RAHNER, KARL

German theologian; b. Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, March 5, 1904; d. Innsbruck, Austria, March 30, 1984. One of seven children of Karl Rahner, gymnasium professor, and Luise Trescher. After concluding his secondary education he entered the Society of Jesus' novitiate at Feldkirch in Vorarlberg, Austria, on April 20, 1922, three years after his brother Hugo. During his philosophical studies from 1924 to 1927, first at Feldkirch, then at Pullach near Munich, he was influenced especially by Joseph marÉchal's Thomistic response to the thought of Immanuel Kant. After teaching Latin at the Feldkirch Novitiate, where Alfred Delp was one of his students, Rahner studied theology at Valkenburg in the Netherlands (1929–33). There his earlier reading of Christian spirituality was deepened through study of the Apostolic Fathers, the patristic period, and medieval thinkers such as bonaventure. He was ordained a priest on July 26, 1932, and pursued his Jesuit tertianship at Saint Andrea in Carinthia, Austria (1933–34).

Early Foundations. Intended by his Jesuit superiors to be a professor of the history of philosophy, Rahner was sent to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau to prepare a doctorate. He attended Martin Heidegger's seminars with other Catholic students such as Max Müller, Gustav Siewerth, Bernard Welte, and Johannes B. Lotz. When his doctoral director, Martin Honecker, rejected his interpretation of Saint Thomas' epistemology, Rahner returned to Innsbruck. In the course of the academic year 1936–37, he was able to satisfy the doctoral and postdoctoral requirements for teaching in the University's faculty of theology and began to lecture the following year. After the Nazis abolished the theology faculty (July 1938) and the Jesuit college (October 1939), Rahner moved to Vienna to work under Karl Rudolph at the Pastoral Institute. For five years he served as a consultant there, also offering courses and occasional lectures. In the final year of World War II he became a pastor at Mariakirchen in Lower Bavaria.

For three years after the war he taught dogmatic theology at Berchmanskolleg in Pullach and then, in August 1948, returned to Innsbruck's faculty of theology, which had just been reopened. Named an Ordinarius the following summer, he remained at Innsbruck through the winter semester of 1964, teaching a cycle of courses on the doctrines of creation and original sin; grace and justification; faith, hope and charity; and the Sacraments of Penance, Anointing of the Sick, and Orders. In the early 1950s his doctoral students included Adolf Darlap, Walter Kern, Herbert Vorgrimler, and Johann Baptist Metz.

In these foundational years of Rahner's theological career his interests ranged from the primary philosophical studies elaborated in his doctoral dissertation and his Salzburg lectures on the philosophy of religion, through classic early publications on prayer and the Christian life, to highly technical re-examinations of questions long considered settled by the neo-scholastic theology that dominated most of Catholic thought at the time, and certainly its major official pronouncements. His Freiburg thesis Geist in Welt (1939) sought a contemporary retrieval of the Thomistic insight into sense experience as the enduring ground for human knowledge. Heidegger's

question of Being also helped to guide his understanding of religion in its historical dependence on the transcendent self-disclosure of a personal God (Hörer des Wortes 1941). His first years in Innsbruck saw the publication of the meditations collected in Encounters with Silence (1938) and his Lenten sermons in postwar Munich appeared in an eloquent book On Prayer (1949).

But it was his probing analyses of human existence in a world permeated by divine grace that gave Rahner's early writings their explosive force. Emphasizing the dynamics of knowledge and freedom yet guided most deeply by the mystery of God's own gift of self, he reconceived the terms of the relationship between nature and grace, took the conciliar definitions as a starting point rather than an end for christological reflection, and renewed ecclesiology by examining the Church in its origin, its sacramental actualization, and its pastoral practice. When his early theological essays were gathered in the first three volumes of the Schriften zur Theologie in 1954, 1955, and 1956 (English translation, Theological Investigations ), it was clear that a wholly original dialectical mind had appeared on the Catholic scene. During this period his prodigious editorial labors began as well, and he was responsible for four editions of Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum (1952–57) and seven editions of Der Glaube der Kirche in den Urkunden der Lehrverkündigung (1948–65).

