A Test of Karl Rahner’s Axiom, “The Economic Trinity is the Immanent Trinity and Vice Versa”

The Thomist 70 (2006): 421-55 A TEST OF KARL RAHNER'S AXIOM, "THE ECONOMIC TRINITY IS THE IMMANENT TRINITY AND VICE VERSA" DENNIS W. JOWERS Faith Seminary Tacoma, Washington By HIS FAMOUS AXIOM, "the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa," Karl Rahner means to assert that divine self-communication "can, if occurring in freedom, occur only in the intra-divine manner of the two communications of the one divine essence by the Father to the Son and the Spirit."1 In other words, the immanent constitution of the Trinity forms a kind of a priori law for the divine selfcommunication ad extra so that the structure of the latter cannot but correspond to the structure of the former. 2 Rahner advances this axiom, the Grundaxiom of his theology of the Trinity, primarily for the purpose of manifesting the relevance of the doctrine of the immanent Trinity for ordinary human life.3 If one can demonstrate, Rahner reasons, that the Trinitarian structure of the intradivine life necessarily corresponds 1 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder, 1970), 36. 2 "The Trinity as present in the economy of salvation," Rahner writes, "necessarily embodies also the Trinity as immanent" ("Reflections on Methodology in Theology," in Theological Investigations 11, trans. David Bourke [London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: The Seabury Press, 1974], 108). 3 "We must," writes Rahner, "try to make the doctrine of the Trinity fruitful for practical Christian living, given that the doctrine has a 'sitz im leben' and that the Trinity is of crucial importance for actual Christian life and spirituality.... The teaching cannot even have the right 'speculative' content and form, unless it meets these demands in Christian life" ("The Mystery of the Trinity," in Theological Investigations 16, trans. David Morland, O.S.B. [New York: The Seabury Press, 1979], 256). Cf. also Rahner, The Trinity, 10-15, 39-40. 421 422 DENNIS W. JOWERS to, and indeed constitutes, the ratio essendi of the universal structures of human experience, then one can also explain why human beings ought to care about the ontology of God in se. Specifically , if the human experience of divine self-communication is an experience of the immanent Trinity as it eternally and necessarily exists in itself, then the doctrine of the immanent Trinity in large part accounts for the peculiar structure of this experience4 and explains to a great extent the structures of human beings themselves, whom God has created to be the addressees of his self-communication.5 If Rahner's Grundaxiom is correct, therefore, every statement of the theology of the Trinity is also a statement about the experience, nature, and purpose of human beings: all matters of pressing, existential concern. Besides Rahner's pastoral interest in manifesting the relevance of Christian doctrine for human life, a second motive also seems to animate his arguments for the necessary correspondence of the immanent and the economic Trinity. He desires to place Trinitarian theology on a new methodological footing, far removed from typically neo-Scholastic presuppositions. He wishes, specifically, to ground all speculation about the immanent Trinity in what he considers the ultimate source of human knowledge of this mystery: the human experience of the economy of salvation.6 4 Cf. Rahner's analysis of the experience of divine self-communication into four dyads of mutually opposed moments (origin-future, history-transcendence, invitation-acceptance, knowledge-love); his reduction of these dyads to the fundamental relation ofknowledge-love; and his argument for the correspondence of the external processions of the Son and Spirit, respectively, with these moments of human experience (Rahner, The Trinity, 91-99). s Cf. ibid., 88-89. 6 "The OiKovoµia," writes Rahner, "is actually the whole of theology and ... contains and reveals the immanent Trinity in itself" ("Trinitiitstheologie," in Sacramentum Mundi, 4 vols., ed. Karl Rabner et al. [Freiburg: Herder, 1967-69]). Putatively revealed propositions, by contrast, cannot constitute the immediate means by which the immanent Trinity discloses itself, in Rahner's view, because God does not intervene in the categorical order as he must if he is to insert data concerning his inner nature directly into the consciousness of the bearers of revelation. As Rabner...