Toward a Contemporary Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: Karl Barth and the Present Discussion

Paul D. Molnar

doi:10.1017/S0036930600048213

^{page 311 note 1} Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13pts. (hereafter: CD.)Google Scholar. Vol. 1, pt. 2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans, by Thomson, G.T. and Knight, Harold (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1970), 878–879Google Scholar. Cf. also ibid., 35–7 and CD. 2, 2, 309, 313.

^{page 312 note 2} C.D. 4, 2, 126. ‘The separation and distinction of this one true God from all the others can only be—continually his own deed’, Barth, Karl, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, (hereafter: Evangelical Theology) trans, by Foley, Grover (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1963), 6.Google Scholar

^{page 312 note 3} Rahner, Karl, ‘Theology and Anthropology’, Theological Investigations (23 vols.) (hereafter: TI), Vol. 9. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 28–45Google Scholar, 32. See also Ibid., 130.

^{page 313 note 4} Scottish Journal of Theology (hereafter: SJT), 47, 1, 1994, 136–7. Gunton suggests greater distinction between the economic and immanent Trinity in The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1991), 137ffGoogle Scholar. Thompson, John, Modern Trinitarian Perspectives, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), argues with clarity and subtlety for the unify and distinction of the economic and immanent Trinity (25ff.) and opposes grounding the doctrine in philosophy or anthropology.Google Scholar

^{page 313 note 5} CD. 2, 1, 319–20.

^{page 314 note 6} LaCugna, Catherine Mowry, God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life, (hereafter: God For Us) (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 222–224 and 228.Google Scholar

^{page 314 note 7} Ibid., 1. Cf. also 354.

^{page 314 note 8} Ibid., 353–55.

^{page 315 note 9} Ibid., 3. Emphasis mine.

^{page 315 note 10} Ibid., 169. Cf. also 397–8: ‘The God who does not need nor care for the creature, or who is immune to our suffering, does not exist… person, not substance is the root (radix) of all reality… the idea of the person as self-sufficient, self-possessing individual … is perhaps the ultimate male fantasy. Classical metaphysics, the effort to ascertain what something is “in itself”, is perhaps the ultimate projection of masculinity.’

^{page 315 note 11} CD. 2, 2, 3.

^{page 316 note 12} CD. 1, 1, 462–5. Cf. also CD. 1, 2, 249.

^{page 316 note 13} CD. 2, 1, 260–1.

^{page 316 note 14} Ibid., 313. Cf. also 2, 1, 326–7.

^{page 317 note 15} Cf. CD. 1, 1, 384–489 and CD. 2, 1, 611ff.

^{page 317 note 16} Cf. CD. 1, 1, 426–7. ‘“Begotten of the Father before all time” means that He did not come into being in time as such … That the Son of God becomes man and that He is known by other men in His humanity as the Son of God are events, even if absolutely distinctive events, in time … But their distinction does not itself derive or come from time … because the power of God's immanence is here the power of His transcendence, their subject must be understood as being before all time, as the eternal Subject…’ Emphasis mine.

^{page 317 note 17} CD. 1, 2, 134–35 and 150ff. Barth insisted that the incarnation takes place in the freedom of the eternal Word and therefore does not rest on any inner or outer necessity (Ibid., 136ff.). It is a miracle which, if it could be explained would no longer be a miracle. When Barth speaks of God as person he emphasizes that ‘Precisely in His Word is person,’ (C.D. 1, 1, 139), namely, Jesus as the Word is not a thing or an object; but a ‘free subject’ even ‘in respect of the specific limitations connected with its individuality’ (138); to be a real person then is to be a ‘really free subject’ (139), a ‘knowing, willing, acting I’ (2, 1, 283ff.).

