Trinitarian Self and Salvation

An Evangelical Engagement with Rahner's Rule

Scott Harrower

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781610976749
  9781498261616
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621894421
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In 1967 Karl Rahner famously wrote: "The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa." From that time onwards, Rahner's Rule has become the norm for conceiving the relationship between the Trinity in the economy of salvation and God's eternal inner life. Evangelical theologians currently employ Rahner's Rule in a variety of ways. One of the most popular is the "Strict Realist Reading" whereby trinitarian relationships in salvation history are taken to mirror eternal relationships within God. This book brings this norm into conversation with the witness of Scripture in order to assess its viability. In doing so, it highlights troubling issues that arise from the application of the Strict Realist Reading of Rahner's Rule to the narrative of Luke-Acts. This book suggests that the Strict Realist Reading can be shown to be a questionable basis for our doctrine of God's inner life.

1

Contemporary Evangelical Rahnerianism

Theological views on the Trinity greatly affect most aspects of Christian faith and life. For example, in terms of basic Christian belief, the current trinitarian debate about the subordination of God the Son to God the Father has great significance for Christology. In terms of Christian life, the inner life of God the Trinity has been argued to be the basis for various social, familial, and ecclesial relationships and practice. Much of this theology and its implications revolve around the methodological use of Rahner’s Rule (RR). This axiom, RR, is defined as follows in Karl Rahner’s classic work The Trinity: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”1

The positive aspect of this maxim is that it reconnects the human experience of God in history with the immanent Trinity, thus narrowing any perceived gap between the Trinity and faith. A second positive outcome is that if all theology is carried out with RR in view then all branches of theology will necessarily be in close relationship to trinitarian theology.2 RR has become so significant that Vanhoozer recently stated, “One of the most important present-day litmus tests for theologians pertains to how far one accepts (or understands!) Rahner’s Rule.”3 Evangelicals are no exception to this need to deal with RR, and in fact many Evangelicals with a high view of Scripture do employ RR as a key theological norm. However, amongst Evangelical theologians RR is employed in different ways in order to support their various proposals. For example, despite the fact that Letham’s The Trinity, and Erickson’s God in Three Persons, are regarded as two of the most significant conservative Evangelical works on the Trinity,4 these works come to opposite conclusions on various issues based upon different interpretations of RR.5 This is not an isolated phenomenon.6 Rather, this highlights two reasons for the difficulty that RR poses. The first is that it contains an “inherent instability.” As Sanders notes: “Rahner’s Rule . . . lean[s] sometimes toward a more strict and total identification of economic and immanent Trinity, and sometimes toward a more carefully circumscribed account of the relationship between them.”7 Secondly, RR is “difficult to falsify and . . . difficult to confirm.”8 Struggles with RR and its attendant issues are not limited to the English-speaking world.9 In German-speaking scholarship, Stolina’s 2008 work “»Ökonomische« und »immanente« Trinität?” called for a re-conception of the relationship between the economic Trinity and the immanent Trinity.10 A representative of French scholarship is Dunard, who argues that Rahner never expected his rule to be interpreted as a univocal norm.11

Our current context, in which RR has been interpreted in varying ways, demonstrates the need for a decisive Evangelical methodology which a view to assessing the validity of RR, and any particular use of it. Evangelicals with a high view of Scripture tend to choose either of two approaches to RR. These can be usefully described with the application of Rauser’s designations. There is firstly the “strict realist reading” (SRR) of RR,12 secondly, a “loose realist reading” (LRR) of RR.13 Other designators for these two approaches include Sanders’ designations: the “radicalizers” and the “restrictivists.”14 The approach known as the “restrictivist” approach has also been called the “methodological” and “epistemological” reading of Rahner’s Rule. Coppedge employs the language of “methodological” and “ontological” to differentiate two approaches to the Rule. He favors the “methodological” approach, which is the one taken by those whom Sanders would designate as “restricters.” Coppedge writes: “It is probably best to see Rahner’s insight as a methodological one, so the economic Trinity is understood as revealing the ontological Trinity. To take his rule in an ontological way might blur the distinction between the being of God and the doing of God. If that should happen the focus is on what God does in relation to creation and leads to a functional understanding of the Trinity. The result would be not enough attention given to the relationship of the triune God within himself.”15

What Coppedge designates as “methodological” is equivalent to what others have called the “epistemological” interpretation of RR. A representative of the epistemological approach to RR states this view as: “The ontological Trinity is the ground of being for the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the ground of cognition for the ontological Trinity.” The rationale underlying this statement is that “one needs to acknowledge the ontological Trinity as the ground of being for the economic Trinity. If it were not for the ontological Trinity, there would not be the economic Trinity. The ontological Trinity that might be completed by the economic Trinity is not the ontological Trinity in sensu strictu. Only when there is the ontological Trinity is there the economic Trinity through which we can recognize and understand God.”16

There has been confusion about how to interpret the Rule within Roman Catholic circles since Rahner penned it,17 and Evangelical theology has not been exempt from this phenomenon. Evangelical theology has not ignored the role of RR within the “trinitarian renaissance” of the twentieth century. On this topic Kärkkäinen (who is a contemporary Evangelical theologian working on the Trinity) states that, “what is exciting about the current trinitarian renaissance is that questions and issues old and new are being re-visited and re-examined. Far from being an archaic doctrine, the Trinity has proven itself to be a source of vital debate and spiritual renewal.”18 In the context of explicitly speaking about RR, Kärkkäinen makes clear the priority of the correct understanding of RR when he says, “While a number of issues are being debated in contemporary trinitarian theology . . . at the heart of the discussion stands the question of the relationship between the economic and the immanent Trinity.”19 For Kärkkäinen, the importance of the interpretation of RR is not limited to the economic/immanent question alone: “The centrality of the issue is accentuated by the fact that the way one attempts to resolve this question is based on and has implications for several other key topics such as how to establish the oneness of God and how to defend the freedom of God.”20

Rauser’s three possible readings of RR, and the two possible readings by Sanders (above), point out the fact that a neat division of the readings of RR into either an epistemological or an ontological reading is insufficient for Evangelicals because their foundations have not been demonstrated by Scripture. Rauser’s LRR is equivalent to Sander’s “restrictivist” view, which affirms a strong epistemological connection between the economic and immanent Trinity. However, what Sanders labels as the “radicalizing view” ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Contemporary Evangelical Rahnerianism
• Chapter 2: The Rahnerian Background
• Chapter 3: The Messianic Office of God the Son in Luke-Acts
• Chapter 4: God the Father and God the Son
• Chapter 5: God the Son and God the Spirit
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Bibliography