¹ For example, Wiles, M., Working Papers in Doctrine (London, 1976)Google Scholar and The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (London, 1974); G. Lampe, God as Spirit (Oxford, 1977); Welch, C., in In This Name: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (New York, 1953)Google Scholar continues the Schleiermacherian view that only the economic trinity can be the subject of theology; see also Richardson, C., The Doctrine of the Trinity (New York, 1958)Google Scholar.

² See Mühlen, H., Der Heilige Geist als Person (Munster, 1963)Google Scholar and Una Mystica Persona (Munich, 1964); also Sears, R., ‘Trinitarian Love as Ground of the Church’, Theological Studies 37 (1976): 652–679CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bracken, J., ‘The Holy Trinity as a Community of Divine Persons’, Heythrop Journal 15 (1974): 166–182, 257–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ford, L., ‘Process Trinitarianism’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1975): 199–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenson, R., God After God (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)Google Scholar and The Triune Identity (Fortress, 1982); Tavard, G., Vision of the Trinity (Univ. Press of America, 1981)Google Scholar; Moltmann, J., The Crucified God (New York, 1974)Google Scholar and The Trinity and the Kingdom (New York, 1981).

³ The Trinity (New York, 1970)Google Scholar is a translation by Donceel, J. of ‘Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte’, in Mysterium Salutis: Grundriss Heilsgeschichtliche Dogmatik, Bd. II, hrsg. von J. Feiner & M. Löhrer (Einsiedeln. 1967)Google Scholar. Hereafter pagination is given in the text. See also Rahner, , ‘Remarks on the Dogmatic Treatise “de Trinitate”’, Theological Investigations vol. IV, pp. 77–102Google Scholar, and ‘The Mystery of the Trinity’, Theol. Invest. vol. XVI, pp. 255–9.

⁴ See the reservations expressed by Hill, W. in The Three-Personed God (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982)Google Scholar; also Torrance, T. F., ‘Toward an Ecumenical Consensus on the Trinity’, Theologische Zeitschrift 31/6 (1975): 337–350Google Scholar.

⁵ In contrast with the ‘Arian’ type of theology referred to in n. 1 above, a ‘Sabellian’ type of imbalance is exemplified in P. Schoonenberg's theology; for him, God is not eternally self-differentiated but God ‘becomes’ triune in the event of Jesus Christ, cf. ‘Trinität — der vollendete Bund. Thesen zur Lehre vom dreipersönlichen Gott’, Orientierung 37 (1973): 115–117Google Scholar.

⁶ ‘Unitarianism’ might have been more precise than ‘monotheism’ since Christians do believe in only one God.

⁷ cf. Rahner's remarks on the difficulties of the psychological theory, especially insofar as it has little to do with the ‘economic’ reality of God; in The Trinity, pp. 115ff.

⁸ Rahner, has in mind Galtier, P., L'habitation en nous des trois personnes (Rome, 1952)Google Scholar.

⁹ cf. Rahner, , ‘The Theology of the Symbol’, Theol. Invest, vol. IV, pp. 221–252Google Scholar; also ‘Current Problems in Christology’, ibid. Vol. I, pp. 149–200; ‘On the Theology of the Incarnation’, ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 105–20.

¹⁰ Thus origin-history-invitation-knowledge constitute one unity; future-transcendence-acceptance-love a second unity. The first pertains to the reality constituted by God with the possibility of reception, the latter to the conditions for reception of the divine self-communication. Self-communication means: ‘(a) the absolute nearness of God as the incomprehensible mystery which remains forever such; (b) the absolute freedom, hence the irreducible facticity of this self-communication, which remains a “mystery” for this reason too; (c) that the inner possibility of the self-communication as such (absolute communication of the absolutely incomprehensible) can never be perceived. It is experienced as an event in pure facticity, it cannot be deduced from another point, and as such again it remains a mystery’ (p. 88, n. 10).

¹¹ Rahner writes, ‘For these modalities and their differentiation either are in God himself (although we first experience them from our point of view), or they exist only in us, they belong only to the realm of creatures as effects of the divine creative activity. But then they are God's mediations in that difference which lies between creator and that which is created out of nothing. Then they can only be that communication of God which occurs precisely in creation, in which what is created contains a transcendental reference to the God who remains forever beyond this difference, thus at once “giving” him and withdrawing him. Hence there occurs no self-communication, God himself is not there, he is only represented by the creature and its transcendental reference to God’ (p. 100).

