If Karl Rahner's key insight is that *the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity* is true it has significant relevance to the disciple of Christ as such: Christ is the revelation of God and the fullness of God's salvific, historical, economic activity of the Triune God in the world. This analyis unpacks Rahner's explication of Christ in light of God's self-communication and his axiomatic equivocation of the immanent and economic Trinity with special concern for his relationship between the immanent Trinity and individual "persons" such as Christ. We explore Christoph Schwöbel's movement toward a Trinitarian Christology—its premises and implications. All in all, both Rahner and Schwöbel bring the Trinity (particularly the immanent Trinity) within closer proximity to our experience and relation to God through Christ.

At the heart of Rahner's Trinity is the self-communication of God. This is fundamental to God's relation to us and to a proper understanding of the existance of God as such. For Rahner, Christ as Logos and particularly in human form is God freely stepping outside himself in selfcommunication. However, this understanding of Christ as self-communication of God needs to be seen in unified concert with the self-communication of the Spirit: Insofar as this is one self-communication of God, which occurs necessarily in these two complementary aspects, is *free*, the incarnation and the descent of God's Spirit are free, even though the connection between these two moments is necessary.[^1] Nevertheless, Rahner is clear that when we speak of Christ we speak of a distinct "manner of God's subsisting" in Triunity. And yet on the other hand he does, at times seem to equate Christ with the immanent Trinity. In these instances we note that he does not do so without including the Holy Spirit: We may in this treatise confidently look for an access into the doctrine of the Trinity in Jesus and in his Spirit, as we experience them through faith in salvation history. For in these two persons the immanent Trinity itself *is* already given. The Trinity is not for us a reality which can only be expressed as a doctrine. The Trinity itself is with us, it is not merely given to us because revelation offers statements about it. Rather these statements are made to us because the reality of which they speak is bestowed upon *us*.[^2] Therefore it seems we must rely on an equivocation: it would be proper to say that God's selfcommunication (as the basis for the activity of the economic trinity) is, in fact the immanent Trinity. However, God's self-communication is not wholly reducible to the person of Christ. Therefore, when Rahner refers to Christ, although one could argue he may see the fullness of the Trinity within him, he is not conflating "the person of Christ" with the "Trinity" (economic or immanent).

Rahner's Christology is Trinitarian in the sense that the reality of Christ is a facet of the unified act of God's self-communication in both an economic and immanent sense and therefore is not just the revelation, but an "embodiment" of the Father. Rahner's treatment of Christ does not appear Trinitarian in the way one might expect: i.e. Christ *qua* himself is a complete revelation of some concrete Trinitarian life rather than an actor in the self-communicating and processional nature of God as Father.

The primacy of God the Father within Trinitarian formulations seems to lend itself to a Christology that is leveraged on the notion of a type of substantive subordination within the Triune God. Within this context, a Trinitarian Christology (that is, one that sees Christ as some type of full revelation of Trinitarian life itself) is easily undercut by any intimation that the Son "participates" in Trinitarian life that is "initiated" by the Father (this both in an economic and an immanent sense taking Rahner's axiom to be true).[^3] One way to approach a Christological Trinitarianism that remains true to the distinctions of the persons and preserves their traditional roles, is by attending to relationality as central to Trinitarian reality.

Rahner pivots to the issue of relationality by considering its use as fruitful in logistic and practical terms but not as a reference to any "general ontology." This is probably due to, in part, the difficulty that comes with considering Trinitarian "relationality" from an ontological standpoint, when one has abandoned personhood. Instead Rahner prefers to focus on "our experience of the 'economic' Trinity."[^4] Nevertheless, he submits that it is helpful because relationality can be "really identical with God's absolute essence," while "the persons are distinct only throught their *esse ad*."[^5] It is here however, that Schwöbel draws on Rahner's sentiment and chooses to explore the implications of a relationality as an ontological premise. Following the same spirit, this analysis also diverts its attention from Rahner to Christoph Schwöbel.

Like Rahner, Schwöbel also sees the relationships of the Trinity as part and parcel to the self-communication of God and follows in developing a Christology that does bifurcate the divine and human natures of Christ as such. Rather he qualifies his being as determined upon his being-in-relation in Trinitarian terms and, to us, in human terms. For Schwöbel, the persons of the Trinity are defined as "persons" in essence by their relations. This then, has significant implications for the redefining of our own anthropology, as well as a reframing of the role of the Trinity in revelation and the life of the church possibly in ways that are arguably more fruitful than Rahner's (although we can't deny Rahner's influence).

Schwöbel emphasizes the urgency of a renewed Trinitarian Christocentrism that seeks to progress toward a more fruitful Christology and soteriology. His Trinitarian–Christological formulations may give us a greater foundation for a proper Christian anthropology extrapolated from a Trinitarian Christology: The declaration of Jesus as the Son by the Father and the descent of the Spirit upon him [in the baptism story] belong closely together and they testify *that the relationship by which Christ's divinity is constituted is mediated in the forms that are constitutive for a human life.*[^6] This—our being-in-relation to Christ and furthermore, Christ's being-in-relation to us and Trinity—fundamentally grounds us as humans in both the economic and the immanent Trinitarian life.

Rahner's axiom grounds the Trinity not only in reality as such, but in our experience of the salvific work of Christ. Schwöbel develops this by giving us a concrete way in which that Trinitarian life becomes fundamental to our experience of humans because of the incarnation. If our being-in-the-world is in type of participation in the Trinitarian life, then this urges us to extrapolate from the inter-relationality of the Trinity to our own as one among others. This has the

possibility of reframing everything from our ethics to our understanding of sin. But more significantly, it reframes in a much simpler and more profound way, our being not as wholly-other but rather, as being-towards and being-in-and-among our fellow people.

[^1]: Karl Rahner, *The Trinity* (New York: Crossroads, 1997), 86.

[^2]: Ibid, 39

[^3]: Ibid, 64f.

[^4]: Ibid, 69.

[^5]: Ibid, 71.

[^6]: Christoph Schwöbel, "Christ for Us—Yesterday and Today: A Response to 'The Person of Christ," in The Person of Christ, ed. Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae (London: T&T Clark International, 2005), 185.