Rahner's Trinitarian Ontology: Eschatology and the First Principles of Theology

Abstract This article investigates the linkage between Rahner's conception of the human person's relationship with being and with God, and the early Heidegger's understanding of Dasein in relation to the horizon of death. This paper argues that Rahner's attempt to rehabilitate these concepts in his Spirit in the World and Theology of Death distances him from Heidegger in important ways, even as it raises new methodological questions for fundamental theology. Although Rahner boldly redefines the concept of death and even being itself in relation to the Trinity, his approach to Christian faith and to those elements of Aquinas's thought that he chooses to retain expose the risks of an exclusively theological response to the challenges posed by transcendental thought. This paper concludes by suggesting that a return to pre‐transcendental scholastic accounts of being can provide a more secure foundation for the theological concepts that Rahner seeks to defend.