Rereading Rahner

Hensley proposes to offer a reading of Rahner which brings him ‘much closer methodologically to Barth's sense of the immanent Trinity that preserves the priority of divine acts of grace’. This is indeed a laudable goal. For, if Barth and Rahner were truly in agreement about the fact that Jesus Christ alone is and must be the starting point both for the doctrine of the Trinity and for all other Christian doctrines, then that certainly could be the basis for genuine ecumenical agreement with very far-reaching implications. Hensley properly sees that Rahner's thinking plays a central role in contemporary debates regarding divine freedom and the doctrine of the immanent Trinity.

He says that he agrees with me that ‘for Rahner a general understanding of the relation between God and creatures – what Molnar calls Rahner's account of transcendental experience – provides the context of intelligibility for christology, for his account of God's self-revelation in Christ and thereby ultimately his account of God's triune identity’. But of course if this is in any sense true (as we both agree that it is) then it is exactly this methodological position of Rahner's which actually undercuts his ability to begin and end his reflections with Jesus Christ and thus exclusively with the economic trinitarian self-revelation. That was certainly one of the crucial points of my book: unless God's freedom for us in the economy is recognised as God's own action as creator, reconciler and redeemer, and therefore as the act of one who loves in freedom, then we risk adopting an agnostic position regarding who God is and the only subsequent alternatives will be theological presentations which end (often inadvertently) in some form of dualism or pantheism. And such results inevitably leave us far away from any genuine recognition of God's sovereignty and of God's actions for us in his Word and Spirit, specifically because they open the door not only to the idea of a dependent deity of some kind or other, but to the confusion of the Holy Spirit with the human spirit and to the idea that it is from our transcendental experience that knowledge of God arises in the first place. Let us explore this issue briefly. Because Hensley has misunderstood this most basic point of my book I must repeat: this methodological problem has material and formal repercussions since it is my contention that formal theological constructs are meaningless without material content; and the material content of a theology based on revelation is and remains the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit whom we know in faith and by grace and through revelation in his incarnate Son and through his Holy Spirit, namely, through the economic trinitarian self-revelation.Footnote ²

All will, I think, agree that for Karl Barth and for T. F. Torrance there is no accurate knowledge of the creator/creature relationship if such knowledge does not begin and end in faith in Jesus Christ, that is, with a genuine recognition of his deity in its authentic, definitive and essential sense – a divinity that is his as the eternal Son of the Father from all eternity. But for Rahner there is such a knowledge – there is an unthematic awareness of God present in everyone which provides the ‘context of intelligibility’ for understanding both christology and the Trinity. All of this, together with the conclusions which follow from such thinking, is extremely well documented in my book and is shown to be operative throughout Rahner's writings since it is not restricted mainly to his book, Foundations of Christian Faith, as Hensley seems to think. That explains why Rahner deliberately rejects beginning his theology exclusively with Jesus Christ, arguing that that is too narrow a starting point and that we must therefore begin with ‘a knowledge of God which is not mediated completely by an encounter with Jesus Christ’.Footnote ³ And it is to be noted that this method is followed by everyone who adopts Rahner's method or some variation of it – thinking this way one always begins by analysing human experience and only then turning to a consideration of Christian doctrines.

Here, at the most basic level of theological inquiry, Barth and Torrance on the one side and Rahner on the other are divided by a chasm which can only be traversed by the miraculous action of the Holy Spirit himself. Hensley does not appreciate the fact that Rahner's starting point is not really Jesus Christ himself (as I demonstrated numerous times in different contexts in the book) but rather Jesus Christ interpreted from within the context of intelligibility provided by transcendental experience.Footnote ⁴ What difference does this make? It makes all the difference in the world. It leads to such curious assertions as: ‘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’.Footnote ⁵ It leads to Rahner's belief that love of God and love of neighbour really are identical so that wherever we posit positively moral acts we already love God whether or not we know him explicitly.Footnote ⁶ It leads to Rahner's anonymous Christianity which, as I maintained, is just the kind of universalism (idealism) one would expect if a theologian indeed had confused grace and revelation with our self-experience, and it also leads to Rahner's belief that God's grace and revelation are part and parcel of transcendental experience in the form of an obediential potency for revelation as well as what he calls a supernatural existential. In the end this thinking leads Rahner to assert that self-acceptance is the same as accepting Jesus Christ! As I pointed out in my book, even the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger criticised Rahner for that last assertion precisely because it makes Christianity unnecessary and superfluous.Footnote ⁷