^{page 319 note 18} Karl Barth Letters 1961–1968, ed. Fangmeier, Jürgen and Stoevesandt, Hinrich, trans. and ed. by Bromiley, Geoffrey W., (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 348.Google Scholar

^{page 319 note 19} Moltmann, Jürgen, The Spirit of Life A Univenal AfJirmation, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 343 and 290.Google Scholar

^{page 319 note 20} Ibid., 7.

^{page 320 note 21} Ibid., 34–5.

^{page 320 note 22} C.D., 2, 1, 149.

^{page 320 note 23} Cf. God For Us, 317, n. 143 and 296.

^{page 320 note 24} Ibid., 119. She misunderstands Barth's theology as modalist claiming he says that God was one subject existing in ‘three modes of revelation, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, 252. For Barth revelation is threefold ad extra because God who is Father, Son and Spirit in eternity has freely acted in revelation as God for us. Like Rahner she equates God's original being [unity] with the unoriginate which she equates with the Father.

^{page 320 note 25} Cf. Carr, Anne ‘Theology and Experience in the Thought of Karl Rahner’ in Journal of Religion 53 (1973) 359–376, at 359CrossRef Google Scholar. Leonard, Ellen ‘Experience As A Source For Theology’ in the Proceedings of the Annual Convention of The Catholic Theological Society of America (1988), 44–61Google Scholar believes that ‘It is the task of theology to revision God in the light of contemporary experience…’ (56). Without necessarily being influenced by Rahner, Gordon D. Kaufman thinks this is the main function of theology. Cf., e.g., God The Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 24Google Scholar and An Essay on Theological Method (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990)Google Scholar, 8. Dych, William V. believes that neither God nor scripture can be starting points for theology today but rather ‘our shared human existence’, in A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology, ed. O'Donovan, Leo J. (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 3.Google Scholar

^{page 320 note 26} CD. 1, 1, 381.

^{page 320 note 27} God For Us, 224, 211, 222. Cf. Molnar, Paul D. ‘The Function of the Immanent Trinity in the Theology of Karl Barth: Implications For Today’ in SJT, 42, 3, (1989), 396.CrossRef Google Scholar

^{page 320 note 28} Ibid., 225, 227. ‘The immanent Trinity is not transhistorical, transempirical, or transeconomic… to speak about God in immanent trinitarian terms is nothing more than to speak about God's life with us in the economy… an immanent theology of God is an inexact effort to say something about God as God is revealed in the economy … Speculating about the immanent Trinity is a kind of discernment… a way to speak about the nature of God with us in the economy … Because the essence of God is permanently unknowable as it is in itself, every attempt to describe the immanent Trinity pertains to the face of God turned toward us’, 229–30.

^{page 321 note 29} Cf. Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheisrn, trans. by Guder, Darrell L., (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 392, 316f. Cf. also SJT vol. 42, 390–98 and John Thompson, op. cit., 32f., 58ff.Google Scholar

^{page 321 note 30} McFague, Sallie, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age, (hereafter: Models) (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 192.Google Scholar

^{page 321 note 31} Models, 112–113. Also, 72, 166, 150 and 136.

^{page 321 note 32} Ibid., 150, 136

^{page 321 note 33} Ibid., 181.

^{page 321 note 34} Ibid., 224.

^{page 322 note 35} God For Us, 227; also, 334.

^{page 322 note 36} CD. 2, 1, 312. ‘The mythology of a merely partial and… selected identity of God with the world, which under the name of panentheism has been regarded as a better possibility than undiluted pantheism, is really in a worse case than is that of the latter.’ This, because it must mingle God with something else idealistically or materialistically and leads either to materialism or to spiritualism.

^{page 322 note 37} C.D. 1, 1, 432. Cf. also CD. 2, l, 324ff., 286f. and Torrance, , The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1988), 71, 133, and 246.Google Scholar

^{page 322 note 38} God For Us, 227.

