“The Trinity in the ‘economy of salvation’ is the immanent Trinity and vice versa”: Karl Rahner’s influence concerning the question of the divine attributes after the Second Vatican Council

In this article, for the first time in Russian, Karl Rahner’s essay “Bemerkungen zum dogmatischen Traktat ‘De Trinitate’” is studied. In this essay the German Jesuit and theologian revisits Augustine’s axioma that “the works of the Trinity are indivisible”, and, as linked to it, the approach, in Western theology, that studies questions concerning the “immanent” Trinity independently from the treatise “De Deo uno” on the one hand and the treatise “De creatione”, and soteriology, on the other hand. Starting from the fact that not the Trinity but the Second Person of the Trinity, i. e. the Logos, became man, Rahner expresses his position that the Trinity communicates itself to the world always and in everything as itself, the way it is. That is why the Trinity, in his view, is identical with the One God, the Creator and Savior, not “only” ontologically, but also gnoseologically. Due to this new paradigm expressed by Rahner, together with the ideas promoted by several other leading theologians of the Vatican II epoch, Catholic theology leaves the strict division between philosophical and revealed theology and the division between the teaching on God “per se” and “quoad nos” behind. As a consequence, further on, the teaching on the divine attributes can no longer be separated from the teaching on the Trinity and its creating and saving action.