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Karl Rahner's Philosophical Understanding of the Trinity (endnote)

1. Robert Kress, A Rahner Handbook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 9. Though he was under the papal censorship at that time, the strong support of the German Church made him to be chosen as a peritus(expert) for the Council and even dominate the Vatican II. As Wiltgen asserted in his evaluative history of Vatican II, "the Council was dominated by the Germans, who themselves were under the hegemony of Karl Rahner."

2. Rahner, The Church After the Council, tr. Davis C. Herron and Rodelinde Albrecht (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), pp. 80-81. Accordingly, he contended that the concept of heresy should be changed now. In the spirit of the Vatican II, "a new form of heresy" is not modernism but "the heresy of indifference" to keep the tradition in the Zeitgeist of pluralistic modernism. Thus, he severely criticized so-calfed "dead orthodoxy" in his Nature and Grace: Dilemmas in the Modern Church, tr. Dinah Wharton (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 77-19.

3. Rahner, The Christians of the Future, tr. W. J. O'Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), pp. 35-38. Traditionally, the changeability of dogma has been denied but Rahner tried to justify it with dialectic logic. First, he agrees with the tradition: "Such a dogma of the Church is truely unchangeable."(22) Next, he denies it: "But the immutability of the Church's dogma does not exclude, on the contrary it implies, that there is a history of dogmas...even the Church's unchangeable dogma can have a history and can change even in spite of its immutability."(23-24) Finally, he synthesizes both positions: "It cannot change back....But it can change forwards in the direction of the followers of its own meaning and unity with the one faith in its totality and its ultimate grounds."(24) According to his understanding, this logic has been developed in the Second Vatican Council, and this change is certainly the work of the Holy Spirit.

4. Rahner, "The Mystery of the Trinity," in Theological Investigations, Volume XVI, tr. David Morland (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 256.

5. Rahner, The Trinity, tr. Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), p. 10.

6. Ibid., p. 11; cf. Rahner, "Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise 'De Trinitate'," in Theological Investigations, Volume IV, tr. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), p. 80. "For since St. Augustine, contrary to the tradition preceeding him, it has been more or less agreed that each of the divine persons could become man."

7. Cf. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., "The Hodgson-Welch Debate and the Social Analogy of the Trinity," Ph.D. dissertation (Princeton Theological Seminary, 1982). I think that Dr. Plantinga's following humble attitude is more biblical and pious than Rahner's blind courage: "Could it not be the case that the Son's and Spirit's functional subordination is only for the historical-redemptive economy of which the Scripture speak? Is it not conceivable that there are other worlds and, therefore, other economies in which the arrangements are quite different? Perhaps there is a novel pactum salutis for each such economy. Surely humility and modesty prevent us from merely waving away such a possibility."

8. Rahner, Trinity, pp. 12-13; "Remarks", p, 80.

9. Rahner, Trinity, pp. 21-22.

10. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction To the Idea of Christianity, tr. William V. Dych (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), p. 137; Trinity, p. 33. "strictly same".

11. Plantinga, "The Hodgson-welch Debate", p. 20; C. M. LaCugna, "Re-Conceiving the Trinity As the Mystery of Salvation," Scottish Journal of Theology 38(1985):2.

12. Rahner, Trinity, p. 39; Joseph A. Bracken, What are they saying about the Trinity? (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 9.

13. Rahner, Trinity, p. 50.

14. Ibid., p. 47.

15. Ibid., p. 51. "If the incomprehensible God himself opens this horizen of knowledge, we wish to develop a theology of knowledge."

16. Rahner, Foundations, pp.3-14, 24-25.

17. Rahner, Theological Investigations, Volume XII, p. 599.

18. Gerald A. McCool, ed., A Rahner Reader (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975). He failed it, because his mentor Martin Honecker did not approve his dissertation, which later published under the title Geist in Welt, due to Rahner's strong adherence to a philosophical movement called Transcendental Thomism, which is also called as Marechalian Thomism because Joseph Marechal is its founder. Its principal thesis is that "if Kant's transcendental reflection on humnan knowledge is applied consistently, it leads to metaphysical realism and not to critical idealism, as Kant has mistakenly supposed."(xiii) Marechal attempted to synthesize the philosophies of Kant and Aquinas. However, it has remained as a small branch in Thomism without receiving a wide approval among Thomists. "One of the most distinguished Thomist of this century, for example, Etienne Gilson, has never been willing to admit that Transcendental Thomism is either good Thomism or good philosophy. In Gilson's opinion, Transcendental Thomism makes fatal and unnecessary concessions to Kant, and the philosophers who uses this method can never work out of Kant's idealism. Martin Honecker, the mentor of Rahner's dissertation, took an equally negative view of Transcendental Thomism."(xvii) So, he refused Rahner's dissertation.

19. McCool, The Theology of Karl Rahner (New York: Magi Books, 1969), pp. 4-5, 12.

20. McCool, A Rahner Reader, p. xxvii.

21. J. J. Mueller, What are they saying about theological methods? (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), pp. 5-6.

22. Rahner, Foundations, pp. 31-35.

23. Ibid., pp. 14-23.

24. Ibid., pp. 116-137.

25. Ibid., p. 213. "It is only here that the mystery of the divine Trinity is accessible to us..."

26. Kress, A Rahner Handbook, p. 38. "Christology can serve as the nexus of theology and anthropology."; Lacugna, "Re-Conceiving the Trinity as the mystery of Salvation," pp. l4-16. Here, Lacugna pointed out that a man-oriented, soteriological, economic trinitarianism like Rahner's is neither traditional nor Christocentric, when he said as follows: "To bring this about, Jesus Christ must be at the heart of our trinitarian theology...[this type of] trinitarian theology would point up the inadequacy of a Christian theology which in the west, from the fifth century on, has concentrated on the 'immanent' trinity and developed its doctrine in a non-soteriological, a-historical fashion."

