Self-communication

Rahner re-describes the nature/grace problem in terms of God’s self-communicating love, which is the final cause of creation and the first intention of God: “Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love.” (Good Edwardsian supralapsarian, he.) But for Rahner, as for every side of the Roman Catholic debate, this self-communication (or grace, or supernatural fulfillment) is a second stage, something that for Rahner man is created with a capacity to receive but which Adam does not initially receive.

Wouldn’t it be better to say that God communicated Himself to man from the beginning, but that this self-communication becomes fuller over time, as God communicates more of His infinitely inexhaustible self and by this self-communication eternally expands our capacity for receiving His self-communication? Perhaps this is what Rahner is getting at with his “supernatural existential,” but it’s much cleaner to avoid the natural/supernatural distinction entirely and simply speak in terms of maturation and glorification.

Rahner posits “pure nature” as a limiting concept that helps define the supernatural. In what he likes to call man’s “concrete quiddity,” man is never in a state of pure nature, since the supernatural existential is always-already there at least as a call, even if not as an answered or received call. That doesn’t fit the actual situation of Adam in the garden, who is not merely “called” to fellowship with God, but created in actual, living – albeit immature – fellowship with God. No doubt, created communion with God is not yet the communion that Roman Catholics mean when they talk about the visio Dei , but what prevents the visio Dei from being the fulfilled communion that Adam had at creation?

In the end, doesn’t Rahner’s model, despite his terminology and intention, depend on a stronger notion of “pure nature,” a nature waiting for God’s self-communication but not yet receiving it, and isn’t this pure nature something more than a Restbegriff ?