^{page 323 note 39} Ibid., 18. While she believes it is appropriate to name God Mother, she will avoid the distracting name Father and use God and Godself. Her ‘agenda’ is ultimately to refer merely to God with us rather than ‘probing an intradivine realm (‘God in se’)’, n. 7. Yet she also believes that Mother expresses better than Father the deep physical bond between God and creation (303). Both Roland Frye and Robert Jenson have pointed out the gnostic and polytheist connotations in speaking of God as mother or Godself. Cf. Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Kimel, Alvin F. Jr. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 17ff. and 95ff.Google Scholar

^{page 323 note 40} God For Us, 228, 321–22.

^{page 323 note 41} Ibid., 354.

^{page 323 note 42} Ibid., 383–4, emphasis mine. By comparison for Barch ‘Revelation remains identical with Christ and Christ remains the object of Christian faith, even though He lives in Christians and they in Him’ (CD. 1, 2, 118).

^{page 324 note 43} Kaufman quoted in God For Us, 226.

^{page 324 note 44} Kaufman, Gordon D., Theology for a Nuclear Age, (Phila.: The Westminster Press, 1985), 43f.Google Scholar

^{page 324 note 45} Ibid., 50–6.

^{page 324 note 46} Ibid., 19.

^{page 325 note 47} Ibid., 57.

^{page 325 note 48} God For Us, 382.

^{page 325 note 49} Ibid., 378.

^{page 325 note 50} Ibid., 402. Elaine Pagels has shown that this was Gnostic but not a Christian belief.

^{page 325 note 51} Evangelical Theology, 152.

^{page 325 note 52} Cf. CD. 2, 2, 589ff. Cf. also CD. 4, 1, 744–5 and 4, 2, 129, 496.

^{page 326 note 53} Gunton, Colin E., Theology Today, vol. 51, 1, 1994, 174–176.CrossRef Google Scholar

^{page 326 note 54} Peters, Ted, God as Trinity Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life, (hereafter: Trinity) (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 122ffGoogle Scholar. While we have shown that she never even perceived God's freedom as Barth understood it, he believes she ‘extends the Barthian insight into practical spirituality,’ 123.

^{page 326 note 55} Ibid., 70.

^{page 326 note 56} Ibid., 125.

^{page 326 note 57} Ibid., 91 and 143.

^{page 327 note 58} Ibid., 92.

^{page 327 note 59} Cf. CD. 2, 1, 324 and CD. 4, 2, 346–7.

^{page 327 note 60} C.D. 2, 1, 314ff. For Barth ‘the one God in His three modes of being corresponds to the Lord of glory. As it is of decisive importance to recognise the three modes of being, not only economically as modalism does, but, according to the seriousness of the divine presence and power in the economy of His works, as modes of being of the one eternal God Himself, so it is equally important to understand that God in Himself is not divested of His glory and perfections, that He does not assume them merely in connexion with His self-revelation to the world, but that they constitute His own eternal glory’, 326–7.

^{page 327 note 61} Trinity 93ff.

^{page 327 note 62} C.D. 2, 1, 306. See also C.D. 1, 1, 354 where Barth insists that God does not need ‘a Second and then a Third in order to be One…’.

^{page 328 note 63} C.D. 4, 2, 344–5.

^{page 328 note 64} C.D. 2, 1, 303.

^{page 328 note 65} See, e.g., Trinity, 134ff. and 180. When Peters depicts Barth's understanding of God's eminent temporality as the simultaneity of past, present and future he misses Barth's point, i.e., that God's time is not subject to the limitations and sin connected with our time. Instead he says: ‘Barth goes on to insist that the eternal life of God is dynamized by the temporal actuality of the world’, 149. So Peters wonders ‘why we need to maintain simultaneity of past, present and future’ at all. Thus ‘God's eternity is gained through the victory of resurrection and transformation’, 175. For Barth, of course, God does not have to gain his eternity—he already has and is it in freedom. Peters believes his thinking is not captive to a metaphysical principle and that ‘It is God who defines what divinity is’ (145); yet if God depends on history then history defines God.

