How Neo-Thomism Affected 20th Century Trinitarianism (Part Four): Case Study Two-- Rahner's Rule
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| Rahner's Lesser Known Corollary: The Beer in Your Glass Is the Beer In Your Belly. Less Emphasis on the Vice-Versa. |
Case Study Two: Karl Rahner’s “Rule”
In their
seminal introductory text, 20th
Century Theology: God & World in a Transitional Age, Stanley Grenz and
Roger Olson help readers navigate the rocky and labyrinthine terrain of
twentieth-century theology by noting how groups and individual thinkers
oscillate between prioritizing God’s transcendence and God’s immanence. In fact, as they put it, “the see-saw of
transcendence and immanence as a significant focus provides a handle for
grasping the unity and diversity of the central current of theology that flowed
through the century.”[1] Yet, despite how helpful this heuristic is,
it can also obscure. At its best, Grenz
and Olson demur, Christian theology “balances” immanence and transcendence. But so too, they represent the struggle with
oscillation as something perennial to the theological task itself. To be sure, in many senses they are not
wrong: the question of God’s relation to the world is always a contentious
one. But to describe this procedure as
one of “balance” between what appear to be two contrary elements, is already to
signify that this contemporary endeavor has shifted into an idiom alien to
Patristic and Medieval theology. As
Henri de Lubac comments:
Those who
uphold immanence deny transcendence whereas those who believe in transcendence
do not deny immanence. Indeed, they
grasp the idea of transcendence sufficiently to understand that it necessarily implies immanence. If God is transcendent then nothing is opposed
to him, nothing can limit him or be compared to him: He is Wholly Other and
precisely therefore penetrates the world…[2]
The
roller-coaster of the transcendence-immanence dialectic represents a
particularly modern phenomenon in its acuteness—one that has begun to register
transcendence and immanence in a zero-sum system as contraries in need of
“balancing.” That this is so has been
the burden of the work of Kathryn Tanner, in particular her monograph God and Creation in Christian Theology. She writes regarding the modern perplexity to
Christianity’s claims of God’s power with the simultaneous assertion of human
accountability and freedom. These
claims, she notes, “to the modern mind seem recondite and unfamiliar,
disquieting in their attempt to bring together obvious incompatibles.”[3] Yet the specific acuity of this perplexity is
not a perennial problem but “arise[s] historically … with a certain body of
interrelated presumptions that form the framework for modern discussion of the
topic … problems of intelligibility arrive on the scene as an earlier tradition
of Christian discourse in Christian theology is subtly but quite significantly
transformed: a modern interpretive frame skews the sense of traditional
Christian claims about God and the world.”[4]
When she
reaches a chapter ominously entitled “The Modern Breakdown of Theological
Discourse,” she argues that the tradition’s various ways[5] of
remaining faithful in speaking of the “non-competitive transcendence” of God
with the freedom of creatures, breaks down precisely in “the modern
theologian’s own attempt to take up the tradition of Christian discourse and
continue it in a form appropriate for a contemporary audience.” Such discourse, “is skewed by improper inferences
that a modern cultural context promotes.”[6] What are some of these modern cultural
contexts? It behooves us to quote at
length:
For the modern interpreter, what one gets when one strips
away [theological] contexts is not an abstraction, the world viewed apart from
its real relations with divinity and a community of human knowers. One is left with the world as it is in its
own integrity as an already constituted fact[7] …
God’s transcendence [now] tends to be defined negatively viz-a-viz an already
given factuality [of the world]. This
violates our rule for talk of God’s transcendence and thereby suggests the
incompatibility of that transcendence with God’s immediate involvement with the
world. God is [in the modern view]
simply not what the world is; too close a connection with it would seem to
threaten a transcendence of that sort. … God is imprisoned [in modernity] by a
transcendence negatively defined: God is either isolated over against a
basically self-sufficient nexus of created causes and effects, or may operate
in the way a finite being would within a single causal order shared with others
… The otherness of God in power and purpose [now] suggests distance. God would not seem in the main, therefore to
be present or influential [or if he was, it would be precisely by dislodging claims
to human freedom or violating natural causality]. The world is de-sacralized, disenchanted, men
and women are abandoned by God, left to the devices of their own making.[8]
The
length of this citation can hopefully be forgiven if we keep an eye on the
interesting nature of its claims. In
sum: in modern discourse God, world, and man, are all separated and seen as
pieces of a puzzle for theologians, philosophers, and (later on) natural
scientists to put back together, with part of that process now to be seen as
giving precedent to one or another “piece” as it interacts with the
others. An obverse implication of this
is that the “pieces” (God, world, humanity) can now be constituted and
theorized in discrete units that then must
be conceptually related.[9] Having said that, just so Karl Rahner can
enter into our story.