Furthermore, and especially in chapter 6 of my book, I spelled out the differences all of this makes with regard to the way one interprets the resurrection, by explicitly comparing how Torrance interprets the resurrection with Rahner's approach. I focused particularly on the fact that, for Torrance, who follows Anselm and Barth, there is no such thing as non-objective and non-conceptual knowledge of God (what Rahner calls unthematic ever-present knowledge of God as the nameless, silent term of our experiences of self-transcendence). Any such knowledge, in Torrance's thinking, has to lead to the projection of our experiences into God instead of to our receiving such knowledge, by God's grace and through faith, from God's self-revelation in his Word and through his Spirit. This leads to serious differences between the two theologians with regard to the resurrection in particular. First, Torrance insists (and I agree) that the resurrection is something utterly unique for which we have no a priori whatsoever and that it is entirely unknowable from what we already know or think we know. Rahner insists that it can be known, perhaps anonymously, just by exploring our experiences of hope, and without explicitly referring to the name of Jesus, exactly because he thinks grace and revelation have become fundamental elements in our own transcendental experience; while Torrance (with Barth) thinks grace and revelation cannot be detached in any way from Christ or from the Holy Spirit and located within our experience. Second, this leads Rahner to believe there is a relationship of mutual conditioning between our knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of God – an idea that is unequivocally rejected by both Torrance and Barth because it undermines the nature of grace as the free action of God within history in his Word and Spirit and assimilates grace to nature in the form of a supernatural existential. Third, ultimately it is just this type of thinking that leads Rahner to believe that anthropology and christology are mutually conditioned and mutually conditioning just as natural theology and revealed theology are mutually conditioned.

Hensley clearly does not see the depth of this issue as he thinks that there may be a way to understand this mutually conditioning relationship correctly within Christian dogmatics. One might say that here the whole force of my book should be seen as an effort to say No! There is no right way to think of christology and anthropology as mutually conditioning realities unless christology has been displaced to begin with by the content of one's transcendental experience.Footnote ⁸ Here lies the force of one of the key indicators that God's freedom was either ignored or misunderstood: there is a trend today to begin theology with our experiences of self-transcendence and this trend itself is an indication that a doctrine of the immanent Trinity has been undermined, ignored or rejected.Footnote ⁹ Again it must be stressed at this juncture: this is a methodological issue with both material and formal consequences. A choice is required here: either one is unequivocally bound by faith to Jesus Christ as the Word of God incarnate – as the self-communication of God ad extra – or one can rely partially on one's own self-transcending experiences of faith, hope or love and then find a place for Jesus by partially standing upon oneself and also upon him.

But, as Barth starkly and rightly reminded us: ‘in faith we abandon. . .our standing upon ourselves. . .for the real standing in which we no longer stand on ourselves. . .but. . .on the ground of the truth of God. . .We have to believe; not to believe in ourselves, but in Jesus Christ.’Footnote ¹⁰ That is clearly the choice Hensley refuses to make and so he spends a good part of his review presenting how he would like to read Rahner instead of dialoguing with what Rahner actually says, and with the careful and detailed critique I offered in my book, where my goal was not to say that people should no longer read Rahner's theology or see what is of value therein. My objective was to say that the irreconcilable conflicts which are clearly present in Rahner's thinking can only be resolved when one makes this choice and that the very fact that this is so is itself an indication of why we need to acknowledge God's sovereignty today as something only God can and does establish in ever new acts as he is present to us and for us and even within us in his Word and Spirit.

Absolutely none of this is addressed by Hensley in his proposal to read Rahner in a way which would see that he had recognised and preserved the divine freedom in se and ad extra and that therefore Rahner and Barth are closer methodologically than I suggested they were. Yet all of these Rahnerian ideas betray the fact that Jesus Christ does not in reality exercise the kind of priority for Hensley and Rahner that he exercises for Barth and Torrance. That is simply a fact which cannot be escaped. Can Rahner be read in the benign way suggested by Hensley? Obviously he can or Hensley would not have made the suggestions he has made. But the point of my book was to suggest that he can be read that way only if the reader leaves out at least half of what Rahner thinks and says in his theology.Footnote ¹¹ And that procedure hardly does justice to the systematic implications of his theology as a whole. It certainly does not do justice to the fact that Rahner himself believed his own transcendental philosophy was intrinsic to his theology and could not be sundered from it without doing damage to the entire structure of this thought. This is especially evident in Rahner's famous articles in Theological Investigations 4 on ‘The Theology of the Symbol’ and on ‘The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology’, which were discussed extensively in my book.