^{page 329 note 66} Ibid., 214. Following Rahner, he thinks that logical or analytic explanations of scripture must ‘always refer back to the origin from which they came, namely the experience of faith that assures us that the incomprehensible God is really … given us… in … Christ and the Spirit’, (98) and thus mistakenly believes that the doctrine of the Trinity primarily refers to the experience of the ‘beyond and intimate’, 19.

^{page 329 note 67} Ibid., 15–6. Cf. also 78, 82. Following Hegel he believes God is in the process of constituting himself and this includes God's saving relationship to the world.

^{page 329 note 68} C.D. 2, 1, 492–503.

^{page 329 note 69} Trinity, 16, 82. Cf. also 83–4.

^{page 330 note 70} Ibid., 95.

^{page 330 note 71} Cf. CD. 1, 1, 349–52. God's ousia ‘is not only not abrogated by the threeness of the ‘persons’ but rather that its unity consists in the threeness of the “persons”’, 349–50. Many think that for Barth God's oneness has priority over his threeness. Thus, Colin Gunton: ‘As Pannenberg has written, the weakness of Barth's theology of the Trinity is that God's unity is seen as the ground of his threeness, rather than the result’, ‘The triune God and the freedom of the creature’ in Karl Barth: Centenary Essays, ed. Sykes, S. W. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60. For Barth God is simultaneously one and three; neither threeness nor oneness comes first.Google Scholar

^{page 330 note 72} Torrance, Thomas F., Trinitarian Perspectives Toward Doctrinal Agreement, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994), thinks God can be properly seen as three persons and ‘the infinite and universal Person’, 97fGoogle Scholar.

^{page 330 note 73} C.D. 2, 1, 659–60. Regarding God's pre-temporality, supra-temporality and post-temporality Barth argued: ‘There is just as little place for … rivalry here as between the three persons of the Trinity, whose distinction is really … the basis of these three forms … there is in God both distinction and peace’, 639.

^{page 331 note 74} Trinity, 95f.

^{page 331 note 75} Cf. esp. ibid., 128–45.

^{page 331 note 76} Ibid., 96. Having completely lost the distinction between God's internal and external relations, Peters uses trinitarian categories to describe the experience of the beyond and intimate and concludes that the absolute becomes related through the incarnation and that the related becomes absolute eschatologically, 146fT., 182ff.

^{page 332 note 77} CD. 1, 2, 133.

^{page 332 note 78} Cf., e.g., Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 52f. and ‘The Christian Apprehension of God the Father’, in Speaking the Christian God (ed. Kimel, ), 123.Google Scholar

^{page 333 note 79} C.D. 2, 1, 311. Cf. also 187, 310. Speaking of the incarnation as an act of God's free love Barth said “while this event as a happening in and on the created world makes, magnifies and enhances the glory of God outwardly; inwardly it neither increases nor diminishes His glory, His divine being. For this is neither capable nor in need of increase or decrease. God did not and does not owe this happening to the world or to us any more than He did creation or the history of salvation … It was not the case, nor is it, that His being necessitated Him to do it’, CD. 2, 1, 513–4. Jesus Christ did not surrender or curtail hisdivinityinhis self-concealment and self-offering but was divine in it showing his freedom to be humiliated on our behalf (516ff.). By contrast Peters believes ‘God ceases to be God — or, at least, what we might assume to be God — in order to become human and die’, Trinity, 13; God needs history to be relational.

^{page 333 note 80} Trinity, 181. Jesus is not the sole norm for Peters' understanding the Trinity; it is also our experience of the beyond and intimate. Thus Jesus must gain his divinity and the Holy Spirit must find his divinity by accomplishing community between Father and Son and with the world (180'1).

^{page 334 note 81} C.D. 2, 1, 308.

^{page 334 note 82} Ibid., 307f.