Rahner, reacting to the dry neo-scholastic or neo-Thomistic
“Manual Thomism” of his days as a seminarian, in his famous work The Trinity notes that one of the major reasons for the decline of the
Trinity is that it often presented as if “this mystery had been revealed for
its own sake, and that even after it has been made known to us, it remains, as a reality, locked up within itself.”[10] To understand how this came to be so, Rahner
points to two major moments of “isolation” of the Trinity from Christian
life. The first is an isolation of the
doctrine from the rest of systematic theology.
Here Rahner complains that (nota
bené) “since Augustine” it has become commonplace that theologians have
speculated any of the three hypostaseis of God (Father, Son, Spirit)
could have, in theory, become
incarnate.[11] This creates, in Rahner’s eyes, the
detrimental conclusion that we cannot discern anything about the specific
character of the Logos who did, in
fact, become incarnate, because the conjunction of the Logos and the humanity
of the man Jesus with the texture of his historical reality, become logically
discontinuous.[12]
And the second separation: the theological relation between
God as “one” and God as “three” is severed, according to Rahner, by Aquinas’
fateful “separation of the treatises” on God into “De Deo Uno,” and “De Deo
Trino” (or: On the One God, and only thereafter, On the Triune God).[13] “Thus the treatise of the Trinity,” Rahner
concludes, “locks itself in even more splendid isolation … it looks as if
everything which matters for us in God has already been said in the treatise On the One God.”[14] This also has ramifications for our general
notion of God expounded in the first treatise.
No longer connected as it is to the oikonomia
of salvation history (in which, of course, the Trinity is revealed), the
treatise On the One God is “only
justified by the unicity of divine essence … as a result the treatise becomes
quite philosophical and abstract and refers hardly at all to salvation history”[15]
and conversely, “in this, even the theology of the trinity must produce the
impression that it can make only purely formal statements about the three
divine persons … and even these statements refer only to a Trinity which is
absolutely locked up within itself.”[16]
It is in
this context that Rahner formulates his famous “rule”: “The immanent Trinity
[that is: the Triune God in eternity apart from creation] is the economic
Trinity [that is: the Triune God manifest in salvation history], and
vice-versa.”[17]
We cannot deal with its implications at this juncture, but two things are
important: First, Rahner is attempting to tie more intimately together
God-as-revealed in the economy of salvation, to God as He is in eternity
precisely because of a particular historical diagnosis.[18] Second, despite the Rule’s ambiguity—as one
commentator has humorously put it, “Rahner’s rule is an axiom in search of an
interpretation,”[19]—nevertheless
it is hard to overstate how influential “Rahner’s Rule” [20]
has been in contemporary theology. Fred
Sanders writes: “It is possible to tell the whole story of Trinitarian theology
from 1960 on as the story of how Rahner’s work was accepted, rejected, or
modified.”[21] Though I would want to draw some additional distinctions here[22]
Sanders’ pointing our attention to the nearly ubiquitous presence of Rahner—cited
or otherwise—is a very helpful way to approach the history of late twentieth
century Trinitarian theology.
It is
helpful precisely because it demonstrates how a general
[The
neglect of commenting upon divine unity] goes beyond the evident demise of the
treatise de Deo Uno in Catholic
theology, by whatever name it might be called, as well as of its Protestant
parallels. The admonition to ‘start’
with the Trinity has had the effect, it seems, not so much of relocating
sustained reflection on the one God as of killing it off altogether, though we
can hope the effect is temporary. The
deeper problem lies within Trinitarian theology itself. Though a great deal is now written about the
Trinity, surprisingly little of this writing pauses to consider in detail how
it is that the three distinct persons are one God, let alone to regard it as a
fundamental question of Trinitarian theology.
For the most part, the unity of the triune God seems simply to be
assumed, or insisted upon as a kind of afterthought. … [And this is because]
recent Trinitarian theology has … been greatly concerned about … a unity of a
different sort … [most theologians now] regard the unity of ‘the economic
trinity’ and ‘the immanent trinity’ as the main problem facing Trinitarian
theology.[24]
Marshall
has elsewhere argued that this is also a product of post-Hegelian influence—not
just on the constructive endeavor of theology, but which also affects its
historiographical reading of the tradition.[25] But for our purposes at the moment we can put
this aside, and note with Marshall, and others like Stephen Holmes, that ‘the
pervasive post-Rahnerian predilection for identifying the eternal life of God
with the gospel history, even if rejected, creates a particular intensity
around the question of how economy and eternity relate.”[26]
The problem with this is not that Rahner was tackling an illegitimate
question. Rather, it is that despite the
fact the specific context of Rahner’s disquiet with “Manual” Thomism is
repeated ad nauseum in the relevant
literature alongside his citation as a founding figure of the Trinitarian
renaissance, the specific import of
the historical context is seldom elaborated upon. Indeed, ironically Rahner himself—despite his
close association with those like de Lubac and Yves Congar[27]—seems
to be unaware, or dismissive, of the fact that his rejection of Manual Thomism
is only questionably read back into Thomas himself, and the Western tradition
at large.
