Contemporary Trinitarianism Part Four (Excursus B): Rahner's Rule

There are few axioms in theology. Most of the best work in theology can hardly be reducible to any type of epigram which contains legitimate deductive or analytic capacity which could (or should) control the theological enterprise and discussion as it unfolds. Even the Creeds, which are often the most compressed theological reflections we possess, are themselves hardly operating in the same way as a mathematical rule or physical principle: they are, rather, more or less tightly constructed hermeneutical glosses which provide both conclusions and guides to the scripture, the christian life, its modes of speech, and so on. Creeds are thus, so to speak, the cliffnotes of the Bible. To misappropriate Robert Jenson's wonderful little phrase regarding the name "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" used in baptism, the creeds--even amongst their technical terminology like homoousios--are "a very compressed telling of the total narrative by which Scripture identifies God." It is no coincidence then (as Jenson himself goes on to note) that the creeds can often also been seen as expanding upon the Baptismal formula for catechetical purposes. That said it may be slightly surprising (or not, given its now near universal prevalence) that contemporary Trinitarianism can summarize many of its aims via its relation to what has become, despite precedent, more or less an axiom, namely "Rahner's Rule,"--and that elaboration and clarification upon this rule has not simply become an endeavor to be worked out in Systematics, but has also, via theological genealogy, become an investigative "tool" whereby the theological tradition is analyzed.

The Rule

The "rule," which Rahner laid down in his seminal book The Trinity (originally printed as an essay in Mysterium Salutis), gained the nomenclature "Rahner's Rule," says Ted Peters, originally by Roger Olsen (though Peters does not cite a source by Olsen) though Peters notes that he himself was (borrowing from Olsen) among the first to employ the designator “Rahner’s Rule,” in his two articles both entitled “Trinity Talk,” in Dialog 26 no.1 (Winter 1987) pp.44-48 and 26, no.2 (Spring 1987) pp.133-138. (C.f. Ted Peters God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life p.213 n.33). The Rule states “The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity; the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.” (Rahner, The Trinity p.22). In other words, who God is eternally (Immanent Trinity) is who God reveals Himself to be in history (economic or Trinity of manifestation), and vice versa: what God does in history is who God is in eternity. Rahner felt the necessity to formulate the Rule under pressure from various areas, perhaps above all what he sees as the Scholastic "Manualist" tradition he reads from Aquinas which concludes that any of the three Persons could have become Incarnate as Jesus. To Rahner this eliminates Trinitarian theology:

There would be no longer any real and intrinsic connexion between the mission of a divine person and the immanent life of the Trinity. Our sonship in grace would have absolutely nothing to do with the sonship of the Son, since it would have been absolutely the same if it could have been based on any other inacarnate person of the Godhead. There would be no way of finding out, from waht God is to us, what he is in himself as the Trinity (The Trinity p.30)

Rahner of course was not the first to develop this concept. Earlier Karl Barth, as one example of a concept throughout his Church Dogmatics, in II/1 p.262 he writes "we have to take revelation with such utter seriousness that in it as God's act we must directly see God's being too...our first and decisive transcription of the statement that God is, must be that God is who He is in the act of His revelation." Jüngel in his masterful commentary on Barth's Trinitarian theology God's Being is in Becoming writes of Barth's doctrine that this means:

Gods being ad extra corresponds essential to his being ad intra in which it has its basis and prototype...as interpreter of himself, God corresponds to his own being. But because God as his own interpreter (even in his external works) is Himself, and since in this event as such we are also dealing with the being of God, then the highest and final statement which can be made about the being of God is: God corresponds to Himself [in the event of revelation]. (36)