^{page 335 note 83} This is why Peters can actually say: ‘As the Holy Spirit, God becomes so inextricably tied to our own inner self that the line between the two sometimes seems to us blurred’, Trinity, 19.

^{page 335 note 84} Cf. C.D. 1, 1, 323.

^{page 335 note 85} C.D. 1, 1, 171.

^{page 335 note 86} Ibid., 117–20.

^{page 336 note 87} Ibid., 163–6. Cf. also CD. 2, 1, 287.

^{page 336 note 88} Ibid., 166, 168.

^{page 337 note 89} Ibid., 171–2.

^{page 338 note 90} Ibid., 321, 323.

^{page 338 note 91} Cf. C.D. 1, 2, 131ff. Cf. esp. CD. 2, 1, 516flf.

^{page 339 note 92} C.D. 1, 1, 414–15 and CD. 2, 1, 625ff.

^{page 340 note 93} C.D. 3, 1, 54. Cf. C.D. 4, 1, 52. Cf. also C.D. 1, 2, 168ff. and C.D. 3, 2, 64–6 and The Göttingen Dogmatics, vol. 1, ed. Reiffen, , trans. Bromiley, (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 160Google Scholar where Barth wrote: ‘The Son is both logos ensarkos and logos asarkos. Do we not have to say this afresh and for the first time truly the moment we speak about the union of Cod and man in revelation lest we forget that we stand here before the miracle of God? Can we ever have said it enough?’

^{page 340 note 94} Cf. Jenson, Robert W., God According to the Gospel The Triune Identity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 138–141Google Scholar. Jenson believes such a concept prevents the procession of the Son from being the same as Jesus' mission. And indeed it does; precisely in order to prevent God's eternal freedom from being confused with his freedom for us. I am not arguing here for a separation of Jesus' humanity and divinity but for the fact that, unless his mission is seen against the background of his being in se before the world was, then his deity will be equated with or seen as the outcome of history. Jenson, Peters and Pannenberg all see it this way. For Jenson ‘the Trinity is simply the Father and the man Jesus and their Spirit as the Spirit of the believing community’ (141). What happened to the eternal Trinity which pre–existed, exists now and is also future? This Trinity is banished into a future: ‘This “economic” Trinity is eschatologically God “himself”, an “immanent” Trinity,’ (ibid.). Hence Jenson substitutes Jesus' resurrection for God's ousia (168) and argues that ‘The divine ousia is no longer our first concern. It is the work, the creative event done as Jesus' life, death, resurrection …’ (113); here historical events displace God's eternal being and action.

^{page 340 note 95} C.D. 1, 1, 416–20.

^{page 340 note 96} E.g. Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, (hereafter: Systematic Theology II) trans, by Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), 370ff.Google Scholar

^{page 341 note 97} C.D. 1, 1, 420.

^{page 341 note 78} Ibid., 421. See my articles in SJT 42, 1989 and ‘The Function of the Trinity in Moltmann's Ecological Doctrine of Creation,’ in vol. 51, no. 4, 1990, of Theological Studies, 673–97. Moltmann conceives Christ's antecedent existence in terms of suffering love which is more blessed in giving than in receiving and so sees God's actions in history as necessary attributes of God. Peters agrees with this aspect of Moltmann's thought.

^{page 341 note 99} Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, trans, by Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 327–329, emphasis mine; and 296.Google Scholar

^{page 341 note 100} Ibid., 56.

^{page 342 note 101} Ibid., 331, emphasis mine.

^{page 342 note 102} Ibid., 310–13, 322, emphasis mine. Cf. also Systematic Theobgy II, 391.

^{page 342 note 103} Ibid., 312, emphasis mine.

^{page 342 note 104} Ibid., 430 and 426–7.

^{page 343 note 105} C.D. 1, 1, 421.

^{page 343 note 106} Systematic Theology II, 325. Chapter 10 concerns the deity of Christ.

^{page 344 note 107} Ibid., 367, n. 126.

