God, Christ and Salvation: Barth and Rahner
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GOD, CHRIST AND SALVATION: BARTH AND RAHNER
3.Barth on the Trinity (CD 1/1 348-52)
The typography here reproduces Barth’s own practice. He begins major section with a paragraph statement. He also distinguishes his main argument from passages in smaller print, where he goes into the history of theology (originally without bothering to translate it). You have to imagine him preaching; and the original German tends to put individual words into bold type—a convention which the English translators did not follow, in my view regrettably. I’ve put some of the emphases back in.
THE TRIUNITY OF GOD
The God who reveals Himself according to Scripture is One in three distinctive modes of being subsisting in their mutual relations: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is thus that He is the Lord, i.e., the Thou who meets man's I and unites Himself to this I as the indissoluble Subject and thereby and therein reveals Himself to him as his God.
1. UNITY IN TRINITY
… The doctrine of the triunity of God, as this has been worked out and rightly maintained in the Church as an interpretation of biblical revelation regarding the question of the Subject of this revelation, does not entail—this above all must be emphasised and established— any abrogation or even questioning but rather the final and decisive confirmation of the insight that God is One.… The doctrine of the Trinity is not and does not seek to be anything but an explanatory confirmation of this name (YHWH, the Lord, Kyrios). This name is the name of a single being, of the one and only Willer and Doer whom the Bible calls God.
What is Barth concerned to deny here?
… The man who prays to the Father, who believes in the Son and who is moved by the Holy Ghost is a man whom the one Lord meets and unites to Himself. We quoted the Pauline passages 1 Cor. 124f.(Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit;and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord) Eph. 44f.(There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,one Lord, one faith, one baptism) in these, however, one should note not only the distinction betweenθεός, κύριος, πνεῦμαbut also the unity to which emphasis is given by the repetition ofαὐτόςorεἷς.
The trinitarian baptismal formula could not be more wrongly understood than by understanding it as a formula of baptism into three divine names.
TertullianAdv. Prax., 26 spoke of the‘individual names’.But the‘name’ of Father, Son and Holy Ghost in Mt. 2819(baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) is one and the same. ‘Thus to this holy Trinity one natural name belongs, with the result that in the three persons it cannot be plural’ (Conc. Toled., XI,a.675,Denz., No. 287) …
The faith which is confessed in this formula, and similarly the faith of the great three-membered confessions of the ancient Church, is not, then, a faith which has three objects. …
What then did Christ mean when he commanded that people be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, except that it is was necessary to believe in the Father, the Son and the Spirit with one faith? And what is that, except to bear explicit witness that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are one God? (Calvin,Instit., I, 13, 16).
Three objects of faith would mean three gods. But the so-called “persons” in God are in no sense three gods.
‘The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God. And yet there are not three gods, but God is one. In the same way, the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Spirit is Lord; and yet there are not three lords, but the Lord is one. (Symb. Quicunque).
We may unhesitatingly equate the lordship of God, to which we found the whole of the biblical concept to be related, with what the vocabulary of the early Church calls the essence of God, thedeitasordivinitas, the divineοὐσία,essentia, natura, orsubstantia. The essence of God is the being of God as divine being. The essence of God is the Godhead of God.Stresses in original, but not in translation
This is quite an important sentence. What do you think it means?
The more explicit development of this concept must be reserved for the doctrine of God. It may be said of this essence of God that its unity is not only not abrogated by the threeness of the “persons” but rather that its unity-- 350 --consists in the threeness of the “persons.” Whatever else we may have to say about this threeness, in no case can it denote a threeness of essence. The triunity of God does not mean threefold deity either in the sense of a plurality of Gods or in the sense of the existence of a plurality of individuals or parts within the one Godhead.
The Church doctrine of the Trinity may be summed up in the equationGod is the Trinity but it is noted at once in relation toTrinity: not triple (triplex) but threefold (trina)(Conc. Tolet., IX,Denz., No. 278).Whatever is in God, God’s own Self is one and single[note]; whatever one may have to say about the distinctions in God, they cannot denote a distinction of the divine being and existence (essentiaandesse; Bonaventura,Breviloq., I, 4).
‘Not triple, but threefold’. (nb. triplex is etymologically the same as ‘threefold’!) Does this make sense? How?
The name of Father, Son and Spirit means that God is the one God in threefold repetition, and this in such a way that the repetition itself is grounded in His Godhead, so that it implies no alteration in His Godhead, and yet in such a way also that He is the one God only in this repetition, so that His one Godhead stands or falls with the fact that He is God in this repetition, but for that very reason He is the one God in each repetition.