The
particular problems with his “Rule” as a historiographical criterion arise not
so much in attempting to explicitly conceptualize the relationship between
immanent and economic “Trinities,” as it lay within the evaluative histories
implicitly attached to the affirmation of Rahner’s Rule. For the Rule itself is invoked generally in
the context of “Trinitarian revival,” in which one of the key moments of
thought—as we have seen—is the perpetuation of narratives of decline
elaborating where and when—and by whom—the Trinity became a problem. When this couples (as it does in Rahner,
Ziziouas, Gunton, LaCugna, Jenson, T.F. Torrance, and others) to a Western (or
Augustinian-Thomistic) axis citing a historical trajectory toward trinitarian
marginalization, the “Rule’s” prescriptive capacity is imbalanced precisely by
being juxtaposed against theologians who in actuality share much of its
concern. To affirm the rule is now to
deny Augustine, or Thomas, or the “West” as a historical construct. This tacit coupling of Rahner’s Rule and such
a historiographical diagnosis explains why so many who affirm the Rule also
shift from a supposed Western modalism into a more robust “social” Trinitarianism.
Or in the case of LaCugna Eberhard Jüngel, and Jürgen Moltmann in particular,
it is to become suspicious of any talk that creates a robust conceptual
difference between God in eternity and God as revealed in the economy. Yet, following Tanner’s analysis, such a
juxtaposition of immanence and transcendence—even in a supposed solution
uniting them—is an indication that something has gone wrong in interpreting the
tradition.
Take for example Jürgen Moltmann’s peculiar doctrine of tsimsum, taken from Jewish Kabbalah and
meant as a particularly aggressive reposte to much of classical theism’s
picture of God’s absoluteness: here space for creation is allowed by God’s
“contraction” into himself.[28] Yet curiously if God must “contract” to allow
“room” for creation “apart” from the theistic God’s “immensity” (the scare
quotes promulgate quickly at this point), then already the critique has
misconstrued God’s immensity along finitized, univocal lines (even where God is
spoken of as infinite), and consequently inscribes this feature within the
solution it posits as a counterpositional exegesis of scripture. Even if we put aside the bodily connotations
of the idea (Moltmann does not, unlike Clark Pinnock, want to predicate a body
of God qua God),[29]
and assume this is a metaphysical contraction (however that might be
construed), in order to view this as overcoming classical “impassibility” or
“transcendence” one has to envision that classical doctrine along the lines of
competitive transcendence, which as we saw with Tanner’s analysis is the
outcome of a modern transmutation in how the tradition is interpreted.
As such, this is to
misconstrue Augustine and Aquinas and really the Patristic and Medieval
tradition at large, and so attempt to provide not only a solution to a false
problem, but one that remains within the bounds of post-nominalist and
univocalist changes by merely shifting within a spectrum defined by it: God is
too big? He must become smaller to allow room.[30] One gets the picture of a fat God sucking in
his belly (tsimsum in Kabbalah was
the “deep breath” God takes before exhaling the creative Word of
Creation). Similar criticisms could be
extended to other paradigms that finds it necessary to speak of God’s
“self-limitation,” where He in some sense must be absolved of transcendence to
allow created freedom, or in kenotic Christologies that feel a profoundly
literal “emptying” must occur in order for the divine Logos to “fit” (to put it
crudely) into Jesus, or more generally to allow space for created freedom.[31]
Or again, the Social Trinitarian reaction against Augustine
and the West’s supposed “modalism”—itself not unrelated to kenosis, but as two
proponents have argued strong kenotic models must presuppose social trinitarianism[32]—itself
rejoins Augustine’s “substance” language as if it were offering a rationalistic
definition of God, and then oscillates into, if not quite its opposite (which
would presumably be tri-theism) something quite close to it.[33] This is exactly what one gets with LaCugna
and Zizioulas, for example. In fact one
recent interpreter of LaCugna records,
LaCugna’s account of the Cappadocians [where she understands hypostasis to mean “concrete
existence”] fails to appreciate [ousia and hypostasis]
mutual dependence. Her theology reflects
a nominalist misreading of their
metaphysic [emphasis added], in so far as ousia for LaCugna is a term that
is merely expressive of existence,
but what actually exists are the individual hypostaseis Since there is no ‘real’ ousia in LaCugna’s portrayal of the
Cappadocians, and since (on her account), she concludes that ‘personhood and
not substance [is] the ultimate principle’ in Cappadocian theology.[34]
Raith
concludes of LaCugna’s nominalist reading of the Cappadocians that, as such:
“she ‘conflates’ the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘person’ resulting in a concept of
being that can no longer be used in its original Cappadocian context to refer
to God in his utter simplicity and unity.”[35] This nominalist reading can also manifest in
the sense that each hypostasis can gain dense psychological predication,[36]
and in particular that each possesses a will tuned in agreement with the