Trinity and revelation

Everything Hensley has to say in his review about the Trinity and revelation hinges on the fact that he accepts Rowan Williams's critique of Barth while I do not. Revelation for Barth is not, as Rowan Williams says, ‘fundamentally the impartation of God's self-knowledge’ (p. 11). Rather, says Barth, revelation is identical with the incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ:

In Barth's thinking two important factors are in evidence which are missing from the thinking of Hensley and Williams. For Barth, revelation means both reconciliation and God's seeking and creating fellowship between himself and us. And both take place because Jesus Christ is the one God who loves us without having to do so – he is the grace of revelation who establishes communion between God and us in his own person and through his own works ad extra. What the analysis offered by Hensley suggests, relying on the thinking of Williams, is that they are basically accusing Barth of a type of modalism because for Barth there is only one divine subject. But the question to be put to their analysis is just how many divine subjects do they think there should be? This issue of the one divine subject arises several times in my book.Footnote ¹³ And while I am careful to note that it could have Hegelian overtones, I also explain in detail that in Barth's thinking it does not lead toward modalism because the one divine subject he invariably has in mind is the triune God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it is important to acknowledge, with Barth, that there is only one divine subject because the God who loves us does so in his Son and through his Holy Spirit, and thus he does so in freedom and in such a way that his love cannot be divided polytheistically into multiple divine subjects (tritheism) and it cannot be confused with our human experiences of love (pantheism/panentheism).

Barth is said to have an underdeveloped sense of the relations between the divine persons early in the CD. Yet in the first and second volumes of the Church Dogmatics a great deal of what Barth says is structured around the fact that God is precisely one who loves in freedom as the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit and in no other way ever. In his trinitarian doctrine, Barth delicately held together three important principles which belie the idea that he had an underdeveloped sense of the divine relations: 1) opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa; 2) perichoresis; and 3) appropriation. Because all the actions of the Trinity ad extra are one, we know it is God himself who meets us in revelation and establishes and maintains communion with us. But the God who meets us in this way is present in the incarnation in his Word, and is known analogously in faith as the Spirit enables us to participate in God's own knowledge and love in virtue of the perichoretic relations of the Father, Son and Spirit and in virtue of Barth's own distinctive understanding of the doctrine of appropriation. This point is made a number of times in my book.Footnote ¹⁴ At this juncture the issue I raised is whether or not God who is self-related ad intra is the only divine subject and thus the only one who defines the theological meaning of relationality. Here Hensley virtually ignores the rather extensive evidence I accumulated to demonstrate that those who contest the idea of a singular divine subject commonly allow a concept of relationality defined by our human relations to define both God's internal relations as well as his relations with us. So Hensley argues, following Williams, that relation does not apply to God as ‘a singular communicative subject encountering humanity in the act of revelation’. Rather, ‘it describes also that which characterizes the nature of God godself’. Emphasising revelation then supposedly leads to the idea that the ‘divine economy is no longer seen as a fellowship of mutual interaction into which the history of the world is drawn into saving communion, but as the cognitive self-bestowal of the Revealer’.

Yet this is surely an impoverished reading of Karl Barth's theology. Barth simply does not reduce revelation, even in the early volumes of the CD, to mere cognitive union because he insists that faith without obedience is not really faith at all.Footnote ¹⁵ Therefore Barth repeatedly insists that our union with God takes place as a miracle through which the Holy Spirit enables us to live as those reconciled in Christ and drawn into union with God the Father through his Son, Jesus Christ. Quite obviously none of this could happen without cognitive union since we have to know God in order to love God. But Barth never reduces revelation to mere cognitive union – he always insists on the fact that our relations with God are irreversible because they are grounded in grace, lived in faith and understood through revelation; that is, that all our acts of knowledge and love have validity only in and through Christ himself who is the revelation, reconciliation and grace of God present and active within history. Our lives, in other words, have no independent validity but find their meaning only in Christ himself.

