Alan begins his recent Hedgehog Review essay on Glenn Gould like this:
“My friend Elizabeth Corey, a pianist as well as a political philosopher, tells me, ‘You can’t unhear Gould.’ A simple but important statement. The music of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932–1982) is so distinctive, so memorable, even today so surprising, that once experienced, it stays in your mind and can easily become the frame of reference by which you evaluate other pianists.”
When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking of the late Robert Jenson (1930-2017), who may be to the theological world what Gould was to music. Like Gould, Jenson could be temperamental, quirky, and demanding. He attacked sentences the way Gould attacked the keyboard: with energy and precision. I may go to my grave still not knowing whether his radical metaphysics of the gospel “rhymes” (a favorite Jensonian metaphor) with the larger Christian tradition. I would like to think it does. He’s sometimes accused of being a Hegelian. But the more salient thinker for him was Luther, and behind Luther, Paul and the gospels. His whole project could be seen as a thought experiment revolving around the question, “what if reality is defined not by ‘being’ or ‘substance’ but by the life, death, and resurrection of this one Jewish man?”
But, well … agree with him or not, you can’t unhear Jenson. He writes so clearly that there’s nowhere to hide: when you read him, you can easily identify what the key claims are and where he might be challenged. There’s a sparse, crystalline beauty to his prose: as if Barth’s Dogmatics had been written by Wittgenstein, or possibly Hemingway. One of Jens’s greatest achievements was to have been profoundly influenced by Barth without ever becoming a Barthian. He went his own Lutheran and evangelically catholic way. His theology is “so memorable, even today so surprising, that once experienced, it stays in your mind and can easily become the frame of reference by which you evaluate other theologians.”