others, rather than the traditional teaching that all three possess one will, precisely because will is linked to substance. With the nominalist dissolution of substances
as real, will becomes a predicate of “concrete existence.”[37]
The
importance of considering the historical context of neo-Thomism (of the
manualist variety) being rejected by Rahner and taking the form of his “rule”
as we shall see in the next section, is that on top of the few problems already
mentioned (e.g. Moltmann and LaCugna’s distorted reading of the tradition)
Rahner’s Rule also seems to identify any attempt to “start with” talking about
“The One God” as a philosophical abstraction that hovers aloof from the
concrete biblical narrative. This is
undoubtedly why narrative theology has melded so seamlessly with the Rahnerian
axiom. The problem is that understanding
the tradition that “starts with” the One God (itself a dubious description) as
primarily being “philosophical” or a form of “natural theology” that grounds
and annexes later discourse on the Trinity (as Rahner described it) itself has a particular history. For the sequence of “starting with” the One God hardly requires philosophy to recommend this procedure, which stems from the Biblical order and is rooted primarily in the theology of Divine Names. That it has come to be perceived as a primarily philosophical problem to be overcome by a more robust “Trinitarian” theology can, I will suggest in the next section, also be seen as a symptom of the neo-Thomistic context that Rahner was demurring from.
[1] Stanley Grenz and Roger E. Olson, 20th Century Theology: God & World in a Transitional Age
(Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 12.
[2] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996), 94.
[3] Tanner, God and
Creation in Christian Theology, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press,
1988), 6.; Cf. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus,
Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis:
Augsburg: Fortress Press, 2001), esp. 1-35; Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
[4] Tanner, God and
Creation, 4.
[5] Tanner construes “non-competitive transcendence” as a
“second-order” or “grammatical” discourse, and not a prescriptive set of
doctrine. Thus it does not, for example,
necessitate a Thomistic or Augustinian viewpoint—another of Tanner’s
protagonists is Karl Barth. As such
calls to “revision” theistic discourse do not automatically run afoul of her
analysis.
[6] Tanner, God and
Creation, 122.
[7] Ibid., 125.
[8] Ibid., 158-159.
[9] It is not incidental that Tanner’s description matches
another scholarly account that maps these shifts onto the change nominalism
wrought upon theology. Cf. Michael Allan
Gillespie, The Theological Origins of
Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 16-17: “The
nominalist revolution was an ontological revolution that called being itself
into question … It …gave rise to a new ontology, a new logic, and a new
conception of man, God, and nature. All
succeeding European thought has been shaped by this transformation. While nominalism undermined scholasticism, it
was unable to provide broadly acceptable alternative to the comprehensive view
of the world it had destroyed. Some
retreat from radical nominalism was thus probably inevitable. On the basic ontological point, there was no
turning back—all, or almost all succeeding forms of thought accepted the
ontological individualism that nominalism had so forcefully asserted. With
respect to the other elements of metaphysics, however, there was considerable
variation, although these variations themselves were constrained by the
structure of metaphysics itself [emphasis added]. In fact … succeeding thinkers focused not on
the fundamental ontological question [of the difference of God from creatures]
but on the ontic question of the priority or primacy of particular realms of
being within metaphysica specialis. The deepest disagreements in the period
between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries were thus not ontological,
but ontic, disagreements not about the nature of being but about which of the
three realms of being—the human, the divine, or the natural—had priority. To put it simply, post-scholastic thinkers
disagreed not about being itself, but about the hierarchy among the realms of
being … Modernity, as we more narrowly understand it, was the consequence of
the attempt to resolve this conflict by asserting the ontic priority not of man
or God but of nature.”
[10]Rahner, The Trinity,
14. Cf. his more extended (though
largely similar) remarks in Karl Rahner, “Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise De Trinitate,” in Theological Investigations vol.IV (Baltimore: Helicone Press,
1966), esp. 80-91. Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas, 183, notes that though it
is much less frequently cited, a decade before Rahner penned his seminal
treatise, Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his early work rendered a similar complaint
regarding Aquinas’ separation of the treatises on God.
[11] Ibid., 11. Emphasis in original. This illustrates the truth of the statement
put forth by Karen Kilby, “Aquinas, the Trinity, and the Limits of
Understanding,” International Journal of
Systematic Theology vol. 7 no.4 (2005), 415: “Thomas
[Aquinas] is rarely censured in isolation: most often the context is a
criticism of the whole Western tradition of trinitarian reflection, beginning with Augustine…” [emphasis
added].