Following upon Williams's criticism of Barth, then, Hensley claims that a certain irony develops in my book because I claim that the kind of divine freedom which is the condition which enables human freedom is purely noetic or cognitive so that humans cannot participate in the life of the Trinity. But this is sheer fabrication, given what I actually asserted. Here it appears that Hensley wants to argue for some form of ‘divinisation’, which Barth rejected because of its tendency to confuse nature and grace by not seeing nature defined by its relation to Christ in reconciliation and redemption and thus through the Spirit. This is not surprising given his propensity toward a Rahnerian fusion of nature and grace which I spent a great deal of time dismantling in my book. And it is not unexpected either, given the fact that Hensley seems to have missed the point of my criticism of Alan Torrance, which was that one cannot censure Barth for underplaying communion because for Barth there is no knowledge of God without fellowship (communion), and this fellowship includes us in an irreversible relationship with God which leads to renewed fellowship among creatures (love of God and love of neighbour).Footnote ¹⁶ Why else would Barth have insisted that knowledge of God is ‘an event enclosed in the mystery of the divine Trinity’?Footnote ¹⁷

Here Hensley claims that my lack of reflection on social justice in my account of the Trinity is striking because of the ways political and feminist theologians have understood ‘the power of the doctrine to transform social relations’ (n.30). But at this point Hensley shows that he was not paying attention to the main thesis of my book. I argued against his type of thinking and agreed with Colin Gunton that the doctrine could not be used as a weapon to attain certain social goals. And Hensley's assertion that the doctrine can transform social relations misses the further point that no doctrine has the power to do this, because in reality only God can do it and he does do it in and through our own acts of obedience. Yet God is not thwarted by our disobedience either since he is free to bring about his saving activity even in spite of our disobedience. In my book I demonstrate that those feminists and others who do see the doctrine as a tool for social transformation have in fact reduced God to a symbol we use to create a better world. So the question is not whether or not I develop specific themes related to social justice. That was never the stated purpose of my book, which was much more modest than that. My purpose was to say that theologians could not just use the idea of mutual relations gleaned from human experience to advance an agenda, whether that be an agenda of social justice, the equality of men and women or concern for the environment. All of these are important concerns of course, but none of them can be properly understood or approached theologically unless and until God is once again recognised as God acting for us within the sphere of history. And that I maintain is impossible as long as the Trinity is taken to refer to a type of relationality that either ignores, subverts or undermines the unique relations of the immanent Trinity as the sole enabling condition of faithful Christian knowledge and activity (obedience). This is why I so strongly opposed Rahner's identifying love of God and love of neighbour in my book.Footnote ¹⁸

Freedom and love

Finally, Hensley claims that I privilege God's freedom ‘at the expense of God's love’. But this understanding once again misses the main thesis for which I argued, namely, that we would have no way of distinguishing divine and human love unless we respected the fact that God's love of us was and remains a free act of grace; that is, unless one respected God's freedom to be immanent within history in the man Jesus of Nazareth and not in some generally recognisable experience of love. I stressed that recognising that God's freedom for us has taken this specific form is possible only through the power of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Christ in faith. Once more, however, following Rowan Williams's mistaken idea that Barth's view of God's freedom must mean God's absolute independence of the world, Hensley misses Barth's point and the view of divine freedom I advanced in my book. Repeatedly I argued that what God is towards us, he is eternally in himself. That means that God loves us precisely by stepping into the situation of enmity created by human sin and suffering himself so that in Jesus Christ he experienced our God-forsakenness for us, though he never needed to do this. He suffered and died for us precisely out of divine love. This is something that I stressed very many times in my exchanges with Moltmann, Alan Torrance and others. And I appealed directly to Barth's understanding of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as the one who loves in freedom in order to make my case that God experienced our suffering and alienation for our benefit, and that God's love was and is identical with the fact that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that those who believed in him would have life in his name. I never advocated an idea of absolute independence. Rather, what I advanced was Barth's statement that the God who was ‘for us’ remained independent even as he acted for us.Footnote ¹⁹ It is amazing that Hensley understood my presentation to suggest that I had ignored Barth's insistence that God is the one who loves in freedom since that was the whole premise on which the entire book was built. At the very beginning of the book and throughout, I insisted that the God who is for us in Christ had to be recognised as God, and that a clear and sharp distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity was necessary if that was to happen. That is why I said ‘The triune God who loves chooses to go down that path [of creation, reconciliation and redemption] in full loving freedom.’Footnote ²⁰ If God did not and does not love us in freedom then there would be no economic Trinity and Barth could never have insisted that knowledge of God was an event enclosed in the mystery of the divine Trinity.

I conclude where I began, thanking Jeff Hensley for his time and effort in responding to my book. It is hoped that my comments here may continue to stimulate interest in and appreciation for ongoing dialogue to clarify the pivotal theological concerns discussed in both of these papers.