Nonetheless the concise nature of the Rahner's formula has allowed it to persist under the namesake of its formulator. Perhaps the main reason for the persistance of the Rule under Rahner's name despite the fact that conceptually it is hardly original either to him or contemporary theology, is that in its very terseness it has ironically (given its prima facie preciseness) captured the very ambiguity of God's relation to the world which has in an accelerated way captured the attention of 20th century theology (Grenz and Olson's 20th Century Theology, for instance, organizes their whole survey of 20th century theology by its relation to the problematic of "balancing" God's immanence and transcendence). Even a mere 15 years after the “Rule’s,” initial publication in Mysterium Salutis, Walter Kasper in The God of Jesus Christp.274 notes “What K. Rahner sets down as a basic principle reflects a broad consensus among the theologians of the various churches.” and Stanley Grenz in his intro to 20th century Trinitarianism Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology p.57 writes “So standard has [Rahner’s] terminological and methodological proposal become that it routinely appears in theological works without its source being cited.” Yet to state the prevalence of the axiom is one thing, but to describe it, as Kasper did, as "a widespread consensus" is something entirely different and, perhaps, not entirely correct, for as has become well known the formula can be submitted to innumerable interpretations.

Its Ambiguity and Reception

The basic ambiguity and controversy over interpretation of Rahner's Rule can best be summed up in Yves Congars criticism of the statement: "The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa." He says that "the first half of the statement is beyond dispute" but that the "vice versa" be dropped. Why? Congar believes that only in this way is the ontological priority of God-in-Himself maintained, that is, dropping the "vice-versa" preserves "the free mystery of the economy and the necessary mystery of the Tri-unity of God." In other words the basic question regarding the interpretation of the Rule regards the implications we take from it for whether (and how much) God is "changed" in relation to the world. In other words, is God's revelation in the economy of salvation "mirroring" or "expressing" eternal relations among the Trinity, or is it, as many radicalizers of the Rule want it, that God's economic manifestation alters, constitutes, or determines God's ontological, immanent constitution? As LaCugna puts it "Is it literally true that the economic trinity is the immanent Trinity, as in the tautology A=A?" LaCugna notes that if it were to be interpreted as such, it would be difficult to distinguish the Rule from pantheism (God For Us p.216).

Walter Kasper is himself worried about such a strict identity thesis and thus proposes a modified alternative, saying "In the economic self-communication the intra-trinitarian self-communication is present in the world in a new way, namely under the veil of historical words, signs and actions, and ultimately in the figure of the man Jesus of Nazareth." (The God of Jesus Christ p.276). Colin Gunton likewise takes umbrage with those who interpret Rahners Rule in too radical a way in the introduction to the 2nd ed. of his The Promise of Trinitarian Theology. Gunton prefers the terms "otherness" and "relation" (perhaps echoing Zizioulas) because "these alternatives are not contraries...but correlatives which require and interpret each other. Only that which is other than something else can be related to it." (202) Thus an eternal immanent Trinity is necessary, says Gunton, to make sense of the notion of God's relation to us (which is usually the opposite of what the radicalizers of the Rule say, namely that an eternal Immanent Trinity obscures God's relational character). This is not only a matter of God's freedom for Gunton, it is also about man's "otherness' from God and thus humanity's freedom as well (134-135).

Miroslav Volf, though not writing expressly on Rahner's Rule, nonetheless goes into considerable detail regarding the analogical limits of the relation between the Trinity and the "limits of correspondence" and analogical qualifiers that are necessary in order to derive what he sees as its ecclesiological benefits (After Our Likeness pp.191-200) demonstrating in a tacit way a basic agreement that the identity thesis of Rahner's should be qualified. David Bentley Hart, too, though noting that "what Rahner’s maxim describes is the necessary shape of all theological rationality" (Beauty of the Infinite p.156) is quite adamant that strict identity not only should not be emphasized, but that it is detrimental:

If the identity of the immanent Trinity with the economic is taken to mean that history is the theater within which God — as absolute mind, or process, or divine event — finds or determines himself as God, there can be no way of convincingly avoiding the conclusion (however vigorously the theologian might deny the implication) that God depends upon creation to be God and that creation exists by necessity (because of some lack in God), so that God is robbed of his true transcendence and creation of its true gratuity. (156)