[12] Though there are undoubtedly currents where such an idea
was affirmed, it is germane to note in passing that Rahner does not cite anyone
at this point.
[13] Ibid., 15-21.
[14] Ibid., 17.
[15] Ibid. 17-18.
[16] Ibid., 18.
[17] Ibid., 22.
[18] This is strengthened by the analysis of Rahner’s pupil,
LaCugna (God for Us, 218): “Rahner’s
principle … as an … axiom does not justify any theological starting point other
than the economy of salvation,” just so “The deductive approach of Augustine or Thomas Aquinas is ruled
out.” The epithet “deductive approach”
here seems to be staggeringly reductive
to encapsulate complex and often ad hoc theological methodology.
[19] Randal Rauser, “Rahner’s Rule: An Emperor Without Clothes?”
International Journal of Systematic
Theology, 7 no. 1 (2005): 81-94.
Quote at 81. Its ambiguity and
reception history are notorious. Cf.
LaCugna, God For Us, 216: “Is it literally true that the economic trinity is
the immanent Trinity, as in the tautology A=A?”; While both Karkkainen (The Trinity in Global Perspective, 84) and Grenz (Rediscovering the Triune God, 69) agree
Rahner did not mean to collapse the immanent trinity into the economy of
history, Paul Molnar, Divine
Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth
and Contemporary Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 83-124, esp. 91ff,
believes this is exactly what he did. In
fact, Molnar’s thesis is essentially that it is ironic Rahner is routinely
cited as a major figure in the Trinitarian renaissance, since in Molnar’s view
the majority of Rahner’s theology—his “Transcendental Thomism” –in fact
mitigates and absorbs anything specifically Trinitarian that otherwise occurs
in Rahner’ thought. LaCugna, for one,
interprets Rahner’s thought in a decidedly “immanentizing” direction (God for Us, 228). Similarly, 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).
[20] The term “Rahner’s Rule” was first coined by Ted Peters,
“Trinity Talk,” in Dialog 26 no.1
(Winter 1987), 44-48 and 26, no.2 (Spring 1987), 133-138. Cf. Ted Peters God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life
(Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 213 n.33.
[21] Fred Sanders, “The Trinity,” in Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction eds.
Kelly M. Kapic & Bruce L. McCormack (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), 36. Indeed Sanders himself has done this: Fred
Sanders, The Image of the Immanent Trinity:
Rahner’s Rule and the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (New York:
Peter Lang, 2001). Cf. Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, 274, who wrote
a mere fifteen years after Rahner formulated his idea that “What K. Rahner set
down as a basic principle represents a broad consensus among theologians of the
various churches.” And cf. Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God, 57: “So standard has [Rahner’s] terminological and
methodological proposal become that it routinely appears in theological works
without its source being cited.”
[22] As a point of distinction we have to add that, though we
can not get into it here, often Rahner’s Rule and a similar, earlier
formulation in Barth are held side by side, so that the concern’s of these, the
two most major Trinitarian revivalists, are held in common. However, this downplays the difference of the
two formulations that resides precisely in Barth’s emphasis regarding the
sovereignty of God, especially as it is developed in the Church Dogmatics II/2 onwards.
This radical understanding of Barth’s concept of the relation between
God and world, places the notion of election as an ontological concept: God
elects to be God for us, elects to be the Father of Christ Jesus and the
history that entails. The decision for
the covenant of grace, in other words, is the logical grounds for God as
trinity. This, according to its most
profound proponent Bruce McCormack of Princeton, is neither modalism nor
adoptionism, since the Trinity here is not accidental to God (Sabellianism) or only
historically achieved (adoptionism), but based on the eternal decree and decision of God.
As we said, we cannot get into this here except that, first, it is
necessary to point out this differentiation between Barth and Rahner, and
second, it has become a contentious point of debate within Barth scholarship in
the last decade. This debate began with
Bruce McCormack, “Grace and Being: The Role of God’s Gracious Election in Karl
Barth’s Theological Ontology,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 2000), 92-110; cf. Idem,
“Election and Trinity: Theses in Response to George Hunsinger.” Scottish Journal of Theology vol.63 no.2
(2010): 203-224. Opposed to McCormack’s
interpretation in various ways are George Hunsinger and Paul Molnar. Cf. Hunsinger, “Election and the Trinity:
Twenty-Five Theses on the Theology of Karl Barth,” Modern Theology vol.24 no.2 (2008): 172-198; Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the
Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology
(London: T&T Clark, 2002), and Idem,
“The Trinity, Election, and God’s Ontological Freedom: A Response to Kevin
Hector,” International Journal of
Systematic Theology vol. 8 no.3 (2006): 294-306; For an attempt at
mediating the debate, cf. Kevin Hector, “God’s Triunity and Self-Determination:
A Conversation With Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack, and Paul Molnar,” International Journal of Systematic Theology
vol.7 no.3 (2005): 246-261. Not
often entering these debates specifically would be two theologians falling
definitively on the side of McCormack with alterations specific to their
thought. Cf. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol I: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997); Neil B. MacDonald, Metaphysics
and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006).
