Barth on Economy and Ontology

God is, Barth repeatedly insists, as He reveals Himself. But Barth also hesitates about reading the relations expressed in the economic Trinity into the ontological Trinity (Church Dogmatics, I.1, ch. 10). The relations as revealed are comprehensible, but these relations as revealed, precisely insofar as they are comprehensible, “do not signify the last word in the hidden essence of God, and the distinctions in God Himself cannot rest in these distinctions.” In fact, there is only an “analogy” between the relations expressed in the economy and the “genetic relations” or “relations of origin” that exist ontologically within the divine essence.

Barth admits that the relations expressed in the economy provide a hint of ontology, but it is only a hint: “There is an analogy – we recall our exposition of the doctrine of relations in this regard – between the terms Father, Son and Spirit along with the other formulations of this triad in revelation on the one side, and on the other side the three divine modes of being which consist in the different relations of origin and in which we have come to know the truly incomprehensible eternal distinctions in God. In these analogies, which are not present in the world like the alleged vestigia trinitatis but which have been set up in the world by revelation, and by which the mystery is not as it were abandoned and solved but rather denoted, and denoted precisely as a mystery, we have the truth of the triunity as it is assigned and appropriate to us. We shall not overestimate this truth. If we did, if we confused the analogy with the thing itself, if we equated the distinctions that are comprehensible to us with those that are not, in other words, if we thought we had comprehended the essence of God in comprehending His word, we should be plunged at once into the error of tritheism.”

Barth appeals to the doctrine of appropriations to explain how, in the comprehensible revealed relations of the persons, they seem to act as individual personalities: “Per appropriationem this act or this attribute must now be given prominence in relation to this or that mode of being in order that this can be described as such. But only per appropriationem may this happen, and in no case, therefore, to the forgetting or denying of God’s presence in all His modes of being, in His total being and act even over against us.”

From this, it seems clear that Barth’s concern with a simple equation of the comprehensible relations of the economy and the incomprehensible relations of the ontological Trinity arises from his desire to affirm the unity of God, his fear of tritheism, and his affirmation of the axiom opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt.

If I have understood this correctly, this creates some tensions in Barth’s Trinitarianism. How does he know what features of the economic relations pertain to the economy and which don’t? More precisely, if the name “Father, Son and Spirit” is only “analogous” to the “different relations of origins” of the “truly incomprehensible eternal distinctions of God,” how do we know in what ways they are disanalogous? Jesus speaks to the Father: Is that “analogous to” an eternal communication between Father and Son? In what way? Or is “communication between Father and Son” an analogy for an incomprehensible something that takes place between Father and Son in their eternal life?

Barth’s point is challenging, since no matter how earnestly we wish to affirm Rahner’s Rule (“the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity”), we inevitably, and perhaps unconsciously, create the gap of “analogy” between the two. I would want to explore how the Spirit is “dovelike,” but I concede that the dove is only an analogy to the Spirit, that the Spirit is not a dove, and (perhaps) that the Spirit is more un-dovelike than dovelike. So, there is a point to Barth’s insistence that we cannot read ontology from economy. But I’m suspicious: he seems to be claiming that the creation is incapable of revealing God as He is.

To be sure, the revelation of God in creation, and the created history of redemption, is not exhausive, but it is true and adequate for its purposes, since the creation was designed to be a bearer of this revelation. If all Barth means is that the economic Trinity is revealed in a way that is accessible to creatures, I’m with him. And if all he insists on is that creatures don’t know the Trinity in the way that the Trinity knows the Trinity, I stay with him and am content cheerfully to remain ignorant of God’s knowledge of Himself. But I sense that he’s saying more: That for Barth the creation is somehow an obstacle to the revelation of God. This runs counter to much of what Barth says elsewhere (that we encounter God Himself in His revelation), but I dare to suggest that it’s not impossible that there are inconsistencies in Barth.