• Does the (RC) church dogma that revelation closed with the death of the last Apostle necessitate a conception of theology in which all that can be said by theologians is already explained in that closed revelation, requiring only translation for each generation? (The Protestant equivalent of this dogma, I suppose, would be the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.) Rahner’s answer: “What does this proposition mean? It would be false to interpret it as meaning more or less that when the last Apostle died there was left a fixed summary of strictly drafted propositions like a legal code with its clearly defined paragraphs, a sort of definitive catechism, which, while itself remaining fixed, was going to be forever expounded, explained, and commented upon. An idea like this would do justice neither to the mode of being proper to intellectual knowledge nor to the fullness of life of divine faith and its content.”
• This last quotation summarizes Rahner’s position in this essay on (what I call) the difference between static and dynamic theology. For him, a static theology first denies the scientific nature of theology — “the mode of being proper to intellectual knowledge” — and second does not live up to the “plenitude” — the “fullness of life of divine faith” — of its object. Rahner argues that, instead, revelation has “closed” to the extent that the “continuous Happening of saving history has now reached its never to be surpassed climax in Jesus Christ: God himself has definitively given himself to the world.” For Rahner, the history of revelation is dialogic, involving God’s initiation and man’s response — in Christ God’s revelatory reaction to man’s general response of rejection was permanently defined as one of redeeming grace. This permanent definition of God’s continuing revelation, for Rahner, is the sense in which revelation is “closed.” He proceeds to develop a complex and interesting theory of the Holy Spirit’s role in the development of dogma.

I find much to admire in Rahner’s observations. Three highlights that I’d like to appropriate into my own distinction between static and dynamic theology: (1. the doctrine of revelation’s closure does not preclude a high degree of revelatory significance to the development of dogma; (2. the theologian’s task, consequently, is not merely one of translation and re-presentation, or even of clarification and explication, but of renewing and progressing investigation into the plenitude of the fullness of God’s revelation in Christ. Essentially, I assert that just as God defies predicatory confinement, God’s revelation defies complete conceptual comprehension — not just by remaining “bigger than our best attempt” but by remaining “deeper than our last attempt”; (3. every definition of theology absolutely requires some description of the Holy Spirit’s role in the development of dogma, both to live up to the demands of theology’s object and in order to check the theologian’s natural tendency to consider his thinking the fullest conceptual response to God’s revelation to date.