McCormack, Jenson, and MacDonald’s positions are not Process, or Open
theism, where history and human volition have a sort of reciprocal effect upon
God; rather God’s identity in relation to history and human volition are
themselves (quite classically sounding) based upon God’s eternal act of
volitional election—we might put it otherwise: this history of Israel and Christ Jesus is included within the act
of God’s self election to be
God-for-us. The object of election is
not history or humanity, but God’s being
itself to be the one who is historically
locatable and identifiable as made manifest in the history of Israel, Jesus
Christ, and the ekklesia.
[23] Philip Gabriel Renczes, “The Scope of Rahner’s Fundamental
Axiom in the Patristic Perspective: A Dialogue of Systematic and Historical
Theology,” in Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Wozniak, Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary
Issues in Trinitarian Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2012).
[24] Bruce Marshall, “The Unity of the Triune God: Reviving an
Ancient Question,” The Thomist vol.74
(2010): 7-8.
[25] Bruce Marshall, “The Absolute and the Trinity,” vol. 23
no.2 (2014): 147-164. “[Despite explicit
criticism] several basic theses endorsed by much of modern Trinitarian theology
seem originate chiefly with Hegel. These
theses have been taken to be essential for a properly theological renewal or
renaissance of Christian thought about the Trinity, and their origin traced not
to Hegel and other Idealist philosophers of his age, but to ancient theologians
supposedly neglected in the Western tradition, especially the Cappadocian Fathers”
(148).; Cf. O’Regan, The Anatomy of
Misremembering, 175: “Hegelian [thought], constituted by monism, eros, a
self-fulfilling form of kenosis, and necessity, not only fails to translate the
Christian narrative into terms that are faithful to Christianity’s dramatic
ethos, it effects a wholesale distortion of the Christian narrative, which
renders th drama of the triune God’s relation to the world as founded and
sustained by gratuitous love.”
[26] Steven R. Holmes, “Trinitarian Action and Inseparable
Operations: Some Historical and Dogmatic Reflections,” in Oliver Crisp and Fred
Sanders, eds., Advancing Trinitarian
Theology: Explorations in Constructive Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
2014), 167.
[27] Cf. Congar’s prescient remarks in Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit trans.
David Smith (New York: Crossroads, 1997), III: 117: “Any attempt to present him
[Aquinas] as an ‘essentialist,’ that is, as being conscious of, and as
affirming first of all the common divine essence, would be to betray the
balance of his theology. … This interpretation has all too often been based on
the fact that Thomas’ study of the Trinity of Persons in the Summa is preceded by a study of the
divine essence. Surely, however, it is
hardly possible not to proceed in this way from the point of view of
teaching? Is this procedure not
justified by the economy of revelation itself?” We will elaborate more on this
in the next section.
[28] Cf. Moltmann, Trinity
and the Kingdom, 110ff.
[29] Cf. Clark Pinnock, The
Most-Moved Mover (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 34: “There is an
issue that has not been raised yet in the discussion around the open view of
God. If He is with us in the world, if
we are to take biblical metaphors seriously, [!] is God in some sense
embodied? Critics will be quick to say
that though there are expressions of this idea in the bible, we shouldn’t take
them literally. But I do not believe
that the idea is as foreign to the Bible’s view of God as we have assumed. In tradition, God is thought to function
primarily as a disembodied spirit, but this is scarcely a biblical idea. For example Israel is called to hear God’s
word, to gaze on his glory and beauty.
Human beings are said to be embodied creatures created in the image of
God. Is there perhaps something in God
which corresponds to embodiment? Having
a body is certainly not a negative thing because it makes it possible for us to
be agents. Perhaps God’s agency would be
easier to envisage if he were in some way corporeal.” Among many things, it is interesting to note
that Pinnock’s argument slides from “taking Biblical metaphors seriously” into
“making God’s agency easier to understand.”
[30] O’Regan believes much the same of Moltmann, cf. Anatomy of Misremembering, 346:
“Moltmann’s impatience with paradox is symptomatic, perhaps suggesting that
Moltmann’s honesty resolves in the end to a post-Enlightenment commitment the
univocal.” It is absolutely fascinating
to note that in saying this, O’Regan also notes that the many oscillations of
post-nominalist shifts we spoke of in the last chapter are also exemplified in
Moltmann (348-350): “In a fundamental way, then, Moltmann reenacts the Hegelian
eclipse of biblical and Christian dramatics, which depend upon distinct spheres
of incommensurable—though not incompatible—agency. In this eclipse, the historicization of God
is married to the apotheosis of the world and human being. Thus, we have at once the exaggeration of the
horizontal and vertical poles of the relation between God and the world…as a
matter of fact Moltmann demonstrates extraordinary certainty regarding the
nature of God. God, or God’s history,
can be unambiguously read off the history of the world.” Of course again, this cannot simply be cited
as the legacy of nominalism and voluntarism (in a negative key) as there is an
extremely complex tale to be told regarding the influence of Jewish Kaballah
and Gnosticism on Hegel himself that then also finds its way into
Moltmann. Cf. O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity, 179-225.