27. Kress, A Rahner Handbook, p. 44. "For Rahner, God initially intended the hypostatic union."

28. Cf. Ibid., p. 40. "Creation without incarnation is not unthinkable. But at best it would be a deficient mode of that of which God is capable."

29. Ibid., p. 44.

30. For example, Ibid., p. 44. "From this point of view it is also 'natural' for God to create....This statement in no way places in God a necessity to create. It merely seeks in God the necessary condition of the possibility of creation."

31. Paul D. Molnar, "Can We Know God Directly? Rahner's Solution From Experience," Theological Studies 46(1985): 254ff. As the evidence of his pantheism, he suggested the fact that Rahner accepted a modified version of pantheism in his Dictionary of Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), pp. 333-334. Even, he argued that Rahner denies the creatio ex nihilo in his thinking.; Ibid., pp. 260-261. "This is clearly the emanationism rejected by the tradition. And this thinking leads directly to the Christological idea which has always been the hallmark of Ebionite Christology..."

32. Rahner, Theological Investigations, Volume V, tr. Karl H. Kruger (Baitimore: Helicon Press, 1966), pp. 157-192.

33. Ibid., pp. 178-179. "We want first of all to clarify a little more what exactly we are asking now. It seems to me that we should have no particular difficulty in representing the history of the world and of the spirit to ourselves as the history of a self-transcendence into the life of God..."

34. Ibid., p. 161.

35. Ibid., p. 175; Joseph Donceel, The Philosophy of Karl Rahner (New York: Magi Books, 1969), pp. 25-26. Here, Donceel understood Rahner's acceptance of "anonymous Christian" in this context that whole human race participate in the world process of divinization.

36. Rahner, "Christology within an Evolutionary View," pp. 171-172.

37. Ibid., p. 190.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., pp. 176-177.

40. Kress, A Rahner Handbook, p. 45.

41. Rahner, "Christology within an Evolutionary View," p.176.

42. Ibid., p. 187.

43. Rahner, Trinity, p. 43. Concerning consciousness, Rahner once seems to accept that "each divine 'person', as concrete, possesses a self-consciousness."(p. 75) But, he meant that "there is only one real consciousness in God, which is shared by Father, Son, and Spirit, by each in his own proper way."(p. 107)

44. Ibid., p. 44.

45. Ibid., p. 43; Dictionary of Theology, pp. 516-517.

46. Rahner, Trinity, pp. 43-44.

47. Ibid., p. 44. "Yet the word 'person' happens to be there, it has been consecrated by the use of more than 1500 years, and there is no really better word, which can be understood by all and would give rise to fewer misunderstandings. So we shall have to keep it..."

48. Ibid., pp. 109-115.

49. Ibid., pp. 105, 111. "Of course, the phrase 'distinct manner of subsisting' entails also the delicate problem of 'vague individual,' which we mentioned above in connection with the concept of 'person.' The concrete, the absolute, unique concreteness is here made into an abstract concept, a most abstract concept possessing a minimum of unity."; Kress, A Rahner Handbook, p. 7. Vagueness is a favorite methodology which Rahner uses especially in dealing with conflicts with tradition. Kress says, "How often did we hear what was both Rahnerian self-defense and methodological principle: 'Das Klarere ist nicht immer das Wahrere' (The more clear is not always necessarily the more true)?"; Rahner, Nature and Grace, p. 71. However, it is ironical for him to list vagueness as a mark of modern heresy in the followings: "Hence this latent heresy has two principal methods: on the one hand it avoids coming into conflicts with the magisterium by avoiding clear statements in books, official teaching etc...on the other hand, it keeps to the vague and approximate, the undefined attitude..."

50. Rahner, Trinity, pp. 52-55, 69.

51. Ibid., p. 17.

52. Rahner, "Theos in the New Testament," Theological Investigations, Volume I, tr. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), pp. 135-137, 143-144. In this article, Rahner attempted to demonstrate that God, not only in the OT but also in the NT, refers to the Father, while the term "God(Theos)" is not used for the Son and the Spirit. And, he concluded that "ho Theos is being spoken of, it is not the single nature that is seen, subsisting in three hupostases, but the concrete Person[the Father] who possess the divine nature unoriginately..."

53. Rahner, Trinity, p. 59.

54. Ibid., p. 74.

55. Rahner, "Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise 'De Trinitate'," p. 85

56. Rahner, Trinity, pp. 93-94, 116.

57. Ibid., p. 84.

58. Cf. Ibid., p. 41. "When these two are not active, Yahweh has retreated from his people."

59. Bracken, What are they saying about the Trinity?, p. 13.

60. Rahner, Trinity, p. 88.

61. Cf. Ibid., pp. 94-99.

62. Molnar, "Can We Know God Directly?", p. 229.

63. Bracken, What are they saying about the Trinity?, p. 5.

64. Plantinga, "The Hodgson-Welch Debate," p. 15. "Catholic theologians(besides Rahner) kept on publishing discussions of traditional trinity questions."; C. Williams, "Review of Theological Investigations Volume I", The Thomist 25(1962): 450. "...by the time Fr. Rahner finished with his speculations, there is very little left of the bible or of the teaching of the Church's magisterium."