While both Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (The Trinity: Global Perspectives p.84) and Stanley Grenz (Rediscovering the Triune God p.69) both agree that Rahner himself clearly did not move in the direction of making God dependent on the world, others like Paul Molnar (Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity p.83-124, 181ff) believe that is exactly what he did, though Molnar believes this isnt evident in Rahner's axiom unless the axiom is embedded within the larger context of Rahner's theology, most importantly his transcendental method, the supernatural existential, etc... At any rate, whether or not Rahner himself intended such a close relation of God to the world, several of his disciples certainly have taken it in that direction, making God in various respects, dependent upon the world. LaCugna for example insists upon the necessity of the economy for God (God For Us p.228), and so our necessary incorporation into the divine life. Indeed for her, the life of God does not belong to God alone, rather the perichoretic-relational structure of the Trinity implies qua its nature that “it is also our life,” and in being incorporated we reciprocally (though asymmetrically) determine God (354).

For Ted Peters, God's eternity is not timelessness but rather means "an everlastingness that takes up into itself the course of temporal history" thus "what happens in time contributes to what is eternal." (God--the World's Future p.109; God as Trinity pp.146-187). In this way Peters' simply wants to drop the immutability of God and embrace the full trajectory of what he sees as the natural conclusion of Rahner's Rule (God as Trinity p.101). Moltmann in The Trinity and the Kingdom affirms that he has "taken up Rahner's thesis" and adds "the thesis about the fundamental identity of the immanent and economic Trinity of course remains open to misunderstanding as long as we cling to the distinction at all...what this thesis is actually trying to bring out is the interaction between the substance and the revelation...the economic Trinity not only reveals the immanent Trinity; it also has a retroactive effect on it." (160).

The "Radical" Barthians Weigh In

In order to fully understand Rahner's Rule and its relation to the Trinitarian declension narratives, a brief overview of how Barthian theologians have reacted to it is necessary. This is because in my opinion while many overview volumes on the Trinity often speak of Barth and Rahner affirming similar ideas (God is who God expresses Himself to be in the economy) I am not quite so convinced that Rahner's Rule shares more than a passing, or perhaps even superficial, similarity, to Barth, and even more so to many theologians who are currently indebted in this area to the legacy of the Swiss theologian. The divergence between Rahner' Rule and the possibilities within Barthian theology becomes most evident when we briefly look at a few "radicalizers" of Barth. Despite terminological (and definitely several conceptual) similarities, the major difference between theologians following the pattern set up by Rahner's Rule and the Barthian theologians, despite differences among all individual theologians roughly in either category, boils down to a difference between positing a reciprocal God/world relation (as radical applications of the Rule seem to imply,e.g. that the world has a reciprocal effect on God) or whether God's interaction with the world is itself a function of God's elective and voluntative capacity, as the Barthians argue. Lets elaborate so that this difference becomes clear.

For example in Bruce McCormack's now notorious essay in the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth entitled "Grace and Being: The Role of God's Gracious Election in Karl Barth's Theological Ontology," McCormack grapples with the question on whether the Incarnation is "constitutive" of God's eternal being (100). This prima facie sounds quite similar to a question that the "Radical Rahnerian's" are asking, but its interior logic is different. Whereas the Rahnerian Rule can be generalized to picture a Trinitarian God who completes Himself in relation to the world, being altered or complete eschatologically and gaining from relation to the world (e.g. in LaCugna, Peters, Moltmann) McCormack's basic position is that God has constituted Himself as Triune, that is, God wills to be God for us and just so constitutes Himself as the God we experience in economy. He writes:

We must understand Triunity logically as a function of divine election...the eternal act of Self-differentiation in which God is God 'a second time in a very different way'...and a third time as well, is given in the eternal act in which God elects himself for the human race. The decisions for the covenant of grace is the ground of God's triunity and, therefore, of the eternal generation of the Son and of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from Father and Son...the works of God ad intra (the trinitarian processions) find their ground in the first of the works of God ad extra (viz. election). And that also means that eternal generation and eternal procession are willed by God; they are not natural to him if 'natural' is taken to mean a determination of being fixed in advance of all actions and relations. (103, emphases in original)