[31] Tanner, Jesus,
Humanity, and the Trinity, 11, notes similarly: “Behind the problem, to
which kenosis and the historicizing
of God are offered as solutions, is the mistaken idea of God as a kind of being
over against other kinds of beings…”; Cf. Sarah Coakley, “Does Kenosis Rest on
a Mistake?: Three Kenotic Models in Patristic Exegesis,” in C. Stephen Evans,
ed. Exploring Kenotic Christology: The
Self-Emptying of God (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), 246-265, where she
argues that kenotic Christologies simply ignore the complicated (and
analogical!) tradition of communicatio
idiomatum to assume a direct competition or jostling between the
natures. Cf. 248n.3: “the ‘mistake’ I am
attempting to expose is the presumption made by modern philosophical analyses
of kenosis that there is a necessity
to bring ‘divine’ and ‘human’ characteristics into the same plane and make them into a ‘coherent’ package.” Here we must again mention the difference
between these sorts of Kenoticism and Barth (analogous to the difference we
mentioned above regarding the difference of Barth and Rahner regarding the
Immanent and Economic trinities). Cf.
Bruce L. McCormack, “Karl Barth’s Theology as a Resource for a Reformed Version
of Kenoticism,” International Journal for
Systematic Theology vol. 8 no.3 (2006): 243-251.
[32] Thomas R. Thompson and Cornelius Plantinga jr. “Trinity and
Kenosis,” in Exploring Kenotic
Christology, 165-189; cf. 166-167, where they “argue that the viability of
the kenotic model [here they mean any model assuming real relinquishment of divine
attributes] is dependent upon a social model of the trinity—that the success of
the former requires the success of the latter.”
[33] The accusations that Augustine or the West embodies a
“substance metaphysics” that controls the theological vision of God by static
or dualistic metaphysical categories, is odd for a number of reasons. The first is that Augustine in De Trinitate explicitly rejects the idea
that God can be called a substance.
Cf. De Trinitate VII.5.10: God is not a substance, for then “God
subsists, and is a subject, in relation to his own Goodness.” Rather God is His own goodness.
Augustine rejects substance language on the grounds of simplicity, rather than simplicity making Augustine a
culprit of “substance metaphysics”! For many, of course, this will be a moot
point, since the charge of “substance metaphysics” seems more akin to
identifying a trope of argumentation within a thinker (tending towards more
static, ahistorical, a-personal categories, etc…), than it does specified
terminology. In fact they would at this
point find themselves in odd company with Aquinas, who notes that—in opposition
to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215 A.D.), Augustine appears to state that the divine essence generates, rather than
the person of the Father (de Trin. VII.3),
a position Aquinas himself adamantly rejects since generation and relation are
proper to persons alone (ST I. q.39.
a.5, c). Far from condemning Augustine
for “substance metaphysics,” Aquinas opts for a more charitable route of
interpreting Augustine as a whole:
what Augustine means, says Aquinas, is that “the Son, who is the essence … is from the Father, who is the essence …” (ST I
q.39 a.5 ad.1). This both seems to
indicate that Aquinas is not unreflectively assuming a “substance metaphysics”
(since both he and Lateran IV reject it) and
that Augustine, despite what may perhaps be some incautious turns of
phrase, when interpreted charitably and holistically, is affirming the same
“personalist” values as many who vilify him.
Cf. Bruce D. Marshall, “Aquinas the Augustinian? On the Uses of
Augustine in Aquinas’ Trinitarian Theology,” in Aquinas the Augustinian ed. Michael Dauphinias, Barry David, and
Matthew Levering (D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007),
41-62. This leads to the second reason
that, as William Alston, “Substance and The Trinity,” in The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, 179-203 points out,
the paradigm for substance even in Aristotle was the living organism (199) and so was not “static” or “lifeless.” Cf. Kerr, After
Aquinas, 48-50 for the same judgments as Alston, only regarding Aquinas’
use of cause and substance. In fact the
charge against Thomism (that it trades on a “substance ontology”) is itself
predicated on Cajetan: “Cajetan allowed himself to be contaminated by Scotism,
and reduced Thomas’ metaphysics of the existential act of being to an ontology
of substance” (83). For critiques of Patristic trinitarianism along the lines
of the so-called “substance metaphysics,” cf. Peters, God as Trinity: “When the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed was
formulated in A.D. 381 our theologians were quite
confident [emphasis added] they could speak of the being of God. Whether
speaking of the divine ousia in Greek
or substantia in Latin, no one
doubted that these terms referred to the divine reality itself…What it means
for God to be understood in terms of divine substance was spelled out over
time. Augustine described God as a
substance that is invisible, unchangeable, and eternal…” (31-32). Ironically, in Peter’s mind, a classical
commitment “to a substantialist understanding of God’s being,” runs into an
obstacle in modern thought, viz. “the denial that we could know God in Godself.” Given the apophaticism of the tradition it
would be difficult to manufacture a more pronounced misunderstanding at this
point. Similar critiques are found in
Jenson, The Triune Identity, e.g.