In relation to the name of Father, Son and Spirit we have to distinguishalius—alius—alius(3 masculines, persons)but notaliud—aliud—aliud (3 neuters—things) as though we had here parts of a whole or individuals of a species (Fulgentius,De fide ad Petrum,c.5).We distinguish the persons; we do not separate the deity(Conc. Tolet., IX,Denz., No. 280).For those realities which are one in the nature of deity, there is a special quality in the distinction of the persons. …
What is Barth trying to do here by using the unfamiliar idea of ‘threefold repetition’?
The idea we are excluding is that of a mere unity of kind or a mere collective unity, and the truth we are emphasising is that of the numerical unity of the essence of the “persons,” when in the first instance we employ the concept of repetition to denote the “persons.” It is as well to note at this early stage that what we to-day call the “personality” of God belongs to the one unique essence of God which the doctrine of the Trinity does not seek to triple but rather to recognise in its simplicity.
This concept, too, will have to be dealt with explicitly in the doctrine of God. The concept—not what it designates but the designation, the explicit statement that God is a He and not an It—was just as foreign to the Fathers as it was to the mediaeval and post-Reformation Scholastics. From our point of view, not theirs, they always spoke much too innocently and uncritically of thedeitas, the-- 351 --essentia divina, etc. as though God were a neuter. The concept of the “personality” of God—which we are emphasising just for the moment by defining God's essence as His lordship—is a product of the battle against modern naturalism and pantheism.
What is Barth worried about here? What does he want his readers to unlearn?
“Person” as used in the Church doctrine of the Trinity bears no direct relation to personality. The meaning of the doctrine is not, then, that there are three personalities in God. This would be the worst and most extreme expression of tritheism, against which we must be on guard at this stage. The doctrine of the personality of God is, of course, connected with that of the Trinity to the extent that, in a way yet to be shown, the trinitarian repetitions of the knowledge of the lordship of God radically prevent the divine He, or rather Thou, from becoming in any respect an It. But in it we are speaking not of three divine I's, but thrice of the one divine I. The concept of equality of essence or substance (ὁμοουσία,consubstantialitas) in the Father, Son and Spirit is thus at every point to be understood also and primarily in the sense of identity of substance. Identity of substance implies the equality of substance of “the persons.”
The claim that the Church with its doctrine of the Trinity was defending the recognition of God's unity, and therefore monotheism, against the antitrinitarians may well seem paradoxical at first, for the concern of antitrinitarians in every age has apparently been to establish the right relation between the unique significance and power of the revelation in Christ and His Spirit on the one side and the principle of monotheism on the other.
Again, what way of thinking does Barth want his readers to avoid here?
… We have simply missed the point if we see here the competition between two different interests in the assertion of whose rights tensions and cleavages, etc., can easily arise. Certainly one can understand the antitrinitarian heresies from this standpoint. These all became heresies because they were answers to questions that had been wrongly put. In other words, they were attempts to reconcile falsely opposed concerns, i.e., to remove irrelevantly manufactured tensions. In contrast, the Church's line is already distinguished formally from the heretical line by the fact that what happens on it is intended and is to be understood from the very outset as responsibility to the one concern as well as the other, because in fact we do not have two concerns which are opposed to one another and then artificially-- 352 --reconciled. On this thin but steady line where the basic issue is not this or that principle but quite simply the interpretation of Scripture, the point from the very first and self-evidently is both the oneness of God and also the threeness of God, because our real concern is with revelation, in which the two are one.
How would you characterize the way Barth wants you to do theology?
‘But, Herr Dr Barth, we have to be able to talk to people who are not convinced of the New Testament.’ What kind of answer might KB give to the implied objection here?
On the other hand all antitrinitarianism feels it must confess the threeness on the basis of Scripture and the oneness on the basis of reason, that it must then combine them, which it naturally cannot do because it is prevented already by the difference in the sources from which and the sense in which it speaks of the two.
This is a very compressed sentence: can you put it into your own words?
Inevitably—and we must see this if we are to understand the sharpness with which the Church has fought it— all antitrinitarianism is forced into the dilemma of denying either the revelation of God or the unity of God. To the degree that it maintains the unity of God it has to call revelation in question as the act of the real presence of the real God. The unity of God in which there are no distinct persons makes it impossible for it to take revelation seriously as God's authentic presence when it is so manifestly different from the invisible God who is Spirit. On the other hand—and this must be our primary concern here—to the degree that it is ready to maintain revelation but without acknowledging the substantial equality of the Son and the Spirit with the Father in heaven, the unity of God is called in question. In its concept of revelation it will not in fact be able to avoid interposing between God and man a third thing which is not God, a hypostasis which is not divine—it does not want that—but semi-divine; it cannot avoid making this the object of faith. In so far as it is not a denial of revelation, antitrinitarianism in any form is a cruder or subtler deifying of revelation.