{"id":18521,"date":"2016-11-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=259"},"modified":"2016-11-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T00:00:00","slug":"rahners-wordless-trinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/11\/rahners-wordless-trinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Rahner\u2019s Wordless Trinity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I<\/span>n his freshly published Triune God<\/em><\/a>, Fred Sanders emphasizes that God\u2019s self-revelation is a communicative<\/em> act, and that the communication doesn\u2019t come only in<\/em> act but also in speech: \u201cRevelatory words are not epiphenomenal to revelatory acts. Rather they are equiprimordial and unavoidable. The missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are irreducibly verbal, though not exclusively verbal.\u201d That last qualification is essential. A \u201cmerely verbal-propositional\u201d treatment of God\u2019s triune revelation is \u201cvery bad,\u201d a perfect way \u201cto strip the doctrine of the Trinity of all its significance and desiccate most of its interests\u201d (61). Yet, though the Trinity is not \u201cmerely verbal,\u201d merely information, God\u2019s self-unveiling isn\u2019t less<\/em> than verbal.<\/p>\n

Sanders emphasizes this over against Karl Rahner\u2019s influential treatise on The Trinity<\/em><\/a>. Relying on the research of Dennis Jowers (The Trinitarian Axiom of Karl Rahner<\/a>), Sanders argues that Rahner\u2019s thoroughgoing anti-extrinicism leads him to reject any role for \u201cextrinsic\u201d verbal revelation. Given Rahner\u2019s understanding of revelation, \u201che must read the reality of the Trinity off of the events of salvation history, eschewing any appeal to verbal-propositional revelation as the foundation of the doctrine. This is why Rahner treats the economy of salvation as the exclusive source of our knowledge of the Trinity. . . . Rahner is able to treat the words of Scripture as revelation only by viewing their \u2018material contents\u2019 as \u2018verbalized objectifications of the revelation which is already present in the gratuitous radicalizing of human transcendentality in God\u2019s self-communication\u201d (57-9).<\/p>\n

Early theologians worked out the Trinity through interpretation of God\u2019s acts \u201cplus its construal of inspired words.\u201d Rahner uses only \u201chalf of the equipment\u201d (59). <\/p>\n

This too is very bad. Since the missions are themselves \u201cirreducibly verbal\u201d (70-1), to deny the verbal is to lose the actual shape of the missions, which are the missions of the \u201cteaching Son and the testifying Spirit\u201d (61). Sanders thinks the consequences even more drastic: Without acknowledging the verbal character of the missions, we lose an essential dimension of Trinitarian life itself: \u201cOne of the (perhaps unintended) casualties of the modern overinvestment in act at the expense of speech is that the conversation among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was for some time harder to discern in Scripture, and harder to credit when it was discerned. If God does not actually speak, it follows necessarily that the Father and the Son do not speak to each other in the Spirit. Losing our grip on the Trinity\u2019s speech to us, we dropped something even bigger, which is the Trinity\u2019s speech within itself about us, and behind that, the Trinity\u2019s own conversation above us.\u201d And then, again, the economy slips through our fingers: Without this grounding in the eternal triune conversation, we can\u2019t be properly oriented to interpret the economy. <\/p>\n

If Rahner is right about the equivalence of the economic and immanent Trinity, his failure to reckon with the speech of the Son and Spirit in the economy distorts his understanding of the ontology.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his freshly published Triune God, Fred Sanders emphasizes that God\u2019s self-revelation is a communicative act, and that the communication doesn\u2019t come only in act but also in speech: \u201cRevelatory words are not epiphenomenal to revelatory acts. Rather they are equiprimordial and unavoidable. The missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit are irreducibly verbal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1718],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trinitarianism"],"yoast_head":"\nRahner\u2019s Wordless Trinity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In his freshly published Triune God, Fred Sanders emphasizes that God\u2019s self-revelation is a communicative act, and that the communication doesn\u2019t come\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/11\/rahners-wordless-trinity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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