surprising, fulfilling the demands of an Aristotelian plot. The narrative identity of God is put at risk on the cross, but God shows His faithfulness by overcoming that risk as well. Like all narratives, the narrative of God is known from the end, and so “Since the Lord’s self-identity is constituted in dramatic coherence, it is established not from the beginning but from the end, not at birth but at death, not in persistence but in anticipation” (quote from Jenson). Though the identity is known from the end, the story’s plot anticipates the future: “the future that moves a story must somehow be available within it if we are to live the story while it is still in progress.” This eschatological perspective gives Jenson a way of affirming Rahner’s rule: “the identity of the ‘economic’ and ‘immanent’ Trinity is eschatology . . . . the ‘immanent’ Trinity is simply the eschatological reality of the ‘economic’” (Jenson). This does not, Jenson thinks, endanger God’s freedom or tie Him in dependence on creation. God’s freedom is not the freedom of a timeless God but “openness to the future,” which means the “genuine freedom of the Spirit.”

Nearly uniquely among Trinitarian theologians, Jenson argues that the Trinity is person, not merely three persons. (The only other theologians to affirm this are those influenced by Van Til.) There are three identities in God, but in addition the Trinity is person, though not a fourth identity since “the Triune God is always identified by reference to one or several of the three identities.” A person is “one with whom other persons – the circularity is constitutive – can converse, whom they address” and expect a response; “A person is one whom other persons may address in hope of response.” Jenson sees two consequences to this point: first that identity and person are not interchangeable, and second that there is more than one way of being person. Father, Son, and Spirit “could not be personal in quite the same way.” Jenson draws from Kant to support the notion that there are diverse modes of personhood; Kant defines selfhood in terms of consciousness, in terms of “I,” the “diachronically identified individual (that makes it possible to identify the ‘I’ that in this instance did this and in another something else, yet being the same ‘I’); and as “freedom, the mysterious relation between these two.”

Karkkainen summarizes some of the critiques of Jenson. Many worry that Jenson has collapsed the immanent Trinity into the economic, that he “borders on absorption.” He also raises questions about Jenson’s claim that “Father, Son, and Spirit” is a proper name, citing critics who think Jenson “authoritarian.”