Augustine and Karl Rahner on the Relationship between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity

Abstract:  Karl Rahner developed his influential axiom concerning the identity of the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity largely as a polemical reaction to their separation in the Western tradition, a tradition heavily shaped by Augustine. An analysis of Augustine's De Trinitate , however, reveals that Augustine was not guilty of most of the charges of which Rahner accuses him. Furthermore, Rahner's outworking of his fundamental axiom leads him into numerous difficulties that he could have avoided had he adhered to Augustine's view of a close but differentiated relationship between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity.     

内在三一和经世三一——论卡尔·巴特和T.F.托伦斯的三位一体神学

本文讨论了现代基督教三位一体神学的巴特和托伦斯的基本框架.从三个方面阐释了其上帝观的基本内容(1)自我启示的上帝与内在三一/经世三一的关系;(2)内在三一/经世三一和homoousia(本质同一)的关系;(3)现代基督教上帝观与古典基督教上帝观的视界融合.     

Trinity and Church: Trinitarian Perspectives on the Identity of the Christian Community

Starting from practical problems with praying and living a Christian life, the author argues that God's relationship with the Christian community has primacy over God's relationship with individual believers. When we conceive of the Christian community as being the body of Christ, we can uphold the high Christian ideals of prayer and living a Christian life without making them unattainable: these ideals are ideals for the community rather than for individual persons within the community. Next, the author argues that being the body of Christ is given to the Christian community not as a possession but as a task to fulfil through the power of the Holy Spirit. Finally, he shows how, in becoming the body of Christ through the Spirit, the Christian community is drawn up into the trinitarian community. He concludes that the identity of the Christian church cannot be fully understood apart from the Trinity.     

The Visible Christ and the Invisible Trinity: MT. 5:8 in Augustine's Trinitarian Theology of 400

The essay is an analysis of Augustine's solution to what I identify as the Homoian subordinationist understanding of the Son's visibility. This solution lies in Augustine's (re-)interpretation of Old Testament theophanies, and his doctrine of the vision through Christ of the Trinity at the end-time which Augustine supports by an exegesis of Mt. 5:8. Historically, the issue for Augustine is the connection made between doctrines of the Son's inherent "visibility" before the Incarnation and arguments made both against modalism and in support of subordinationism on the basis of that visibility. For Augustine's own Trinitarian theology, any consideration of a sight or vision of God in, e.g., Old Testament theophanies or the Incarnation necessarily raises questions about "sight" as both sensible and noetic knowledge, the structure of our way(s) of knowing, and the role of faith as the means for purifying the knowing capacity in humanity. The question of the vision of God which Augustine addresses in those early books of de Trinitate which are written around the year four hundred is connected to Augustine's epistemological concerns addressed in a variety of writings written before or contemporary to books I-IV of de Trinitate .