Summary of Chapter 31: Is There Such a Thing as an Economic Trinity? On the Trinitarian Activity of Divine Revelation (from White’s book, The Trinity)

White looks at the frequently employed modern distinction of the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity in chapter thirty-one, popularized in part by Karl Barth and most especially by Karl Rahner.

• Rahner, building upon some of Barth’s ideas that “the persons of the Trinity are distinguished… principally by their activity in the economic history of revelation” (560), famously states in his Grundaxiom: “The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity” (Rahner The Trinity, 22; qtd in White, 565).

Although White commends Barth and Rahner for their pastoral attempts “in the face of liberal Protestantism to return to the Trinitarian mystery as the center of Christian theology and dogmatic reflection” (572), White shows how the influence of both Kant’s critical philosophy and Hegel’s dialectical philosophy led Barth and Rahner to abandon the classical scholastic starting point of basing their Trinitarian theology on the unity of the transcendent divine nature of God and instead focused solely on finding the Triune God within history.

The result? Barth and Rahner’s “economic Trinity” is incompatible with the “classical Nicene affirmation of the homoousios” (585).

Furthermore, by replacing the classical notion of “divine essence” with “divine freedom” as their starting point for Trinitarian consideration, Barth and Rahner paved the way for more theologians to deviate further from “the biblical confession of the transcendence of God as Creator” (578) and instead fashion a “god of history after the image of the free historical human subject, constituted progressively over time through its relationship to the world” (577-8).

To conclude the first chapter in Part 4, White draws us back to his central claim by putting forward a threefold advantage of embracing the Thomistic concept of eternal processions and temporal missions over the Rahnerian formulation of the “economic Trinity.”

The most compelling advantage, in my opinion, is his first one: “it provides all the historical realism we need in order to maintain that in the concrete historical economy it is the very life of God that is revealed and communicated, without suggesting that the processions are in any way constituted by the missions” (584).