Faith & Spirit Quote by David Edward Jenkins

Jenkins is doing something both pastoral and insurgent: pulling the pin from religious literalism without tossing faith itself. The first sentence lands like a doctrinal slap - not because he denies God, but because he denies our sentences. “No statement” is totalizing on purpose; it blocks the easy escape hatch where believers keep one pet certainty untouched. He’s arguing that theology, at its most honest, is a disciplined kind of failure: language reaching for the infinite and coming up short.

The subtext is a rebuke to the idea that belief is mainly an exam you can pass by repeating correct propositions. “Simply, literally true” targets a modern craving for clean, measurable facts - the same epistemic style we use for lab results or headlines. Jenkins insists God doesn’t fit that genre. The list that follows (“measured, described, defined”) reads like a critique of a culture that treats naming as owning. To “pin down” God is also to domesticate God, to reduce the divine to a manageable mascot for our politics, our moral preferences, our personal stories of cause-and-effect.

Context matters: as a late-20th-century Anglican bishop-theologian, Jenkins spoke in a Britain anxious about secularization and angry about “heresy” whenever clergy resisted simplistic doctrines. This is classic Anglican via negativa with contemporary stakes: protect mystery not as a fog machine, but as a safeguard against spiritual arrogance. If God exceeds ordinary language, then certainty becomes suspect, humility becomes doctrinal, and faith shifts from possessing answers to staying responsive to what can’t be mastered.