¹² Here there is no discernible difference between Rahner's understanding of divine self-communication and Barth's trinitarian doctrine of revelation according to which God reveals God's self. cf. Church Dogmatics, 1/1 (Edinburgh, 1936)Google Scholar.

¹³ Notice that it is the temporal reference which creates the problem when applying the axiom. Rahner says at one point that ‘the Logos with God and the Logos with us, the immanent and the economic Logos, are strictly the same’ (p. 33). Such a formulation raises no difficulties. But when we consider Jesus of Nazareth in relation to the Logos, things become less clear.

J. Moltmann sees here evidence of Rahnerian modalism. Since Rahner prefers the term Logos to the name Son, and since the one single God-subject is the Father, Moltmann concludes that the Son is merely the historical instrument of the divine self-communication (cf. The Trinity and the Kingdom, pp. 147ff). I suspect that part of the difficulty Moltmann has with Rahner on this point could be met by considering (as we are doing here) the linguistic sense of the ‘strictly the same’ in Rahner's assertion.

¹⁴ W. Kasper observes that if one does not carefully qualify the sense of the ‘is’ of Rahner's axiom and interprets it literally, then no ontological distinction between God and world can be made (Hegel), cf. Der Gott Jesu Christi (Mainz, 1982), pp. 333ffGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ For example, when we use phrases such as ‘the trinity's economic activity’ we mean ‘the eternally threefold God's threefold activity in history’.

¹⁶ Ricoeur, P., ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, Semeia 4 (1975), pp. 86ffGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ For example, ‘All the world's a stage’. One means both ‘is and is not’, since the world is not literally a stage and yet it can be thought of as being a stage.

¹⁸ One might distinguish a prior level: ‘God is a trinity’ (without the qualifier of immanent or economic), meaning, ‘God is God by being related to God's other’.

¹⁹ Of course one can never literally predicate anything of God (‘God is “x” ’) without making a category mistake.

²⁰ The denotation (the reference) is ambiguous but is extended, says Ricoeur using Frege's distinction, from the sense (Sinn) to the reference (Bedeutung) and across the latter to the ‘is’ of metaphorical truth. Sinn is the ideal objective content or internal arrangement of a proposition; Bedeutung is its claim to truth about an extra-linguistic reality, (cf. ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, p. 81.)

²¹ The metaphorical nature of God-language, if overstated, produces a subjectivistic, relativistic, anti-systematic, and incommunicable type of theology. It seems to me that while we may in the present need to restore some of the poetic and imagistic flavor lost by ‘scholastic’ and ‘historicist’ theologies, we ought to guard against going too far in the opposite direction, namely, a metaphoricist reductionism. But the degree to which one is willing to vest the model with some ‘ontological’ basis differs among scholars. The reader is referred to the vast literature on the problem, including Funk, R., Language, Hermeneutic and Word of God. The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; McFague, S., Metaphorical Theology (Fortress, 1982)Google Scholar; Barbour, I., Myths, Models and Paradigms (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Black, M., Models and Metaphors (Cornell Univ. Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Ramsey, I., Religious Language (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Ferré, F., ‘Mapping the Logic of Models in Science and Theology’, in High, Dallas M., ed., New Essays on Religious Language (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Scharlemann, R., ‘Theological Models and Their Construction’, Journal of Religion (1973), pp. 65–82Google Scholar.

²² 1. Barbour finds four fundamental types of models of God: monarchial (king to kingdom); deistic (clockmaker to clock); dialogic (between two persons); agent (agent and his actions) (op. cit.); see also his Issues in Science and Religion (Prentice-Hall, 1966).

²³ Black, op. cit., p. 51.

²⁴ McFague, op. cit., p. 104.

²⁵ Because the statement is soteriological it avoids the emptiness of ‘A was in B relating C asymmetrically to A’. The example is Ferré's, op. cit.

²⁶ cf. the historical treatment of the development of the category ‘relation’ in reference to trinitarian theology, in de Margerie, B., The Christian Trinity in History (St. Bede's Publications, 1982), pp. 132ffGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Bowie, W. R., Jesus and the Trinity (Abingdon, 1960), p. 134Google Scholar.

²⁸ This explains why Moltman and Jüngel see the cross as an event which takes place in God's own being, not just in the economy of salvation, cf. Moltmann, , The Crucified God, chap. VI., and Jüngel, , God as the Mystery of the World (Eerdmans, 1983)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Hegelianism exemplifies that a trinitarian theory need not be attached to the threefold God. G. Lampe's work (op. cit.) is, interestingly enough, explicitly soteriological yet not trinitarian; he considers ‘Spirit’ to refer not to God's essence but to God's activity; salvation and creation are conflated as one divine activity ‘toward us’. Lampe's theory shows the consequences of not observing both the ‘is’ and the ‘vice versa’ of the axiom.

