RAHNER, KARL

RAHNER, KARL (1904–1984) was the most prolific and influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. Rahner's bibliography comprises more than four thousand entries. Writing primarily as a dogmatic theologian, he also addressed philosophical, historical, pastoral, and spiritual questions. His work as a whole may be summarized as theological anthropology, correlating human experience and God's self-communication. His method is most often described as transcendental, inasmuch as it seeks to discover the conditions of possibility for divine salvific action, but it also has an inseparable historical dimension, inasmuch as the humanity addressed by God's word and presence is understood as always situated in a temporal world. Indeed, it may be even more accurate to see Rahner as a Catholic dialectical theologian whose career was marked not only by personal response to the religious issues of his day but also by an enduring effort to conceive human history as destined for eternal communion with God, achieved through the course of time.

Born and raised in Freiburg im Breisgau, Rahner entered the Society of Jesus in 1922. During his education in the Jesuit order he developed an Ignatian spirituality of "seeking God in all things." His formal philosophical (1924–1927) and theological (1929–1933) studies were shaped largely by the neoscholastic revival; but through the writings of the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal he entered into philosophical conversation with Immanuel Kant and later with G. W. F. Hegel and German Idealism. To these general influences on his thought must be added his intensive reading in patristic sources and in medieval mysticism. Ordained a priest in 1932, Rahner concluded his basic theological program the following year and then pursued a further year of pastoral and ascetic studies (the Jesuit tertianship).

In 1934 Rahner began a doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where he attended Martin Heidegger's seminars. His doctoral dissertation, a modern retrieval of Thomas Aquinas's theory of knowledge, centered on the theme of conversio ad phantasma (conversion to the phantasm) as the ground of all human knowledge, and it conceived human existence fundamentally as "spirit in world." When his director rejected the thesis as insufficiently traditional (it was published in 1939 as Geist in Welt ), Rahner left for Innsbruck. After quickly completing a theological doctorate and habilitation, he began in 1937 to teach dogmatic theology. From those first years came an eloquent book of meditations, Worte ins Schweigen (1938), and also the publication of his Salzburg summer lectures on human history as the place where God's self-revelation must be sought, Hörer des Wortes (1941).

When the Nazis closed the Innsbruck faculty in 1938, Rahner moved to Vienna and served at the Pastoral Institute until 1944. From 1945 to 1948 he taught theology under straitened circumstances at Pullach bei München. Returning to Innsbruck in 1949, he was responsible for courses on grace and the sacrament of penance, topics that shaped his thought for the rest of his life. Rooted in the experience of grace as God's mysterious self-communication, Rahner's thought broke new ground in a whole range of areas: for example, the biblical understanding of God; current problems in Christology, nature, and grace; the human condition after original sin; human dignity and freedom; the meaning of church membership; existential ethics; and the pastoral situation of the church. His major essays were collected from this time on in a multivolume collection, Schriften zur Theologie (1954–1984).

Already in Hörer des Wortes it was clear that Rahner was developing a philosophy of religion on the assumption that Christian revelation had occurred, and in order to make plausible how that was possible. A theologian of grace and reconciliation, he engaged in extensive positive research, as is made abundantly clear in Schriften, vol. 11 (1973), with his historical essays on penance in the early church. But the special creativity of his writing showed itself in his efforts to correlate the circumstances of particular experience with the permanent "existentials" of the human condition. This interrelation of historical and transcendental moments was evident as well in the prodigious editorial labors that began in his early Innsbruck years and continued with the publication of four editions of Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum (1952–1957) and seven editions of Der Glaube der Kirche in den Urkunden der Lehrverkündigung (1948–1965).

Building on the early Innsbruck period came a second phase of Rahner's thought, during which he was coeditor of the second edition of the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (1957–1965) and a leading figure in the preparation and course of the Second Vatican Council (despite efforts to disqualify his participation). His retrieval and renewal of tradition in light of contemporary perspectives had previously been achieved largely through pressing particular questions against the background of School Theology. Now he drew out the consequences of these studies and began to speak more programmatically of a theological anthropology encompassing the history of a world whose call to union with God (the "supernatural existential") evokes transcendental reflection on the structural possibilities for such salvation. In powerful essays on mystery, incarnation, theology of symbol, and hermeneutics of eschatological assertions, collected in Schriften, vol. 4 (1960), Rahner developed his analogy of transcendence. Facing questions posed by evolutionary science, the great world religions, and utopian views of the future, other major essays in Schriften, vol. 5 (1962), present the scope of the divine salvific will in more comprehensive terms and argue for the coextension of salvation history and the history of the world. Corresponding to the council's ecclesiological focus, Schriften, vol. 6 (1966), collects papers that present a dialogue with secularized, pluralistic society and seek to express the Christian church's new self-understanding in it. Earlier, Rahner had published a large collection of essays in pastoral theology (Sendung und Gnade, 1959). He gathered a new collection of essays in spirituality (Schriften, vol. 7, 1967), and in 1962 he cooperated in drafting a plan for the Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, which subsequently appeared in five volumes between 1964 and 1972, with Rahner as one of its editors.

