Karl Rahner

Theology and Philosophy

Karen Kilby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134511594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Karl Rahner is one of the great theologians of the twentieth century, known for his systematic, foundationalist approach. This bold and original book explores the relationship between his theology and his philosophy, and argues for the possibility of a nonfoundationalist reading of Rahner. Karen Kilby calls into question both the admiration of Rahner's disciples for the overarching unity of his though, and the too easy dismissals of critics who object to his 'flawed philosophical staring point' or to his supposedly modern and liberal appeal to experience. Through a lucid and critical exposition of key texts including Spirit in the World and Hearer of the Word, and of themes such as the Vorgriff auf esse, the supernatural existential and the anonymous Christian, Karen Kilby reaffirms Rahner's significance for modern theology and offers a clear exposition of his thought.

1 Introduction

Karl Rahner is universally recognized as important, but often lightly dismissed. He is not alone in this: it is a fate he shares with many theologians. Figures such as Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Barth, and Balthasar, to name but a few, are so difficult—they write so much, and of such a demanding nature—that few readers, even professional theological readers, manage to become thoroughly knowledgeable, thoroughly at ease, with the work of more than one or two of them. It therefore seems useful, almost necessary, to have some quick way of dismissing a theologian, some good reason not to bother with the difficult business of understanding him or her. In the case of Rahner, the dismissal can take a number of forms: with his famous theory of anonymous Christianity, Rahner is an inclusivist, and inclusivism is fundamentally patronizing towards other religions, and so not a viable option in the theology of religions; or again, Rahner uses “the transcendental method,” and the transcendental method is essentially reductive, a priori—it levels out all difference and undermines the historicity and particularity of Christianity—so Rahner can be set to one side as representing an interesting but ultimately mistaken route for Christian theology to take.

Those who really know Rahner’s work, of course, would not subscribe to either of these wholesale and rather simple-minded rejections. But because he is so hard to understand (in difficulty, if nothing else, Rahner is unsurpassed in the theology of the last few centuries), because there is such an investment of time and effort required before one can enter serious conversation about him, very often those who really know Rahner’s work are in fact talking only among themselves, and have little impact on the wider theological world’s reaction to him. Or if they have an impact, it may not be the one they intend: some Rahner scholars may, through their admiring emphasis on the unity and coherence of his thought, inadvertantly contribute to the too-easy rejection of Rahner by his detractors.

My aim in this book will be to work against such quick dismissals of Rahner on two levels. One is expository. I hope the book will be an aid to readers in coming to terms with some of Rahner’s most difficult and important philosophical and theological ideas, and with the ways in which these are related to one another. This is not to say that I can here provide a survey of everything Rahner said, nor an introduction to Rahner’s thought for those entirely unfamiliar with it. The book is intended to be of use to those who are engaged already to some degree or other in grappling with Rahner’s writings, to puzzled but reasonably serious students of his theology. Insofar as the expository aspect of the book succeeds, then, in making the process of getting to grips with Rahner—at certain points, at least—somewhat easier, I hope it may render the option of a quick and easy dismissal less necessary.

On a second level, I shall be setting out an argument for the possibility of a particular kind of interpretation of Rahner—a nonfoundationalist interpretation. This involves a claim about the relationship of different parts of Rahner’s work, but also, and more importantly, a claim about the kind of enterprise Rahner’s mature theology can be taken to be. Insofar as such a reading in a certain way decouples Rahner’s theology from his philosophy, it should make his theology more approachable to those who are frightened by his philosophy (Spirit in the World is, after all, a ferociously difficult book), and more usable to those who have grappled with but remained unpersuaded by the philosophy. Insofar, on the other hand, as the reading casts his theology as such in a rather different light than it has often been seen, it will, I hope, undercut the grounds on which at least some of the quick dismissals of Rahner’s work have rested.

Before all this can become clear, however, it will be necessary to say a bit more about foundationalism and nonfoundationalism and how these relate to Rahner.

Foundationalism and nonfoundationalism in philosophy and theology

Foundationalism is a notion borrowed from philosophy, adopted (and adapted) for theological use. In both discisplines it functions mainly as a term of criticism, a way of identifying what is problematic in another person’s position: one meets few self-described foundationalists.¹ The notion has proved interesting to theologians in that it has allowed them to identify and criticize a common pattern in an otherwise highly diverse (Protestant and Catholic, conservative, and liberal) list of nineteenthand twentieth-century theologies, a list on which Rahner’s name almost invariably appears.

