From my research paper on "Is God a person?"
God as person: Used of humans to denote a living being with the capacity for freedom, consciousness and relationships, of God as similarly, yet pre-eminently personal; and of the three members of the Trinity. When referring to the triune personhood of God, person does not have any similarity to the contemporary psychological understanding, nor does it connote three separate Gods. Instead the trinitarian persons are relational in their personhood.
“God as person” is believed by many Christians to be a statement naturally flows out of the biblical witness and capsulizes an important aspect of the God who has disclosed himself to us. Stanley Grenz also notes that “the triune God enters into a person-to-person relationship with his creatures, that will never be dissolved.[1]
If God is a person, then it is possible to enter into a personal relationship with God? Human personal relationships are declared to be appropriate analogies or models for our relationship with God. Paul’s use of the image of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-19) is important, as it implies an analogy between the reconciliation of two estranged people, and of sinful human beings to God.
[2]
Edmund Fortman declares one definition of the Trinity is “the personalities of the divine persons really consist in their relationship with one another.”
[3]This definition below by M. Schmaus, encapsulates these concepts, and gives us a greater understanding of the personhood of the triune God.
"The life and being of God are of such abundance, so overflowing with the ability to know and love, that it cannot creatively display itself in the living, knowing and loving of a single person. It requires a threefold ego. Thus, the tri-personality of God is a sign of life at its highest and richest potential …three persons use God’s power, life-potential of knowing and loving to the full. There is no impersonal zone in God, but rather, in the sphere of divine being, existence, life, knowledge and will are taken to the highest peak in personal existence…The three divine persons exist in in closest relationship with one another."
[4]
While there can be no doubt God as the sovereign Lord in in control, God’s Lordship is best defined as “the freedom of God’s grace to love creation and grant it creaturely freedom.”
[5] As Christians, “we acknowledge that God is totally beyond our control. God is free. And he is also the source of our relative human freedom. Consequently, we speak of God as a person."
God is “in the horizon of freedom and defines him as perfect freedom…to call God a person is to say that God is the subsistent being, which is freedom in love. This definition brings us back to Scripture, and ‘God is love’ (1 John 4, 8, 16).”[6] Barth defines this further as “God’s being as He who lives and loves is being in freedom.[7]
From notes on the Immanent and Economic Trinity on God's being and relationships! (Different from his person!)
In classical theology, knowing God concerns God’s relationships both within the Trinity (known as the immanent Trinity) and also with us and all of creation, (the economic or “working” Trinity). This revelation of God having relationships is the basis of evangelical Christianity today. However, it is also necessary to explicitly explain and demonstrate that in the doctrine of grace, for example, that the true and authentic concept of grace interprets grace, and thus salvation history. Grace should not be reduced to a purely mental relation of the one God to the elected creature, nor to a relation, merely “appropriated” to the other divine persons.
[8] Jesus is not simply God in general, but the Son. The second divine person, God’s Logos, is man, and only he is man. Neither of the two other members of the Trinity can be Jesus, only the Logos. (John 1:1) The three persons are not interchangeable.
Karl Rahner articulates that he is not merely speaking of something “about” the person of Jesus, but the fact that something has occurred “outside” the intra-divine life in the world itself, something which is not a mere effect of the efficient causality of the triune God acting as one in the world, but something which belongs to the Logos alone, which is the history of one divine person, in contrast to the other divine persons.
[9] He concludes by stating that no adequate distinction can be made between the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the economy of salvation.
[10]
Rahner observed that Christians were “in their practical life, almost mere monotheists,”
[11]he challenged this view by presenting his axiom in his book,
The Trinity, in 1967. His goal was to “recover the vitality and relevance of the Christian faith.”
[12]Further, his “overall theological concern in his trinitarian writings was to re-establish he unifying doctrines of grace, Christology, soteriology, pneumatology, and eschatology, and therefore a mysterious reality that lies at the very heart of the Christian faith.”
[13]
Rahner claims that rather than the Trinity existing in “splendid isolation,”
[14] he hopes that through his dogmatic treatise, the Trinity will “instead resume its place as a unifying doctrinal bridge for the entire Christian Faith.”[15
]Thus, Rahner’s basis thesis:
‘establishes the connection between various dogmatic treatises’ and ‘which presents the Trinity as a mystery of salvation’ is, ‘the economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic” Trinity.’ (The economic Trinity refers to God’s action and presence in the economy of salvation (‘oikonomia,’ οίκονομία), or God
ad nos (‘God-for-us’), whilst the immanent Trinity refers to the mysterious existence together of the three divine persons in their eternal life, or God’s life
in se (‘theologia’, θεολογία).Rahner has ‘identified’ the economic and immanent Trinity, and this identification is, for him, ‘axiomatic’, his basic axiom (‘Grundaxiom’).”
[16]
Continued
Limited References (For more details on publisher, etc, send me a pm)
[1] Theology for the Family of God, Grenz, 1994, 83.
[2] Christian Theology: An Introduction McGrath, 245.
[3] Edmund J. Fortman,
The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity, 294
[4]Ibid, 297.
[5] Grenz, 1994, 85.
[6] Walter Kasper,
The God of Jesus Christ, 155.
[7] Eric. J. Titus, “The Perfections of God in the Theology of Karl Barth: A Consideration of the Formal Structure,” 207.
[8] Karl Rahner,
The Trinity, 22-23.
[9] Ibid., 23.
[10]Ibid., 23-24.
[11]Ibid.,, 10.
[12]Di Noia, J.A. Di Noia, Op, “Karl Rahner” in
The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century.
[13]Vincent Battaglia
, An Examination of Karl Rahner’s Trinitarian Theology, (Australian eJournal of Theology, 9 March 2007), 1.
[14]Rahner, 17.
[15]Battaglia, 3.
[16]Ibid., 4.