In 1964 Rahner succeeded Romano Guardini in the chair of Christian Weltanschauung at the University of Munich. As it became apparent that he would not be allowed to direct doctoral students in theology, he accepted in 1967 a call to the University of Münster, where he taught until his retirement in 1971. In these first years of Vatican II's reception within Catholicism, criticism of Rahner's thought grew in various quarters. Concerned with fidelity to the tradition and to Christian symbolism, some writers, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar, accused him of anthropological reductionism. Others, especially his former student J.-B. Metz, drew back from what they considered an individualistic, idealistic existentialism. Rahner took the second critique more seriously and gave new emphasis to the historical concreteness of Christianity and its social responsibility. Renewing the dialectic of unity in difference with which he had from the beginning sought to understand time in its openness to eternity, he addressed basic conciliar themes with a deepened sense of faith's constructive participation in its secular context. Schriften, vols. 8, 9, and 10 (1967, 1970, 1972), calls for a new understanding of Jesus of Nazareth as the human way to God ("Christology from below") and reform of the church in the direction of a declericalized, more democratic, and socially critical community of service. Meanwhile Rahner had undertaken additional editorial responsibilities for the four volumes of Sacramentum Mundi (1967–1969) and for Concilium (1965–).

During the first years of Rahner's retirement in Munich, his major project was the preparation of his Grundkurs des Glaubens (1976), an introduction to the idea of Christianity. While not intended as a complete systematic theology, the book does present many of his basic positions on the central topics of Christian doctrine and has commonly been seen as a summation of his thought.

In the last years of his life Rahner continued to lecture and write vigorously. Four further volumes of the Schriften were published (vols. 13–16: 1978, 1980, 1983, 1984), two while he was still living in Munich, two more after his final retirement to Innsbruck in 1981. They were accompanied by numerous smaller works and several anthologies, one of which, Praxis des Glaubens (1982), may also serve as a general introduction to its author's thought. These later years are again of a piece with the whole career and include familiar themes as well as considerable repetition. Nevertheless, some significant developments occur here too: in the consolidation of a historical Christology, in the proposal of a "universal pneumatology" that might precede Christology, in pleas for ecumenical seriousness, and in arguments for a truly world church.

In these last years of his life Rahner was newly concerned with addressing the mounting relativism and skepticism he saw about him. In addition, the writings of this last phase show how thoroughly dialectical his thought was, as it sought to mediate between opposed positions in either doctrine or morals, to speak of the fruitful tension between permanent polarities of historical existence, and, above all, to understand the relation between continuity and discontinuity through the passage of time.

Rahner's future influence will depend largely on how effectively his students and readers will be able to draw on his thinking for a continuing dialogue with scientific and technological culture, the social sciences, and narrative and symbolic modes of discourse. It remains to be seen how a more biblically imagined, historically diverse, and socially responsible theology will appropriate his legacy. Many who knew him would insist that the personal witness of his life will surely endure alongside the remarkably elastic architecture of his thought.

Bibliography

For a complete, chronological listing of Rahner's publications, see Bibliographie Karl Rahner: 1924–1969, edited by Roman Bleistein and Elmar Klinger (Freiburg, 1969); Bibliographie Karl Rahner: 1969–1974, edited by Roman Bleistein (Freiburg, 1974); "Bibliographie Karl Rahner: 1974–1979," compiled by P. Imhof and H. Treziak, in Wagnis Theologie, edited by Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg, 1979), pp. 579–97; and "Bibliographie Karl Rahner: 1979–1984," compiled by P. Imhof and E. Meuser, in Glaube im Prozess, 2d ed., edited by Elmar Klinger and Klaus Wittelstadt (Freiburg, 1984), pp. 854–871.

The core of Rahner's work is in his Schriften zur Theologie, 16 vols. (Einsiedeln and Zurich, 1954–1984), of which fourteen volumes have been published in English as Theological Investigations, 20 vols. to date (New York, 1961–). Outstanding examples of his spiritual writing can be found in Worte ins Schweigen (Leipzig, 1938), translated as Encounters with Silence (Westminster, Md., 1960), and in Von der Not und dem Segen des Gebetes, 4th ed. (Innsbruck, 1949), translated as On Prayer (New York, 1958). Key essays on charismatic gifts and existential decision are in Das Dynamische in der Kirche (Freiburg, 1958), translated as The Dynamic Element in the Church (New York, 1964). The major late work is Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums (Freiburg, 1976), translated as Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York, 1978). Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt have edited a fine anthology of Rahner's spiritual writings in Praxis des Glaubens (Freiburg, 1982), translated as The Practice of Faith (New York, 1983).

For further biographical information and commentary, see Herbert Vorgrimler's Karl Rahner: His Life, Thought and Works (London, 1966) and my collection of studies entitled A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology (New York, 1980).

Leo J. o'Donovan (1987)