Programmatic Years. A second, programmatic phase coincided roughly with Rahner's work as coeditor for the second edition of Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (1957–65) and his contributions to the preparation and course of the Second Vatican Council. Continuing to teach at Innsbruck, he also lectured extensively, undertook new editorial responsibilities, and for a year (1962–63) was subject to a preliminary censorship regulation from Rome. When the University of Munich in 1963 invited him to become Romano Guardini's successor in the Chair of Christian World View and Philosophy of Religion, he received permission from his Order to accept the call and began teaching in Munich in the summer semester of 1964. In that year also, a monumental two-volume Festschrift, Gott in Welt, appeared in honor of his sixtieth birthday.

In view of urgent contemporary questions, Rahner had previously sought to re-appropriate Catholic tradition through a dialectical discussion with scholastic theology and the dogmatic tradition. He probed the implication of these studies and began to write more programmatically on the correlation between theology and anthropology within the historical process. In a world that is always and everywhere invited to union with God (the "supernatural existential,") he argued, responsible theology must conduct a continuing transcendental reflection on the structural conditions of possibility for salvation. In Schriften IV (1960) he published seminal essays on mystery, the Incarnation, the theology of symbol, and the hermeneutics of eschatological assertions. An analogy of transcendence unifies these essays materially, envisaging history as a response to the Holy Mystery that draws the world toward eternity through self-communication in Word and Spirit. In the essays of Schriften V (1962), the analogy was significantly broadened by his discussion of evolutionary science, world religions, and utopian views of the future. Schriften VI (1966) continued his effort to express the Church's new self-understanding in a secularized, pluralistic world.

In these same years Rahner published major essays in pastoral theology (Sendung und Gnade 1959; English translation, Mission and Grace 1963) and gathered a new collection of essays in spirituality (Schriften VII 1967). In 1962 he helped to draft a plan for the Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, which subsequently appeared in five volumes (1964–72) with Rahner as one of its editors. With Heinrich Schlier he conceived the series of Questiones Disputatae (1958 ff.) in which appeared some of his own most original contributions on the inspiration of Scripture, the theology of death, the prophetic mission of the Church, the relation between episcopacy and papal primacy, and the renewal of the diaconate. Rahner was a founding member of the editorial committee that planned Concilium, chaired its section on pastoral theology, and with Edward Schillebeeckx edited its first issue in 1965. With Adolf Darlap he planned Sacramentum Mundi and then supervised its German edition (4 v. 1967–69).

Late Development. When it appeared that Rahner would be unable to direct doctoral students in theology at Munich and also that there were hopes for collaborating on serious reform of theological education elsewhere, he accepted the University of Münster's invitation to become Ordinary Professor of Dogmatics and the History of Dogma and moved to the Westphalian capital in the summer semester of 1967. His years at Münster were fruitful ones during which he continued to reflect on Roman Catholicism's efforts to appropriate Vatican II and developed his response to critics who found his own theological anthropology reductionistic (Hans Urs von Balthasar) or politically impractical (Johann Baptist Metz). Reflecting on the historical concreteness of Christianity and its social responsibility, three further volumes of the Schriften (1967, 1970, 1972) offer important insights on theology's place in the human search for meaning; careful situational analysis as a requirement for religious authenticity; the need for a contemporary introduction (mystagogy) to the experience of God; a new understanding of Jesus as humanity's way to God (Christology from below); and reform of the Church as a declericalized, more democratic and socially critical community of service to the world.