³⁰ cf. the challenge of Wiles, M. on the traditional way of appropriating activity to the divine persons, in ‘Some Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s., 8/1 (1957): 92–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Two recent examples of a Christological trinitarianism would be E. Jüngel, op. cit., and W. Kasper, op. cit.

³² These remarks should not be construed as being anti-metaphysical since any reformulation along the lines I am suggesting cannot but be metaphysical in its own way. At the same time, the early history of trinitarian theology demonstrates that the shift to the Augustinian preference for beginning with the divine nature and unity makes it impossible to introduce God's relation to the world into God's own being. Thus Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, la, Q. 13, a. 7 has creatures in ‘real’ relation to God but not vice versa since this would entail a lack in God.

³³ cf. McLelland, J., God the Anonymous (Patristic Monograph Series, No. 4, 1976)Google Scholar.

³⁴ cf. Jenson, R., The Triune Identity, p. 115Google Scholar.

³⁵ In addition to the works cited in n. 21 see also Burrell, D., Analogy and Philosophical Language (Yale Univ. Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Tracy, D., The Analogical Imagination (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; Lynch, W., Christ and Apollo (Notre Dame Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Wilder, A., Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel, rev. ed., (Harvard Univ. Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Crossan, J., In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Perrin, N., Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Fortress, 1976)Google Scholar; Keck, L., A Future for the Historical Jesus: The Place of Jesus in Preaching and Theology (Fortress, 1981)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Again, cf. Wiles' essay (n. 30 above)

³⁷ cf. the works of H. Mühlen cited in n. 2 above; also McDonnell, Kilian, ‘The Determinative Doctrine of the Holy Spirit’, Theology Today (1982): 142–161Google Scholar.

³⁸ E. Brunner notes that Scripture has no doctrine of God or humanity in se (Gott-ansich, Menschen-an-sich) but only of God as approaching us and of us as coming from God (Gott-zum-Menschen-hin, Menschen-von-Gott-her). In Divine-Human Encounter (London, 1944), pp. 46ffGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ McLelland notes that we need to recover the intent of the Patristic doctrine of God: ‘Immanence asserts God's trustworthiness, impassibility his moral transcendence, anonymity his eminence beyond our linguistic and conceptual categories’ (op. cit., p. 160).

⁴⁰ Certainly T. J. Altizer's theology is shoulders above the rest; cf. The Self-Embodiment of God (New York, 1977)Google Scholar and Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today (New York, 1980). See also Dewart, L., The Future of Belief (New York, 1966)Google Scholar and The Foundations of Belief (New York, 1969).

⁴¹ Torrance, op. cit., p. 341.

⁴² We must remember that all philosophical terms (accident, form, substance, et al.) are themselves metaphors. See Black, op. cit., pp. 40ff.

⁴³ I. Ramsey suggests that Arius' inability to see the figurative-imaginative dimensions of the metaphor of begetting accounts for his rejection of it (op. cit., pp. 158ff).

⁴⁴ Derived from the discussion in Leclercq, J., The Love of Learning and the Desire For God (Fordham Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 233ffGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ In contemporary science ‘objectivity’ is often understood to be present in proportion to one's distancing from the ‘object’ being studied. But if in theology the ‘object’ (who is really also a ‘subject’) is God-in-relation, such distanciation would involve a logical contradiction. If God can be known only in-relation, one could not prescind from this relation without invalidating one's method.

⁴⁶ J. Leclercq contrasts contemplative and speculative theologies in this way: ‘Monastic theology is a theology of admiration and therefore greater than a theology of speculation. Admiration, speculation: both words describe the act of looking. But the gaze of admiration adds something to the gaze of speculation. It does not necessarily see any farther, but the little it does perceive is enough to fill the whole world of the contemplative with joy and thanksgiving’ (op. cit., p. 283).

⁴⁷ There is support for this distinction in the study by J. Gibbons, ‘Concept and Verbum: Reproductive Metaphors and the Inner Life in the twelfth century’. (Unpublished paper, presented to the 1983 Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan.) She contrasts the monastic-devotional and scholastic-technical approaches to God. In general, the monastic use of the conception metaphor refers to conception in the heart, which is maternal. The monastic attitude stresses the change in one's life brought about by conceiving God's word in the heart. The schools, on the other hand, saw conception as an intra-mental process, the mind being in this case the image of God.