Thus McCormack is saying ultimately not that this is what Barth was arguing (despite Molnar sometimes arguing that this is what McCormack is saying) but that this is what Barth should have said in order to be consistent with a lacuna that arose in his later thought: ultimately the doctrine of the Trinity, for McCormack, "should be subordinated to the doctrine of election" (103). The difference here from the Rule of Rahner is that God's "alteration" in relation to the world is itself, for McCormack, God acting upon Himself, God has chosen to be God for us, and so has constituted His own self in the act. Thus--despite whatever the ultimate viability of McCormack's position--Molnar is incorrect when he writes in criticism "thus the order between election and triunity cannot be logically reversed without in fact making creation, reconciliation, and redemption necessary for God," (Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity p.63) because in a certain sense he is equivocating "freedom," as McCormack has defined freedom in a completely different way. Molnar's criticism would seem to hold for the Rahnerian thesis since creation, redemption etc... would be natural completions or self-expressions of God (Rahner, LaCugna, and Moltmann all say as much) but for McCormack all of these stem from a fundamentally free act of election, they are not "necessary" in the same sense.

To round out a selection of the "Radical Barthians" (if any dislike the term I am not wed to it, simply using it for heuristic purposes here) we can cite Neil MacDonald's somewhat undervalued work, and, of course, the theology of Robert Jenson. In his quite interesting Metaphysics and the God of Israel MacDonald argues along Barthian lines for a new ontological interpretation of God and God's action in relation to election and decision. He writes "theologians commonly distinguish between...God in himself...and God in his works....I want us to ask the question, How far might we go toward reaching the conlcuiosn that the world was created by God if we were to focus entirely on...a concept of God the creator (ad extra) in which God acts on Himself [emphasis added]...rather than outwardly and directly toward the creation of the world. A concept in which God's work of creation is directed at himself and only indirectly outwards." (26) This leads to the idea that "when God determines himself this is something that God does to himself. he does not determine anything or anyone else. Our proposition says something solely about God...It is a statement solely about God determining his being or identity...God is both the subject and--crucially--the object of His actions." (27) He elaborates further:

In order to become--determine oneself as--the person who picks up the coin in front of me, I will have to pick up the coin in front of me...In contrast, God's self determination of himself is basic in the sense of being irreducible...There is a fundamental disanalogy between divine self determination and mere human self-determination. In divine self determination God does not do anything as a condition of self determination (what he does is determine Himself). In other words God does not (e.g.) create the world in order for it to be the case that he determines Himself as creator. God determines himself as the creator of the world; therefore he is the creator of the world. (p.31)

In this sense too the self-differentiation of Unity in Triunity comes under the same logic (p.228ff) and hence, despite MacDonald's own unique twists, is similar to McCormack. Robert Jenson's theology, as is well known, contains several similar characteristics. Much like McCormack Jenson rejects the concept of the logos asarkos (e.g. Triune Identity pp.138-141) and says instead of this "abstract metaphysical entity" there must be another way to articulate that "in God's eternity--with Barth, in his eternal decision--a way in which the one Jesus Christ as God precees himself as a man, in the very triune life which he lives eternally as the God man." (Systematic Theology 1:141). Thus Jenson, though with critical differences that we cannot touch upon here, speaks of the elction of Christ: God not only chooses that He will unite with the man Jesus, that He will be Jesus, but since "God is the act of his choice...he is the man Jesus." (140) Thus:

What the event of God happens to is, first, the triune persons. The fundamental statement of god's being is therefore: God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their Spirit...[also] God is what happens to Jesus in the world. That an event happens to something does not entail that this something must be metaphyscially or temporally prior to it. (ST 1:221)

