Theopedia

Karl Rahner

Overview

Karl Rahner (1904-1984) was a Roman Catholic theologian who “hoped to recapture the transcendence of God with a model that blended idealism and Thomism.”1 His leadership at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) reshaped Roman Catholic theology and practice, and his reworking of the doctrine of the Trinity, known as “Rahner’s Rule,” went on to influence Trinitarian theology well beyond Roman Catholicism.1 Stanley Grenz and Roger Olson describe him as a “mediating theologian” standing between the conservative Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, and the liberal Hans Küng.2

Life and Ministry

Rahner trained under Martin Heidegger at Freiburg, whose existentialist philosophy left a lasting mark on his theology; his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Aquinas was rejected as too dependent on Heidegger’s thought.2 Reacting against a scholastic tradition he judged too shaped by Neoplatonism, Rahner sought to recover God’s transcendence through a philosophical synthesis of Thomism and modern idealism.1 He went on to lead theological work at the Second Vatican Council, where his influence helped reshape twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology.1

Theological Contribution

Doctrine of God and creation

Rahner affirmed creation ex nihilo, aiming to avoid both dualism and pantheism, but tied God’s act of creating to God’s own self-expression: “God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest unity precisely in the differentiation.”3 God creates, on this account, “because he himself wills to impart himself by externalizing and so giving himself,” not because God needs creation to exist, but because creating lets God “become other than what he is.”4

Rahner called man the “cipher of God”: “when God wants to be what is not God, man comes to be.”5 He defined personhood itself as “experiencing yourself in another,” a definition he applied univocally to both God and man.6

Rahner’s Rule and the Trinity

Rahner’s most influential contribution is the axiom known as “Rahner’s Rule”: “the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity.”7 He argued that the Western tradition, following Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the divine essence prior to the three persons, had corrupted the doctrine of God into “mere monotheism,” and proposed instead that the doctrine of the Trinity should begin with the three persons as they are known through their missions in salvation history.8

One consequence is that the Son is defined chiefly by his mission (“the Word became flesh”) rather than by an eternal relation of generation existing apart from creation, so that the Trinity’s own tri-unity becomes tied to God’s decision to create.9 Jürgen Moltmann, whose own social doctrine of the Trinity draws on Rahner’s rule, nonetheless calls himself, on this point, an “idealistic modalist.”10 J. A. Di Noia warns that this way of grounding the three persons in their missions risks “the danger of subordination” unless the full deity of the Son and Spirit is vigorously defended apart from those missions.11

Wolfhart Pannenberg explicitly built on Rahner’s Rule to do “more consistently” what he judged Karl Barth had only partially accomplished in grounding the doctrine of the Trinity on God’s revelation in Christ.12 Moltmann’s own social Trinitarianism likewise treats “created events” as “events in the life of God,” a further application of the same rule that Craig Carter traces as a slide toward Hegelian dependence of God on the world and its history.13

Christ, revelation, and salvation

Rahner’s Christology follows the same pattern: the Son is God’s “self-communication” into the world, and Christ is the historical event through which “God is really present here and now.”14 Rahner summarized the point in his own formula: “Christology is transcendent anthropology and anthropology is deficient Christology.”15 Because this self-communication is, on Rahner’s account, already present in “every reality” as an offer prior to any explicit historical knowledge of Christ, “all men receive this grace and revelation even outside historical knowledge.”16 George Lindbeck classified Rahner, on this basis, as an “experience-expressivist” theologian.17

Salvation, for Rahner, is “the final and definitive validity of a person’s true self-understanding and true self-realization in freedom before God.”18

Historical Significance

Rahner’s Rule reshaped Trinitarian theology well beyond Roman Catholicism: it influenced Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Ted Peters, Catherine LaCugna, Molly Marshall, and Clark Pinnock, among others.19 Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann each put it to further use in constructing doctrines of a God dependent on, or reciprocally related to, the world and its history. Craig Carter’s own analysis treats this as a departure from classical Trinitarian theism toward Hegelianism.13

Paul Molnar credits Rahner with “placing the Trinity at the center of Christian doctrine” but faults him for then “removing it with his emphasis on transcendent experience.”20 Hans Urs von Balthasar likewise accused Rahner of “flattening Christianity” through an experience-based theology that ties the love of God too closely to love for man.21 Keith Goad’s own comparison of Rahner to Gregory of Nazianzus concludes that Rahner’s model “fails to protect the proper dynamic between the immanent and economic Trinity” and “fails to practice a proper grammar… that speaks of God as wholly other than the created order,” risking a form of panentheism in which God depends on creation to become fully himself.22

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Keith Wesley Goad, “Economic and Immanent as Identical or Reflective: Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” in “Trinitarian Grammars: A Comparison of Gregory of Nazianzus and Some Contemporary Models” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 202. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Stanley J. Grenz and Roger E. Olson, Twentieth-Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 238, 240, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 202n1-2. ↩ ↩2

  3. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 62, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 203. ↩

  4. Karl Rahner, Further Theology of the Spiritual Life I, trans. David Bourke, vol. 7 of Theological Investigations (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 62, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 203-4. ↩

  5. Rahner, Foundations, 225, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 204. ↩

  6. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 204-5, 223-24. ↩

  7. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 22, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 206-7. ↩

  8. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 207. ↩

  9. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 219. ↩

  10. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981), 144-48, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 217n56. ↩

  11. J. A. Di Noia, “Karl Rahner,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Ford, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 128, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 220n57. ↩

  12. Wolfhart Pannenberg, quoted in Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩

  13. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” chap. 9. ↩ ↩2

  14. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 208, citing Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word, trans. Michael Richards (Montreal: Palm, 1969), and Karl Rahner, Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology, trans. David Morland, vol. 16 of Theological Investigations (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), 15. ↩

  15. Rahner, quoted in Colin J. D. Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective: Marking Out the Horizons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 176, cited in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 210. ↩

  16. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 212, citing Rahner, Foundations, 228. ↩

  17. George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1984), 32, cited in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 212n47. ↩

  18. Karl Rahner, God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst, vol. 1 of Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 64, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 212. ↩

  19. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 202n2. ↩

  20. Paul D. Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2002), 50-59, quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 212-13n47. ↩

  21. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cordula oder der Ernstfall, Kriterien 2 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966); ET The Moment of Christian Witness, trans. Richard Beckley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1969), quoted in Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 212-13n47. ↩

  22. Goad, “Rahner’s Rule and Gregory’s Grammar,” 228-29. ↩