In his review of my bookDivine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity, John Webster noted that it was “a piece of polemic in the best sense of the term: critical analysis and clarification with an eye kept firmly on a rich and fruitful set of dogmatic commitments.”1 As such he suggested that it should be read as “a ground-clearing exercise: part protest, part alarm signal, part dismantling of the shaky edifice of modern economic trinitarianism.” That such a “ground-clearing” exercise was needed at the time I think will be acknowledged by anyone who realizes the importance of recognizing that a properly conceived doctrine of the Trinity cannot simply be the embodiment of our human experience of relationality or of our religious ideas writ large. Any serious understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity must be shaped by who God eternally was and is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Many reviewers saw clearly that what I had to say about the immanent Trinity as the indispensable premise of what takes place in the economy was based on God’s personal economic self-communication in his Word and Spirit. Thus it was not arbitrary. Yet, for some strange reason there were some who claimed that I held that a proper understanding of the doctrine could not begin with the economic Trinity because I was critical of those who claimed that one could not begin thinking about the immanent Trinity from experience.2 Of course that is not what I said at any point in the book. Any such idea would have circumvented revelation at the outset in an attempt to know God directly instead of mediately through his incarnate Word and through faith that is enabled by the Holy Spirit. Knowing God the Father through his Son and in and by the Spirit means acknowledging that it is always God, who alone exists self-sufficiently as the one who loves, who enables our knowledge of him and our actions as those who live as his witnesses here and now. What I argued was that a proper theology that begins in faith does indeed involve our experience of God, but in that experience we know that it is God and not our experience of God who is the object of faith and of knowledge. This chapter will involve a careful analysis and comparison of the view of mediated knowledge offered by Karl Barth with the view offered by Karl Rahner. Barth’s view, it will be argued, does justice both to knowledge and experience of God just because it takes the action of the Spirit seriously and operates explicitly within faith all along the line. Rahner’s view, which intends to speak of our knowledge and experience of God, as does Barth’s, differs from Barth’s approach by its apologetic attempt to validate knowledge of faith from the experience of self-transcendence. By contrasting these views I hope to clarify why fideism is unacceptable while thinking within faith is required in order to properly understand human and divine interaction, especially when it comes to knowing that our experience of God really is an experience of God and not just an experience of ourselves extended to the nth degree.
Very early in II/1 Barth objected to Augustine’s description of a type of knowledge of God in hisConfessions that he considered to be problematic because it was an attempt to know God by way of “a timeless and non-objective seeing and hearing” (II/1, p. 11).3 While Barth also noted that elsewhere in hisCity of God Augustine himself advanced the kind of “mediate, objective knowledge” that Barth himself believed was the only way we could have knowledge of God through his Word and Spirit, Barth persistently rejected any sort of “non-objective” knowledge of God because any such knowledge necessarily and always bypasses the place and manner in which God reveals himself to us, namely, his incarnate Word. Any attempt to know God that seeks some form of direct knowledge of God (a knowledge without the mediation of his incarnate Word), in Barth’s view, always would mean the inability to distinguish God from us; and that would then mean our inability to speak objectively and truly about God at all. Barth there
