a The Kenotic Drama in the Trinity

In the light of what we have argued this far, a searching question confronts us: What image of God is being presented here? To answer this question it is important to turn to the nature of God who cannot be rightly conceived without reference to inter-trinitarian kenosis.

Talking about inter-trinitarian kenotic life of God seems illusory and it is for this reason that many political and liberation theologians have argued that we only have access to the inner life of the Trinity through the appearance of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit in the historical realm. Making a reflection on God in God’s inner life is simply a speculation without concreteness. This observation cannot be underestimated but Hans Urs von Balthasar following Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure argues that the mission of the Son and the Spirit cannot be isolated from the inter-trinitarian relations. In other words, we cannot have the mission of the Son and the Spirit without the Trinity. Grounding our reflection in the inter-trinitarian life guards

against the tendency of leaning toward Christo-monism in which salvation is reduced to the work of Christ alone without much emphasis on the common purpose of all the trinitarian persons.

Overemphasizing the historical appearance God in Christ and the Spirit runs the risk of historicizing salvation without paying attention to its ontological origin in God’s inner existence.

Despite being three hypotheses with their specific roles, God is always a communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in which each person is involved in every work for our salvation in a particular way.

One example of how the three persons are involved in a single work for our salvation is seen in the way Balthasar speaks about the Annunciation to Mary. In the Annunciation the Father wants to send, the Son accepts to be sent and the Holy Spirit fashions the body of the Son in a virgin mother who accepted to do the will of God. Balthasar says:

Jesus’ consent to the Father’s wish to send him, the coincidence of his fundamental free will with that of the Father, points back to a mysteriously supernatural event that can be nothing but the unanimous salvific decision on the part of the Trinity, according to which it was resolved to send the Son ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh’ (Rom 8:3). Here we may not speak of priorities: we cannot say, for instance, that it was the Father, ‘offended’ by sin, who originally decided that the Son should restore the order of creation through the Cross. The Son’s self-offering is equally original in this work; so is the self-offering of the Spirit, which - in human terms - must have cost the Father no less than did the Son’s fulfillment of this task with the help of the Spirit.”⁴⁰

It is for this that Balthasar also sees the event of the passion as the work of the Trinity and not only the Son who goes through the execution in abandonment, although the crucifixion and abandonment is only proper to the work of the Son.

In the passion, the Father’s loving countenance can disappear behind the hard facts of what must be: now, more than ever, this is very much a part of the Trinity’s eternal, salvific plan laid before him by the Spirit, the witness of the mutual will of the Father and Son. It is as if the Spirit, now

40 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, vol. III tr. Graham Harrison, (San

embodied in the form of a rule, says to them both: This is what you have wanted from all eternity;

this is what, from all eternity, we have determined.⁴¹

Therefore, there is unity and distinction in the economic Trinity (the person and mission of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit) just as there is unity and distinction in the immanent Trinity (God in God’s self).

This resonates with Karl Rahner’s treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity, a mystery of salvation. Rahner argues that “the basic thesis which establishes this connection between the treatises and presents the Trinity as a mystery of salvation (in its reality and not merely as a doctrine) might be formulated as follows: The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity.”⁴² Balthasar is comfortable with the first part of the axiom (the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity) because for him in the event of the Cross the immanent God is revealed in the dead man hanging on the Cross. On the other hand, Balthasar rejects the second part (the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity) because he feels to identify the immanent Trinity with the economic Trinity would underestimate the gratuitous self-abasement of God on the Cross. This is because the divine processions and divine missions are not reducible to one another, although they are inseparable. The underlying argument tries to protect the freedom and the transcendence of God by making the divine mission a consequence of God’s freedom. This is to argue that the Father and the Son’s self-emptying in begetting and being begotten and the mutuality effected by the Spirit is the condition of possibility of the

‘Cross’ itself, separation and abandonment which took place on Good Friday.

Prioritizing the inter-trinitarian kenosis shows that what happened to Christ in his divine mission was the revelation of the love of God in God’s inner self. This understanding is

41 Ibid., 188

42 Karl Rahner, The Trinity, tr. Joseph Donceel, (New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 22

important because even if one would argue that the historical Cross was not intended by God, the reality is that we already have in God’s love the possibility of the Cross. Aidan Nichols in the same vein complements Balthasar by saying “it follows that the drama of our redemption – Christ’s costly self-engagement for our salvation – must also be a Trinitarian revelation.

Whatever he does or suffers can only be carried out or undergone in a ‘filial’ way that corresponds to his trinitarian position, by obedience to the Father in the Holy Spirit – the way, in other words, proper to the Son of God.”⁴³ It is with this belief that Balthasar argues that there cannot be Christology without trinitarian doctrine and vice versa. Aidan Nichols puts this reflection as follows:

This tells us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not the result of reason working through the materials of general experience. It has been disclosed to us only in and by the Word made flesh.

But then to recall the other side of the coin: there is no Christology – no adequate Christology anyhow – without the trinitarian doctrine. Only if God, eternally, from everlasting, and internally, from his own interior life, is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, can we get the hang of the drama played out in the life of Jesus. That drama cannot be explained without reference to the primordial interplay of God’s inner life, the mutual love of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit.⁴⁴

It was Balthasar’s conviction that one cannot understand Christ’s kenosis in incarnation and in the event of the crucifixion without the eternal event of processions in the Godhead. The life of Jesus spent in mission and the essential unity of the paschal mystery show us the real life of the trinitarian God.

The event of the incarnation and eventually the Cross in this way must be understood from our consideration of the otherness in the trinitarian relations. “If the otherness in God is true otherness and if it is in no way conditioned from beyond, then it can only be imagined as the

43 Aidan Nichols, Divine Fruitfulness. ! Guide through althasar’s Theology beyond the Trilogy, (Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 166-167)

action of love and freedom; and an act of love and freedom that causes real otherness to subsist can in turn only be imagined as a self-emptying, a kenosis.”⁴⁵ The life, suffering, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus are the self-revelation of God. In the paschal mystery, God is revealed in the dead man (slave) on the Cross as God who can still be God even in these conditions of absolute limitation. Hence, Balthasar insists that from the very beginning, God’s self-revelation in creation and in incarnation is directed toward the passion because the creation of a creaturely freedom already presupposes a possibility of that creature taking a divergent way away from the Father’s house, love. With creaturely freedom it should be presupposed that Jesus’ suffering, the Cross and entry into Hades is for God a consequence of having loved. John Baldovin is right to argue that the God revealed in Jesus is a kenotic trinitarian God of love. Unfortunately, most often “instead of believing in the God of Jesus Christ, revealed as Trinity, we believe in the same God everyone else does… a Bronze Age Warrior God.”⁴⁶ The correct image of God, as self-emptying love, is of great importance for authentic Christian living and more especially for the theme of this work: reconciliation in a world polarized between identity and uniqueness, resemblance and difference, unity and otherness.