Foundationalism and nonfoundationalism in philosophy

As a technical term of philosophy, foundationalism refers to a particular theory of the way knowledge is (or ought to be) structured and the way beliefs are justified. The idea is that if one is asked to justify any given belief, one will probably refer to one or more other beliefs. So, for instance, I believe that the consumption of a lot of butter will be bad for my health because I have beliefs about the amount of fat in butter, about the connection between the consumption of fat and heart disease, and about my own probable proclivity to heart disease. Each of these beliefs may in turn be justified with reference to further beliefs: for instance, I have a belief about my probable proclivity towards heart disease because of beliefs about the medical history of various family members, and because of a belief in the genetic component of heart disease, and so on. The foundationalist’s contention is that the business of justifying beliefs by appeal to other beliefs cannot go on forever—it cannot be the case that all of our beliefs rest on one or more other beliefs, for this would lead to an infinite regress. There must, then, be some (justified) beliefs which are not themselves inferred from or justified on the basis of any other beliefs whatsoever—there must be a foundation, a stopping point. The beliefs in the foundation, on most versions of foundationalism, have some special status: they are self-evident, or certain, or indubitable. Our beliefs are (or ought to be) structured, then, so that they have a firm foundation, an unquestionable bedrock of certainty, and everything else is built upon this basis: if questioned about something we hold true, we ought in principle be able to trace it back ultimately to the unquestionable foundation.²

Arguably foundationalism has characterized much of modern philosophy, from Descartes onwards.³ What exactly was believed to belong in the foundations varied widely—“logically unchallengable first truths”⁴ for the rationalists, the immediate deliverances of the senses for empiricists— but the shared assumption was that there must be some certain starting point for knowledge which founded all the rest and which itself needed no further foundation.

This assumption has come under attack from many sides in recent decades. What might have been thought the clearest candidates for the “logically unchallengable first truths”—axioms in geometry, arithmetic, or logic—have, through the rise of non-Euclidean geometries, the ingenuity of Kurt Gödel and the development of quantum mechanics, become challengable after all.⁵ The foundations of the empiricists, too, have been problematized—the idea that there could be uninterpreted sense data from which one might begin, deliverances of experience uncontaminated by prior beliefs or concepts, has come to look highly naïve.

It is worth dwelling a little on this latter point, for in the criticisms of the empirical forms of foundationalism, and in particular in the insistence that there is no such thing as pre-conceptual experience, we find a point where the philosophical and the theological versions of nonfoundationalism draw close. Wilfrid Sellars develops one of the classic attacks on pre-conceptual experience in his essay “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.”⁶ His target is the notion that our knowledge can be traced back to and built out of basic, primitive, independent bits of experience. Empiricists have varied to some degree in how they have characterized these bits of experience, but an important feature of their strategy is that they place in the foundations claims about how something looks (or sounds or feels), rather than about how something actually is,⁷ since the latter, but not the former, can be mistaken—I may be wrong that there is a green spot over there, but I cannot be wrong about the fact that it appears to me that there is a green spot over there.

Claims about how the world actually is, then, are thought to follow as a second stage, inferred from the more basic beliefs about how things seem to a given person at a given time. Sellars argues convincingly, however, that on the contrary it is the propositions about how something looks that are derivative, more complex and secondary: one can only make use of the concept of something looking green if one already has the concept of something being green. Furthermore, the concept of “being green” turns out to be, itself, highly complex. The ability to use it involves “the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them—which, in turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it.”⁸ Sellars suggests that there is a kind of circularity here:

Since one can scarcely determine what the circumstances are without noticing that certain objects have certain perceptible characteristics— including colors—it would seem that one couldn’t form the concept of being green, and, by parity of reasoning, of the other colors, unless he already had them.⁹

He is not advocating sheer paradox, however, but rather the notion that our concepts are intertwined, not acquired one by one but as whole packages.¹⁰ We are a long way, then, from having found any uncomplicated basic building blocks of knowledge: “there is an important sense in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in Space and Time unless one has them all—and... a great deal more besides.”¹¹

What Sellars argues, then, by looking at the very basic case of the recognition of color, is that the kind of thing taken by foundationalists of the empiricist variety to be the most simple, unproblematic building blocks of knowledge, that out of which everything else is to be constructed, turns out in fact to be unknowable unless one has already in place a rather complex intellectual structure. The pre-conceptual experience which foundationalists in the empiricist tradition need to get the ball rolling is simply not to be found.