The Relation to Genealogy

As a key element in contemporary Trinitarianism, the various iterations of Rahner's Rule and its Barthian alternatives all are major factors in the genealogical connections drawn by many of the various contemporary theologians engaged in such enterprises. Hence when Jüngel, for example, writes that Rahner's axiom should be given "unqualified agreement" (God as the Mystery of the World pp.369-370) or when LaCugna speaks of Rahner's Rule and its implications in God For Us, both of these instances are done in the context of a lengthy series of investigations of differing traditions (Jüngel, for example, in the history of "Most Perfect Being" theology up through Nietzsche and the death of God theologians). Rahner's axiom provides, as I stated at the entry of this post, a concise summary formula which, despite its ambiguity, and perhaps even its ultimately banal nature (so argues Randall Rauser “Rahner’s Rule: An Emperor without Clothes?” in International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 2005, pp. 81-94) perpetuates itself as an analytic tool because it contains in concentrated form the various inquiries and habits of attention (and the mode or manner these habits are perpetuated) of Modern Trinitarian theology.

Thus the point of this series--an investigation of how declension narratives reveal deeper intuitions and convictions of the theologians and philosophers involved in the enterprise--finds an interesting bounty in the Rule. Jenson utlizes the rule because he believes the tradition of timelessness in relation to God has evolved into a harmful picture of God's static distance. In a similar way Moltmann radicalizes the rule in order to envision a dynamic-perichoretic inter-relation between God and the world. LaCugna also believes the fundamental truth she perceives in the rule--that God is who God reveals himself to be in economy--was lost over the course of the tradition. Yet simultaneously the wealth of information contained in the various appropriations of the Rule also allows for a large amount of anachronism to creep in and so often distorts and creates the very genealogies they are attempting to overcome. The question of the relationship between God and world often contained in the varying appropriations of Rahner's rule are not merely asking questions that every Christian theologian in every generation asked, nor asking in the same way. For example we need to take into account how questions within the spectrums of thought allowed by Rahner's Rule have been set up by a series of historically particular ideas, especially in relation to German idealism and the Trinitarianism which has been more or less related to this mutation. Samuel Powell has done an excellent job in his The Trinity in German Thought of outlining how three concepts often considered central to current Trinitarian projects--the concept of the self-reflective subject, the Word of God (i.e. revelation), and the problematic of history--were the result of the intersection of historical trajectories which began to arise in the Reformation and became prominent in later German thought.

This is not to confess these concerns are wrong, but it is to point out that when LaCugna, for example, uses the rule as a heuristic to analyze how tradition began to become more and more speculative, she sets up the entire history of theology as a spectrum of ahistorical potential options (speculative vs economic, for example) based upon the ideas, possibilities, and questions contained in Rahners Rule. Yet despite the nuances in LaCugna's own analysis, this ignores that the question of the God-world relation, and the particular manner in which it is formulated, was not at any time the guiding principle of reflection, and hence to speak of a gradual "speculative" reduction of economic Trinitarianism which "transcends economy," is, quite frankly, to ignore the historically grounded and polyphonous contexts for various theological constructs, and to construe history very simplistically as a linearly narratable progress (or devolution) of basic ideas. Thus LaCugna in a certain sense (both implicitly and explicitly) baptizes the contingent evolution of doctrine with the air of necessity. This therefore means that the germs of necessity are thus in their own way present early on--thereby, for example, meaning that the pro-Nicene distinction between theologia and oikonomia is from the get go an unfortunate decision in LaCugna's eyes because it is in its own incipient way already dictating the course of theological history in the eventually more radical separation of God for Himself and God for us. Hence LaCugna rejects the distinction outright because she infers that to speak of God beyond the economy is necessarily to leave the economy behind. yet is this actually the case? It seems rather that she is ignoring the actual tenets of pro-nicene theology and giving any and all distinctions of the immanent and economic trinity the full weight of the significance of later separation. As always, our historiography must be more careful than this, for as we have seen, and shall see in a few upcoming posts, our historiographical reconstructions are just as much implicated in our systematic constructions as our material theological formulations are.