^{page 344 note 108} Ibid., 325.

^{page 344 note 109} Ibid., 335. Cf. CD. 3, 2, 62 ‘We cannot say that Jesus did not act in His own right, but in the name of another, namely God… He acts in the name of God, and therefore in His own name.’

^{page 344 note 110} Ibid., 337.

^{page 345 note 111} C.D. 2, 1, 605–6. ‘He, the crucified One, is the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24). Note that He not only has this power but that in His existence He Himself is it. He certainly has it as well… the epitome and sum of all the power He enjoys as given and active in Him by God is the fact that God in His power raised Him from the dead (1 Cor. 6:14; 2 Cor 13:4).’ Following (Ac. 2:24) Barth says ‘He is the One forwhom it was impossible that the resurrection from the dead should not take place. This was only His declaration as the Son of God, and therefore as the possessor of the power of His Father which he gained by this event, according to Rom. 1:4. He did not have to become this. He is from the very beginning the possessor of “the power of an endless life” (Heb. 7:16) …Jesus Christ is not merely the bearer and executive of a power of God which is given Him but which is not originally and properly His. On the contrary, Jesus Christ has the power of God because and as He Himself is it.’

^{page 345 note 112} Cf. Evangelical Theology, 29–30. Cf. also CD. 1, 1, 459–60.

^{page 345 note 113} Systematic Theology 11, 345.

^{page 345 note 114} Ibid., 326.

^{page 345 note 115} C.D. 2, 1, 607.

^{page 346 note 116} Rahner, Karl, The Trinity, (hereafter: Trinity) trans, by Donceel, J. (New York: Herder, 1970), 31, n. 27.Google Scholar

^{page 346 note 117} TI 11:159. Cf. also Rahner, K., Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction To The Idea of Christianity, (hereafter. Foundations), trans, by Dych, William V. (New York: Seabury, 1978), 44 and TI 4:50 where Rahner writes: ‘All conceptual expressions about God, necessary though they are, always stem from the unobjectivated experience of transcendence as such: the concept from the pre-conception, the name from the experience of the nameless.’ This thinking plays a decisive role in Rahner's view of the incarnation. Our spiritual movement helps us appropriate the ancient Christologies: ‘For no understanding is possible anywhere if what is understood remains fixed and frozen and is not launched into the movement of that nameless mystery which is the vehicle of all understanding’, TI 4:106, emphasis mine.Google Scholar

^{page 347 note 118} Foundations, 53.

^{page 347 note 119} Foundations, 149. For LaCugna ‘Revelation is the experienced self-communication of God in the history of salvation’, Cod For Us, 318.

^{page 347 note 120} TI 4: 72.

^{page 347 note 121} Dych, A World of Grace, 13.

^{page 347 note 122} Dych, William V., S.J., , Karl Rahner, (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 36–37.Google Scholar

^{page 348 note 123} Grenz, Stanley J. and Olson, Roger E., 20th Century Theology: God & the World in a Transitional Age (Carlisle: The Paternoster Press, 1992), 246–247.Google Scholar

^{page 349 note 124} Rahner, Trinity, 31–3.

^{page 349 note 125} Wong, Joseph P., Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner, (Rome: Las-Roma, 1984), 193Google Scholar. Cf. also TI 4:251 and 239. Similarly, Peters presses Rahner's axiom ‘to its extreme consequence,’ (Trinity, 192); thus ‘the loving relationship between the Father and the Son within the Trinity is the loving relationship between the Father and Jesus… [hence] when we look at Jesus we see the real thing [the Son]’ (Trinity, 22).

^{page 349 note 126} Rahner, Trinity, 40. Emphasis mine.

^{page 350 note 127} TI 4:224, 234 and 228.

^{page 350 note 128} Rahner, Karl, Hearers of the Word, trans, by Richards, Michael (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 49.Google Scholar

^{page 350 note 129} Rahner, Trinity, 47.