It is worth noting that it is not just analytic philosophers who have come to this sort of conclusion. The rejection of pre-conceptual experience has in various ways been echoed across a range of disciplines. Thus, for example, psychologists studying perception have shown empirically that our recognition even of such simple things as (again) color is heavily influenced by what we know and therefore are expecting to perceive.¹² In the philosophy of science, since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is no longer plausible to think of scientists as theorizing about evidence which is itself independent of any theories. Art historians such as E.H. Gombrich have shown that the way in which the artist, or the child who draws, “sees” and therefore draws is always conditioned by their understanding of the world. Or again there is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, with its central insistence that we never come to the reading of a text or the understanding of a work of art innocently, but that our interpretation of it is always and necessarily shaped by our “prejudices,” by the prior understandings we bring to it.

It is interesting that thinkers across so many areas and disciplines should have converged on, if not the same point, then at least structurally similar points. One might hypothesize that so many figures have felt the need to attack the notion of pre-conceptual experience or its equivalent because the instinct to look for some such pure, untouched data or starting point is in fact deeply entrenched in our culture, at least since the Enlightenment. Indeed, many of the philosophers who have criticized foundationalism present it not just as a technical philosophical theory (or meta-theory) which happened to be wrong and which we can now leave behind, but as a highly seductive view of things, a picture which has us in its thrall,¹³ something with a powerful grip on our imagination and our common sense. Correspondingly, the reactions against it come in the form not only of particular objections to the various candidates for the foundations, but also of more general kinds of criticism: foundationalism represents an excessive desire for certainty, for intellectual security and closure; it is philosophy over-reaching itself, a kind of intellectual hubris.

Foundationalist patterns of thinking are so deeply ingrained in us that it is easy to imagine that the rejection of foundationalism involves the rejection of rationality and intellectual responsibility as such, that nonfoundationalists are advocating relativism, that they maintain that anything goes, or that they are renouncing all intellectual seriousness. Nonfoundationalists would reply that they are not abandoning reason as such, but a particular overly stringent, untenable, and unattainable conception of rationality. To put it another way, it is only because the picture of knowledge as a structure built up on foundations has such a grip on us that we become so very nervous of the thought that it is in fact foundationless. A number of alternative pictures have been proposed: our knowledge, or belief structure, can be thought of as a raft, a wigwam, or a spider’s web.¹⁴ Each of these images suggests that although beliefs are interrelated and support one another, no one of them single-handedly supports the others, and there is none that is not also itself supported by others. If one is thinking with the aid of these images, it ceases to make much sense to ask which is the starting point on which everything else rests. Just as one does not inquire which strand of the spider’s web is the one on which all the others are built, or which stick it is in the wigwam which is the first, which holds all the others up, so one need not look for a special belief or a special subset of beliefs which will play the role of grounding all the others without themselves in turn needing any grounds.

A final comment on philosophical foundationalism has to do with its relation to skepticism. Foundationalism in all its varieties is a response to problems of radical doubt. How can we be certain that anything we believe is justified? How do we know we are not completely mistaken, or at least how do we know that all our knowledge is not in fact mere opinion? The need to find an unshakable foundation, and to show how all else can be built upon it, is driven by the need to find an answer to such questions. This close connection between foundationalism and skepticism means that the antifoundationalist will need to have some take on skepticism as well. Merely to show that foundationalists have so far been unsuccessful will have little effect: if the foundationalists continue to need to answer skeptics, such criticism will do little more than push them into looking for different foundations. One of the characteristic strategies of the antifoundationalists, then, has been, not so much to find a new answer to skepticism, as to raise doubts about its very legitimacy. The challenge of skepticism may in fact be a false challenge, an unreal challenge, in some way an illegitimate challenge. So, for instance, the antifoundationalist might argue that no sane person in fact does or can doubt everything at once; the appropriate response to a person with the doubts of the (usually only hypothetical) radical skeptic would not be to construct a philosophical theory, but to raise questions of one’s own about her mental health.¹⁵ In one way or another, then, antifoundationalists need to show not only that foundationalism has failed, but also that there was no real need for it in any case.

Foundationalism and nonfoundationalism in theology

In theology the term foundationalism is used to describe the assumption that Christian beliefs, if they are to be justified, require a foundation in something independent of and prior to the Christian faith. The theological foundationalist is one who looks for something outside the circle of belief which can provide a support for belief; he or she is looking for a noncircular justification of belief, so that that which gives support for the claims of the Christian faith must not itself rest on this same faith.

Just as in philosophy, foundationalism in theology can take a variety of forms. Thus one can have a foundationalism of the right and a foundationalism of the left, both a fundamentalist foundationalism and a liberal foundationalism. A fundamentalist would count as...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Karl Rahner Theology and Philosophy
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowlegments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Spirit in the World
• 3 Transcendental
• 4 Hearer of the Word and the supernatural existential
• 5 The relation of philosophy to theology: a nonfoundationalist reading
• 6 Defending a nonfoundationalist Rahner
• 7 The theory of the anonymous Christian
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index