Karl Rahner: a centenary appreciation

Catholic New Times, Oct 10, 2004 by Daniel Donovan

By any criterion, whether number and quality of publications or creativity or influence, Karl Rahner was one of the truly great Christian theologians of the 20th century.

Born 100 years ago on March 5, 1904, in a devoted, middle-class Catholic family in Freiburg in southwestern Germany, his life was played out against and in relation to many of the great world and church events that marked the century. At the age of 18, Rahner entered the novitiate of the Jesuits, a step which more than any other gave direction to the whole of his life.

A true intellectual with a gift for philosophy, Rahner, while still a student, began to develop in his distinctive way the efforts of Joseph Marechal, a Belgian Jesuit, to rethink the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in the light of the modern preoccupation with the preconditions and limits of human knowledge.

The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of Rahner's teachers, provided language and categories as well as a perspective on human experience that influenced central features of the Jesuit theologian's thought.

As important, however, as philosophy was for Rahner, his engagement with it was basically in relation to his theology. He was never interested in what might be called a "separate" philosophy. His focus was on Christian experience, Christian life.

The great theological challenge of the modern period as he saw it was unbelief. Modern Western culture with its emphasis on science and technology seemed to him to be cutting people off from the very possibility of faith. Already in the 1940s, Rahner was speaking of a growing "diaspora" situation of Western European Christianity.

As the culture became increasingly secular, the burden of faith was being shifted from the community to the individual. Individuals were being challenged to develop a personal and an adult faith in a way that they had not been since the early church.

An opening to the Holy Mystery

Rahner's earliest works, Spirit in the World and Hearers of the Word, Were intended as contributions to a new form of apologetics, one that begins not with proofs of the existence of God and with historical arguments about the life of Jesus and the founding of the Church, but rather with the individual person as a potential believer.

In a way that is both traditional and modern, Rahner invited people to enter into themselves and to reflect on all that is involved in their knowing and loving, in their questioning and seeking. He was convinced that if people did that they would discern within themselves an orientation to, and a capacity for, the infinite and the absolute, for what he came to call the Holy Mystery, the mystery that surrounds and grounds our lives and draws us forward on our individual journeys.

Rahner never abandoned his anthropocentric starting point but rather deepened it and made it fruitful in ever more areas of theology and spiritual life. The first step in the process was a rethinking of the nature and the experience of grace. Instead of focusing, as the tradition had, on created grace, on grace as a gift of God transforming us from within, he emphasized uncreated grace, the mystery of God turned to us in self-communicating love. For Rahner, this is the essence of Christianity, this is the deepest truth revealed in the life and destiny of Jesus. God and the human person and the relation between the two is the key to Rahner's thought. By nature and grace, humans are open to the self-communicating God. In everything they do or fail to do, no matter how secular on the surface it might appear, they are interacting with the God of grace. Most often our experience of this remains vague, even anonymous. The gospel proclaimed in the church and articulated in the creeds helps us to discern and respond to, as well as to celebrate and give thanks for, the drama that is unfolding in the depths of our lives and of the life of the world.

Starting with the subject

Rahner's conviction of the universality of the offer of grace motivated him to develop in a new way a Catholic, theology of other religions and to encourage a more open and optimistic approach by believers to the secular world. His transcendental method, that is, his method of starting with the subject and with the conditions of possibility of our experience, enabled him creatively to rethink traditional doctrines, especially in the area of Christology, and to endow them with a new power and relevance. If human beings are fundamentally open to God and if in Christ the divine and the human come together in a unique and unsurpassable way, it is not hard to see how anthropology and Christology can be made to illuminate and reinforce one another.

Rahner was deeply Catholic in his commitment to, and in his fearless and loving critique of, the institutional church, and in his efforts to rethink its doctrines and practices in ways that would facilitate their being heard and lived by people in modern Western culture. He was an influential participant in Vatican II and a tireless defender of its vision and call for renewal. He believed that the Council marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Church, the era of "the world church." He saw efforts at inculturation as well as liberation theology as carrying forward the challenge of the Council.