^{page 350 note 130} Cf. TI 1:91, Foundations, 60, and TI 11:153–6. The term God refers to an experience on the basis of which that which we all experience (the term of our transcendental orientations) is what ‘we call God’.

^{page 350 note 131} Cf. TI 4:119. This leads to Rahner's anonymous Christianity and encourages the idea that love of God and neighbor are finally identical.

^{page 351 note 132} Foundations, 126ff.

^{page 351 note 133} TI 4:239 and 251.

^{page 351 note 134} Ibid. 239ff. and Rahner, Trinity, 32–3.

^{page 351 note 135} Ibid., 115.

^{page 351 note 136} Ibid., 237. Cf. also 225 and 231.

^{page 351 note 137} Ibid., 113.

^{page 352 note 138} Ibid., 115, emphasis mine and 117. ‘God has taken on a human nature, because it is essentially ready and adoptable’ (110); human nature ‘when assumed by God as his reality, simply arrived at the point to which it always strives by virtue of its essence’ (109). For Barth ‘human nature possesses no capacity for becoming the human nature of Jesus Christ’ C.D. 1, 2, 188. When it is assumed by God in Christ it receives a new point of departure toward which it could no longer strive by virtue of its essence which is affected by sin.

^{page 352 note 139} Ibid., 115–17.

^{page 352 note 140} ‘Grace exists… by being the divinising condition [of the person], and hence presupposes and incorporates into itself the whole reality of this person as the condition of its own possibility…’, TI 6:73.

^{page 352 note 141} TI 4:236.

^{page 353 note 142} Ibid., 225.

^{page 353 note 143} Ibid., 240.

^{page 353 note 144} Ibid., 236–9, Rahner, , Trinity, 32–33.Google Scholar

^{page 353 note 145} Ibid., 116.

^{page 353 note 146} TI 6:233, 236–37, 239.

^{page 354 note 147} TI 4:117.

^{page 354 note 148} TI 1:185.

^{page 354 note 149} TI 9:28.

^{page 354 note 150} CD. 1, 1, 131 and C. D. 3, 2, 71.

^{page 354 note 151} Rahner, , Trinity, 36–37 and TI 4:112.Google Scholar

^{page 355 note 152} Ibid., 47.

^{page 355 note 153} Barth, Karl, Credo, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), 166–167. Under-estimating Jesus' lordship followed from depreciating the foundation of the community in his resurrection and a failure to perceive the ‘consolation of the Holy Spirit in whose work the community may find full satisfaction at every moment in its time of waiting,’ C.D. 3, 2 509.Google Scholar

^{page 356 note 154} Rahner, K. and Weger, K., Our Christian Faith: Answers for the Future (Crossroad, 1981), 110–111Google Scholar. In TI 17:16 Rahner begins his analysis of Jesus? resurrection saying: ‘It is possible to enquire about Jesus’ resurrection today… only if we take into account the whole of what philosophy and theology have to say about man. Here we must start from the assumption that the hope that a person's history of freedom will be conclusive in nature… already includes what we mean by the hope of “resurrection” …this hope must include knowledge of what is really meant by resurrection.' And for Rahner ‘the knowledge of man's resurrection given with his transcendentally necessary hope is a statement of philosophical anthropology even before any real revelation in the Word’, Ibid., 18. By the time Rahner appeals to grace and scripture they can only describe something which everyone already knows and experiences without faith in Christ and the Spirit.

^{page 356 note 155} Rahner, , Trinity, 47–48.Google Scholar

^{page 356 note 156} T. F. Torrance, Trinitarian Perspectives, reflecting the views of a 1975 Colloquium on Rahner's doctrine of the Trinity, notes this and other problems in Rahner's view, 79, 82, 91, even though he also presents Rahner's positive contributions to the discussion.

^{page 356 note 157} Rahner, Trinity, 47.

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