120, 162-163; Moltmann, The Trinity and
the Kingdom, 149-150. In part the
critique of “substance metaphysics” was popularized by John Maquarrie’s
influential Principles of Christian
Theology (cf. Levering, Scripture and
Metaphysics, 150 for this judgment), but of course the stage was set far
earlier in the general turning of subject against substance conceived as inert
since the Voluntarist turning of God’s will against God’s essence, which then
played out in various ways through Descartes, and later Romanticism, German
Idealism, and even Russian Nihilism (cf. Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche).
Yet even as early on as the debate between Maximus and Pyrrhus, nature
or substance was for Pyrrhus connected to the idea of necessity opposed to
freedom, so again the idea is not solely the property of nominalism as a
phenomenon. Ironically, the charge of
“substantialism” along Scotist lines has recently been applied to social
Trinitarianism itself because of its utilization of theological deduction based
on the priority of certain concepts.
Bruce McCormack writes: “to substitute a doctrine of relationality for a
doctrine of substance … is simply to replace one form of metaphysical
essentialism with another” (“Actuality of God,” 201), and Kevin Vanhoozer
writes: “By taking the idea of ‘perfect love’ as its main point of reference,
however, kenotic-perichoretic relational ontotheology turns out, surprisingly
enough, to be another species of ‘perfect being’ theology. … Both proceed by
way of an analysis of concepts to a conclusion that involves necessity: in one
case, necessary existence, and in the other, necessary suffering. Significantly, the concept of necessary
suffering is drawn from elsewhere than an analysis of God’s self-enactment, but
then used to interpret the latter. …The kenotic-perichoretic relational view
thus repeats the very same error that allegedly undermines classical theism,
namely, that of specifying the unified divine essence (de Deo uno) before considering the Triune economy (de Deo Trino)…” (Remythologizing Theology, 172-173).
[34] Charles D. Raith II, “Ressourcing
the Fathers? A Critical Analysis of
Catherine Mowry LaCugna’s Appropriation of the Trinitarian Theology of the
Cappadocian Fathers,” International
Journal of Systematic Theology, Vol. 10, No. 3 (July 2008), 270. Internal quote from LaCugna, God for Us, 244.
[35] Ibid., 271.
[36] Plantinga jr. “Social Trinity and Tritheism,” 22: “The
theory [of Social Trinitarianism] must have Father, Son, and Spirit, as
distinct centers of consciousness…” It
should be noted Plantinga jr. is an advocate, not an opponent, of Social
Trinitarianism. It is intriguing that
his claim for robust psychology in each hypostasis turns precisely on his
insistence that simplicity be dropped as false (39).
[37] Cf. Holmes, The Quest
for the Trinity, 14. It seems in
part this distinction of person and nature in Zizioulas is driven not just by
Zizioulas’ own desire to demonstrate the viability of his own tradition over
and against Westernized theology, but also due to his emphasis on our
“ecstatic” existence in Christ and the church, which overcomes our “hypostasis of
biological existence,” which is overcome in Christ (e.g. Being as Communion 54). In
other words: we who are persons, are de-personalized by death and procreation,
since we are subject to natures instead of the freedom of personhood. This either/or dichotomy is insightful here,
but it appears translate into a dichotomy between person/nature within the
Godhead itself. This appears to be an
illegitimate univocal extension of the concept: “The perfect man is consequently
only he who is authentically a person, that is, he who subsists, who possesses
a ‘mode of existence’ which is constituted as being, in precisely the same manner in which God also subsists as being—in
the language of human existence this is what a ‘hypostatic union,’ signifies.”
(56-57). The italics are original to
Zizioulas. This freedom of God is
explicated earlier (44): “The ground of God’s ontological freedom lies not in
his nature but in his personal existence, that is, his ‘mode of existence’ in
which he subsists as a divine nature.”
But if the salvation of man is to exist in the same manner as God, while
at the same time man needs personhood to overcome
nature, this seems to cause a feedback into God, at least in Zizioulas
terminology of the “primacy” of person in God and perhaps also his
ontology. Univocity abounds.
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