Retiring to Munich in 1971, Rahner first lived at the Jesuit writers' residence near Nymphenburg. His major project there was the preparation of his Grundkurs or "Introduction to the Idea of Christianity" (1976; English translation, Foundations of Christian Faith 1978). Though not an adequate synthesis of his thought, the book does present his typical approach to central topics of Christian doctrine. In the years immediately before it, he published several briefer works on Church reform (1972) and on an ecumenical understanding of Church office (1974), as well as Schriften XI (1973), which gathers his early studies on the practice and theology of penance, and Schriften XII (1975), which centers on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Having participated in the first planning of Mysterium Salutis (5 v. 1965–76), he continued to contribute major articles to that new, historically conceived dogmatic theology.

Final Dialectic. After moving to the Berchmanskolleg in Munich and living there for several years, Rahner returned again to Innsbruck and made it his final residence (1981–84). Between 1976 and 1984 he lectured and wrote vigorously, publishing four more volumes of the Schriften (v. XII–XVI: 1978, 1980, 1983, 1984); a new edition of his Dictionary of Theology (1976); moving essays on prayer (1977), love of neighbor and love of Jesus (1981, 1982); and a dialogical apology for contemporary faith, co-authored with Karl-Heinz Weger (1979). He was also represented by several anthologies, one of which, The Practice of Faith (1982), also serves well as a general introduction to his thought. He continued his editorial involvements and, fortunately, allowed himself a new candor in his autobiographical reflections.

Although his final years are remarkably consistent with his previous career, significant developments nevertheless do occur in his consolidation of a thoroughly historical Christology; in his proposal for a "universal pneumatology" that might precede Christology in the future; in his arguments for a truly world church and his pleas for ecumenical seriousness; in a series of moral essays on the virtues required of late twentieth-century Christians. Throughout the writings of this last phase, Rahner noted the deepening relativism and skepticism in European culture and attempted to address it. "The old schoolmaster," as he styled himself, also became disturbingly frank about the climate of the Catholic Church, which he had served all his life and would serve to the end.

Systematic theologian though he was, Rahner's thought may be better characterized as a lifelong meditation on the correlation between human experience and God's self-communication. Because of his insistence that theology analyze the conditions of possibility for divine salvific action, he is most often described as a transcendental theologian. Even from the beginning, however, his method required historical research and reflection, since the dynamics of grace always unfold in an unfinished, temporal world where servitude and suffering are all too obvious. In fact, it may be even more exact to see Rahner as a Catholic dialectical theologian. His career presents a personal response to the religious issues of his day and an enduring effort to conceive human history as destined for an eternal communion with God that can only be achieved through the course of time. Thus, a concrete dialectic of transcendence in history characterized his life as well as his thought and influence.

Bibliography: The Theology Department at the University of Innsbruck in Austria maintains the collection of Rahner's manuscripts and papers at the Karl Rahner Archive. For a complete, chronological listing of Rahner's publications see: r. bleistein, ed., Bibliographie Karl Rahner 1969–1974 (Freiburg 1974). r. bleistein and e. klinger, eds., Bibliographie Karl Rahner 1924–1969 (Freiburg 1969). a. e. carr, "Karl Rahner," in d. g. peerman and m. e. marty, eds., A Handbook of Christian Theologians (Nashville 1984): 519–542. w. v. dych, Karl Rahner (Collegeville, Minn. 1992). h. d. egan, Karl Rahner: The Mystic of Everyday Life (New York 1998). p. imhof and e. meuser, "Bibliographie Karl Rahner 1979–1984," in e. klinger and k. wittstadt, eds., Glaube im Prozess (Freiburg 1984): 854–871. p. imhof and h. treziak, "Bibliographie Karl Rahner 1974–1979," in h. vorgrimler, ed., Wagnis Theologie (Freiburg 1979): 579–597. l. j. o'donovan, ed., A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology (New York 1980). c. d. pedley, "An English Biographical Aid to Karl Rahner," Heythrop Journal 15 (1984): 319–365. h. vorgrimler, Understanding Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Life and Thought (New York 1986).

[l. j. o'donovan]